Word: jefferson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chief among Banning's doubts is the fact that the DNA test was not a true paternity test, which would have required exhuming Jefferson's remains as well as those of Hemings' children to get DNA samples. The test that was done proves only that a Jefferson male, not necessarily Thomas, was the father, and there were other adult males in Jefferson's family who lived nearby. What's more, there are several documented denials of the relationship, by Jefferson's former overseer at Monticello and Jefferson's daughter, granddaughter and grandson. Jefferson himself never acknowledged the sexual relationship...
Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at New York Law School, is one of many scholars who have concluded that there is enormous support for the case that Jefferson and Hemings were intimately involved. Her 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, provides a critical analysis of the historical evidence supporting the liaison (see box). In reviewing Jefferson biographies that dismissed the relationship, Gordon-Reed says, "I realized that a lot of what they said was based on prejudice, and they were not taking the words of black people seriously." One example is the skepticism with which...
...until the DNA study was released in Nature in 1998 that the tide began to turn among historians. Although the article was misleadingly titled--the headline read JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE'S LAST CHILD, when in fact the study concluded solely that a Jefferson male had fathered that child--it provided the missing link that many historians needed. And there was other evidence: records indicate that Jefferson was at Monticello at the time of the conception of all of Hemings' children; Israel Jefferson, another slave at Monticello, corroborated Madison Hemings' story that he was the son of Jefferson and Hemings...
...very personal reason to accept the story all along. His mother had told him as a child that he was related to the third President. Descended from Hemings' son Madison, Lanier recalls standing up in his first-grade class in Atlanta and announcing his presidential heritage: "I said, 'Thomas Jefferson was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.' The teacher told me to sit down and stop telling lies...
...house, and they never had me to theirs," she says. She never knew of her ancestor Eston. That is because Eston was light-skinned enough to pass for white. In order to hide his connection with his darker-skinned Hemings relatives, he changed his name to E.H. Jefferson and cut ties with his black family. Westerinen finally discovered her connection in 1974, after Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a biography by Fawn Brodie, uncovered the details of the Hemings family...