The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (43 page)

Later in 2000, CBS Television ran a four-hour miniseries starring Carmen Ejogo as Sally Hemings, Diahann Carroll as Sally’s mother, Elizabeth, and Mario Van Peebles as Sally’s brother, James Hemings. The film was written and co-executive produced by former actress Tina Andrews. “It’s a love story,” insisted Ms. Andrews in an interview. “The fact that they were together 40 years and remained so despite extraordinary circumstances makes me want to believe that there was some tenderness and emotion involved.” Ms. Andrews and her co-producers cited the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s findings as the basis for their drama.
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In the same year PBS Television’s investigative show
Frontline
produced a documentary, “Jefferson’s Blood,” that explored the controversy. Although there were occasional comments that the DNA findings were “not definitive,” most of the participants assumed Jefferson’s guilt. “Blood tests all but confirmed” went one statement. “DNA subjected this great man to a fall” was another remark.

At one point, a descendant of the Woodson family dismissed the DNA findings, which disproved Jefferson’s role in his ancestor’s birth. He insisted his family’s oral history was true—that Jefferson had fathered “Master Tom” in Paris with Sally Hemings. He added that today Jefferson would be convicted of the rape of a child. The show distributed print interviews with principal witnesses, such as Dr. Foster, who reversed himself and said, “It would be possible, but highly, highly, highly highly improbable” that Jefferson was not the father of Eston Hemings. His words reflected the importance of Fraser Neiman’s follow-up statistical study in confirming Jefferson’s paternity.
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The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society was created by Jefferson family descendants and others who disagreed with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s conclusions. In 2000, the TJHS played a leading role in convening a Scholars Commission of thirteen historians, many of them authors of books on Jefferson. After a year of study and fifteen hours of face-to-face discussions, they concluded that while reasonable people could differ on the question, they found no convincing evidence of Jefferson’s paternity, either of Eston Hemings or of Sally Hemings’s other children.

The Scholars Commission hoped to garner major publicity for their five-hundred-page report. It was released to the public at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2001, the eve of Jefferson’s birthday. They were more than a little disappointed. Another meeting a few blocks away won far more media attention. Hemings family descendants and some Jefferson family members who sided with them met at the White House with President George W. Bush.

Backers of the Scholars Commission angrily maintained that the meeting was arranged by members of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation board. President Bush knew nothing about the Scholars Commis
sion press conference and saw no reason why he should not welcome the Hemings descendants and their Jeffersonian friends. The episode suggested the dispute about Sally Hemings was becoming a publicity war, aimed at controlling public opinion. The truth seemed almost—but not quite—irrelevant.

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What seemed to journalists and historians probabilities strong enough to be called certainties in 1998–2000 have slowly been eroded by doubts. After reviewing the report of the Scholars Commission,
American Heritage
magazine concluded: “whatever one’s views, it is hard to deny that honorable people can and do disagree about Jefferson and Hemings…It’s important for the public to realize that the purported Jefferson-Hemings liaison remains a disputed possibility, not an established fact.”
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On February 24, 2003, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation revised their statement about Sally Hemings. They admitted that the evidence for a relationship between her and Jefferson was “not definitive” and “the complete story may never be known.” The Foundation encouraged visitors to Monticello and their website “to make up their own minds as to the true nature of the relationship, based on what evidence does exist.” This was close to a reversal of their previous statement:
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation stands by its original findings—that the weight of evidence suggests that Jefferson probably was the father of Eston Hemings and perhaps the father of all of Sally Hemings’ children
. The foundation’s new stance was—and still is—remarkably close to the one urged by Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn.
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The mystery of who fathered “Master Tom” Woodson has had a growing impact on the believability of the pro-paternity argument. In an article published not long after the DNA tests, Michele Cooley-Quille, a Thomas Woodson descendant, described in impressive detail the history of her family, which includes distinguished people in every generation. Ms. Cooley-Quille is a clinical psychologist. Dismissing the DNA conclusions, she asked, “From what should the tapestry of history be woven? Hairy threads of DNA? Stories told? Or words written?”
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This writer discussed the Woodson conundrum with Dr. Kenneth Kidd, a Yale Medical School geneticist, who said it was possible that a
male with different Y chromosomes had intruded into the Woodson family line at some point in its history and the Woodson volunteers from whom DNA samples were taken had descended from him. Dr. Kidd cited a well-known genetic motto, “the father is always uncertain.” The dictum adds weight to Thomas Moore’s contention (seconded by Dr. Foster) that the Jefferson DNA of Eston Hemings’s descendant could have come from anyone who had acquired the same Y chromosomes in the decades before Jefferson’s death or in the two and a half centuries since his demise.

