The Lost Descendants of Thomas Jefferson
America’s longest-running paternity dispute has seemingly come to an end: Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, his enslaved chambermaid, and the Smithsonian has the DNA to prove it. Richard Kurin, a fifty-year veteran of the institution, launched a top-secret study of the question in 2011. Starting with a few hair samples, he and a team of scientists sequenced Jefferson’s genome and compared it with those of Hemings’s descendants, after a sprawling effort that involved everything from compiling genealogies to scouring rural Virginia for a lost grave. The project’s thoroughness would be almost comical were its subject not so stubbornly controversial, an emblem of all the contradictions embedded in who, exactly, Americans take themselves to be.
Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings is a primal scene in the national imagination. Peeking into the master bedroom at Monticello, we confront the idea that America’s founding champion of liberty and equality sexually exploited a teen-ager while holding her, and eventually their children, in bondage. The possibility that their liaison had a reciprocal dimension—suggested, among other circumstances, by the fact that Hemings agreed to return to Virginia from France, where she was legally free—has upset both liberals and extreme conservatives: How could an enslaved woman have cared for her oppressor? And how could Jefferson, who advocated for the removal of Black people from America, have loved a Black woman? Rumors of their affair sparked the first Presidential sex scandal, when a Federalist newspaper skewered Jefferson for choosing to “engraft his own descendants” on “African stock,” and inspired the first novel by an African American, William Wells Brown’s “Clotel.” In 2002, Maya Rudolph played Hemings opposite Robert De Niro’s Jefferson in an “S.N.L.” sketch. “What time do you get off work?” he asks her. “Never,” she replies.
After spending more than a century debating the issue, historians could easily say the same. They largely dismissed the story as slander until the rediscovery, in the nineteen-fifties, of an 1873 interview with Madison Hemings, a Black carpenter who claimed to be Jefferson’s son. The consensus shifted dramatically in 1998, when the scientist Eugene Foster published a DNA study demonstrating that a descendant of Sally Hemings shared a Y chromosome with descendants of Jefferson and his wife, Martha Wayles. Ten years later, Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian and a law professor, published “The Hemingses of Monticello,” which persuasively argued that a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was the only plausible interpretation of what was known about who they were, what they’d done, and where they’d been.
“My ideal was for people to make a decision ‘on the papers,’ ” Gordon-Reed told me, using a legal term for a decision reached solely on the basis of written testimony. Her book won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and Monticello dedicated an exhibition to Sally Hemings, declaring the matter settled. Still, doubts remained. A few skeptics theorized that the President’s brother might have impregnated Hemings. In the nineties, Gordon-Reed called this the doctrine of “any Jefferson but Thomas,” predicting that for some diehards—who dismissed Black sources while naïvely crediting white ones—no proof would ever be enough.
Kurin’s research faced criticism even before its official release. Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an interview with a Hemings descendant who pulled out of the study. She disapproved of Kurin’s decision to publish a commercial book about his findings before a scientific paper, and had a “gut” feeling that Jefferson couldn’t be her ancestor. Yet the Smithsonian remains confident. The paper has been peer reviewed and is being cleared for publication at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and has also been vetted by a trio of leading genomic scientists. (A preprint of the paper will be released tomorrow, along with Kurin’s book.) “Now you can’t think about the founding without thinking about Black people,” Gordon-Reed said. The study shouldn’t have been necessary, but she’s happy to see her scholarship vindicated: “You have to do overkill with these things.”
Kurin’s study began with a stray thought. An anthropologist by training, rather than a scientist or a historian, he had been reviewing a Smithsonian documentary about the Jefferson Bible when it occurred to him that the President might have shed or bled on the volume. Sure enough, conservators had found hair in its pages, which Kurin quietly sent to labs across the country. Sequencing a genome from old, rootless hair was once impossible, because the DNA within them has broken into very short segments. “Imagine having a jigsaw puzzle with three billion pieces, and you need to figure out the edges,” Kurin explained. (Another common challenge is contamination with bacterial DNA.) But two ancient-DNA specialists, Richard Green and Beth Shapiro, agreed to look into the problem. They set about distilling as much Jefferson as they could.
