Publisher's Synopsis
Thomas Jefferson was accused in the Federalist press in the early 1800s of fathering children by an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. In 1873, one of her sons, Madison, claimed in a newspaper interview that he and his sister Harriet and his two brothers Beverly and Eston were Jefferson's children. In 1998, DNA testing on the descendants of Jefferson's uncle identified a distinct chromosome Y haplotype that would be present in all Jefferson men. This same Y haplotype was also found in a descendent of Eston Hemings. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which operated Monticello, formed an in-house committee, which found that there was a "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." Why did Monticello change its long-held position? Was the evidence manipulated to reach the desired result? All questions and wonder about this, it will answer in this book.
