Thomas Jefferson's Secret Family

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Scams, Money, & Murder — "Thomas Jefferson's Secret Family"

Date: July 27, 2026
Host: Vanessa Richardson (for Crime House)
Episode Theme:
An in-depth exploration of the secret history of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the woman he enslaved and with whom he fathered children—a story long denied, covered up, and finally confirmed through testimony and DNA. The episode dives into the historical, personal, and cultural implications of this story and the effort it took to bring the truth to light.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode uncovers one of the most explosive secrets of early American history: the true story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman owned by Thomas Jefferson, and the children he fathered with her. The episode examines the nearly two-century cover-up orchestrated by Jefferson’s family, their defenders, and historians, as well as the generational trauma and resilience of the Hemings descendants. Ultimately, it asks why America chose to erase Sally Hemings and what it means to finally acknowledge her.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Breaking of the Story (00:46–04:29)

• 1802: Journalist James Callender accuses President Thomas Jefferson in a Richmond newspaper of keeping "as his concubine, one of his own slaves... Her name is Sally," insisting that Jefferson fathered her children and that "there is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story."
• Quote: “Thomas Jefferson never responded. Not that year, not ever.” (00:46, Vanessa Richardson)

2. Sally Hemings’s Origins and Paris Years (06:54–14:09)

• Sally Hemings born into slavery in 1773, daughter of Elizabeth Hemings and allegedly John Wales (making her half-sister to Jefferson's wife, Martha).
• After Martha dies, Sally comes to Monticello as inherited property.
• At age 14, travels with Jefferson’s daughter to Paris, where, legally, she could claim freedom as slavery was not recognized in France.
• Jefferson begins a sexual relationship with Sally in Paris when she is a teenager and he is 44.
• Consent and Power:
  • "A 14-year-old cannot meaningfully consent to a man in his 40s. An enslaved person cannot meaningfully consent to the person who holds total legal power over them."
  • "This was not a love story. It was a man holding the most complete power one person can hold over another." (13:50, Vanessa Richardson)
• Sally negotiates with Jefferson to gain freedom for her future children, sacrificing her own potential for freedom to return to Monticello pregnant and alone.

3. The Children, the Scandal, and the Cover-Up (18:43–24:27)

• Sally has at least six children with Jefferson, four of whom survive to adulthood: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston.
• The scandal breaks openly in 1802 but is dismissed or mocked; Jefferson maintains silence.
• Jefferson frees only Hemings’ children, keeping a promise from Paris, but does not formally free Sally herself—her later years are spent in unofficial freedom, her grave remains unmarked.
• Quote: "The mother of Jefferson’s children may rest unmarked under the asphalt where people park their cars." (24:18, Vanessa Richardson)

4. Competing Family Narratives (24:27–32:53)

• Jefferson’s white descendants concoct the “Carr nephews” story, seeking to attribute paternity to Jefferson’s relatives instead.
• The Hemings family tell a different, firsthand story.
• Madison Hemings’s 1873 published account, corroborated by Israel Gillette Jefferson, details the true relationship and the promise in Paris.
• Historians and the establishment ignore the Hemingses’ narrative for over a century.
• Fawn Brodie (1974) and Annette Gordon-Reed (1997) challenge historical orthodoxy, revealing systemic bias in who is believed.
• Quote: "The accounts of the powerful were believed. The accounts of the powerless were doubted. Same event. Two families, and scholars decided in advance whose word counted." (29:37)

5. Breaking the Silence with DNA (32:53–41:50)

• Oral histories from Sally Hemings’s descendants are dismissed for generations, even leading some family branches to recast themselves as white to survive “across the color line.”
• In 1998, Dr. Eugene Foster’s DNA study uses the Jefferson family Y chromosome as a genetic marker:
  • Eston Hemings’s male-line descendants match the Jefferson Y chromosome, disproving the “Carr nephews” theory.
• Counterarguments arise, focusing on Jefferson’s brother Randolph and other distant male relatives, but are methodically addressed and dismissed based on evidence and records of Jefferson’s presence at Monticello.
• Quote: "The DNA didn’t create the truth. The truth was never actually lost...what changed in 1998 wasn’t the truth. It was that we couldn’t deny it anymore." (49:03)

6. Acknowledgment and Memorialization (41:50–49:03)

• Monticello, after reviewing evidence, acknowledges Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children.
• Restoration of Sally Hemings’s room as an exhibit honoring her and her descendants in 2018—having previously been a public restroom for tourists, the erasure made physical.
• Quote: "The cover-up made physical. Sally Hemings’s own space turned into plumbing in the house she helped run and where she raised her children." (41:50)
• Emphasis on the resilience and generational memory of Hemings’s descendants and the importance of acknowledging buried histories.
• The host highlights how for centuries America “chose a comfortable lie instead” of the “uncomfortable truth.”

