Transcription
Did Thomas Jefferson father children with one of his slaves? I always thought the answer was a clear yes, that it was a settled question proven by DNA and the estate at Monticello agreeing. And I said as much in a video I made a couple months ago, and I was justifiably thrashed around a bit in the comments.
Because whatever the real truth is, it's really not a settled debate among anyone with an open mind. But there really aren't a whole lot of people with an open mind on this topic. I'm Ken Lacourt, and the elephant in the room is that the case saying Thomas Jefferson having children with Sally Hemings isn't as airtight as most people assume. There's reasonable evidence-based alternatives that very few people have heard.
In the next few minutes, we'll go through the DNA testing and how that created a rush to consensus. Then, we'll look at the case for fatherhood, followed by reasonable doubt. And finally, the intriguing story of the forgotten brother. Because there's a name that shows up frequently in early oral histories, yet much less so by later historians.
But before we get into the facts of who did what to whom, let's set the stage. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the country's third president. He's certainly one of the most consequential people in American history, and throughout his entire adult life, he owned other human beings. Over 100 slaves at his Monticello plantation in Virginia alone.
Sally Hemings was one of them. She came into Jefferson's possession as a toddler in the 1770s, inherited along with her mother and siblings through the estate of Martha Jefferson's father. Sally was born to a white father and a half-black mother. She had six children that we're sure of, four of whom survived to adulthood, and she has many descendants still alive today.
During all of Sally's adult life, Thomas Jefferson was a widower. His wife Martha died when she was 33 from complications after the birth of her sixth child. Her death devastated Jefferson, who stayed in his room for weeks. And at that time, Sally was a small child, about 9 years old.
And here's the weirdest thing I discovered in this whole video. Sally was Martha's half-sister. They shared a father, but had different mothers. Did that later draw Jefferson to a woman who grew to resemble his dead wife? Or was it perhaps the reason for some of the special treatment given to Sally's family? And also, think about how thin the distance was from someone who was nearly American royalty to slave. I mean, two half-sisters, close by blood, but very different by status.
Now, rumors about Jefferson's relationship with Hemings started as early as 1802. They even made it into one of the famously partisan and nasty newspapers of the time. For the next two centuries, the mainstream answer to that question was, "It's not true." Jefferson's white descendants, they had a ready answer for the light-skinned children running around Monticello, some of whom looked a lot like Jefferson. They pinned it on a nephew, probably one of the sisters' sons, half-raised at Monticello himself. Jefferson's grandson claimed the nephews had privately confessed, though he never pinned down which one.
Respected 20th-century historians signed off, and nobody pushed back. One even called the Jefferson and Hemings relationship impossible for a man of his character. That denial held for almost 200 years until 1998, when a friend pitched a retired pathologist named Eugene Foster on an idea. DNA testing might finally settle the Jefferson paternity question for good.
Foster doubted it at first, but a new Y chromosome test had just arrived, precise enough to trace a male bloodline across generations. So, he took a shot. Now, Jefferson had no surviving son, so there wasn't a direct DNA to test. Instead, Foster used descendants of Jefferson's uncle. And those were tested against multiple families.
There was the Woodson family, a prominent black family who settled in Ohio and whose tradition said they were descendants of a child that Jefferson and Hemings conceived in Paris. But the DNA ruled that out. The DNA testing also ruled out the Carr nephews, who the family had blamed for decades. But the testing of descendants of Eston Hemings, Sally's youngest son, that was a match. Not to Thomas Jefferson specifically, but to one of about 25 Jefferson men in Virginia who carried that same chromosome.
With the Carrs and Woodson family ruled out, and Jefferson's own presence at Monticello lining up with every one of Sally's pregnancies, the study's authors, they called them the simplest and most probable answer. And with that, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, it ran an article that made it fact. It titled it "Jefferson fathered slave's last child." A claim that went far beyond the testing.
Two months after the story circled the globe, Foster and his co-authors, they published a quiet follow-up in the same journal. They made the actual finding even clearer this time, writing that "Jefferson can neither be definitively excluded nor solely implicated." Nevertheless, the original headline is still on Nature. The abstract softens it by saying the testings provide evidence. But the real details, they're behind a $40 paywall. Now, I have a link to a scanned copy if you'd like to read it yourself. As always, the correction got a fraction of the coverage that the original headline did.
