For more than 200 years, one question about the nation's third president has lingered: Did Thomas Jefferson father children with Sally Hemings, a woman 30 years his junior whom he held in slavery?The question has long been part of debates over slavery, race, power and Jefferson's legacy."Thomas Jefferson wrote the most famous phrase in American history — 'All men are created equal' — and yet, if he bore children with Sally Hemings who were born into slavery, it seemed like a paradox and a contradiction," Richard Kurin told NPR's Michel Martin for Morning Edition.Kurin, a distinguished scholar and ambassador-at-large for the Smithsonian Institution, spent 15 years searching for Jefferson's DNA in an effort to answer the paternity question.The investigation began with strands of hair found in Jefferson's personal Bible and eventually involved scientists, archaeologists, genealogists, forensic experts and Jefferson's and Hemings' descendants.The investigation's twists, as well as the science behind it, are detailed in Kurin's new book, History by a Hair.Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.
Allegations that he fathered children with Hemings emerged in the late 1700s and early 1800s and have been debated by family members, biographers and historians ever since.Kurin and his team were not the first to turn to DNA.In the late 1990s, pathologist Eugene Foster and colleagues analyzed Y chromosome markers from Jefferson's family descendants and a descendant of Eston Hemings."He [Foster] found contemporary descendants who had the Jefferson Y chromosome, and then he found the descendant of Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings' youngest son.Coupling the historical evidence with that DNA evidence, it convinced, I think, most historians and a lot of people that Thomas Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings' children," Kurin said.
But others objected by noting that the DNA results then could point to any Jefferson male, such as a cousin, br...