READING: Mark Silk: Did John Adams Out Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings?
braddelong.substack.com
Mr Jefferson is going to Montecello.... [When' the President dies or resigns, when I suppose he is to be invited from his Conversations with Egeria in the Groves, to take the Reins of the State, and conduct it forty Years in Piety and Peace…
The big problem with Callendar's credibility has been that his specific claim -- Jefferson fathered a son on Sally Hemings around 1790 or so -- has been refuted by the DNA evidence. Her first confirmed child (presumably by Jefferson) was born in 1796 and the rest followed in a natural sequence until 1804 (dates off memory). So the question is, why no children before 1796 if she was his mistress during that time?
This hardly disproves the relationship; it merely suggests that it may not have begun early enough for some of these allusions to have been true. But this certainly is new evidence and it's very interesting.
Yes: since the conjecture is that the… [insert adjective here] relationship started in Paris, that is a problem for the conventional conjecture
The big problem with Callendar's credibility has been that his specific claim -- Jefferson fathered a son on Sally Hemings around 1790 or so -- has been refuted by the DNA evidence. Her first confirmed child (presumably by Jefferson) was born in 1796 and the rest followed in a natural sequence until 1804 (dates off memory). So the question is, why no children before 1796 if she was his mistress during that time?
This hardly disproves the relationship; it merely suggests that it may not have begun early enough for some of these allusions to have been true. But this certainly is new evidence and it's very interesting.