Customer Reviews

Jefferson Vindicated - Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Genealogical Search

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When the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation issued a report in January 2000 concluding that Thomas Jefferson probably fathered all of Sally Hemings' children, I was shocked (because it seemed so out of character with what I had learned during decades of studying Jefferson) but assumed the issue was settled. After all, Sally's son Eston had been matched by DNA to a Jefferson father, and as a man of science Jefferson would want us to follow truth wherever it led us. Three months later, I was invited to join with a group of more than a dozen Jefferson scholars from around the country -- most of whom either had "distinguished" or "eminent" in their academic title, had held chaired professorships, or had at least chaired their department or its graduate studies program. Most have had books on sale at the Monticello gift shop. We all served as volunteers and without compensation.

After a year-long inquiry in which we examined every argument we could find, to my great surprise we concluded with but a single very mild dissent that the story of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was probably false. We found that paternity advocates had altered key historical documents (changing as many as 13 words in a single sentence to totally reverse the original meaning), and that many of the arguments were based upon false "facts" and others that when placed in context disclosed no "special privileges" for Sally or her children (when compared to the treatment received by other descendants of Sally's mother, Betty Hemings). A very brief summary of some of our conclusions can be found here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95000747 .

I would add that, after our report was released to the media in April 2001, the American Political Science Association tried to set up a debate for their 2002 annual meeting on this issue, and not a single one of the prominent scholars who had endorsed the paternity theory (including Professors Joseph Ellis and Annette Gordon-Reed) was willing to defend that position in a debate. Most explained they had "moved on" to other issues.

During this year-long inquiry it was my great good fortune to meet Cynthia Burton, a Virginia genealogist who for decades has been studying Jefferson's neighborhood. I have been a professor at Jefferson's University of Virginia for more than two decades, and I worked at prominent think tanks as early as 1971. I've known some truly brilliant people over those years. But I'm not sure I've met anyone, without advanced academic degrees, who was more of a natural scholar -- in the finest Jeffersonian tradition of pursuing truth wherever it may lead -- than Cynthia Burton. She has a genuine thirst for knowledge and a willingness to track down original materials that greatly exceeds that of most of the Ph.D. students I have taught or advised over the years.

Some of her most valuable advice as an informal "consultant" during the work of the Scholars Commission was in shooting down or persuading me to moderate arguments that at first glance looked compelling. She pointed out numerous factual errors in the TJMF (in late 2000 re-named "Thomas Jefferson Foundation," dropping the word "Memorial" from its name) report -- including some that some of us had accepted as fact that strengthened the case against paternity. For example, the TJMF report asserted that Randolph Jefferson's youngest son was 17 when Eston Hemings was conceived (adding a seventh potential father carrying the Jefferson DNA who was likely at Monticello when Eston was conceived), but Ms. Burton's original research led her to conclude he was more likely about 11.

The report of the Scholars Commission is scheduled to be released in November in book form: http://www.cap-press.com/books/1179 ; http://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Hemings-Controversy-Report-Scholars-Commission/dp/0890890854/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1243450383&sr=1-2 .
At present, I believe the single most useful volume on this issue is JEFFERSON VINDICATED, by Cynthia Burton. It is a wonderful example of how an individual who lacks advanced academic degrees but possesses a true thirst for knowledge and a commitment to pursuing the truth can make a real difference. And it puts to shame much of the modern "scholarship" on this issue written by prominent professors who have not bothered to do the kind of original research that characterizes Ms. Burton's volume. I highly recommend it.

Prof. Robert F. Turner
Chairman
Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission (2000-2001)

The author, Cyndi Burton, was most fortunate in securing a forward by one of the most knowledgeable Jefferson historians alive today, Mr. James Adams Bear, Jr. Emeritus Director of Monticello. On his watch many revealing Jefferson books were published, among them the little known book, Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother,(brother Randolph invited to Monticello exactly 9 months prior to Eston Hemings's birth), The Hemings Family at Monticello, the Jefferson Memorandum Books, the Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, and others. And as author Burton says, "no curatorial research at Monticello has matched Bear's in magnitude." To write the forward for Cyndi Burton's "EXPOSE" is most corageous in a climate of political correctness and historical revisionism surrounding the Jefferson-Hemings DNA "fiasco." I know this because as a Jefferson family historian and assistant to Dr. E.A. Foster with the now infamous DNA Study, you the reader, have been "CONNED" and mislead prior to the publication of this very revealing book. NOTHING proves Thomas Jefferson guilty of fathering ANY slave child.