7. Closing Reflections (49:03–end)

• Vanessa Richardson invites listeners to reflect: Did you know Sally Hemings’s name before this story?
• The episode insists on making visible not only Sally Hemings but the pattern of erasure, asking "why we needed to dismiss it for so long in the first place."
• Quote: "We spent 200 years looking away from Sally Hemings. The least we can do now is say her name and get the story right." (49:03)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Sally’s Effort and Agency:
  "A 16-year-old girl with almost no power had sat across from one of the most powerful men in the world and used the only leverage she would ever have. And she spent all of it. Not on herself, but on the children who hadn't even been born yet." (14:09)

• On Power and Consent:
  "A 14-year-old cannot meaningfully consent to a man in his 40s. An enslaved person cannot meaningfully consent to the person who holds total legal power over them. Both of those things are true here at the same time, and they don't cancel out, they stack." (13:45)

• On the Cover-Up:
  "A secondhand story told by the people with the most to lose became the official truth. Meanwhile the people who had actually lived it...were telling a completely different story." (24:27)

• On Historical Bias:
  "When the white Jefferson family told their secondhand story about the nephews, historians treated it as credible. When the black Hemings family told their firsthand story, historians treated it as suspect." (29:22)

• On DNA Proof:
  "Lay it next to everything else... When you put the genetics together with the paper trail and the testimony, the authors of the study called Thomas Jefferson the simplest and most probable explanation." (39:00–39:30)

• On Memorialization:
  "For most of the 20th century, visitors used that restroom and walked back out to admire the great man’s mansion. It's the cover-up made physical. Sally Hemings’s own space turned into plumbing in the house she helped run and where she raised her children." (41:50)

• On Legacy and Memory:
  "We spent 200 years looking away from Sally Hemings. The least we can do now is say her name and get the story right." (49:03)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:46: The story breaks: Callender accuses Jefferson publicly.
• 06:54: Sally Hemings’ background, Paris years, and relationship with Jefferson.
• 13:45: Power, consent, and the meaning of the Paris negotiation.
• 18:43: Return to Monticello, children born, deepening secrecy.
• 24:27: The cover-up: Family narratives and historical denial.
• 29:22: Systematic bias in historical narratives.
• 32:53: DNA evidence shatters the “gentlemanly” narrative.
• 41:50: Monticello institutional acknowledgment and restoration.
• 49:03: Reflection on erasure, memory, and the necessity of telling Sally Hemings’s story.

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Episode Takeaways

• Sally Hemings’s story was never truly hidden, only systematically disbelieved and silenced.
• America’s discomfort with its founding myths drove generations of denial and erasure.
• The Hemings family’s generational truth-telling and eventual scientific validation forced the nation to confront its history.
• Restorative acts at Monticello represent efforts not just to rewrite the past, but to finally see and honor those it erased.
• Knowing Sally Hemings’s name and story is essential to an honest understanding of American history and identity.

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Listener Invitation

Vanessa Richardson concludes by inviting listeners to reflect on what (and whose) history they’ve learned, and to consider what truths their own country is still not ready to face. The episode is empathetic, pointed, and committed to restoring lost voices with dignity and clarity.

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Transcript

[Vanessa Richardson]

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon

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[Vanessa Richardson]

On September 1, 1802, a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia published a story about the President of the United States. The paper was called the Recorder, and the man writing it was a journalist named James Callender. He he was a former ally of Thomas Jefferson's who had turned on him. The story was just a few paragraphs long, but it would outlive everyone involved. Callender wrote that the President kept, quote, as his concubine one of his own slaves. Her name is Sally. Callender went on to say that Jefferson was the father of several of her children. He insisted this wasn't some wild rumor, that in the area around Jefferson's home, quote, the there is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story and not a few who know it. Thomas Jefferson never responded. Not that year, not ever. And for the next two centuries, the most powerful institutions in America would insist the story was slander. There was just one group of people who kept saying it was true, the descendants of Sally Hemings herself. Nobody believed them either. But the proof was coming, and it would turn up in the one place no one could argue their own blood. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. The I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And remember, these Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. These cases are wild and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Please Note this episode discusses slavery and the sexual exploitation of an enslaved child, so please listen with care. Today, I'm digging into one of the oldest and most explosive secrets in American history. Thomas Jefferson, Founding father, third President the man who wrote that all men are created equal owned a woman named Sally Hemings. He had six children with her, starting when she was a teenager and he was in his 40s. For generations, his family and his country refused to acknowledge the truth. There was never one secret meeting or one villain. It was bigger and stranger than that. A family guarding its name, historians guarding their hero, and a whole country guarding its founding myth. What they protected was a legend. What they erased was a real woman and her children. So how do you keep a true story buried that long? And what does it finally take to dig it back up? All that and more coming up.

