Forum

[jaceravone]

Originally Posted by elaine 1970

Thomas Jefferson had a mistress named sally. is it true?.

It is very well known fact that Jefferson had indeed taken one of his slaves as a mistress. This debated made national headlines several years ago when paternity testing was performed on the Jefferson lineage. As much as I would love to the tell the story, in my present state of mind I would butcher the entire story, so I have copied a small section from Wikipedia that had to do with the controversy and will explain it a little better than I can.

Sally Hemings controversy

Whether Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings has been the subject of considerable controversy since the 19th century. Most historians now believe that he did have a long-term relationship with her and was the father of her children. He was only in his late 30s when his wife died, but he promised her not to marry again. In his society, it was common for widowers of means to have relationships with enslaved women as companions, as his father-in-law John Wayles did for years with Betty Hemings after his third wife died. Many elite white men denied or hid such relationships, but the mixed-race children born attested to the facts.
DNA testing in 1998 showed that the Jefferson male line was connected to Eston Hemings.
Regarding marriage between blacks and whites, Jefferson wrote that "[t]he amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."[87] In addition, Hemings was likely the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Her father John Wayles had a relationship with Betty Hemings for years after his third wife died.
The allegation that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings first gained widespread public attention in 1802, when controversial journalist James T. Callender, wrote in a Richmond newspaper, "...[Jefferson] keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally." Other accounts were also carried in newspapers, and the topic was the subject of political cartoons. Jefferson never responded publicly about this issue but was said to have denied it in his private correspondence.[88]
A 1998 DNA study concluded that there was a DNA link between Sally's son Eston Hemings and the male Jefferson line. It did not conclusively prove that Jefferson himself was the ancestor, because of constraints of the test and evidence. (He belonged to the Haplogroup 'T' DNA group.) Historians point to evidence that Jefferson was in residence at Monticello nine months before the births of each of Sally Hemings' children. This, plus other circumstantial evidence, supports the conclusion that Jefferson was the father. It is an explanation with the advantage of simplicity.
In the early 2000s, three studies were released following the publication of the DNA evidence. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, appointed a multi-disciplinary, nine-member in-house research committee of Ph.D.s and an M.D. to study the matter of the paternity of Hemings's children. The committee concluded "it is very unlikely that any Jefferson other than Thomas Jefferson was the father of [Hemings's six] children."[89]
In 2001, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS)[90] commissioned a study by an independent 13-member Scholars Commission. The commission concluded that the Jefferson paternity thesis was not persuasive. On April 12, 2001, they issued a report; at 565 pages, it was far longer than the Foundation report; many of those pages were devoted to a review of the evidence that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation study examined. The conclusion of most of the Scholars Commission was that "the Jefferson-Hemings allegation is by no means proven"; those members' individual conclusions ranged from "serious skepticism about the charge" to "a conviction that it is almost certainly false." The majority suggested the most likely alternative was that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother, was the father of Eston, Heming's youngest son. (It was not until the late 20th century that Randolph Jefferson was ever proposed as a candidate for paternity of Hemings' children.)
The National Genealogical Society Quarterly published articles reviewing the evidence from a genealogical perspective. The authors concluded that the link between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was credible and consistent with the weight of evidence. They criticized the TJHS report for weaknesses in approach, bias toward data, and ignoring the weight of evidence.[91]