The year before the DNA results were released, the University of Virginia Press published “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.” Its author, Annette Gordon-Reed, described the intellectual journey that led to its creation in a lecture titled “Jefferson and the Hemingses of Monticello,” held last month in Clark’s Higgins Lounge. Callender’s prediction that their names would go down in history together was proved correct. As Jefferson’s stature as a key architect of the American Revolution grew in the decades after his death, rumors of the liaison were denied by his white descendants and ignored or discredited by most historians.īut in 1998, DNA findings published in the journal Nature (later corroborated independently by The Thomas Jefferson Foundation) confirmed the strong likelihood that Jefferson had fathered at least one child by his slave Sally Hemings. In late 1802, in the second year of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, journalist and muckraker James Callender published several articles accusing the president of fathering a male child with an enslaved woman named Sally. Annette Gordon-Reed (photo: Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard University)
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