Jefferson’s Other Face

The story was set in motion in September 1802 when a disappointed office seeker named James Thomson Callender wrote in a Richmond, Va., newspaper, “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.” The object of this attack was Thomas Jefferson, then in his first term as president. The “concubine” was Sally Hemings, who was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife. The story became a journalistic sensation for a time and was never fully forgotten, despite the best efforts of Jefferson’s most admiring biographers to discredit and bury it.

Dumas Malone, who spent more than 40 years writing his multivolume life of Jefferson, denounced the story as “filth” and “virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards.” Willard Sterne Randall, in his 1993 biography, called the story “impossible to believe.” Joseph J. Ellis, Jefferson’s most recent biographer, similarly rejected the allegation.

Could the author of the nation’s most memorable defining sentence--”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”--have forced himself on a woman he held in bondage? No less to the point, could Jefferson, whose racist beliefs and fears of racial “amalgamation” are on record, have carried on a long-term sexual relationship with a black woman?

Genetic science has now provided an indisputable answer. Jefferson fathered at least one child by Hemings, as the descendants of that son have long believed. As anyone familiar with the antebellum South knows, concubinage was by no means unusual among slave owners. Jefferson kept several hundred slaves toiling in his behalf as he polished the eloquent thoughts that made him an apostle of freedom.

Julia Jefferson Westerinen, a descendant of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, sees the new genetic evidence as humanizing Jefferson. Others are more critical. Does the verification of the nearly two-centuries-old rumor diminish Jefferson’s place in history? No. But it does remind Americans of some of the uglier aspects of their history, and prompts them to remember as well that even heroes are not unflawed. Men are not angels, said James Madison, our fourth president, and he may have been thinking specifically of the third president when he said it.