The final word on Jefferson and Hemmings?

A manuscript under review in a refereed journal and a new book together provided new evidence that at least two children of Thomas Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemmings were fathered by Jefferson.

“After a covert and exhaustive 15-year effort led by the Smithsonian Institution, a team of geneticists, genealogists, historians, and anthropologists believe it has found proof that Jefferson fathered at least two of Hemings’s six children. On Tuesday, Richard Kurin, a Smithsonian cultural anthropologist, who led the multidisciplinary research effort, will publish a book detailing the team’s findings. A scientific paper is currently under review for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The researchers, who agreed to speak with me about their results before publication, relied on the latest genetic techniques to reassemble Jefferson’s genome from the Founder’s hair. They then matched that sequence with DNA from descendants of two of Hemings’s sons, Madison and Eston. (Of her other four children, two died in infancy, and the other two didn’t have any known offspring.) Not only did the researchers find that Madison’s and Eston’s descendants share Jefferson’s DNA; many of them had more of it than do his known descendants by way of his wife, Martha Wayles.”

There was a previous genomics study linking Jefferson and Hemmings’ descendants using Y chromosome sequencing. That study held the caveat that it couldn’t rule out Jefferson’s brother, who occasionally visited Monticello. The most parsimonious interpretation is that Jefferson himself fathered Hemmings’ children, but the evidence met with criticism:

“Some detractors saw a more nefarious agenda. One researcher called the 1998 study “a deliberate attempt to select and mold the evidence to fit a pre-selected theory.” 

This reads like projecting to me—selecting and molding a critique of the genetics to fit a pre-selected theory that Jefferson didn’t behave like many slaveowners of his time.*

Needless to say, I can’t evaluate data I haven’t seen. I’m sure the white custodians of Jeffersonian purity will find reasons to attack the latest scholarship. But I’m baffled by the ardor of Jefferson’s defenders who claim that the author of the Declaration of Independence couldn’t have fathered children with his slave. The mere fact that Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime is sufficient evidence for his hypocrisy. To differentiate between rape and other forms of personal abuse that were all a natural byproduct of chattel slavery seems like hair-splitting to me. 

Slavery is America’s original sin. We must confront our past with clear eyed honesty.

*not that implicating Jefferson’s brother absolves Jefferson himself for permitting his brother to rape Hemmings

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/thomas-jefferson-genome-children/688635/?gift=sqWj34BNCz6cFaIXV3FX-Mbmz-XvQavYsbo-1T6kbRY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

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