Most people who've heard of the Jefferson-Hemings DNA test today believe that it proved Jefferson fathered those children. In reality, it was a judgment call by evaluating other evidence and not just the DNA alone. What followed was a perfect example of how a rush to consensus turns a maybe into a fact. The DNA hadn't actually settled which Jefferson was the father, but it handed everyone who wanted a clean answer the excuse to declare the case closed.
Even more so, fear started to play a role by some who still doubted it. For most of the 20th century, the academic establishment treated that Jefferson-Hemings story as a smear and not much more. But then that headline ran, and the reversal was almost instant. Joseph Ellis is the cleanest example. Five years before the test, he called a Jefferson-Hemings relationship remote. Within hours of the results going public, he was calling it proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Other big-name historians who'd spent entire careers waving the story off slipped in that very same window.
And there's a pattern worth noticing here. The closer somebody was to the actual lab work, the more careful they stayed. The further out you got, historians, the foundation, the culture at large, the louder and more certain the claims became. Some academics held their ground, but the ones who flipped fastest, they got the most airtime.
Then came Monticello. In January 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation released its own report on the paternity question. Now, this is the nonprofit that runs Monticello. It sells the tickets. It runs the gift shop. It's whole existence is tied to the Jefferson name. And it sat in judgment of its own founder. The verdict? A high probability that Jefferson fathered Sally's children. Not just the one child the DNA pointed at, but all six.
A dissenting report written by members of that same committee, it got buried. It It didn't even reach the press until much later. The people closest to the data, sitting on the same committee, couldn't agree on what it meant. But the public never got to watch that disagreement play out. And over the next 20 years, the foundation's language only hardened. They moved to flat certainty. Jefferson was the father and stated that as settled fact.
In 2018, Monticello opened an exhibit called "The Life of Sally Hemings." After some internal back and forth, the institution settled on a word to describe the relationship, rape. They stuck a question mark on it, but there it was. So, where did that come from? The argument was straightforward. Sally Hemings was Jefferson's property, and somebody legally owned by another person can't freely consent to that person. So, by definition, whatever happened was coercion.
Now, the last decades were a time where changes were coming in full force. One was a more aware reckoning of our founding historical figures. I mean, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree was being set aside to talk about George Washington the slave owner. The country was deep in judgment over race and history. Confederate statues were coming down. Museums are rewriting their placards. Every institution with a founder was getting asked to look at him through a harsher lens. Monticello read the room. A founding father exposed as a hypocrite fit the mood of the moment perfectly. And outlets that had shown zero interest in maybe suddenly had plenty of interest in a definitely. Nuance doesn't trend nearly as well as a villain.
And a decent number of people have built public identities and even careers around being Thomas Jefferson's descendants through Sally Hemings. Book deals, media appearances, documented family histories. They first appeared alongside Jefferson's white descendants on Oprah back in 1998, and they've turned up regularly on television news shows ever since. Now, I want to be careful here. I mean, these are real people and their family stories matter. But it's just true that real people with real stakes are now attached to one specific answer. And that raises the cost for anyone who stands up and publicly doubts it.
Heck, I got a small taste of that myself. When I went into the comments and I backed off my original belief that the matter was settled, I had people in the comments below calling me a flat-earther and accusing me, literally, of kowtowing to white supremacist denialism. Now, I can easily shrug off nonsense like that, but for a historian or a college professor, their downside is a lot steeper than smack talk in the comment section. Sometimes the safest career move is to never ask the question at all.
Now, here's an interesting thing to think about about race in this controversy. It ran through both ends of the story. I mean, some of the old dismissals, they carried an ugly assumption baked in that a gentleman like Jefferson simply wouldn't lower himself to be with a black slave. Now, how much did that drive early denials? I mean, it's hard to quantify, but I bet it wasn't zero. And once the new headlines were written, race got used the other way.
Hey, speaking of the comment section, if I've messed up any substantive part of this, let me know and I'll address it there and in the description. I also have my script, notes, and sourcing. So, that's how the consensus came together, fast and with social pressure, which raises the obvious question, what did that rushed consensus skip?