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[e-mail] in the late 1700s, Virginia was the most powerful state in the new United States and on slavery. Tobacco was the cash crop, and that crop was planted, tended and picked by enslaved people. Around the time the country was being born, roughly 4 out of every 10 people living in Virginia were enslaved. They weren't treated as people at all. They were property bought, sold, put up as collateral on loans, and handed down in wills like land or livestock. Slavery in Virginia also ran through the mother if your mother was enslaved, you were born enslaved too, no matter who your father was. Thomas Jefferson sat at the center of this world. He wrote the words that became America's promise of freedom. He was also a slaveholder for his entire adult life, with a fortune and a mountaintop mansion built and run by people he owned. One of those people was a young woman named Sally Hemings. Here's the first strange thing about Sally, and it shaped everything that came after. For a woman at the center of a scandal this big, Sally Hemings is almost invisible. We don't know what she looked like. There's no portrait, no photograph, no sketch. We don't have a single letter she wrote, and we're not even sure she could read or write. In the entire surviving record of her life, there are only four short descriptions of her by people who are actually saw her. Here's the most detailed one. It comes from a man named Isaac Granger Jefferson, who had been enslaved at Monticello and worked there as a blacksmith. Decades later, he remembered Sally as, quote, mighty near white with Quote, long, straight hair down her back. That's it. That's most of what we physically know about a woman who changed American history. Almost everything else comes secondhand through other people, usually the ones who owned her. She left behind no voice of her own, which means the people who came after her got to decide what her silence meant. So let's build out what we do know. Sally Hemings was born into slavery in 1773. Her mother was an enslaved woman named Elizabeth Hemings. She would go on to have a dozen children and become the matriarch of one of the most remarkable, remarkable enslaved families in American history. According to the Hemings family's own account, Sally's father was a wealthy white planter named John Wales. That name matters because of who else John Wales was. He was the father of a woman named Martha. Martha went on to marry a promising young Virginia lawyer named Thomas Jefferson. Let that connection settle in for a second. If the family account is right, Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson, the enslaved girl and the planter's wife, were half sisters. They had the same father. When John Wales died, the people he had enslaved, including young Sally and her mother, were inherited as property by his daughter Martha and her husband. That's how the Hemings family came to Monticello, Jefferson's mountaintop estate in Virginia. They arrived as part of an inherited inheritance, the way you might inherit furniture or land. Then, in 1782, Martha Jefferson died at 33 years old. Thomas Jefferson was shattered by her death and never remarried. For the rest of his life, he was a widower with a mountain, a fortune built on enslaved labor, and a household of people he legally owned. Among them was his late wife's half sister, a girl who was then about nine years old. Five years later, that girl crossed an ocean. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson was living in Paris, serving as the American minister to France. He sent for his youngest surviving daughter, Mary, who the family called Polly, to come join him. Polly needed an adult to make the journey with her, and the enslaved woman originally meant to escort her had just given birth and couldn't go. So the job fell to 14 year old Sally Hemings. On the way, Sally and Polly stopped in London and stayed with the family of John Adams, the future president there. Abigail Adams, John's wife, met Sally and wrote about her in a letter. She described Sally as good natured and so young that she seemed, quote, quite a child. Someone who needed more looking after than Abigail could give. In Paris, Sally was reunited with her older brother, James Hemings. He was also enslaved by Jefferson and had come to France earlier to train as a French chef. They lived with Jefferson in his official residence, a grand house on the Champs Elysees called the Hotel de l'. Jacques. Sally began learning French and was paid a small wage. There was also something else about Paris, something Sally Hemings couldn't have missed. In France, Sally slavery had no legal standing. An enslaved person brought onto French soil could go to court, petition for their freedom, and almost always win it. So for the first and only time in her life, Sally Hemings was, in the eyes of the law, a free person. Everything that had made her property back in Virginia simply fell away the moment she stood on French ground. The same was true for her brother James. For this stretch of time, the two of them could have walked into a French court, claimed their freedom, and never looked back. But before that could happen, the man who owned Sally laid a different kind of claim on her. In Paris, Thomas Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. And I want to stop here and be clear, because for 200 years, the language people use to describe what happened was soft. They called it an affair, a romance, a relationship. Every one of those words quietly suggests it was, on some level, mutual. But when this started, Sally was a teenager, somewhere between 14 and 16 years old. Thomas Jefferson was 44. And he wasn't just a grown man who was more than 30 years older than her. He was also the man who legally owned her. The instant she returned to Virginia, she would be his property again. Her body, her labor, her future children, all of it his. So let's say it plainly. A 14 year old cannot meaningfully consent to a man in his 40s. An enslaved person cannot meaningfully consent to the person who holds total legal power over them. Both of those things are true here at the same time, and they don't cancel out, they stack. Whatever happened between these two people, it could not have been a relationship between equals, because Sally's age and enslavement made equality impossible. The historians who run Monticello today reject the word romance. And so do I. Actually, this was not a love story. It was a man holding the most complete power one person can hold over a knife.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

