Of all the Damsels on the green/on mountain or in valley/A lass so luscious ne'er was seen/ As Monticellan Sally
-(Published in the Philadelphia literary magazine Port Folio)

Thou Sally, though my house shall keep/ My widow'rs tears shall dry!/ My virgin daughters--see!they weep--Their mother's place supply.
Oh Sally hearken to my vows!/ Yield up thy sooty charms--/My best beloved! My more than spouse/ Oh! Take me to thy arms.
-(Published in the Boston Gazette)

"Were [cases of interracial sex] enumerated. . . they would be found by the hundreds. Nor is it to be wondered at when Mr. Jefferson's notorious example is considered."

"Mr. Jefferson freed a number of his servants in his will. . . He freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter; she was - -'s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother's room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early. When she was nearly grown, by Mr. Jefferson's direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars. I have never seen her since and don't know what became of her. From the time she was large enough, she always worked in the cotton factory. She never did any hard work.

Watch a special video report on Madison Hemings.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin
November 12, 1908
Editor of the Tribune:

In the Tribune today is a notice of the death of Beverly Jefferson of Madison. His death deserves more than a passing notice, as he was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson, father of the doctrines of the democratic party. . . Beverly Jefferson was one of God's noblemen--gentle, kindly, courteous, charitable. He was friendly to everybody in his home city, and he will be missed there quite as much or more, perhaps, than any other citizen.

A.J. Munson

Upon the flimsy basis of oral tradition, anecdote, and satire, abolitionists avowed their belief in Jefferson's misecegenation. . . The legend would not have been born but for the Federalists; it would not have been revived but for the abolitionists. . . and when there was little but Jefferson's own history and the memories of a few Negroes to sustain it, the legend faded into the obscure recesses of the Jefferson image.

Watch a special video report on Fawn Brodie

Reactions to Fawn Brodie's Jefferson biography were numerous, sometimes favorable, sometimes condescending, and often contentious.

[CBS should] reconsider lending its name and network to mass media exposure of what can only be vulgar sensationilsm masquerading as history.
- Merrill Peterson Letter to William Paley, Chairman of CBS
January 16, 1979

[A Jefferson-Hemings television mini-series] will be a mockery of history. Scandal and sex can be exploited to great financial advantage. The public will always believe the story. You can never get it back. You can never stop it.
-Dumas Malone
February 13, 1979

The Washington Post

Watch a special video report on Dumas Malone's view of Jefferson-Hemings.

Historians dismissed the Callender charges for nearly two centuries until Fawn Brodie dusted off a highly inaccurate and uncorroborated memoir by a man who described himself as Madison Jefferson, son of Jefferson and Sally Hemings.. . [Madison's testimony] is full of hearsay about events that the would-be former house slave could not have seen or known firsthand, if only because of his age, and must be put down as mere gossip about a great man published in the absence of journalistic standards, much less historical ones.

"Despite the certainty with which the filmmakers portray the affair, it is a story for which there has never been, and probably never can be, anything approaching proof." (Columbia University Professor of History Alan Brinkley, Newsweek, April 3, 1995.)

"What 'Jefferson in Paris' presents as vividly real, in a way only film has the power to, has long been viewed by most historians as a possibility at best, or, very likely, pure invention." (Richard Bernstein, New York Times, April 10, 1995).

"The time may come when Madison Hemings's story can be put to the decisive test. In the meantime, it would be prudent for historians and biographers to refrain from dogmatic statements concerning that story. . . In the present state of knowledge, it is prudent to suspend judgment on this matter.

Within the community of Jefferson specialists, there seems to be a clear consensus that the story is almost certainly not true. . . After five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.

It is my belief that those who are considered Jefferson scholars have never made a serious and objective attempt to get at the truth of this matter. . . The failure to look more closely into the identities of the parties involved, the too ready acceptance and active promotion of the Carr brothers story, the reliance upon stereotypes in the place of investigation and analysis, all indicate that most Jefferson scholars decided from the outset that this story was not true and that if they had anything to do with it, no one would come to think otherwise. In the most fundamental sense, the enterprise of defense has had little to do with expanding people's knowledge of Thomas Jefferson or the other participants in the story. The goal has been quite the opposite: to restrict knowledge as a way of controlling the allowable discourse on this subject.

To throw some scientific light on the dispute, we have compared Y-chromosomal DNA haplotypes from male-line descendants of Field Jefferson, a paternal uncle of Thomas Jefferson, with those of male-line descendants of Thomas Woodson, Sally Hemings' putative first son, and of Eston Hemings Jefferson, her last son. The molecular findings fail to support the belief that Thomas Jefferson was Thomas Woodson's father, but provide evidence that he was the biological father of Eston Hemings Jefferson. . . The simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings are that Thomas Jefferson, rather than one of the Carr brothers, was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson. . .

Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.