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Article: Jefferson's Other Family: Recognition for descendants of slave Sally Hemings.(Thomas Jefferson)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Newsweek
- Article date:
- February 7, 2000
- Author:
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For nearly 200 years, historians had refused to credit the calumny that Thomas Jefferson had had a child with one of his slaves--and for just as long, the tale had circulated as gossip and family lore, secrets whispered into the ears of brides or by grandparents on their deathbeds. Scholars hesitated to believe something so at odds with the Jefferson they knew: honorable according to the code of his place and time; loyal to his wife and to her memory after her early death, and an opponent of racial mixing. But then came the report in 1998 that DNA tests strongly indicated that Jefferson had fathered at least one of the children of Sally Hemings, his mulatto slave. Last ...