Which brings us to a question that has haunted this story ever since. If Sally Hemings was legally free in France, actually genuinely free, then why on earth did she get back on the boat to Virginia? Why would anyone choose to return to slavery? The answer is the most human thing in this entire episode. She was 16, and by her son's account, she was already pregnant with Jefferson's child. Her brother James, was in Paris with her, but everyone else she loved was an ocean away. Her mother, the rest of her brothers and sisters, the whole Hemings family she'd grown up with were still at Monticello, still enslaved. Staying free in France would have meant raising that baby in a country whose language she barely spoke, cut off from her family, with no way back to them. For Sally, freedom in France wasn't really freedom. It was exile. So Sally Hemings did something extraordinary. She made a trade. According to her son, Madison, Sally refused to come home unless Jefferson promised her something in return. That the children she had with him would be freed when they turned 21. Looking back, that was an incredibly bold move. A 16 year old girl with almost no power had sat across from one of the most powerful men in the world. World. And used the only leverage she would ever have. And she spent all of it. Not on herself, but on the children who hadn't even been born yet. She gave up her own freedom to buy theirs. Then she got back on that ship and sailed across the ocean with no guarantees. Except for the words of the man who owned her. There was no contract, no court that would ever enforce it. The only thing holding that promise together was Thomas Jefferson's clean conscience. But for her children, Sally was willing to take that gamble.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

Sally Hemmings came back home to Monticello in 1789. Over the next 20 years, she had at least six children, all of them fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Two of those children died very young. The four who survived to adulthood were Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Esten. Every one of them was born into slavery on Jefferson's mountain, just like their mother. For more than a decade, it stayed an open secret, whispered around Monticello and Charlottesville, but never printed and never confirmed. Then James Callender got hold of the rumor and it became a national scandal. Remember Callender from the top of the episode, the journalist who broke the story in 1802? It's worth understanding who he was because he wasn't some crusading truth teller. Callender was a political writer for hire. For years he'd actually been on Jefferson's side, attacking Jefferson's enemies in print, sometimes with Jefferson's quiet financial support. But after Jefferson became president in 1801, Callender wanted a reward. He wanted to be made postmaster of Richmond. When Jefferson didn't give him the job, Callender turned on him with everything he had. And what he had was that rumor about Sally hemings. In that September 1802 article, Callender named her, said Jefferson had several children by her, and even claimed that her eldest son, a boy he called Tom, looked just like the President. It was vicious, it was politically motivated, and at its heart, it was true. The story spread fast. Jefferson's political enemies reprinted it In Federalist newspapers up and down the country, they wrote mocking poems about it. For the rest of Jefferson's presidency, the Alex litigation followed him. And through all of it, Thomas Jefferson said nothing. That was partly his style. He had a lifelong policy of not responding to attacks in the press. There's a single private letter from 1805 that some historians have read as an indirect denial, but it never names Sally Hemings, and it's ambiguous at best. Publicly, Jefferson went to his grave without ever saying he yes or no. That silence is the empty space at the center of this whole story. Jefferson was one of the most prolific writers in American history. He left behind something like 19,000 letters with an opinion on almost everything. He wrote warmly about the daughters from his marriage to Martha, the white children he openly claimed. But when it came to Sally Hemings and the children he had with her, he stayed quite quiet. And by saying nothing, the one man who knew the truth guaranteed it could never be settled. But there's a detail that Jefferson's defenders have never been able to fully explain away. What happened to Sally Heming's children? Her son Beverly and her daughter Harriet both left Monticello around 1822. As young adults, Jefferson let them go. They moved north and crossed what was called the color line. That was the hard social and legal boundary between black and white in America. They were light skinned enough to pass for white, so they left their old lives behind and lived the rest of their days as white people. Then in 1826, Jefferson died. And in his will, he freed Sally's two youngest sons, Madison and Eston. Here's why that matters. During his life, Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people and freed just about 10. All of them came from a single family, the Hemingses. If Jefferson had nothing to do with Sally's children, there's no good reason he'd free them and almost no one else set it beside the promise from Paris that her children would go free at 21. And it reads like a man quietly keeping his word. But notice who didn't go free. Sally Hemings herself. Jefferson never formally freed Sally, not even in his will. Part of the reason is chillingly practical. Virginia had a law on the books passed in 1806 that required any enslaved person who was formally freed to leave the state within a year. If Jefferson had legally freed Sally, she would have had to abandon Virginia and with it, her newly freed children and the rest of her family. Family. So instead, after Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha quietly did something the records describe as giving Sally Hemings her time. It wasn't official freedom. It was an unofficial, unwritten release. Just enough to let Sally stay in Virginia without being sold or hunted and live near her children. That quiet arrangement tells you something on its own. Martha went out of her way to shield one specific enslaved woman from sale and pursuit. The kind of thing you do for someone whose place in your family you understand completely. Sally spent her final years in Charlottesville in a house with her sons, Madison and Eston, and died there in 1835 around the age of 62. Then comes one last erasure, one I find almost unbearable. We don't actually know where Sally Hemings is buried. There's no marked grave. The most likely location, according to Monticello's own longtime historian, is a patch of ground in Charlottesville near where she lived with her sons. Today, that ground is believed to lie underneath the parking lot of a hotel. The mother of Jefferson's children may rest unmarked under the asphalt where people park their car.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