Yes, I too am familiar with seemingly hundreds of e-mails between Dr. Foster and myself in which he was aware of OTHER Jeffersons, namely Randolph, younger brother of Thomas but according to him was unable to get permission from Nature Journal to put tham as possible suspects in the study, space limitations you know. Thus in the absence of this information Nature wrote the damning headline, Jefferson fathers slave's last child. The Carr brothers were the prime suspects in Dr. Foster's study and the "aim" of his study, when DNA eliminated them Nature knew of NO other Jefferson to suspect (they had not received any Foster information to the contrary), thus it just has to be THOMAS. A very scientific statement I must say.

Mrs. Burton has expanded on many topics in great detail, not sensationalism or bias reporting and is a thorough and careful genealogist in the Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia area and knows of what she writes. It is time that the public becomes aware that Madison Hemings interview with Samuel Wetmore in the Pike County Republican is riddled with inaccuracies and this is a prime "piece of evidence" relied upon by the "he's guilty" crowd. You can read all about this article in this exciting book, but on just one claim that Madison Hemings claims to be named for James Madison upon the occasion of Dolley Madison's visit to Monticello on January 19, 1805 let us wander back. Close inspection of this claim would lead the reader to believe that Dolley Madison announces to her husband, James Madison, Secretary of State, and to President Thomas Jefferson (she was acting as his Hostess), that she is sorry that she has heard that a slave is to give birth to a MALE and she must name him after her husband. You will note that I stress MALE here because as we all know this was well before science was able to inform us of the sex of an unborn child. Never mind the severe winter, frozen rivers and roads she must be on her way. The Madison Papers indicate that the Madisons NEVER traveled to Virginia from Washington during the winter months. Thus, how are we expected to believe ANY of the suspect statements of Samuel Wetmore/Madison Hemings. A good account of this newspaper article, Jefferson denials of the rumors, and much more in detail are in this "nuts and bolts" study under the glare of the magnifying glass of a supurb researcher and author. My hat is off in salute to Cyndi Burton and James Bear, Jr. Yours will be also after reading this interesting account of all the lies, misinformation, and biased research to arrive at preconceived agendas. By all means if you are interested in your country's truthful history and especially that of Thomas Jefferson I urge you to please read this book.

I chose five stars because of the author's original research. In my view as a Hemings-Jefferson paternity agnostic who has read both sides' arguments closely, that research in a variety of new sources has enabled the author to shed a substantial amount of new light on the controversy. I read this book carefully soon after it became available in Charlottesville, and I'm not surprised that former Monticello director James A. Bear, Jr., would endorse it by contributing its foreword. Any serious student of the controversy must read this book.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

The submission by a "Virginia history lover" is not a review of "Jefferson Vindicated." It is a political statement. If the Virginia history lover hates Jefferson because he was a slave owner, that bias does not help one evaluate the research and content of this new book. Nor does the fact that Jefferson was a slave owner prohibit an in depth study of whether Jefferson fathered slave children by his slave Sally Hemings. Nor should one be chased away from this examination by Virginia history lover's name calling. In truth, the author Cyndi Burton, a historian and a genealogist, has presented the best detailed examination yet of the issues involved in whether Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Hemings. The argument that he did rests on three basic propositions: one, that Jefferson was always present during the conception window for each of Hemings' children; two, that the statement of one of her sons, made fifty years after he left Monticello, that he and his siblings were the children of Thomas Jefferson, should not be challenged; and three, that the DNA test from one line of Hemings' youngest son showing that he had a Jefferson ancestor means that it was Thomas Jefferson. What Burton has done is to examine each of these propositions and lays in detail the available facts for the reader to make an informed decision. Normally, that's what history lovers do and seek to follow the facts where they may lead. In this case, they do not lead to a common bedroom shared by Jefferson and Hemings. There is much more to Jefferson Vindicated and anyone interested in the legacy of Thomas Jefferson will find it a fascinating study.