While one sympathizes with the Woodsons’ desire to believe their oral tradition, the answer to Cooley-Quille’s large question about the tapestry of history would seem to be complexity. History is written from scientific, written, and oral data. The key criterion for achieving certainty is evidence that is verifiable. Here oral history falls short, especially when it is confused with oral tradition.

Oral history is collected by trained interviewers and is an important part of today’s historical profession. But it has recognized limitations. The human memory is a very unreliable recording instrument. Oral tradition has far more serious limitations. Its unreliability is inevitable as it travels down the generations. It remains a valuable part of historical memory. But in a court of law it would be banned as hearsay evidence. That makes it hard, if not impossible, to see what role oral tradition can play in proving Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.

Recently, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, one of the nation’s leading African-American historians, published an article in which he described his family’s oral tradition that they were the descendants of former slave Jane Gates and her owner, Samuel Brady. Professor Gates set out to “prove or disprove” the story. He found white descendants of Samuel Brady who gave him blood samples for DNA testing. He compared the DNA results with DNA-tested blood from his black relatives—and was amazed to discover “the tests established without a doubt that Brady was not the father of Jane Gates’ children.” One of his relatives dismissed his findings. “I’ve been a Brady eighty-nine years and I’m still a Brady,” she told him.
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Though Mr. Gates does not do so, his relative could cite Dr. Kidd’s motto, “the father is always unknown,” and argue that an interloper in the family line has disrupted the descent of Samuel Brady’s DNA. The story testifies to the unreliability of both oral tradition and DNA evidence.

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In 2008, two biostatisticians, William Blackwelder and David Douglas, found grievous fault with archaeologist Fraser Neiman’s statistical study that declared Jefferson’s guilt a 99-percent certainty. Neiman used a sampling method called Monte Carlo, which is often used by businessmen to evaluate investments. Another version is used by insurance companies. But experts warn that Monte Carlo has serious flaws. People put too high a probability on outcomes produced by the method. A whole industry called AIE, Applied Information Economics, has been developed to train Monte Carlo practitioners to develop more realistic probabilities.

Blackwelder and Douglas published their critique on a website to invite further discussion. The man who asked them to undertake this task is Steven T. Corneliussen, a science writer who works with physicists in Virginia. Blackwelder is a biostatistical consultant at the National Institutes of Health; Douglas is a physicist and senior scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News. Statistics and probability theory and computer simulations are Douglas’s specialty. All three men were troubled by what they saw as a serious misuse of science in Neiman’s study.

Blackwelder condemned Neiman’s conclusion, that “doubt about Jefferson’s paternity can no longer be reasonably sustained.” The veteran biostatistician called this “a gross misinterpretation” of the study. Douglas’s criticism was equally harsh. He found that Neiman miscounted the probable conception “windows” for Sally Heming’s pregnancies. (The term refers to the interval between the end of a menstrual cycle and the start of another one during which a woman may be fertile.) In four of her six pregnancies, Sally could have conceived while Jefferson was absent from Monticello. Douglas even found a distinct possibility that Jefferson was absent from Monticello at the time of Eston Hemings’s conception—the only child to which DNA has linked a Jefferson. With Blackwelder’s full agreement, Douglas concluded the probability of Jefferson’s presence at all six conceptions was less than 50 percent. Douglas also faulted Neiman’s unscientific presentation, which omitted crucial details that would enable other statisticians to replicate the study.
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These surges of uncertainty have led to increasing doubts about the reliability of Samuel F. Wetmore’s ghosted narrative of Madison Hemings’s life in the
Pike County Republican
. It seems only fair to apply the same standard of proof to Wetmore’s journalism that Jefferson paternity advocates have applied to the testimony of Thomas Jefferson Randolph and others who have denied Jefferson’s fatherhood. They claim these people’s affection and loyalty to Thomas Jefferson prompted them to lie about his relationship with Sally Hemings.