So that's what actually happened. Now here's the lie they built. On top of it, while Sally was still alive, and especially after Jefferson died, his white family went to work protecting his name. Jefferson's daughter Martha privately denied that her father had any relationship with Sally Hemings, her own children. Jefferson's grandchildren came up with an alternative explanation for those light skinned children at mine, Monticello, who looked so much like the President. Their story was this. It wasn't Thomas Jefferson at all. It was his nephews, two of Jefferson's sister's sons, the Carr brothers. They were the real fathers and the family had just kept quiet to spare everyone the embarrassment. Years later, Jefferson's grandson told this story to one of Jefferson's early biographers. The biographer passed it along in a private letter in 1868. From there, it hardened into the respectable, gentlemanly version of events. The explanation that serious people were expected to accept. A second hand story told by the people with the most to lose became the official truth. Meanwhile, the people who had actually lived it, Sally Heming's own children, were telling a completely different story. And one of them was about to say it out loud in print for the entire country to read. The year is 1873. The Civil War is over. Slavery is abolished. And in a small town In Ohio, a 68 year old man sits down with a local newspaperman to tell the story of his life. The man's name is Madison Hemings. He's the son of Sally Hemings. The newspaper, the Pike County Republican, prints his account under a heading borrowed from the era's most famous anti slavery novel. They call it Life among the Lowly. What Madison Hemings says in that interview is to this day, the most detailed firsthand account we have of the whole story. Madison says flatly that Thomas Jefferson was his father and the father of his brothers and sister. He tells the story of Paris, the same one I told you earlier, except. Except now we're hearing it from inside. The family passed from Sally to her son. He talks about the free soil, the refusal to come home, and the promise Jefferson made to get her back on the ship. In Madison's words, his mother, quote, refused to return with him unless Jefferson made that pledge to persuade her. Jefferson, quote, promised her extraordinary privileges and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of 21 years. End quote. Madison even mentioned what happened to the baby his mother was carrying when she left France. The child was born soon after they got back to Monticello, but didn't live long. Then he lists the children by name and describes growing up at Monticello and talking about himself and his siblings. Madison Hemings says, quote, we were the only children of his by a slave woman. End quote. But Madison wasn't the only one who said it. That same year, the same little Ohio paper ran a second account in the same series, this one from another man who'd been enslaved at Monticello named Israel Gillette Jefferson. He'd grown up alongside Madison, and for years he worked right at the center of Jefferson's household. He made the fires in Jefferson's private chambers, cleaned his office, dusted his books and waited on him day to day. And here's what's different about Israel. He had no stake in any of it. He wasn't claiming to be Jefferson's son. He was just a man who'd been close to both Jefferson and Sally Hemings. What he described lined up with Madison. Exactly. He called Sally Hemings Jefferson's concubine and confirmed that she and Jefferson were the parents of Madison and his brothers and sisters. That's what made his account so hard to explain away. A single witness can be written off as a dreamer. Two of them telling the same story is a different thing entirely. And yet that's exactly what the country managed to do. Within weeks, a rival Ohio paper trashed Madison's account and said he'd just invented a famous father for himself. But that same claim wasn't even relevant when it came to Israel. So instead of arguing with him, they just ignored him. For the better part of a century, historians treated both Men the same way. Most didn't even know the accounts existed until the 1950s. And when the testimony finally surfaced, they brushed it aside as unreliable. But none of that was random. It followed a pattern. And that pattern had a logic to it. Through most of the 20th century, the people who shaped how America understood Thomas Jefferson were a small number of enormously respected biographers. The most important of them, Dumas Malone, spent decades on a sweeping, prize winning, multi volume life of Jefferson. When it came to Sally Hemings, these men basically agreed on one thing. It was unthinkable. A man like Jefferson, a philosopher, a founder, the author of American Liberty, just wouldn't have done something like that. The story had to be false because they couldn't stomach the alternative. When a historian named Fawn Brody took the relationship seriously in a 1974 biography, she was attacked for it, treated as sensational, even disgraceful for suggesting it was real. Then in 1997, a legal scholar named Annette Griffin, Gordon Reed published a book that made the old narrative impossible to believe. She didn't claim she could prove the relationship had happened. She did something sharper. She went back through two centuries of Jefferson scholarship and showed piece by piece that the evidence had never been given a fair hearing. Here's the double standard she exposed and it's the engine of this whole cover up. When the white Jefferson family told the their secondhand story about the nephews, historians treated it as credible. When the black Hemings family told their firsthand story, historians treated it as suspect. The accounts of the powerful were believed. The accounts of the powerless were doubted. Same event. Two families and scholars decided in advance whose word counted. It wasn't that the evidence pointed away from Jefferson. It's that the people judging it couldn't accept where it pointed. Gordon Reed went on to write a book about the Hemings family that won a Pulitzer prize. But in 1997, the establishment still hadn't budged. Officially, the truth was still a fantasy, but not to everyone. The descendants of Sally Hemings had been telling the same story the entire time. The truth had never been lost. That was never the problem. The problem was that the people with the power to accept it had chosen not to. For that to change, the Hemings family needed something no one could argue away. And it wasn't long before they got it.

