What is Jefferson–Hemings controversy?

The Jefferson–Hemings controversy was a historical debate over whether there was a sexual relationship between the widowed U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and his slave and sister-in-law, Sally Hemings, and whether he fathered some or all of her six recorded children. For more than 150 years, most historians denied rumors from Jefferson's presidency that he had a slave concubine. Based on his grandson's report, they said that one of his nephews had been the father of Hemings' children. Before changing his mind following the results of DNA analysis in 1998, Jefferson biographer Joseph J. Ellis had said, "The alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may be described as the longest-running miniseries in American history." In the 21st century, most historians agree that Jefferson is the father of one or more of Sally's children.

Beginning in 1953, new documentation related to this issue was published and studied by historians. In a 1972 article in American Heritage and later in her bestselling 1974 biography of Jefferson, Fawn M. Brodie suggested Jefferson had been the father of Hemings' children. In 1997 the controversy was reopened when Annette Gordon-Reed published an analysis of the historiography on this issue, deconstructing previous versions and detailing oversights and bias. That year Ken Burns released his documentary on Jefferson as a PBS series. African-American historian John Hope Franklin noted all the mulattos and mixed-race slaves of the period and said, "These things were part of the natural landscape in Virginia, and Mr. Jefferson was as likely as any others to have done this because it's in character with the times—and indeed, with him, who believed in exploiting these people that he controlled completely." In the same documentary, though, historian Stephen Mitchell is quoted as believing "anyone who has a sense of integrity will recognize integrity in Jefferson and won't believe that there was an atom of possibility that the Sally Hemings story happened, since Jefferson was such a deeply compassionate man and felt the way he did about slavery."

Historically, in the 1850s Jefferson's eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, told historian Henry Randall that the late Peter Carr, a married nephew of Jefferson's , had fathered Hemings' children; Randolph asked Randall to refrain from addressing the issue in his biography. Randall passed on this information to James Parton, another historian. Parton published the Carr story, and major historians of Jefferson generally denied Jefferson's paternity for nearly 150 years. While some historians challenged the denial, a changed consensus did not emerge until after a Y chromosome DNA analysis was done in 1998. The DNA study showed a match between a descendant of the Jefferson male line, a descendant of Field Jefferson, and a descendant of Eston Hemings, Sally's youngest son. It showed no match between the Carr line and the Hemings descendant.

In 2000, a consensus, generated by the DNA study titled "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child," emerged among historians, even though the authors of the study admitted that the title of the study was misleading, saying "The title assigned to our study was misleading in that it represented only the simplest explanation of our molecular findings."