In Pursuit of the Father: Thomas Jefferson and His Biographers

At a dinner in June 1969, with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby, who headed the American pacification program in South Vietnam, journalist Wallace Terry’s wife, Janice, “startled everyone” by saying her “American roots run as deep as anyone’s since she is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson.” Terry’s biographer, Ray Boomhower, passes by Janice Terry’s remark without comment. Apparently, no one thought to follow up this origin story with questions, any more than most Jefferson biographers questioned his fathering of slaves before Fawn Brodie published “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History” in 1974. Her narrative was highly speculative, but she provided powerful circumstantial evidence that Jefferson was a sensuous man, given to romantic attachments—sometimes to other men’s wives. To one of them he wrote a long letter, a dialogue between his head and his heart. He was telling himself that he had the bad habit of allowing his romantic affections to get the best of him, no matter how strictly his head tried to make him behave. The passionate tone of the epistolary dialogue is not out of line with a man who relished randy novels like “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” by Laurence Sterne and enjoyed showing a visitor to Monticello a treasured volume of salacious French literature. After Brodie had delivered a paper, “The Great Jefferson Taboo,” at the Organization of American Historians, Winthrop Jordan, author of “White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812″ (1968), winner of the National Book Award in History and Biography, stated that he had already been sixty percent on what might be called the Brodie side of the argument and described himself as having upped the percentage to eighty after reading her paper. He was impressed with the psychological evidence,” according to the historian Eric T. Owens. The influential Garry Wills, on the other hand, decried Brodie’s “endless appetite” for psychologizing historical figures based on virtually no actual evidence.Many professional historians greeted Brodie’s book with skepticism and even ridicule. African American claims to Jeffersonian ancestry were rejected because they relied on family oral histories. Jefferson’s purported liaison with a slave, Sally Hemings, first made news during his presidency in reports by journalist James Callender and were dismissed by Jefferson biographers as part of his political enemies’ efforts to discredit him. But Callender had not made up these stories. Jefferson’s neighbors, the journalist learned, took for granted his liaison with a black woman as they observed so many light-colored Hemings slaves in service inside Monticello and receiving other kinds of favorable treatment. And, after all, slave owners begetting children with their slaves was hardly an uncommon phenomenon in the antebellum South.Later Madison Hemings, a freed Jefferson slave, publicly announced that Jefferson was his father, but biographers rejected his testimony as the product of abolitionist agitation and an ex-slave’s desire to associate himself with an illustrious white man. By and large, until the 1990s, Jefferson biographers believed it was out of character for their man to have fathered members of the Hemings family.Sally Hemings. Thomas Jefferson FoundationThen in “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (1997), lawyer and historian Annette Gordon-Reed, re-examined Brodie’s work and the historical record, rehabilitating Madison Hemings by showing that his testimony had not been a put-up job by an abolitionist but the result of years of quietly claiming his birthright. If you read his published account (available as an appendix in Brodie’s biography) you will see that his acknowledgment of Jefferson is begrudging, not boastful. He seems almost irritated to have to disclose what his own father cared not to divulge. Ms. Gordon-Reed did not claim she had proven the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, but she made Brodie’s circumstantial case all the more powerful.The next year DNA analysis persuaded several historians that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least two of Hemings’s children. Now in 2026, yet another DNA analysis has made an even stronger scientific case for the Jefferson-Hemings coupling resulting in Madison and Eston Hemings. The scientific paper describing the research was still under review.In this black-white pairing more is at stake than Thomas Jefferson’s biography. So many biographers over so many generations had a conception of a Jeffersonian country that had no place in its origin story for a black woman, let alone a whole people. In this attitude, they were bolstered by Jefferson himself who preferred that black people be resettled in Africa or the Caribbean after their emancipation. He seemingly never held the view that black and white people could live in comity and equality in the future. In fact, he feared that given the harsh nature of slavery, black people could not reconcile themselves to living in peace with their former white masters. If the news stories about the DNA analysis that proved Jefferson’s black paternity would have come as no surprise to Janice Terry and other black Americans, it is because they located their identities in the very country that had enslaved them, and not in some far-off land that Thomas Jefferson supposed they would prefer. Beginning in 1979, even before Annette Gordon-Reed’s groundbreaking book Barbara Chase-Riboud in her novel, “Sally Hemings,” projected a black attachment to an American identity that reflected a momentous cultural shift that became fully advanced in Clarence E. Walker’s “Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.” (2009). Walker drove deeper into Jefferson’s psyche, punctuated by his silences, that Chase-Riboud makes so much of in her novel. Even though it was not uncommon for enslavers to have long-term relationships with black women they held in bondage, in the “Jeffersonian world there was no place for Jefferson to ‘come out.’” Here, as in other places in his book, Walker used contemporary language—in this case the phrase used for gays and lesbians who publicly reveal their sexual orientation. In short, “interracial sex was normative, if largely unacknowledged.” When Callender reported it in the newspapers, he was breaking a taboo. That Jefferson described black people in almost a clinical fashion in “Notes on the State of Virginia” mattered little to Walker, since he regarded Jefferson as more than the sum of what he wrote. When Jefferson deemed black Americans more “ardent” than whites, Walker wondered: How did Jefferson know? Inside knowledge? “People’s sexual practices are