The idea was to bypass the uncertainties of the Foster study by going to the source. If Thomas Jefferson’s genome could be sequenced, it would then be possible to calculate Hemings descendants’ “identity by descent” (I.B.D.) from Jefferson, without having to rely on genetic markers that he might have shared with, say, his brother Randolph. But the experiment was fraught with difficulties, as Kurin’s book, “History by a Hair,” makes clear. After a years-long effort to extract just a fraction of DNA, the Bible hairs turned out not to be Jefferson’s. Luckily, Monticello had provided other clippings from his deathbed. These were authentic—but, after so many generations of semi-random recombination, not all of the Hemings descendants had enough genetic overlap with Thomas to definitively rule out Randolph.
So Kurin decided to exhume him. With DNA from Randolph’s remains, the team could determine which Jefferson each descendant had more I.B.D. with, and, thus, which was their forebear. Yet the location of Randolph’s grave had been lost to time. Kurin conducted an archeological survey of the area where his plantation once stood, assisted by a biographer, a “bone hunter,” experts in forensics and lidar, and an authority on historic buildings. After a search of thirteen-hundred acres, they found little more than a few old bricks and nails.
The project might have ended there had Kurin not made contact with a few previously untested Hemings descendants. One of them shared over five per cent of her DNA with Thomas Jefferson—not just enough to establish that he, specifically, was her ancestor but more than any of those tested from his legitimate family. Meanwhile, there were breakthroughs in California. Green and Shapiro’s lab at U. C. Santa Cruz had devised a new way to extract and prepare old DNA, which enabled them to sequence Jefferson’s entire genome. Their new method was also key to the conviction of the Gilgo Beach serial killer, as well as the recent “resurrections” of extinct species by Colossal Biosciences, where Shapiro is the chief scientist. And the discovery will likely beget still others. “We hope to post the Jefferson genome online and make it accessible,” Kurin told me. It could lead to the identification of Sally Hemings’s other children, who left the family and passed for white.
Two weeks ago, I flew to Columbus, Ohio, to meet Margot Kossmann Williams, one of the newly confirmed Jefferson-Hemings descendants. Williams is a developmental biologist at Ohio State University, where she runs a lab that studies zebra-fish embryos, and her maternal grandmother, Dorothy (Dottie) McKnight, participated in Kurin’s study. “I was so impressed that Dr. Kurin was working with some of the best paleogeneticists in the world,” Williams told me. “It told me that he meant business.”
A slender woman with wavy chestnut hair and a Jeffersonian jut to her chin, Williams was also, to all appearances, white, as was her mother, Susie Kossmann, who waved from the back seat of a white Honda as they pulled up to my hotel. The three of us were bound for southern Ohio to explore Dottie’s roots, which had been kept from her for most of her adult life.
“Part of me thinks it’s what she was waiting for before she could go,” Kossmann ventured, as Ohio farmland blurred by. From earliest childhood, Dottie suspected that her family had a secret. She knew that she had Black cousins by marriage, but one day at school a group of girls accused her of being Black. Another time, a teacher asked her to take attendance, and she noticed that the word “colored” had been written beside her name. She crossed it out and wrote “white.”
Decades later, a relative sent Dottie a newspaper clipping about the Foster study, which included an archival photo of her grandmother. “I hid it,” she told Kurin, shortly before her death last year. Dottie was shocked to learn that she shared about three per cent of her genome with Jefferson. “I have a lot to process,” she said. “Guess it means more to me than I’d thought.” Kossmann had always thought her mother’s sister looked like Tina Turner. “In fact, her husband’s family kind of shunned her because she was Black,” she recalled.
