A Lock of Hair Cut from a Dead President Just Settled America’s Oldest Paternity Mystery

4 min readIn 1811, a visitor to Monticello reported that Thomas Jefferson cohabited with enslaved Sally Hemings and fathered children whom he kept in bondage, a rumor that haunted the Founding Father’s legacy for over two centuries.Historian Richard Kurin spent 15 years locating Thomas Jefferson’s DNA from a lock of hair cut upon his death in 1826, finally providing irrefutable genetic proof that Jefferson fathered at least two of Sally Hemings’ children.Despite Jefferson’s careful omission of Sally Hemings from his writings, DNA sequencing definitively established his paternity, ending centuries of denial and proving that no historical revisionism could erase the truth of their relationship.This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.In 1811, teacher and plantation owner Elijah Fletcher paid a visit to Monticello and met Thomas Jefferson. Fletcher, as he noted in his letters, found the former president to be “tall, spare, straight in body,” and was greeted by him “very cordially.” Yet Fletcher learned as much about Jefferson from the talk around Monticello as from Jefferson himself.“I learnt he was but little esteemed by his neighbors,” Fletcher continued in his letter. “I confess I never had a very exalted opinion of his moral conduct, but from the information I gained of his neighbors who must best know him, I have a much poorer one.”Fletcher reported the grim rumor he had heard spoken around Monticello as gospel:“The story of black Sal is no farce. That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth, and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves, an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts.”The rumored relationship between the writer of the Declaration of Independence and Sally Hemings, a woman he legally owned, has dogged the Founding Father’s legacy for centuries. But the term “relationship” is far too broad and neutral to properly grapple with the complexities of the dynamic between Jefferson and an enslaved woman 30 years his junior. This long-unacknowledged history has now been the subject of a number of books, dramatized in film, satirized on Saturday Night Live, and recently, even explored in a museum exhibit at Monticello itself.The Washington Post//Getty ImagesA 2018 exhibit on Sally Hemings was on display at Monticello, a rare acknowledgement of the controversial entanglement between the former President and an enslaved womanYet no matter how much evidence mounted over the centuries, some holdouts have refused to acknowledge the likelihood that Jefferson fathered Hemings’ children. In 1998, when Eugene A. Foster published his paper “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” which used Y chromosome evidence to prove that Hemings’ youngest son, Eston, was a descendant of the Jefferson bloodline, doubters argued that it merely proved “a Jefferson” was in the bloodline, but not necessarily Thomas Jefferson himself.It’s that demand for proof “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that makes the revelations in Richard Kurin’s new book History by a Hair so momentous. His discovery deals the decisive blow against decades of strenuous denials.As reported by NPR, Kurin “spent 15 years searching for Jefferson’s DNA in an effort to answer the paternity question.” The quest began with a strand of hair found in a Bible that belonged to the former President (Jefferson was an avid reader of theological texts, and even edited together his own version of the Bible in 1820, omitting the miracles and other supernatural elements).However, after extensive efforts on the endeavor, Kurin found that while the Bible may have belonged to Thomas Jefferson, the hair he found within it did not. Kurin, undeterred, kept searching until he finally found a “rich lock of hair” belonging to Thomas Jefferson; it was some of the last the statesman would ever grow. A note on the package, buried deep in Monticello’s archives, dated the lock to July 4, 1826: it was cut from Jefferson’s head the day he died.“That was the, you know, the key to sequencing his DNA,” NPR quotes Kurin as saying.Bill Tompkins//Getty ImagesThe grave of Eston Hemings Jefferson, son to Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, WisconsinToday, an expectant parent in their mid-40s may undergo genetic testing to sequence their DNA, often to determine if their impending offspring risks inheriting any health problems or genetic mutations. In the case of Thomas Jefferson, who was himself in his mid-40s when the relations with the 14-year-old Hemings are believed to have begun, his genetic testing just came some 230 years later than most.The full sequence of Thomas Jefferson’s DNA made it irrefutably clear that he was the father of Hemings’ two sons, Madison and Eston Hemings. The paternity of Hemings’ other children who survived to adulthood, Harriet and Beverly, less clear. But that has less to do with the DNA sequencing than with Harriet and Beverly’s disappearance from the historical record.“Her two other children, Harriet and Beverly, a boy and a girl, basically ran off from Monticello,” Kurin told NPR. “Jefferson let them run off in 1822. They went to Washington, D.C. They passed as white, and they had families, and so nobody knows about their descendants.”Though Jefferson was prolific in his writings, Sally Hemings and her children make scant appearances in them. In a 1799 letter to his son-in-law, Jefferson makes a vague allusion to them, stating “Maria’s maid has been confined and has had a child. Both are well.” Scholars at Monticello have since identified the aforementioned maid as Hemings. A few years later, Jefferson would acknowledge Hemings by name, when during a measles outbreak he told his daughter in a letter that “there are no young children there but Bet’s and Sally’s.”But in no extant writing does Jefferson ever acknowledge the paternity of Hemings’ offspring, nor even his entanglement with her. Thankfully, his DNA writes a story that no amount of omission or revisionism can erase.Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.