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DNA reopened the Jefferson case
The old verdict
Dumas Malone won a Pulitzer Prize for his six-volume biography of Jefferson, and he held a professorship at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded. In 1970 he judged the story of a relationship with Sally Hemings virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson's moral standards and habitual conduct. Joseph Ellis's acclaimed 1998 biography American Sphinx doubted it too.
The new evidence
The 1999 DNA tests did not single out Thomas Jefferson himself, but they pointed strongly to him. The historian Annette Gordon-Reed then went through the Jefferson archives and showed that he had been at Monticello nine months before the birth of every one of Sally Hemings's children. In 2017, archaeologists at Monticello excavated Sally's room, complete with its original hearth and floors. It sits directly beside Jefferson's bedroom.
Ellis changed his mind when the DNA evidence came out. The overwhelming consensus among historians is now that Madison Hemings and her other children were Jefferson's, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, has accepted it.
How did DNA link Jefferson's family to the Hemingses?
The Y chromosome passes from father to son almost unchanged, so men in one male line share it. In a study published in Nature, geneticist Eugene Foster and colleagues compared Y-chromosome markers from a male-line descendant of Eston Hemings with those of male-line descendants of Jefferson's paternal uncle. They matched. The study could not name Thomas Jefferson specifically, because other Jefferson men carried the same marker.
How did Annette Gordon-Reed change the debate?
Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy in 1997, arguing that historians had held the Hemings family's oral tradition to a harsher standard than the Jefferson family's denials. Her later book The Hemingses of Monticello won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award in 2009. She became the first Black woman to win the history Pulitzer. The book follows the Hemings family across several generations.
What is the Sally Hemings room at Monticello?
Archaeologists excavated the room in the south wing of Monticello in 2017, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation opened it to visitors in 2018 as part of an exhibition on Hemings's life. The room sits next to Jefferson's bedroom and was long used for storage and as a restroom. Researchers identified it using historical records and the layout of the surviving foundations. There is no known portrait of Sally Hemings.
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