For more than 200 years, the question has nagged at the edges of American history: Did Thomas Jefferson father children by Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved?
The claim that he did has prompted denials, polemics, scandalous best-sellers and sober historical scholarship, before settling in recent years into a widely, if not universally, accepted truth.
Now, the Smithsonian Institution is offering what it says is the most definitive evidence yet, based on an extraordinary piece of data: Thomas Jefferson’s genome, sequenced from samples culled from a few strands of his hair.
“History By a Hair,” to be published on Sept. 22 by Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, arrives with endorsements from prominent scholars…
While the Hemings issue has not figured into the controversy, the Smithsonian has adjusted the rollout of its research. An event on Sept. 22 announcing the findings has been moved from the American history museum to a less prominent Smithsonian location, limited to descendants and closed to the news media. An online public lecture by Kurin through the institution’s educational arm set for the next day was canceled.
Kurin acknowledged what he called the “unpredictability” of the moment. But for him, the research was just “doing my job.”
“This is a topic of interest to the American people,” he said. “I didn’t invent this question, and it wasn’t invented by the Smithsonian. It goes back to Hamilton and Jefferson and Adams. If we have evidence, scholarship and science that helps elucidate American history, I think we have a duty to pursue it.”
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