(4 of 5)
Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at New York Law School, is one of many scholars who have concluded that there is enormous support for the case that Jefferson and Hemings were intimately involved. Her 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, provides a critical analysis of the historical evidence supporting the liaison (see box). In reviewing Jefferson biographies that dismissed the relationship, Gordon-Reed says, "I realized that a lot of what they said was based on prejudice, and they were not taking the words of black people seriously." One example is the skepticism with which historians assessed an interview with Madison Hemings, one of Sally's children, which was published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873. In the interview, Madison states that his mother was Jefferson's "concubine" and that Jefferson was the father of all her children. "We were the only children of his by a slave woman," he said.
It was not until the DNA study was released in Nature in 1998 that the tide began to turn among historians. Although the article was misleadingly titled--the headline read JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE'S LAST CHILD, when in fact the study concluded solely that a Jefferson male had fathered that child--it provided the missing link that many historians needed. And there was other evidence: records indicate that Jefferson was at Monticello at the time of the conception of all of Hemings' children; Israel Jefferson, another slave at Monticello, corroborated Madison Hemings' story that he was the son of Jefferson and Hemings; and John Hartwell Cocke, one of the founders of the University of Virginia, wrote in his diary in 1853 and 1859 that Jefferson had a slave mistress. "I feel a bit stupid that I felt otherwise," says Philip Morgan, a professor of early American history at Johns Hopkins University, who once doubted the relationship. "I should have picked up on it sooner."
A FAMILY REUNITED
Shannon Lanier, who is black, had a very personal reason to accept the story all along. His mother had told him as a child that he was related to the third President. Descended from Hemings' son Madison, Lanier recalls standing up in his first-grade class in Atlanta and announcing his presidential heritage: "I said, 'Thomas Jefferson was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.' The teacher told me to sit down and stop telling lies."