The Forensic Historian by Robert C Williams

Author:Robert C Williams [Williams, Robert C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, World, Social Science, Archaeology, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781317456797
Google: CG6sBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-26T16:09:04+00:00

4.3 Eugene Foster: Jefferson’s Children

Charlottesville, Virginia, featured another DNA announcement in 1998. Not only was Anna Manahan not Anastasia, but Thomas Jefferson might well have fathered a child by one of his slaves.

Ever since U.S. president Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, people had argued whether he had fathered children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Retired pathologist Eugene Foster’s 1998 DNA tests of Jefferson’s and Hemings’s male descendants and relatives seemed to show the presence of the same Y-chromosome DNA alleles. A few historians like Joseph Ellis changed their minds on the paternity issue because of modern science. They thought Thomas Jefferson might well have fathered children by Hemings. Most scientists concluded only that one or more Jefferson males (of two dozen in Virginia)—including Thomas, his brothers, and his cousins—fathered Sally’s children. Foster’s DNA tests were misunderstood, and the paternity case against Jefferson remains unproven.

As early as 1802, a muckraking journalist named James Callender charged that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a seven-year-old son, Tom, who was conceived in Paris in 1795 when Jefferson was serving as U.S. minister there. Callender was a self-confessed liar, a racist, a drunkard, and a defamer of five presidents. But his allegations against Jefferson and “dusky Sally” persisted.

In 1998 a retired pathologist in Charlottesville named Eugene Foster (1927-2008) learned of the recent progress in DNA fingerprinting to prove identity. Foster was born in the Bronx, got his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis (where Mildred Trotter worked) in 1951, and then taught pathology at the University of Virginia and Tufts University. Friends persuaded Foster that he should try to test the old canard about Jefferson with the new techniques of DNA fingerprinting.

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