http://www.academia.org/CampusReport/February1999/jefferson.htm
Jefferson Was Falsely Accused

The respected British scientific journal, Nature, is suffering acute
embarrassment over the articles it published in its November 1998 issue
claiming that a study based on DNA analysis had proven beyond
reasonable doubt that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a son by Sally
Hemings, one of his slaves. In its January issue Nature ran three
letters, including one from the principal author of the November
article, pointing out that it had "overstated" the evidence of
Jefferson’s paternity.

The article was introduced with this statement by the editors of
Nature: "The scandals involving American presidents are nothing new. In
1802 President Thomas Jefferson was accused of fathering a child by
Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. A molecular genetics study in the
November issue of Nature finally puts the affair to rest, establishing
beyond reasonable doubt Thomas Jefferson’s relationship to Sally
Hemings’s sons."

The article by Dr. Eugene Foster and others described a study of Y
chromosomes from the male-line descendants of President Jefferson’s
paternal uncle, Field Jefferson and male-line descendants of two of
Sally Hemings’ sons, her alleged first-born, Thomas Woodson, and her
last son, Eston Hemings Jefferson. Five male descendants of Jefferson’s
uncle, Field Jefferson, were used in this study because Thomas
Jefferson had no sons to carry on the line. The chromosomes of the five
descendants of Field Jefferson were found to share a distinctive
characteristic.

That characteristic was not found in any of the five descendants of
Thomas Woodson, proving that Thomas Jefferson was not his father. The
allegation that Jefferson had fathered a son named Tom published by a
Richmond newspaper in 1802 was what started the long-lived rumor that
Jefferson was the father of all Sally Hemings’ children. The
descendants of Thomas Woodson have long believed that their ancestor
was Thomas Jefferson’s son, but Herbert Barger, the Jefferson family
historian, says it is doubtful that Thomas Woodson was even the son of
Sally Hemings. There was only one descendant of Sally Hemings’ youngest
son, Eston in the study. His Y chromosomes had the distinctive
Jefferson characteristic. That was what Nature trumpeted as proving
beyond reasonable doubt "Thomas Jefferson’s relationship to Sally
Hemings’ sons."

The article itself was a tad more cautious. It allowed that there were
other remote possibilities that someone other than the then 65-year-old
Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston, but the authors said, "In the absence
of historical evidence to support such possibilities, we consider them
to be unlikely." But the title of the article threw all such caution to
the wind. It read, "Jefferson fathered slave’s last child." 

This resulted in numerous articles based on the belief that Jefferson
was guilty as charged.
Historian Joseph Ellis wrote, "Our heroes-and especially presidents-are
not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all the frailties
and imperfections that this entails." Others were more critical,
calling President Jefferson a hypocrite and perhaps even a rapist. One
of the worst was written by Christopher Hitchens and published in The
Nation. He suggested that Thomas Jefferson be described as "the
slave-owning serial flogger, sex addict and kinsman to ax murderers." 

Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post Magazine, implied that
Sally Hemings had become pregnant with her supposed first child, Tom,
when she was only 14 or 15 years old. He didn’t know that the Nature
article had reported that the genetic evidence proved that Thomas
Jefferson was not Tom’s father. Mr. Cohen said he had always believed
that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally’s children and that it was
"now a dead certainty." He said the Hemings story made President
Jefferson "harder, meaner, selfish-an exploiter."

Messrs. Hitchens, Cohen, and others like them have not welcomed the
news that the editors of Nature have admitted that Dr. Foster’s article
omitted facts that make it clear that the analysis of the chromosomes
did not come close to proving that Thomas Jefferson fathered any of
Sally Hemings’ children. The crucial fact that Dr. Foster knew but did
not include in his article was that Thomas Jefferson was only one of
nine living Jeffersons who might have fathered Eston, passing on to him
the distinctive Jefferson Y chromosome. 

The most probable candidate, according to Herbert Barger, was Thomas
Jefferson’s forgotten younger brother, Randolph. He says Randolph’s
wife died around 1793 and he didn’t remarry until 1810. He was a
frequent visitor to Monticello, and a slave oral history described him
as liking to play the fiddle and dance with Jefferson’s slaves "half
the night." Barger told Dr.
Foster about Randolph and the seven other Jefferson men who could have
fathered children by Hemings. A Nature editor claimed Dr. Foster did
not share this information with them and that he approved the headline
that declared without any qualification that President Jefferson was
Eston’s father. 

Dr. Foster acknowledged in an interview with me that he had not
informed the editors of Nature that Thomas Jefferson had a younger
brother, five nephews and two cousins who could have passed the
distinctive Jefferson Y chromosome on to the male children of Sally
Hemings. He admitted that he had known of these other Jeffersons, but
he said rather testily, "I don’t believe I have to account for all the
history." 

Nature’s admission that its article was flawed and misleading should be
particularly embarrassing for historian Joseph Ellis, author of
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Persuaded by the
Foster study, Ellis had switched from a critic of the Hemings story to
a believer. He co-authored an article for Nature that accompanied the
Foster article. His article called attention to many parallels between
President Jefferson and President Clinton, but it omitted one of the
most striking parallels that nearly all the media had overlooked. That
is the allegation that Bill Clinton, like Thomas Jefferson, fathered a
black son. 

The mother making that claim is Bobbie Ann Williams. She was a
prostitute at the time her son Danny was conceived, and she claims that
Gov. Clinton was the only white client she had at that time. Carl
Limbacher, who writes for NewsMax.com on the Internet, has interviewed
her aunt, who cared for Danny for many of his 14 years. Limbacher
reported that the family wanted President Clinton to take a paternity
test. They believed that DNA would prove that the President is Danny’s
father. The Star, the supermarket tabloid that first published Gennifer
Flowers’ claim that she had a 12-year affair with Clinton, became
interested in the case and reportedly paid $100,000 for exclusive
rights to the story. It also paid to have a comparison made of the DNA
of Bill Clinton and Danny Williams, using the printed profile of
Clinton’s DNA that was one of the documents that Ken Starr turned over
to the House Judiciary Committee. 

An independent laboratory informed the Star that the DNA showed no
match. The Star and nearly everyone else assumed that closed the
matter, but Limbacher discovered that the FBI refuses to say that the
DNA profile that it submitted to the Office of the Independent Counsel
is genuine or whether the numbers were altered to protect
thePresident’s privacy. The OIC, the Secret Service, and the White
House press office have also been slow to answer that question.
It appears that it may take an inquiry by a member of Congress or even
a congressional committee to extract this information. Until it is
disclosed, the question of whether or not Clinton is the father of a
black child will remain as unresolved as the same question about Thomas
Jefferson.

If true, this might do the president more damage than the perjury and
obstruction of justice charges that have been lodged against him.
According to a new edition of former Clinton consultant Dick Morris’s
book, Behind the Oval Office, in 1996 President Clinton announced new
regulations requiring states to crack down on deadbeat dads because
polling data showed that 80 percent of the respondents said they would
be more likely to vote for him if he took action against fathers who
don’t pay child support.

- Reed Irvine