The National Press Club

THOMAS JEFFERSON HERITAGE SOCIETY
On September 1, 1802, as part of a blackmail scheme, a disreputable scandalmonger named James Thomson Callender accused President Thomas Jefferson of fathering children by Sally Hemings, a member of an enslaved family inherited by Jefferson. This allegation gained little traction with the general public and was uniformly dismissed by most Jefferson scholars. However, in recent decades, a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings has been accepted by a growing number of historians (in part because of misunderstood DNA testing), and the story has crept into the public mind as the truth.
At 1:00 PM on Thursday, September 1, 2011, an important new book will be released by Carolina Academic Press in the Zenger Room of the National Press Club (529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C.). Entitled The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, this report culminates a year-long study by thirteen distinguished scholars from across the nation. It concludes with the “unanimous view that the allegation is by no means proven,” and the views of the twelve-member majority range from “serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false.” Heavily documented with more than 1400 footnotes, the 400-page volume shows that most of the arguments used to support the allegation are simply not true. Credible eye-witness testimony points to someone other than Thomas Jefferson as the father of at least one, and perhaps more, of Sally Hemings’ children.