thomas jefferson and sally hemings an american controversy

The results further strengthened, but by no means proved, the case for Jefferson’s paternity of one or more children with his slave, while ruling out the Carr line (which lacked the distinctive Jefferson Y-chromosome). Although Gordon-Reed conceded that the case was not airtight, she concluded that Jefferson was the most plausible candidate since he was present at Monticello nine months before Sally gave birth to each of her four children.Īll this took place a year before the publication in the scientific journal Nature of new DNA tests on a male descendant of Eston Hemings, Sally’s youngest son. Using her legal training to interrogate received opinions and giving more weight to the oral traditions of Jefferson’s slaves than past historians had done, Gordon-Reed set off a firestorm by arguing that Jefferson, rather than his Carr nephews, was the likely father of Sally Hemings’s children. There was, O’Brien insisted, no place in an increasingly post-racial and multicultural America for such a hypocrite.Ī year later, Annette Gordon-Reed unsettled matters still further in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.

Arguing that Thomas Jefferson was a radical who supported genocide and a racist to boot, he demanded that the founder be toppled from the pantheon of American heroes.

In an essay written in 1996 for the Atlantic, the Irish politician and scholar Conor Cruise O’Brien lobbed a literary grenade into the stately field of Jefferson studies.

Thomas jefferson and sally hemings an american controversy