Its a sad thing indeed when a reviewer, like an earlier one below, imputes biases to a book but is unwilling or unable to defend the imputation. The suggestion that Ms. Burton has produced a work that perpetuates "white supremacy" is a pretty serious claim, which this reviewer tosses out but makes no responsible effort to support. Here, it seems to me, we might all benefit from the canons that guide professional historians when they review work in professional journals. I have not read Cynthia Burton's book, and so am in no position to state one way or the other whether it is a species of white supremacist thought. But were I to toss out such a bomb shell of an accusation with not even a whit of substantiation, in a professional review, I would rightly be castigated by my professional peers and colleagues. The earlier reviewer may not be "singling out" Ms. Burton, but manifestly is lumping her book in with the category of shameful white supremacy--a category in which she may or may not belong, and a categorization which that reviewer makes no effort to defend. At the very least, that reviewer has been hugely unfair to the work he purports to be reviewing.

No one disputes that Jefferson owned slaves. No one disputes either that Jefferson recognized that slavery was ethically wrong, albeit for reasons that are fully compatible with racism. Those two facts--that Jefferson professedly knew that slavery was wrong and yet nonetheless chose to own slaves, are all that one needs to condemn the man. (If you want to see a very thoughtful man rip into Jefferson's hypocrisy, read David Walker's 1829 "Appeal to the Colored Citizen." Walker does not need an alleged relationship with Sally Hemings in order to skewer Jefferson, correctly, as a hypocrite. In this sense, the barn door Herb Barger strives to shut has long been open--that horse is long gone.)

As an historian, I don't view it as my primary job or purpose to condemn or defend Jefferson's moral character. We can play those kinds of games, and many do, here and elsewhere. But in the end, we do not learn very much from those conversations. I do not think that Jefferson matters to us, today, primarily because he was a slaveowner. Like so many of his peers--and not just in the South--Jefferson was thoroughly implicated in the viciousness that was slavery. Jefferson matters for the ideas he, along with numerous others, helped implant into the political and constitutional psyche of the United States. I would argue that for all of Jefferson's hypocrisy, he nonetheless was a great American because he, as much as anyone else, implanted a moral chord into the American political and constitutional tradition that subsequent generations of American reformers and American defenders of human rights have sounded again and again, to great effect. Jefferson, as much as any of the founders, wrote the civic poetry that resonates in every civic conversation that matters today. So by any standard, Jefferson was a morally and ethically ambiguous character--brilliant and transcendent, and deformed and tragically human, all at once, all in the same package.

If we wish to explore Jefferson's insight that ownership of slaves inevitably corrupted the character of the slave owner, Jefferson himself is not the man to examine. As so many biographers have pointed out, Jefferson's inner self remains opaque to us, sphynx-like. Other slaveowners, and other biographers, explore Jefferson's insight more profoundly. As superb biographers like Drew Gilpen Faust and Rhys Isaac have amply demonstrated, just about anyone who owned slaves was deformed by the evilness of slavery. The lesson here is not, ultimately, that slavery deforms character. Rather, the lesson is that any form of evil deforms character--including the evils in which we ourselves are implicated, and perhaps (unlike Jefferson) do not even recognize as problematic because we turn our minds from contemplating them.

As an historian, when I arrive at judgments about the past, I have an obligation to master the evidence on which my judgments are based. I am not entirely certain what "Virginia History Lover" (below) means by "the DNA-denying attitude," but anyone who has taken the time to examine seriously the scientific evidence presented in the DNA study has to conclude that it falls far short of proving conclusively one way or the other that Jefferson fathered any of Heming's children. The DNA evidence is inconclusive--it tells us, really, only two things of importance. First, it tells us that neither of the Carr brothers were fathers to one of Heming's children. (They may have been parents to some of Sally Heming's other children--the DNA evidence only speaks to the paternity of some of Hemings' children.) And second, it tells us that someone descended from Thomas Jefferson's grandfather *was* the father to one of Heming's children.

One of the truly vile aspects of slavery was that it rendered slave women easy victims to the sexual aggression of the white men who owned them. This fact, this intrinsic wickedness inherent in the ownership of one person by another, means that we can not even say for certain who is and is not included in the group of people defined as "men descended from Thomas Jefferson's grandfather." It is entirely plausible to imagine that Jefferson had male cousins who were themselves enslaved, and who, perhaps, he himself owned. Given the fact that so very many enslaved women were subject to the sexual advances of the men who owned them, or who assaulted them with the consent, tacit or even explicit, of the slave-owner, we are unable to state with any certainty of whom the population of possible fathers to the Heming's children consists. Under these circumstances, the DNA evidence is of only the slightest value, when one tries to ascertain the paternity of Sally Heming's children. It is, from any objective view of the matter, almost (but not quite--see above) irrelevant. Or, put another way--the very fact that we can not say with any conclusive certainty who fathered Heming's children, even after the application of DNA testing to the case, illuminates the fundamental wickedness of slavery.