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By the end of the 20th century, the Sally Hemings story had stalled. Two centuries of arguing, and it still came down to the same standoff, the family's word against the establishments. The one man who could have settled it had been dead since 1826, and the official keepers of Jefferson's legacy still wouldn't admit that it was true. There seemed to be no way forward. But the people those experts kept overlooking had known the answer all along. Sally Heming's own family, who'd been told their entire lives exactly what had happened. In 1993, Monticello launched an oral history project to track down and interview the descendants of the people who'd been enslaved there. They called it getting word. When the researchers started talking about to the descendants of Sally Heming's son, Madison, they discovered something shocking. These families had been carrying the same story for as many as eight generations, that they were descended from Thomas Jefferson. They had passed it down, parent to child, grandparent to grandchild, through slavery, through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow. And they had done it, in the words of the project, in a climate of disbelief and Hostility. Hostility. For 200 years, every respectable voice told these families they were liars or dreamers. They kept telling their children the truth anyway. They passed it down at moments that mattered, when a child came of age or hit a turning point. In one case, a grandmother told the family history at the exact moment her granddaughter won a history prize from the Daughters of the American Revolution. That day, a descendant of an enslaved woman accepted an award in American history and learned that she was American history, descended from the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. And there's a Reason these families held on so tightly. Researchers found that for most of them, their link to Jefferson was the only family history to survive slavery at all. Slavery declined, deliberately destroyed black families pasts. It scattered people, erased names and wiped out the records of who was born to whom. For these descendants, the line back to Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson wasn't just a famous connection. It was the one thread that told them where they came from, their origin story, the proof that they had a history at all. So when the country told them it was a lie, they should look, let go of. It was asking them to throw away the only inheritance slavery had never managed to take. So they kept saying it generation after generation, no matter who called them liars. But holding on like that came at a cost. And not every branch of the family could pay it. The same project that recovered these stories also surfaced a darker one. And it shows you just how heavy the COVID up became. Sally's son Eston and his descendants had moved to Wisconsin and like Beverly and Harriet, eventually crossed the color line to live as white. For a time, they kept the family story intact. But decades before those researchers ever came knocking back in the 1940s, this part of the family made a deliberate change to it. Instead of saying they descended from Thomas Jefferson, they began saying they descended from one of Jefferson uncles. They altered names, they altered places, all to cut any connection to Sally Hemings and their black ancestry. To survive as white people in America, part of this family had to take the truth they'd been given and bury a piece of it themselves. The COVID up didn't just come from Jefferson's white descendants or from the historians. It got so intense that even the people keeping the truth alive had to carry it in disguise for generations. All of this had come down to one question. Whose word were you willing to take? Then, in 1998, the question changed completely. It stopped being about whose word you believed. It became about something no historian could argue with and no family could be shamed out of. In the late 1990s, a retired pathologist named Eugenia Gene Foster set out to do something no historian had ever been able to do. He wanted to test the story with DNA. The challenge was that Thomas Jefferson had no surviving sons from his marriage, which meant there was no direct male line of his own to test. So Foster did something clever. The Y chromosome passes down nearly unchanged from father to son. Jefferson would have carried the same Y chromosome as his paternal uncle, a man named Field Jefferson. And Field Jefferson did have living male line descendants. So Foster gathered DNA from the Descendants of Field Jefferson and compared it against the descendants of Sally Heming's children. He also compared it against the descendants of those Carr nephews, the men the family had blamed all along. The results came back in the fall of 1998 and they were published in the scientific journal