The DNA Case Against Jefferson

"The Thomas Jefferson Paternity Case," letters from E. A. Foster et al., in Nature (Jan. 7, 1999), Porters South, 4 Crinan St., London N1 9XW, England; "The Tom-and-Sally Miniseries (Cont.)" by Lewis Lord, in U.S. News & World Report (Jan. 18, 1999), 1050 Thomas Jefferson St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.

How certain is it that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child by his slave Sally Hemings?

Since dropping their scientific bombshell last November making Jefferson seem, in all likelihood, guilty in the paternity case (see WQ, Winter ’99, pp. 115–116), pathologist Eugene A. Foster and his colleagues have returned to the pages of Nature to elaborate.

They reiterate that the simplest—and, in their view, on the basis of the available historical evidence, the most probable—explanation of the DNA data (matching the Jefferson male line’s Y chromosome with the Hemings male line’s) is that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’s last son, Easton. However, Foster and his colleagues point out, that is not an absolute certainty, as the headline on the original Nature story misleadingly suggested. It is possible, they note, that Jefferson’s brother, Randolph, or any of Randolph’s five sons could have fathered Sally Hemings’s later children.

Herbert Barger, a retired Pentagon supervisor and genealogist married to a Jefferson descendant, had helped Foster’s project by persuading descendants of Field Jefferson, the president’s uncle, to take part. According to U.S. News & World Report senior writer Lewis Lord, Barger had expected that the DNA tests might link Samuel and Peter Carr, sons of Thomas Jefferson’s sister, to Hemings. Grandchildren of Thomas Jefferson had said the Carr brothers probably fathered Hemings’s children. But Foster and his colleagues found no DNA match between the Carr and Hemings lines.

Barger now suspects, according to U.S. News, that the father of Hemings’s children was Randolph Jefferson, who lived 20 miles from Monticello, or his sons, who were in their teens or twenties when the children were born. He cites a Monticello slave’s memoir that said Randolph "used to come among black people, play the fiddle, and dance half the night." He also quotes a letter in which Thomas Jefferson invited his brother to Monticello nine months before Easton’s birth. However, Lucia Cinder Stanton, a Monticello historian who has been examining Jefferson documents for two decades, tells U.S. News that Randolph can be definitely placed at Monticello only three times between 1790 and 1815. Thomas Jefferson, in contrast, always happened to be at Monticello when Hemings conceived a child.

Yet another possibility is outlined by Gary Davis, of Evanston (Illinois) Hospital, in a letter in the same issue of Nature: that Thomas Jefferson’s father or grandfather, or one of his paternal uncles, fathered a male slave who had one or more children with Sally Hemings.

Foster and his colleagues call Davis’s theory "interesting." However, they conclude: "When we embarked on this study, we knew that the results could not be conclusive, but we hoped to obtain some objective data that would tilt the weight of evidence in one direction or another. We think we have provided such data and that the modest, probabilistic interpretations we have made are tenable at present."