As an historian, the question of whether or not Jefferson has sex with Hemings strikes me as of minimal interest. It sheds almost no light at all on slavery in Virginia, given the idiosyncrasy of Jefferson's Monticello as a plantation. Nor does it give us much insight into Jefferson's thought, when we consider Jefferson's thought in the contexts for which it most matters to us today. It is hard to imagine, just to take one obvious example, that had Abraham Lincoln known with certainty in 1863 what "Virginia History Lover" thinks s/he knows now, that it would have changed Lincoln's evocation of Jefferson in the Gettysburg Address. I very seriously doubt that had David Walker known with certainty that Jefferson was having children by Hemings, it would have added any greater weight to his condemnation of Jefferson as a hypocrite in his famous, and searingly strident "Appeal to the Colored Citizens." Walker's condemnation is stinging--and he, no more than any of the rest of us, needs the "fact" that Jefferson had children by Hemings to drive his argument home in vividly compelling fashion. For both Lincoln and Walker, had they known for a fact that Jefferson was the father of some of Heming's children, this fact would have been at best a subordinate consideration to the larger political and ethical concerns that animated them. Not quite irrelevant, perhaps, but of lesser importance to the things for which, to them, Jefferson spoke most profoundly.

American history is full of moral and ethical richness, nuance, and complexity. Jefferson is right at the heart of that history--of our history. Morally simplistic, self-righteous screeds, like the ones that proceed so abundantly from the most engaged participants in the conversation about Jefferson and Hemings, do very little to advance our understanding, either of our history or of ourselves. The deeper sadness revealed by this conversation, it seems to me, is the inability of so many of our best and brightest minds to transcend the simplistic and binary moral categories in which so much of our public discourse is conducted. Jefferson, after all, was optimistic about the capacity of typical American citizens to think through complex moral issues for themselves, In his famous 1813 correspondence with John Adams, he premised his entire faith in the coherence of the American experiment in republican government on this optimism. The conduct of so many of the people in this conversation provides disturbing evidence, it seems to me, that whatever grounds Jefferson had for optimism in 1813, we no longer are capable of sustaining any kind of moral complexity in our public conversation today. If that is true, then that is cause for sadness indeed.

As a Virginian, I am saddened at the vehemence with which Jefferson's (alleged) white descendants fight to keep any of his (alleged) black descendants from sharing the shade of the family tree. I am saddened, too, that we still have among us so many white supremacists who are not at all troubled that Jefferson owned slaves even as he repeatedly stated that it was evil to do so--and yet cannot abide the idea of two people of different races making love. Lest the context of my comment lead to any misunderstanding, let me stress that I do not wish to single out Ms. Burton. What's appalling is the whole DNA-denying attitude. Before the DNA evidence, these people fingered Jefferson's nephew as the father of Sally Hemings's children. Then, the moment the DNA evidence excluded him, Jefferson's brother became the new fall guy. And the reason they do this is as clear as the nose on your face (no matter what color it is). It is well for the rest of us to remember that Jefferson's crime was not that he loved Sally Hemings (if that is what it was) but that he owned her.

Why do people continue to deny this? As a white person, I am offended by this.

It appears that Cynthia Burton, Herbert Barger, and the like continue to debate a subject that is no longer debatable. Their over reliance on the testimony of only white family members and their complete dismissal of DNA evidence, and the testimony of black family members indicates their bigotry and racism.

The DNA evidence coupled with the massive circumstantial evidence is clear. Even Master historian David McCullough agrees that Thomas Jefferson very likely fathered some, if not all, of Sally's children.

Come on now, stop perpetuating lies in order to fuel your own agendas.

The DNA test concluded that Eston Hemings was a Jefferson. The DNA eliminated the Carrs as suspects. There is no evidence that Sally had any contact at all with any other relatives of Thomas Jefferson on his father's side.

No other relative of Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello during the times of conception despite the claims to the contrary. There is no basis to conclude that anyone other than Thomas Jefferson was their father.