Nature. First, the Jefferson Y chromosome turned out to be rare, A genetic signature the researchers had never seen outside the Jefferson family. That's important because it meant a match would actually mean something. And sure enough, it did. The descendants of Sally's youngest son, Eston Hemmings, carried the Jefferson Y chromosome. It was a match. Even more shocking, the car nephews, the men Jefferson's family had pinned this on for 130 years. Their Y chromosome didn't match at all. In a single result, the nephew story, the respectable, gentlemanly explanation that generations of historians had leaned on, collapsed. It was proven to be false. Now, I have to be careful here because this is the one spot where there's still a real argument. What the DNA pro proved, strictly speaking, is that a Jefferson man fathered Eston hemings. It can't by itself prove which Jefferson man. There were other adult male Jeffersons in Virginia at the time who carried that same chromosome. So DNA alone doesn't completely close the case. But DNA was never alone. Lay it next to everything else. The fact that Thomas Jefferson was physically present at Monticello around the time each one of Sally's children was conceived, Every single one, with no exceptions on record. Lay it next to Madison Hemings account. Lay it next to the oral history of eight generations. Lay it next to the fact that Jefferson freed Sally's children and almost no one else's. When you put the genetics together with the paper trail and the testimony, the authors of the study called Thomas Jefferson the simplest and most probable explanation. In 2000, after reviewing all of it, the foundation that runs Monticello reached the same conclusion, that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings children. In the spirit of this show though, I want to give the other side a fair hearing because there's still a group of people who dispute all of this. After the DNA results, a group calling itself the Scholars commission spent about a year reviewing the evidence and concluded concluded that the case against Jefferson wasn't proven. Most of them thought it was unlikely that Thomas Jefferson fathered any of Sally's children. They pointed to someone else. Jefferson's younger brother, Randolph Jefferson. He carried the same Y chromosome as Thomas. He lived about 20 miles away. And a surviving letter shows Thomas inviting him to Monticello about nine Months before Eston was born, he was a widower during the years Sally kept having children. And one formerly enslaved man remembered Randolph coming out in the evenings to play the fiddle and dance late into the night. The dissent leans on two more things. The 1998 study also tested a separate family. The descendants of a man named Thomas Woodson, long rumored to be Sally's firstborn. The Tom from Callender's article. They found no. No Jefferson match at all. The other piece comes from Jefferson's overseer, Edmund Bacon, who claimed in a memoir that he'd repeatedly seen another man leaving Sally Hemings room early in the morning. I want to take all of it seriously, so let's hold each piece up to the light. Let's start with Woodson. He was never actually documented as Sally Hemings child. Her oldest recorded son was Beverly. So a test that fails to link the Woodsons to Jefferson tells us nothing about the children Sally really had. Then there's Bacon, whose story runs into a timing problem. He didn't arrive at Monticello until 1806, which means he wasn't there for the conception of any of Sally's children except Eston. But the DNA had already shown Eston's father was a Jefferson. Historians are also pretty much in agreement that Bacon's account is that of a former employee shielding his famous boss. Which leaves Randolph. He's not an impossible option, but everything around him is. Thomas Jefferson was documented at Monticello around the time all six of Sally's children were conceived across nearly two decades. Randolph wasn't Monticello's own. Records show just a handful of his visits in all those years. Years. None of them lining up with a conception. And there's no sign he ever took Thomas up on that 1807 invitation. Six children with one woman takes a sustained presence, not a rare overnight stay. The history of the theory gives it away, too. For two centuries, nobody pointed to Randolph. The White family had always blamed the Carr nephews. His name only surfaced after 1998, once the DNA matched a Jefferson and the car story fell apart. One historian noted that Randolph had never been seriously proposed by anyone until the moment the establishment needed a Jefferson who wasn't Thomas. And genealogists who reviewed the commission's own report weren't impressed with its scholarship either. As for the uncle in Esten's family lore, Monticello's senior historian, Lucia Stanton argues that wasn't an old memory at all. But the story Esten's descendants invented in the 1940s to pass