I don't want to re-open the whole Hemings question here. For my book on
Jefferson I have gone over the documents inch by inch and I'm going to
re-argue the whole case. It is extremely murky, and I won't give away the
surprise ending. 

From the day James Callender published his first article alleging the
Hemings / Jefferson relationship, this issue has been political and it
remains so today. Merrill Peterson's research shows how British commentators
in the 19th century tried to use the Hemings story to discredit not just
Thomas Jefferson but American democracy. Thus, for some 200 years it has
been "unpatriotic" to accept the Hemings story as fact. If you believe it,
you must be one of those people who hate America. Indeed, the UVA Magazine
article runs a quote from someone saying that defending Thomas Jefferson,
"has come to mean defending what America means, and we feel compelled to
rise to that defense." Recently a new element has been injected into the
equation: if you don't believe the Hemings story, you must be a racist. It
is very difficult for a historian to navigate these waters while dodging
shells from two sides. 

I think that Jefferson's defenders have done some excellent research (hats
off to C. Burton and the McMurrys) and have made some strong arguments but a
number of bad ones. Peterson and Dumas Malone set a very unfortunate tone by
attempting to discredit Madison Hemings and his editor, SF Wetmore, as
biased without actually reading Hemings's statement very carefully. Malone's
assertion that Hemings's statement in Wetmore's newspaper was abolitionist
propaganda is absurd and it gave me a headache to see it trotted out yet
again in the UVA Magazine piece. Peterson is a superlative scholar but the
Hemings story drove him crazy and I think he lost his objectivity in those
pages. The article quotes the so-called "Scholars Commission"; well, I wish
the "Scholars" had recruited a few members who actually know something about
slavery, plantations, plantation families, and the daily life at Monticello.
They are professors of history, government, law, and economics, used to
operating at lofty levels of theorizing. None of them is an expert on
Monticello or Jefferson's family. On the other hand, the Hemings partisans
have overlooked the many errors in Madison Hemings's statement and the
outrageous fabrications in Callender's articles. One of the core assertions
in Fawn Brodie's book--that Jefferson was the father of "President Tom"
Woodson--has been blasted by DNA, and as far as I know no one has come to
terms with that. 

The bickering and name-calling over the Hemings question actually serves a
useful purpose--it re-creates the vicious partisan atmosphere of Jefferson's
own time and has helped me get a sense of the waters Jefferson was navigating.  

Henry Wiencek