Setting the record straight
Historians take another look at Jefferson and Hemings
Archived article from Feb 18, 2000
By Carla Capizzi
What a difference a couple of centuries make.
In the early 1800s, the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings affair was the subject of whispers and gossip that raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic.
Today it's the fodder of made-for-television movies, a high point of February's ratings "sweeps" weeks.
The renewed attention over the relationship between one of America's founding fathers and one of his black slaves doesn't really surprise Jan Lewis, a professor of history on the Newark campus and one of the nation's leading Jeffersonian scholars. "Americans are obsessed with the private lives of public officials. This obsession is built into our system, even if we don't quite know how it works."
The debate over the Hemings-Jefferson relationship was resurrected in October 1998 by DNA testing that showed Jefferson probably was the father of at least one of Hemings' children, her youngest son, Eston. The testing stirred the pot of controversy that had been brewing since 1802, when then-President Jefferson was publicly accused of fathering the children of his black slave. The test results also led the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to acknowledge Jefferson's paternity of at least one and possibly all six of the Hemings children. The foundation owns and operates Jefferson's home at Monticello, which is open to the public.
The DNA announcement spurred Lewis and other scholars into action. Within weeks of the 1998 DNA announcement, Lewis helped organize -- and later participated in -- a March 1999 scholarly conference that took a more measured, in-depth and decidedly less glamorized look at the affair than had the media and moviemakers.
The conference brought together "a diverse range of voices," scholars selected because they are "the best historians in this field, people who would have something worthwhile to say," according to Lewis. Panelists included several Pulitzer Prize winners and both female and male presenters of diverse races. Lewis' presentation, "The White Jeffersons," described how the Jefferson family conspired over the years to preserve the falsehoods used to deny Hemings' children's paternity.
She also co-edited, with Peter S. Onuf of the University of Virginia, a collection of the papers delivered at the conference. "Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory and Culture" was published last November by the University Press of Virginia -- just 13 months after the release of the original DNA findings.
The book explores such issues as the times in which Jefferson and Hemings lived and the role of interracial sex in that culture; the long-term implications of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship on Jefferson's legacy; and what white and black family members did -- and did not -- say about the relationship over the decades.
These academic efforts were necessary, says Lewis, because "the press coverage of the findings was not very profound. It was very superficial, a lot of sound bites." The relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was far too important to American history to be relegated to the "gossipy aspect of a scandal." The conference and the resulting book, says Lewis, are meant to "focus the public's thinking, help people figure out the significance of this issue."
And that significance is considerable in terms of rewriting accepted American history: "We want to make it clear that responsible historians now accept that Thomas Jefferson is the father of at least one and probably all of Sally Hemings' children."
Ironically, many Americans, white and black alike, have long accepted the rumors of the Jefferson-Hemings affair as reality. It was historians, Lewis notes, who have been slower to accept the relationship. Some have always denied the affair, arguing that it was "out of character" for Jefferson to have a relationship with a black woman.
But, Lewis argues, "Character is a nebulous thing. People are so complex; you really can't know for certain what a person would do in a particular situation." For that reason, she argues, "You can't define history through the lens of character. You have to use evidence and facts.
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