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All right. Now, back to the Jeffersons. So, look, a lot of whole books have been written all around this issue, but let's get into the main reasons behind the case for fatherhood. They're not insignificant. I mean, the reason people are debating this hundreds of years later is it's because it's a good mystery. And for that, we'll start in Paris.
This is the story told by Madison Hemings, one of Sally's sons. In 1787, Jefferson sent for Sally, then 14, to accompany his daughter to France while he served as the American minister there. Under French law, though, slavery had no legal standing. The moment Hemings set foot on French soil, she was free. Two years later, when Jefferson prepared to sail home, Hemings, 16 now, and according to Madison, pregnant with Jefferson's son, didn't want to go. She understood exactly what going back meant. Freedom in Paris, slavery in Virginia.
Madison said his mother negotiated. In exchange for returning to Monticello, Jefferson promised her extraordinary privileges and made a solemn pledge that any child she had would be freed at 21. That's leverage almost no other slave in Jefferson's life ever had. Now, Jefferson did eventually free Sally's children. In fact, he only freed seven slaves in his entire lifetime or by will, and all seven were members of the large Hemings family. Two children were allowed to leave during his lifetime, and two others, Madison and Eston, through his will upon his death. No other family member at Monticello got that treatment.
And Sally's children, they were trained in skilled trades, not field labor. Madison and Eston in carpentry and music, and others were placed above the general slave population at Monticello. There was a definite pattern of favoritism towards the Hemings family. But that had limits. Sally's children were freed, but not given money or land. And Sally herself? She wasn't legally freed by Jefferson's will. I mean, after his death, she was allowed to first informally leave, and later she was freed by Jefferson's daughter.
Another point to mention is that some people at the time noticed a physical resemblance. People who actually saw Hemings' children with their own eyes said they looked like Jefferson. And those weren't just hopeful family members with something to protect. So, it's hard to read too much into some of these actions, but then there's the calendar. It's one of the stronger arguments for Jefferson's paternity.
Now, as I mentioned, Jefferson kept meticulous records of the plantation operations, as well as his own travel. And the foundation saw that he was present at Monticello during every known conception window for Sally's confirmed children. Now, the calendar proves presence, not paternity. And it And it wasn't a study that looked at or ruled anyone else out as potential candidates. It was just a look at Jefferson himself. But where the calendar gets more merit as evidence is that when you consider Jefferson had long stretches away from Monticello, years as Secretary of State, Vice President, President, and Sally had no children during those absences. Now, Thomas was usually at Monticello during his presidential recesses, so that correlation may be less than it appears. But overall, it's one of the strongest data points, if not the strongest.
And finally, people point to his silence. He never once publicly denied a relationship with Hemings, even though the accusation followed him throughout his entire presidency. Now, that said, he generally didn't respond to any personal attacks on principle. But for a man who wrote so much about so much, he left this charge completely untouched.
Okay. So, now let's take a look at where some reasonable doubt should be brought into the equation. And it starts again in Paris. Madison's story was fascinating, but was it true? I mean, we never got his direct words. It was a story compiled from an interview he gave in 1873. He talked to the editor of an Ohio newspaper, the Pike County Republican. Now, that was a newspaper with a strong agenda in the midst of reconstruction, and it was politically useful to tie Democrat Jefferson to a slave sexual relationship. When it was published, it was attacked by rival newspapers that said the story sounded more like its own propaganda instead of an interview of an old man.
And we also need to look at the timing of that interview in 1873, because that was a full 86 years after the Paris trip. In fact, the trip took place over a decade before Madison was even born. There's no indication of how he got the information, and there's no mention of a baby in Jefferson's household notes, which tracked nearly everything at Monticello. All of Sally's known six children, they were in those records, including the name, date, sex. Although interestingly, while entering the father's name was typical for records of other slaves, there was none listed for any of Sally's six children. That could easily imply that Jefferson knew who the father was and choose not to write it down for whatever reason.
There's also the statements from Edmund Bacon, who ran Monticello as an overseer for two decades. In a memoir published in 1862, he said flatly that Harriet, another of Sally's children, wasn't Jefferson's daughter. In fact, he named the actual father saying, "I've seen him come out of her mother's room many a morning." Now, in a twist, the name itself got redacted by the minister who transcribed the memoir, and it's never been recovered. The foundation, they pushed back on Bacon saying that he started at Monticello after Harriet's conception. Although that's at odds with Bacon's own timeline.