as White. If she's right, it isn't a separate clue pointing at a Randolph. It's that same invention aimed in a new direction. Nearly every historian who studies this period, along with Monticello itself, looked at the same evidence and came down squarely on Thomas Jefferson. You can weigh it for yourself, but to me, the descent is the last light on in a house everyone else has already left. Which brings us finally to an actual room. In 2018, after years of work, Monticello did two things. First, the foundation officially dropped the careful hedging language it had used for years and stated clearly that Thomas Jefferson was fathered. Sally Hemings children, the institution that exists to preserve his legacy, stopped protecting the myth and started telling the truth. Second, they restored a room during the renovations. Archaeologists went looking for the space where Sally Hemings most likely lived. A room in the south wing, right next to Jefferson's own bedroom, built around 1809. They found it, but here's what they had to dig to through to get to it. At some point back in 1941, that room, Sally Heming's living space, had been converted into a men's public restroom for the tourists who came to admire Thomas Jefferson's home. So for most of the 20th century, visitors used that restroom and walked back out to admire the great man's mansion. It's the COVID up made physical. Sally Heming's own space turned into plumbing in the house she helped run and where she raised her children. In 2018, Monticello tore the restroom out and restored the room. They filled it with an exhibit built around the words of Sally's son, Madison. The testimony that had been mocked and ignored for nearly a century and a half. And when they opened it to the public, the descendants of Sally Hemings stood inside it. After more than two centuries, the the family that had been called liars stood in her room in her home with her story finally carved into the wall as fact. Before I wrap up, I want to ask you something. Be honest. Before this episode, had you ever heard the name Sally Hemings? You've known Thomas Jefferson's name your whole life. It's on schools, on memorials, on the back of the nickel. But hers? The woman who had six of his children, did you know her? If today is the first time you're hearing her story, leave a comment wherever you're listening, because that gap tells us everything. It's tempting to make this a story about science, about how a DNA test in 1998 finally cracked a 200 year old mystery, but I don't Think that's really the story? Because the DNA didn't create the truth. The truth was never actually lost. Sally Hemings knew it. Madison Hemings knew it and said it out loud in 1873. Eight generations of their family knew it and never stopped repeating it. The facts were always there, sitting in plain sight in the testimony of the people who had lived them. What changed in 1998 was. Wasn't the truth. It was that we couldn't deny it anymore. And the only honest question left is why we needed to dismiss it for so long in the first place. I think we know the answer. To admit the truth about Sally Hemings, America would have to admit something about itself. That the man who wrote all men are created equal, the man we carved into mountains and put on our money, owned human beings. One of them became the mother of his children. That's not a comfortable founding story. So for 200 years, we chose a comfortable lie instead. But I don't want to leave you with the institutions or the historians or even Thomas Jefferson. I want to leave you with her. Sally Hemings was 16 years old, standing on free soil in Paris when she made the hardest trade I can imagine. She handed back her own freedom in exchange for a promise that her children would one day be free. Then she got on a ship, sailed back into slavery, and spent the next several decades raising those children on a mountain, holding a powerful man to a promise no court would ever enforce. She was never legally freed in her own lifetime by the man himself. Himself. She died without a marked grave. Her own country insisted she was a lie that someone made up. But she wasn't. She was a real person who carried an almost unimaginable weight. Think about the bargain she struck. The freedom she bought was her children's, not her own. So the more it worked, the more it took from her. Because the price of their safety was wide. Watching some of them walk away into white society and out of her life for good. We spent 200 years looking away from Sally Hemings. The least we can do now is say her name and get the story right. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa. Richard Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original Powered by Pave Studios Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media crime house on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.

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