Lyle Browning's most recent most strikes me as imminently sensible.

What we know for sure is that someone descended from Thomas Jefferson's grand-father was the father of one of Sally Heming's children.  All of the rest of the evidence is circumstantial.  The timing of Heming's pregnancies is certainly strongly suggestive of Jefferson's paternity, but its not conclusive either.

My own view of the matter is:  first, we don't know for sure, and barring further evidence likely will not; second, the weight of the circumstantial evidence makes it reasonable to say that Jefferson *likely* was the father of at least one of Heming's children; and third, that the issue of paternity represents a kind of distraction (albeit a highly profitable distraction, for the authors of all these books focused on the founders) from the deeper moral issues.

Jefferson's anti-slavery writings lack the moral clarity of contemporaries like Alexander Hamilton, or even of his Virginia rival Patrick Henry.  Jefferson was a racist, and a pioneer and popularizer of the paternalism that would emerge full blown in the pro-slavery arguments and assumptions of Antebellum Southern intellectuals and statesmen.  Southern pro-slavery arguments never denied the humanity of the slave--merely the slave's capacity for adult reasoned self-government.  Lacking the capacity for self-government, slaves could not be citizens.  In its most destructive form, the pro-slavery argument asserted that slavery was in the best interest of the slave, because slaves required the benevolent and superintending guidance of their parent-masters.

I do not need Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings to indict the man for hypocrisy or racism.

All best,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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