unruly,” Walker emphasizes, invoking his mentor Winthrop Jordan’s argument that Jefferson’s letter about the stringent head and the susceptible heart suggested “repression often coexists with desire.” To call black Americans ardent may even be evidence of projection, Walker posited: “although ostensibly speaking about blacks,” Jefferson was “really talking about himself.” Never one to shy away from speculating on the full range of Jefferson’s feelings, Walker considered “Jefferson’s preference for ‘enslaved sexuality,’”—a term scholars of Caribbean slave societies have employed. What Gordon-Reed had also entertained—that the relationship with Hemings may have been reciprocal, even in the power-imbalance—becomes in Walker’s reading the history of Hemings women who were able to use their sexual attractiveness to gain the privileges and protection that ex-slave Harriet Jacobs wrote about. Walker attempted to situate the Jefferson-Hemings relationship within a history of how black women sought to protect themselves and their families, realizing a certain power (however limited) they had over those who enslaved them: “Just as [Harriet] Jacobs thus exercised the full range of her sexual agency as a female slave, Sally Hemings may have done the same with Jefferson.” If so, that led to this question: “Did Sally and her family think of themselves as black? Or did they, like the fair-skinned gens de colour of Haiti, consider themselves not to be black or Negro at all?”Having reversed the perspective of generations of Jefferson biographers, Walker concluded: “The Jefferson-Hemings affair, given Jefferson’s place in the pantheon of the Founding Fathers, raises questions about the national identity or racial provenance of the United States. Using it as a point of departure, I want to posit in this book a new myth of origin of the United States. That is, I am suggesting that at the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixed-race one, in which Jefferson and Hemings, as a mixed-race couple, rather than George and Martha Washington, should be considered the founding parents of the North American republic.”Jon Meacham with his book “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power’ on November 27, 2012 at Los Angeles, California. Via Gary Leonard/Getty ImagesIn his 2012 biography of Jefferson, Jon Meacham accepted the liaison with Hemings as established fact, which “gave rise to two centuries of speculation about the true nature of the affair. Was it about love? Power? Both? And if both, how much was affection, how much coercion? Jefferson’s connection with Sally Hemings lasted from about 1787 to Jefferson’s death in 1826—almost forty years.” As Mr. Meacham’s questions demonstrated, much remained occluded about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship.So altered has Jefferson’s biography become that in “John Quincy Adams: A Man for the Whole People” (2024), Randall Woods introduces the third president this way: “Thomas Jefferson, six feet two with red hair and rugged good looks . . . charming, empathetic, and, at least early in life, unassuming. Women loved him and he loved women. Devoted to his first wife . . . he had promised her on her deathbed never to remarry. But he then conducted an affair with Maria Cosway, a married woman, and famously fathered several children with his slave and concubine, Sally Hemings, who was also his deceased wife’s half sister.”In “Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh”(2022), Thomas S. Kidd describes a “continuing relationship with Hemings.” In “Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America” (2024), Tyson Reeder notes that “Napoleon asked a few questions about Jefferson. How old was he? About sixty. Was he married? Widowed. Did he have children? Yes, two daughters (it was actually three daughters and a son, but [James] Monroe didn’t count—probably didn’t know about—the boy and girl born to Jefferson and Sally Hemings).”In “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America”(2024), Jeffrey Rosen has an excoriating chapter on Jefferson, noting that his liaison with Sally Hemings contradicted his racist writings about the inferiority of black people and the immorality of miscegenation. Jefferson went so far as to deny the genius of Phillis Wheatley, an African American poet that no less than George Washington and Benjamin Franklin lauded. Mr. Rosen assesses Jefferson’s anti-slavery opinions as just that—opinions he never significantly acted upon as an enslaver susceptible to the avarice that he and other founders recognized as a cardinal vice that made the genuine pursuit of happiness impossible, even as they enjoyed a luxurious living made possible by enslaved men and women’s labor.Nick Nolte as Thomas Jefferson and Greta Scacchi as Maria Cosway in ‘Jefferson in Paris,’ 1995. Merchant Ivory ProductionsMr. Rosen’s negative verdict, however, has to be tempered by the tolerance that made movies such as Merchant Ivory’s “Jefferson in Paris”(1995) possible, and a romance with Sally Hemings conceivable, although, as Mary E. Stuckey cautions in “Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are”(2025), supposing a love match between Hemings and her enslaver may suggest to some that slavery was not that bad, or at least that Jefferson had a heart. In 2014, Thomas A. Foster observed in “Sex and the Founding Fathers,”that the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had become so much a part of the American psyche that to doubt that it happened made Jefferson less credible as a human being. Making him more like his contemporaries, who enslaved men, women, and children, and fathered children with enslaved women, had not diminished him — as so many of his earlier biographers supposed would be the case — but had transformed him into a more compelling representative of a multicultural American society with its evolving notions of sexuality and race that no longer made miscegenation the horror, or at the very least, the scandal, of previous generatioMr. Foster’s interpretation of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship has to be factored into the complex nexus of rape, coercion, and an incontestable power imbalance. To romanticize Hemings and Jefferson is to ignore the sexual violence that miscegenation inflicted on black women who, like Sally Hemings, were deprived of a voice of their own and unheeded by generations of Jefferson biographers seduced by an eloquence that seemed to lift him above the stirrings of his own loins.Mr. Rollyson’s ‘Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History’ will be published on Presidents’ Day 2027.

In Pursuit of the Father: Thomas Jefferson and His Biographers

In Pursuit of the Father: Thomas Jefferson and His Biographers

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