And then, there's plain old biology. Jefferson was 64 when Eston was conceived in 1807. By that point, he had documented rheumatism severe enough to affect his ability to walk, plus recurring bouts of dysentery and malaria. Now, none of that makes fatherhood impossible, but it certainly makes it trickier.
In 2001, a panel of 13 credentialed scholars, lawyers, historians, scientists, they spent a full year independently reviewing the entire case. They called themselves the Scholars Commission, chaired by a University of Virginia law professor, Robert Turner. Their unanimous conclusion? The paternity allegation was, {quote} "by no means proven." And it ranged from serious skepticism to outright conviction that it was almost certainly false. The report ran over 500 pages with over 1,400 footnotes. And unsurprisingly, it got a fraction of the press that the original DNA headline got.
That panel also pointed to far more likely suspects, including the largely forgotten brother of Thomas Jefferson. For generations, the descendants of Sally's youngest child, Eston, they told the same family story. They were descended from a Jefferson, but specifically from an uncle, not from Thomas himself. At Monticello, the slave community had a name for Thomas's younger brother. They called him Uncle Randolph.
So, who was this brother? Randolph Jefferson lived about 20 mi from Monticello, and he was a very different man than his older brother. An enslaved blacksmith named Isaac Jefferson, in a memoir dictated around 1847, remembered him fondly. Randolph, he said, used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle, and dance half the night. That's not how plantation owners usually get described. Thomas Jefferson himself, in a sworn deposition, he said that Randolph lacked the skill for judicious management of his affairs. He called him a a of easy pliancy to the wishes and urgency of others. Someone very susceptible of influence from those who had any views upon him.
Now, Randolph didn't keep letters or records or calendars like his brother did. And the foundation minimized his visits to Monticello because they could only confirm a total of four visits. And they also noticed that there was a 15-year gap in letters between the brothers. But critics respond that he only lived a half day ride from Monticello, so the absence of letters were very likely the proof of regular visits, so they didn't need to write often. And regarding the calendars of who was at Monticello when, however frequent Randolph's visits were, they likely corresponded to when his brother was also at home.
But the timing around Eston's birth is notable. On August 12th, 1807, Thomas wrote his brother inviting him to Monticello. A letter sent 9 months and 9 days before Eston Hemings was born. Now, to be clear, Randolph was invited, but they didn't have an exact record proving that he actually made the trip. What we do know though is that 9 months after that invitation, literally a week after Eston was born, Randolph himself showed up at Monticello and asked his brother to help him draft a new will.
Now, just for context, Randolph was 12 years younger than his brother Thomas. He was 52 and a widower and in good health. Sally at that time, she was about 35. Not long afterwards, Randolph, who was also known to have fathered at least one child with a slave, married another woman in her early 20s. And Sally never gave birth again. So, in this story, there are a lot of facts all over the place, but none that come to definitive proof.
But here's something fun because the question may not stay theoretical forever. In November 2025, a man named John Works filed a petition in a Nashville court. He's a seventh-generation Jefferson descendant and wants a DNA sample from Randolph's son, who's been buried in Nashville's historic cemetery since 1845. Now, nobody can find Randolph's grave. Two centuries later, the brother who left almost no paper trail, he also left no headstone. But Works is asking for a tooth, and he's lined up a prominent lab. The foundation says the matter is already settled, but Works disagrees. In his own filing, he put it simply, "Either way, the search for truth will be advanced."
So, after 200 years of letters, lawsuits, and family legends, the answer to one of America's oldest paternity mysteries might finally come down to a tooth in a Tennessee cemetery. So, where does that all leave us? I'll be honest, I really don't know. I mean, I bounced around as I was researching this multiple times, and I bounced around even more while I was writing it. We know that Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, but which Jefferson? To me, that's still a mystery.
All right. If you haven't had enough controversial topics for today, how about this one? Why do so many Muslims marry their cousins? It's a very foreign concept to Westerners, but hundreds of millions of people in the world, mostly in Muslim countries, are married to their first cousin. And in a number of countries, it's the most common practice. So, so why? And and why did it stop in the Western world? It's a fascinating topic with layers deeper than you'd imagine. Hey, I hope you came away with something smart here, and I hope I did a fair job of presenting what I learned. Until next time.