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Alex Lo

A long-standing campaign by Thomas Jefferson admirers and descendants to discredit DNA tests that claimed to show the early president fathered at least one child with his slave, Sally Hemings, has been revived.

The debate was rekindled by Steven Corneliussen of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in a letter in the current edition of Nature  magazine.

The facility is a part of the Jefferson laboratory network, funded by the US government to continue the scientific legacy of the statesman and amateur scientist.

DNA tests, published in 1998 in Nature,  claimed genetic markers from Jefferson's ancestral line matched those of descendants of Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally's youngest son.

The science journal also ran a report in May critical of the refusal of Jefferson's family to allow descendants from Hemings' side to join their exclusive family club despite the DNA evidence.

Mr Corneliussen said many people now wrongly believed the DNA results proved once and for all the third president of the US fathered at least one of his slave's children.

'In fact, that evidence suggests no specific Jefferson. The [May] story also asserts that insistence on conclusive proof that the father was Thomas cuts no ice in academia,' he wrote in the letter.

'In fact, 13 noted scholars from 12 universities reviewed the historical and DNA evidence and unanimously found the paternity by no means proven.'

The letter came weeks after the Monticello Association, a group of nearly 800 descendants of Jefferson's daughters, voted to keep Sally Hemings' descendants out of their club.

The refusal means Hemings' descendants cannot be buried in the graveyard at Monticello, Jefferson's estate in Charlottesville, Virginia, despite an earlier suggested compromise that at least some of them might be allowed to rest there.

The two-century old sex scandal looked settled once and for all in 2000 when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, the group that maintains Jefferson's estate at Monticello, all but confessed for the dead president.

In a report it said there was 'strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.'

But efforts to discredit the Jefferson DNA tests began almost as soon as the test results were published. The most successful attempt came last year when a panel of 13 scholars, mostly historians and political scientists hired by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, published their findings and criticism of the Nature  tests.

The matching samples in the 1998 tests were taken from the Y chromosome of five male-line descendants of two sons of the president's paternal uncle, Field Jefferson, and that of one male-line descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson.

The Y chromosome passes intact from father to son, except in rare cases of mutation. Jefferson had no surviving sons, so DNA from his paternal uncle's line had to do. In other words, the tests could not distinguish among the male members of the Jefferson family.

The historians pinpointed this weakness in the tests. They said there were two-dozen known Jefferson men in Virginia at the time who would carry the Y chromosome, and seven of them - including the president - could have been present at Monticello around the time when Eston was conceived.

The scholars went on to dismiss another study, unrelated to Nature's,  which statistically matched Jefferson's visits to his estate with the times of conception of Sally's five known children. In a highly dubious sleight of hand, they dismissed the statistical study by arguing the other Jefferson men only visited the president's home when he was in town.

Yet the real scandal is not that the third president slept with his slave and fathered one or more of her children, but that the chief author of what is arguably history's most inspiring document on human freedom - the Declaration of Independence - owned so many slaves to the day he died.

Jefferson was president from 1801 to 1809.



Jefferson 'slave offspring' row resurfaces