Thomas Jefferson's DNA (Bonus)

0:007 million Californians depend on community health clinics for their care, but Proposition 44 cuts billions from clinics. Under 44, hundreds of clinics will close, and health services will be eliminated. That's why Prop 44 is opposed by nurses, doctors, and patients. Vote no on the clinic shutdown proposition. No, on 44. Add paid for by no on Prop 44. Stop the attack on patients in community health clinics, sponsored by California Primary Care Association Advocates. Add Committee's top funders ultimate health services in California Primary Care Association Advocates. To ghost haunted houses because they have unfinished business or because you have unfinished races. There they are. It's further evidence that everything happens for races. This is a bonus episode of history as it happens at Saturday, October 3rd. Scientists sequence Thomas Jefferson's genome from three strands of his hair that have been conserved for a project led by the Smithsonian Institution's Richard Curran to prove that

1:00Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Researchers employed cutting-edge techniques to extract and sequence the DNA, and then compared it with the DNA samples obtained from 13 living Hemings in Jefferson Family Descendants. In an interview on PBS, Curran explained why he spent 15 years working on this. Well, there were still people who questioned it, a few historians, members of the family, and so on. And I think the idea of being able to firmly establish that was very appealing for many people. And how did this how did this all come together? Well, it was, you know, a hair in the Bible and we discovered it while we were conserving the Bible and national treasure at the Smithsonian. And I said, well, if that's a hair in Jefferson's Bible, maybe we can DNA from it. If we get the DNA and we can analyze the DNA of contemporary descendants, maybe we can prove this once and for all. The New York Times reported it was a 15-year detective story involving archaeologists, genealogists, molecular geneticists,

2:03and historians stretching across multiple changes in Smithsonian leadership. Curran referred to it as a capstone to decades of previous research and extraordinary proof that Jefferson fathered Hemings' children. Now, this story is in some ways old news. The allegations that Jefferson had an enslaved mistress appeared when he was president. And it was common knowledge in the Hemings Family tradition, their oral history. And books written decades ago by Faun Brodie and an Eckgordon re-delved into their relationship. Yet the story still fascinates and has a new chapter for us to talk about. Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation chair emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer prize and the author of Thomas Jefferson's Education. And most recently, Tower Hill, a plantation on the edge of rebellion among many books. Alan Taylor, welcome back. It's nice to be back with you. Good timing. I was just out in Charlottesville a couple of weeks ago, making my annual trip to Monticello.

3:07Actually, did a podcast there with Brandon Dillard. He's a great guy. But we're going to return to Thomas Jefferson's world in this episode now because of this remarkable story about his DNA using groundbreaking innovative techniques to trace Jefferson to living descendants in the Jefferson and Heming's family today. What did you think of this story? Well, I thought it was a very good story. And I think that the research is quite ingenious. It's not completely out of the blue, of course, because there was a DNA study done in 1998. But that study didn't have access directly to Thomas Jefferson's own genome. So the previous study had used genetic connection with his uncle, Field Jefferson, and had found that there was a 999 jessus out of a thousand that Jefferson was the father of one of the enslaved people of the Heming's family, Eston Hemings. But this latest study is even more directly connecting to Thomas Jefferson. This story is really in many ways a

4:13reflection of our country and the way we discuss controversies and how we view people from the past, isn't it? It is because there have been so many people who have refused to accept any evidence for Jefferson's paternity of Sally Heming's children. Despite the fact that evidence has been mounting for several generations, even before we had this DNA testing, there was abundant evidence that people who knew Jefferson quite well understood that he was the father of Sally Heming's children. And there's the statistical evidence that he was present approximately nine months before the births of all of her children. Despite the fact that during that same period of time, he was away from Monichello at least half of the time because he had jobs like being vice president of the United States. As a net Gordon Reed wrote about this before the DNA testing started, there was already overwhelming evidence and support of this paternity, but people just didn't

5:13want to believe it. But people believe in science or most people believe in science. And consequently, under the DNA testing seems to have brought a lot of people around who are not willing to look at the earlier evidence. I feel like resistance to this is waning. But anytime this comes up, it is an opportunity to revisit what has often been a painful, even nasty debate over Jefferson. Alan, why did people, why did so many historians reject this story for so long? Well, historians have not rejected it certainly since the DNA evidence came out. So in 1998, the original DNA test, so somebody like Joe Ellis, who had been quite skeptical of this story, he came around at that point. And a lot of historians had already embraced the notion that Thomas Jefferson was the father of her children by that point. It's been building pretty steadily among historians since the 1960s. But before the DNA, as you said, a net Gordon Reed showed, prior to any DNA, the evidence was compelling to go ahead. People tend to defer to

6:18Dumas Malone, who was the great biographer of Jefferson. And he was just absolutely rejected this and just said that this was filth that Thomas Jefferson was this philosophical, highly moral man and would be incapable of doing this. So there's a premise in there that if you have a relationship with one of your enslaved people that lowers you below the level that Dumas Malone and most people wanted to see Jefferson lowered. Now, somebody like Fawn Brodiew in the 1970 wrote a biography which embraced this relationship as being real. She says this doesn't diminish him, that she saw it as a loving relationship. And I think a net Gordon Reed tends to see it as mostly a positive relationship in one in which Jefferson and Hemings reached an understanding that man both fulfilled their ends of that understanding. A big part of it was just this notion that Jefferson was too pure to engage in interracial sex. And there was an insistence that there was something really

7:19quite disturbing about interracial sex. And this was shared among historians prior to the 1960s, who tended to be a more conservative lot than they are now. However, we know throughout the period of slavery, these kinds of relationships was the norm in Southern society mixed race off spring, if you will, were the norm. So the idea that it couldn't possibly be Thomas Jefferson when this was going on all the time doesn't make any sense. People who were the great champions of Jefferson like Dumas Malone thought of Jefferson as a higher level of humanity. So they Dumas Malone might say, yes, there were other planters who would do this, but he said, surely Thomas Jefferson would never do that. And we shouldn't even entertain this idea. And so that was fairly standard among white historians. And that's what an Edward Reed set out correct was to say, you know, really let's just look at the evidence here. There's better evidence for who was the father of Sally Hemings children, and there is for just about anybody else in the early republic. Yeah, the evidence tying other

8:21potential fathers to the children is far thinner than the evidence supporting Jefferson being the parent. The other cases are not very strong as an Edward Reed showed. You know, the other end of the political spectrum, if you will, Alan, I was just in Monticello. I mentioned I took the two and a half hour slavery tour. We all sat down at the end and we had a discussion with the tour guide. We were able to ask questions and converse with each other. In some members of the group did not refer to this as just some kind of benign relationship, but as rape, as abuse, as exploitation. Everyone thinks they know what the dynamics were between Thomas and Sally when really no one knows, but we draw inferences based on their age difference, the power imbalances. How do you as a historian approach that aspect of their relationship? Well, you know, facts are stubborn things and they need to be paid attention to. So the fact that this relationship probably began before she was 16 is a fact that he is her owner. She's his property to say that it is fully a matter of free choice on her

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