ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 13, 1997 TAG: 9703130037
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE
SOURCE: IAN ZACK THE DAILY PROGRESS
The allegation that Jefferson fathered up to seven children with Sally Hemings was first made in 1802.
Did Thomas Jefferson spend the last 38 years of his life in a romantic relationship with his slave Sally Hemings?
Many modern historians have weighed in on the subject; most have dismissed the long-rumored affair as salacious gossip, a political brickbat or the pathetic fantasy of the Hemings family.
But a soon-to-be-released book by a law professor examines the evidence and concludes that it supports the liaison far more than scholars have been willing to admit.
In ``Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,'' Annette Gordon-Reed accuses noted Jefferson biographers of bending over backward to refute a charge they didn't want to believe.
``I don't think we can ever think about the Jefferson-Hemings controversy in the same way again,'' Peter Onuf, chairman of the University of Virginia's history department and an expert on the Jeffersonian era, said of the book. ``It has demystified that whole notion that `authorities say it couldn't have happened.' I think we can discount that from now on.''
The allegation that Jefferson, after the death of his wife, Martha, fathered up to seven children with Hemings was first made in 1802, during Jefferson's first term as president, by journalist James Callender.
Hemings was the daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, and the slave Elizabeth Hemings, making Sally Hemings the half-sister of Jefferson's wife.
Jefferson's contemporary defenders denounced Callender as a tool of the Federalist Party, which despised Jefferson. Callender, they said, was out for revenge at being rebuffed in his request of Jefferson for a patronage job.
The controversy over Callender's allegation died down for more than a century, then was rekindled in 1974 when historian Fawn Brodie published a Jefferson biography that was vilified by many scholars for its contention that the story of the affair probably was true.
One reason historians have cited for not believing the story was that Jefferson's family denied it, saying that one of his two nephews, Samuel or Peter Carr, was the father of Hemings' children.
Gordon-Reed, who teaches at New York Law School and was educated at Harvard, decided to examine the evidence in early 1995, after the torrent of negative publicity surrounding the film ``Jefferson in Paris.''
The movie was lambasted for historical inaccuracies, including, much to the dismay of some commentators, the strong suggestion that Jefferson began an affair with a teen-age Sally Hemings while he was the American minister to France.
``I started seeing articles and stories by people that I thought were really derogatory to black people,'' said Gordon-Reed, who is black. ``They said, `Jefferson would never be involved in a romantic relationship with a slave girl.' As if you could know that.''
Gordon-Reed spends much of her book sifting through the evidence in the manner of a trial lawyer.
One of the strongest pieces of circumstantial evidence for the affair, she writes, is the undisputed fact that Sally Hemings and all four of her children who lived to adulthood went free, being among the lucky few of Jefferson's 130 slaves and the only complete nuclear family to do so.
Among the new evidence Gordon-Reed adds to the debate: All of the Hemings children were given names from the Jefferson-Randolph family line.
Andrew Burstein, a historian taken to task by Gordon-Reed, said he still believes that Jefferson was not involved with Hemings.
Gordon-Reed is ``a provocative writer and a very talented writer,'' said Burstein, an assistant professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa. ``The book is thorough and in many places strong enough to shake the staunchest defender of Jefferson's honor.
``On the other hand, the author's training as a lawyer is very apparent because we know that lawyers don't always expose the truth. They often obscure it by introducing so many variables, all of which seem plausible, yet in the end we may be no closer to the truth.''
For Burstein, the evidence is inconclusive.
``I'm becoming an endangered species, a Jefferson scholar that accepts the traditional notion that maybe a large number of Virginia slave owners did go to bed with their slaves, but that maybe Jefferson was not one of them,'' he said.
Gordon-Reed responded: ``I don't know that I can convince people. For a lot of people, this is not about evidence, it's about what they need psychically.
``I believe that this is probably true, and I have a feeling that over the years, barring any major new find, it will be accepted as true.''
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