Our first stop was the cemetery where Dottie’s grandmother was buried, in the town of Bloomingburg. A Cargill grain-processing plant loomed over the modest headstones, which were arranged in rows between the highway and an open field. After thirty minutes of searching, Kossmann waved us over to the pinkish headstone of Emma Jane Byrd Young. Williams put her hand against it, then looked for a stone to leave in remembrance, borrowing the Jewish custom because she hadn’t thought to bring flowers. “It’s hard to feel much of a connection,” she said. “But I remember my grandma, and her telling me about her grandma, and reading about Emma remembering her grandpa. The overlap makes it feel more real.”
Emma’s grandfather was Sally and Thomas’s son Madison Hemings, who was born into slavery at Monticello. He learned carpentry from his uncle, who ran the plantation’s woodshop, and worked closely with his father and enslaver, an amateur woodworker himself. Jefferson freed Madison and the other Hemings children in his will, fulfilling what Madison described as the “treaty” that his parents made while living in Paris, where Jefferson served as Minister to France. “She was young, but she was pretty savvy, it sounds like,” Kossmann said. She’d learned the story on a recent visit to Monticello with twenty-five relatives—including her eldest brother, Rick, a Republican who supports Donald Trump.
“It made me a little bit hesitant about Jefferson’s character,” Rick told me later. Mostly, though, he feels pride in both forebears, and gratitude toward the Smithsonian, which he hadn’t heard had faced White House censorship for overemphasizing slavery. (He does see an agenda behind critiques of the Founding Fathers, but rejected the idea that Kurin’s research was part of it: “That’s just stupidity.”) Now retired from a career in commercial construction, he likes to spend his time woodworking.
Around noon, we arrived in Waverly, an old canal town near where Madison settled in the eighteen-thirties. He plied his trade as a carpenter in the area, eventually purchasing a sixty-acre farm. His siblings chose to pass as white after Jefferson’s death, but he remained within the Black community—and, in 1873, when a journalist came knocking, Madison insisted on telling the truth about his family’s life at Monticello. Without the interview, his parents’ relationship might have gone down in history as a rumor.
A building that Madison had worked on around the time of the Civil War—a two-story box of washed-out bricks, with a corrugated roof—was now a Mexican restaurant, with fuchsia doors and Día de los Muertos decorations. We stopped in for a lunch of tacos and guacamole, hoping to see a staircase that a local historian attributed to Madison. Our server told us it was behind a locked door, which she didn’t have the keys to access.
The setback made me think of Madison, locked out of his heritage by a father and a public that didn’t recognize him. After his interview, a response accused him of lying, claiming that the “colored race” was prone to grandiose claims of “illustrious parentage.” (Waverly was a sundown town.) Generations of white historians did the same, treating his words with a skepticism that they didn’t apply to white sources on Jefferson’s life.
A few minutes later, our server returned, and told us that the upstairs tenants could let us in. She led us through a sunny back patio and up a flight of stairs. A windowless hallway with dull gray carpeting provided access to a handful of apartments—and, midway down, the staircase, which was all but concealed by curtains and heaps of junk. We picked our way past boxes, beer cans, and old appliances cluttering the landing, then tentatively made our way upward.
The steps were dusty, and the old brown paint was chipped. But the wood felt solid beneath us. “Looks like he knew what he was doing,” Kossman said, placing her hand on the bannister. It was smooth and shiny, the dark reddish-brown wood softened by graceful curves. “I’m surprised at how well-preserved it is,” Williams said, though, really, it was our finding it here that was the surprise. Looking at the weathered balusters, some of which were missing, I couldn’t help but think of the DNA fragments used in the study—artifacts of our founding contradiction, scattered among families all over the country.
It can’t have been easy for Madison Hemings to tell his story. After all, who would’ve cared to hear it? Probably not his community of freedmen, anxious to escape the stigma of an enslavement that had ended less than ten years prior. Neither can his siblings who passed for white have welcomed the exposure of their origins. Madison’s white neighbors almost certainly didn’t want to believe that a Black carpenter was the son of Thomas Jefferson. Yet thanks, in part, to him, science and history have confirmed the truth of his parents. They are ours, too. ♦