America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, fathered two children with the woman he enslaved, a new DNA study reveals, resolving one of the nation’s oldest and most contentious debates.
Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, which said that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
Yet, he enslaved more than 600 people at his Monticello estate and other properties.
In the run-up to Jefferson’s election as president, rumours began swirling that he had children with Sally Hemings, whom he never freed. The founding father never directly addressed the allegation, and his family denied it, hinting instead that his nephews or other family members had fathered Hemings’s children.
Jefferson was president from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the first US secretary of state and as the second vice president.
Historians and biographers refuted the possibility of Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children, citing a lack of any eyewitness accounts. However, a landmark study in 1998 concluded that there was a high probability that Jefferson was the biological father of at least one of Hemings’s six children.
The conclusion of the study was hotly debated. Many argued the evidence laid out in the study did not rule out Eston Hemings’s paternity by a relative of Jefferson, like his brother Randolph.
To resolve the debate, Smithsonian scientists conducted cutting-edge DNA analysis on a small lock of hair collected from Jefferson and compared it with genetic samples from 13 living descendants of the former president as well as Hemings’s children Madison and Eston.
After nearly 15 years of research, the scientists found that there was “a less than 0.001 per cent chance” Jefferson was not the father of Madison and Eston.
“We developed an innovative technique to recover DNA from multiple rootless hair samples in a museum collection whose provenance, mitochondrial genomes, and identity to each other indicate these hairs and their DNA are from Thomas Jefferson,” the researchers said in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed study due for publication in the journal PNAS.
“Having recovered Thomas Jefferson’s DNA, the genomic evidence further reinforces strong historical scholarship indicative of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings children.”
The researchers ran 20,000 simulations of paternity scenarios involving Jefferson, his brother Randolph and Randolph’s sons.
They found that the odds of Jefferson not being a father of either Madison or Eston were less than one in 1,000.
“We find clear evidence of Thomas Jefferson ancestry in descendants of both his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” they wrote.
“The findings may enable descendants of ‘founding father’ Thomas Jefferson, whether born to Martha Wayles Jefferson or to Sally Hemings, and whether their ancestral legacy is one of slavery or freedom, to consider themselves as part of one and the same, complicated, American family.”
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