Updating a Life: The Case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

The rumor that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings first captured the public’s attention in 1802, when muckraking journalist James T. Callender, a former agent of Jefferson’s who turned against the president when he refused to offer him a government sinecure, wrote in a Richmond newspaper, “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.”

For nearly two centuries, the story remained largely as it began, a rumor, one on the whole discounted by historians, vigorously refuted by keepers of Jefferson’s legacy, and tenaciously clung to by the descendents of Sally Hemings and her siblings. Reflecting the prevailing historical consensus, Merrill D. Peterson (1921–2009), in his chronology for the Library of America edition Thomas Jefferson: Writings, first published in 1984, wrote the following for the year 1802: “In July, James T. Callender, disappointed office-seeker, commences libels of Jefferson, including allegation that he fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings.” As recently as 1996, in his National Book Award–winning book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, historian Joseph J. Ellis concluded “that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote,” with the caveat that “unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhume the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter a mystery.”

Two years after Ellis’s book appeared, Dr. Eugene Foster and a team of geneticists conducted DNA analysis that indicated a genetic link between Jefferson and Hemings descendants: specifically, that an individual carrying the male Jefferson Y chromosome fathered Eston Hemings (born 1808), the last known child born to Sally Hemings. Of the twenty-five adult male Jeffersons who carried this chromosome living in Virginia at that time, only a few are known to have ever visited Monticello and only Jefferson himself is known to have been at Monticello approximately nine months before each of Sally Hemings’s six recorded births. “The simplest and most probable” conclusion, according to the study’s authors, was that Thomas Jefferson was Eston Hemings’s father. Most historians now agree that a preponderance of evidence—genetic, circumstantial, and oral historical—suggests that Jefferson was the father of all of Sally Hemings’s children, and this consensus is reflected, and refined, in Annette Gordon-Reed’s powerful 2008 National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

To reflect this new consensus, the twentieth printing of the LOA edition of Jefferson’s writings, by far the most comprehensive single volume collection available (and also, by far, The Library of America’s best-selling volume to date), will include a newly revised chronology.

Learn more about Sally Hemings and the controversy surrounding her children, visit Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account, at the Monticello site sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Update: View or download a PDF of the updated chronology.

The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades

Over the weekend, Roger Ebert noted on Twitter that The Library of America’s first collection of Philip K. Dick fiction, Four Novels of the 1960s, is the “best-selling” title in the LOA’s history. Indeed, two years ago, we had publicized that the volume had sold faster than any other title during its first year of publication, and it is currently in its sixth printing, with more than 50,000 copies sold.

But, because it was published just four years ago, the volume has a way to go before it becomes the Library of America’s all-time best-selling title. We’re asked frequently what have been the most popular volumes in our history, and we thought we’d start off the New Year by publishing our top-ten titles, based on the total number of copies sold through all channels (including retail stores, book club sales, and our mail-order subscription program):

1. Thomas Jefferson: Writings [1984]                                   217,518
2. Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings [1982]                         150,973 
3. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches 1859–1865 [1989]                120,589
4. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches 1832–1858 [1989]                118,284
5. Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose [1982]                             114,790
6. Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, etc. [1985]        114,367
7. Debate on the Constitution: Part One [1993]                               112,273
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures [1983]            108,781
9. Robert Frost: Poems, Plays, & Prose [1995]                      106,772
10. Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works [1988]                   105,753

Philip K. Dick, still selling strong, is at #39 on the list. Other titles published during the last decade include The American Revolution [2001] at #24, H. P. Lovecraft: Tales [2005] at #31, and John Steinbeck: Novels 1942–1952 [2001] at #38.

All told, the 215 titles in the Library of America series total 222,020 pages (an average of 1,047 pages per volume), with over 8 million copies in print.

Sarah Palin and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Houston speech on religion

Advance notices of Sarah Palin’s new book America By Heart report that she takes issue with John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960. About Palin’s new book the Associated Press reports:

Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that JFK’s speech reconciled religion and public service without compromising either. But since she's revisited the speech as an adult, she says, she's realized that Kennedy "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are."

In the same AP report, historian Ted Widmer, editor of The Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton, expresses surprise at Palin’s remarks:

It's putting a negative spin on what was interpreted at the time as a sensible and uplifting message . . . JFK was trying to protect his own right to be a Catholic and to run for president.

In A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that with this speech Kennedy “knocked religion out of the campaign as an intellectually respectable issue.” Kennedy affirmed, “I am a Catholic,” and sought to reassure voters what that meant:

I believe in an America where the separate of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act. . . 

In her book, Palin is also said to have praised Romney’s approach (not “doing a JFK”) during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he delivered his own speech on religion. At the time, Garry Wills analyzed how Mitt Romney’s speech differed from JFK’s:

Kennedy had to convince people that he would not let the Vatican push him around. Romney has let evangelicals know that he would let them push him around. He not only has given them a theological formula on Jesus which he hopes they will accept—he implicitly has attacked Kennedy’s absolute separation of church and state using the evangelicals’ own slogan: those who think (like Kennedy) that “religion is seen merely as a private affair” are, Romney said, “intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong.” That phrase has not been much noticed in public comments on Romney’s speech, but it is a key statement for the evangelicals.

With her attack on Kennedy and identification with Romney, Palin seems to be expanding on her earlier statement in April rejecting the idea that “God should be separated from the state.”

The debate over the concept of “the separation of church and state” goes back more than 200 years, when Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase famous today, in a letter sent on New Year’s Day 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association discussing the First Amendment, “that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Of related interest: Watch a video of John F. Kennedy’s Houston speech

Related LOA works: American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (includes Kennedy’s Houston speech); Thomas Jefferson: Writings