What was Wetmore’s motivation in claiming Jefferson’s paternity? The answer: hatred and contempt for Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Party. Viewed in this light, the Wetmore-Hemings story begins to look more and more like a recycling of James Thomson Callender’s vindictive 1802 assault, with Wetmore in control.

Recent research has added strength to this suspicion. In his opening sentences, Wetmore claims that Madison Hemings was five feet ten and one half inches tall, giving him a strong resemblance to Jefferson. In the Virginia census of 1833, Madison was measured as five feet seven.
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Why did Madison Hemings tolerate this distortion? It seems likely that Wetmore had convinced him it was important to “improve” his story in various ways to make it more appealing to readers. If Hemings were willing to agree to let Wetmore misstate his size, would he not be equally ready to say that his mother had only one lover, Thomas Jefferson? This would correct the cruel accusation that James Thomson Callender had flung at Sally: she was “a slut as common as the pavement.” It would make an innocent Sally another victim of Thomas Jefferson, the uncaring slave owner.

Madison Hemings was the only one of Sally Hemings’s children who never passed for white. In census after census, he was listed as a Negro. That makes a reader dubious about his “sandy complexion,” which supposedly added to his resemblance to Jefferson. Madison’s brother Beverly and sister Harriet left Monticello with Jefferson’s permission in the early 1820s and vanished into the white world. His brother Eston moved from Ohio to Wisconsin and passed there. The nasty remark Wetmore has Madison make about “white persons” for Dolley Madison’s failure to give his mother a gift after his birth suggests he had few if any warm feelings for
whites, and especially for Thomas Jefferson, the man who had enslaved him. These feelings were probably exacerbated by Madison’s experience in Pike County, Ohio. The largely Democratic citizens of Waverly, the county seat, refused to permit blacks to live within the town limits.

Wetmore’s presence as the narrator is visible in other ways. At one point, Hemings tells how familiar he was with Martha Jefferson Randolph’s children. He claims they taught him to read—and he reels off the names of the eleven who lived to adulthood:
Ann, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, Mary, James, Benjamin Franklin, Lewis Madison, Septemia, and George Wythe
. Madison had not seen any of these people for forty-seven years. This is surely Wetmore the ghostwriter at work, with
The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson
or some other biography of Jefferson on the desk beside his manuscript.

In the same category is Madison’s astonishing knowledge of Jefferson’s early life. “Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was educated at William and Mary College, which had its seat at Williamsburg. He afterwards studied law with Geo. Wythe and practiced law at the bar of the general courts of the Colony. He was afterwards elected a member of the provincial legislature from Albemarle county.” Jefferson was sixty-two years old when Madison was born. This passage is almost certainly Samuel F. Wetmore copying word for word from a popular biography.

Equally dubious is Hemings’s claim that he never knew how famous Jefferson was until after his death. Even granting that Jefferson left the presidency when Madison was a toddler, wouldn’t the teenage Hemings notice and wonder why hundreds of visitors came to Monticello each year to pay homage to Jefferson’s fame? Again, this is Wetmore the ghostwriter at work. He is trying to make readers sorry for Hemings, whose famous “father” paid so little attention to him. Once more we see that contempt for an unfeeling Thomas Jefferson is the desired outcome of Madison’s story.

Another dubious statement is Hemings’s claim that Jefferson was extraordinarily healthy: “Till within three weeks of his death he was hale and hearty and at the age of 82 years walked erect and with a stately tread. I am now 68, and I well remember that he was a much smarter man, physically, at that age than I am.” When Jefferson was sixty-eight, Madison was six years old. That puts this recollection in the same class as Israel Jefferson’s story about waiting on Jefferson’s table at the age of four. Through
out his later life, Jefferson suffered from crippling attacks of rheumatism, which he frequently mentioned in his letters. In 1794, 1797, 1802, 1806, 1811, 1813, and 1819 agonizing pain in his back, hips, and thighs often kept him from walking.
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