Jefferson did not grant freedom to any other enslaved family unit. The claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello, entered the public arena during Jefferson's first term as president, and it has remained a subject of discussion and disagreement for two centuries. Based on documentary, scientific, statistical, and oral history evidence, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation TJF Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings January remains the most comprehensive analysis of this historical topic.
In September , political journalist James T. Callender , a disaffected former ally of Jefferson, wrote in a Richmond newspaper that Jefferson had for many years "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Although there had been rumors of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and an enslaved woman before , Callender's article spread the story widely. It was taken up by Jefferson's Federalist opponents and was published in many newspapers during the remainder of Jefferson's presidency.
Jefferson's policy was to offer no public response to personal attacks, and he apparently made no explicit public or private comment on this question although a private letter of has been interpreted by some individuals as a denial of the story. Sally Hemings left no known accounts. Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph privately denied the published reports. Two of her children, Ellen Randolph Coolidge and Thomas Jefferson Randolph , maintained many years later that such a liaison was not possible, on both moral and practical grounds.
They also stated that Jefferson's nephews Peter and Samuel Carr were the fathers of the light-skinned Monticello slaves some thought to be Jefferson's children because they resembled him. The Jefferson-Hemings story was sustained through the 19th century by Northern abolitionists, British critics of American democracy, and others.
Its vitality among the American population at large was recorded by European travelers of the time. Through the 20th century, some historians accepted the possibility of a Jefferson-Hemings connection and a few gave it credence, but most Jefferson scholars found the case for such a relationship unpersuasive. Over the years, however, belief in a Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship was perpetuated in private.
