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Major Events in the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

1735: Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings, Sally's mother, born, child of English sea captain Hemings and a nameless "full-blooded African" slave belonging to Francis Eppes; Hemings acknowledges and attempts to claim Elizabeth, even by force, but is prevented

1743: Thomas Jefferson born, third child and first of four sons of wealthy Peter Jefferson and socially prominent Jane Randolph, whose family ultimately numbered ten children; the only other son to survive into adulthood is the youngest child, Randolph Jefferson, who will figure in the controversy as the possible father of Sally Hemings's children

1745: TJ's first memory is at age two carried by a slave as his family moves to Tuckahoe

1746: On the marriage of Martha Eppes, daughter of Francis, to John Wayles, Elizabeth Hemings becomes the property of Martha Eppes Wayles

1748: Martha Wayles, TJ's future wife, is born to Martha Eppes Wayles and John Wayles

1748: Martha Eppes Wayles dies, and Elizabeth Hemings becomes the property of John Wayles

1753: Over the next eight years Elizabeth Hemings gives birth to five children by a black man or men

1753: James Thomson Callender born in Scotland, journalist and political writer who in 1802 breaks the story about a relationship between TJ and SH

1755: Randolph Jefferson born, TJ's younger brother, the only brother to survive infancy, late in the controversy it was suggested that Randolph or one of his five sons fathered SH's children, not TJ

1757: Peter Jefferson dies

1757: TJ given Jupiter, his long-time personal servant

1760: TJ attends college at William and Mary for two years

1761: On the death of John Wayles's third wife, Elizabeth Hemings becomes his concubine and over the next twelve years bears him six children, all with the Hemings last name: Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, Sarah (Sally); Betty has two more children after Wayles's death

1762: TJ begins the study of law with George Wythe, also later a signer of the Declaration of Independence -- a man TJ biographer Fawn Brodie claims to have had a publicly acknowledged and highly valued son during a long-term relationship with an African American woman -- passing the bar in 1765

1763: TJ's first love, 16-year-old Rebecca Burwell, rejects him, throwing him into a misogynistic funk for a period of time

1766: Martha Wales, TJ's future wife, marries Bathurst Skelton, who dies in 1768

1768: TJ elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, serves until 1776

1768: TJ attempts to seduce Elizabeth Moore Walker, wife of his long-time friend John Walker, attempts that may have continued a decade, behavior that Callender reveals in 1802 along with the SH relationship, causing Walker to demand "satisfaction," resulting in Jefferson apologizing in 1805 to avoid a duel and a politically damaging public scandal

1769: TJ begins construction of Monticello, which will become a life-long project

1770: In Howell v. Netherland TJ defends a mulatto suing for his freedom from servitude because his white mother had him by a black man, arguing for the first time the natural rights of man, but loses

1772: TJ marries Martha Wayles Skelton (Patsy), a widow, daughter of John Wayles

1772: TJ's first child with Martha, daughter Martha (Patsy) is born

1773: Sally Hemings born, father John Wayles, mother Elizabeth Hemings, making her half-sister of TJ's wife Martha

1773: John Wales dies, his daughter Martha Jefferson inherits a large number of slaves, making the Jeffersons the second largest slave owners in the county; the Hemingses move to Monticello

1774: TJ's second child with Martha, Jane, born, dies within a year

1774: TJ's A Summary View of the Rights of British America marks him a strong advocate for independence

1775: The Revolutionary War begins

1775: TJ as delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia with Robert Hemings as his servant

1776: The Declaration of Independence, which, no surprise, TJ saw, along with the writing of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the founding of the University of Virginia, as one of his three greatest achievements

1776: TJ as member of the Virginia House of Delegates, helping draft a broad range of legislation on democratic principles, especially a bill on religious freedom

1777: TJ's third child with Martha born, dies within weeks, unnamed

1777: TJ's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he saw as the second of his three greatest achievements, argues for the separation of church and state

1778: Maria (Polly), TJ's fourth child with Martha, born

1779: TJ as Governor of Virginia during the war, narrowly escaping capture twice, in Richmond and at Monticello, twenty-three of his slaves take advantage of Lord Dunsmore's offer of freedom and join the British cause; his leadership as governor much criticized

1780: TJ's fifth child with Martha, Lucy, born, dies within two years

1782: TJ's sixth and last child with Martha, also named Lucy, born

1782: Martha Jefferson dies after eliciting a promise from TJ never to re-marry; nine-year-old SH is thought to be at her deathbed, receiving a handbell as a momento from Martha; distraught TJ grieves for weeks, destroys correspondence with Martha

1783: TJ a delegate to Congress from Virginia

1784: TJ travels to France on government business with daughter Martha (Patsy) and James Hemings as his servant; daughters Maria (Polly) and Lucy stay with the Eppes relatives, presumably SH too

1785: TJ appointed Minister to France

1785: TJ's Notes on the State of Virginia published, begun in 1781, his only book, contains now-controversial thoughts on African Americans and slavery

1786: While in France, TJ's romantic involvement with Maria Cosway, a married woman, causing him to write, as a letter to her, a dialog between head and heart

1787: After the death of Lucy, fourteen-year-old SH accompanies TJ's daughter Maria (Polly) to France to be with her father; only two of TJ's six children with Martha now alive; SH described as a child herself by Abigail Adams when she and John meet the pair in London; if one occurred, TJ and SH begin their intimate relationship

1789: The French Revolution begins while TJ is in Paris

1789: TJ with daughters, James Hemings, and SH, possibly pregnant, return to America

1789: TJ appointed Secretary of State in President Washington's cabinet when he gets home

1790: SH possibly has a child named Tom, later Tom Woodson after he left Monticello; the 1998 DNA tests do not show a match between the Woodson and Jefferson lines

1792: Callender's The Political Progress of Britain, the book that will bring him to TJ's attention as a political writer sympathetic to his own causes

1793: Callender emigrates to America under threat of prosecution for sedition

1794: TJ resigns as Secretary of State after years of philosophic and party squabbles with Federalist Alexander Hamilton and retires to Monticello

1795: The first Harriet Hemings, SH's first certain child, born, dies at age two

1796: Worried by the monarchical tendencies of Federalist John Adams and company, TJ comes out of retirement to run for president, is defeated, but, under the rules, becomes Vice-President

1796: Callender's History of 1796, which describes a sexual relationship between Alexander Hamilton and married woman Maria Reynolds, forcing Hamilton to confess publicly, staining his reputation

1796: TJ frees James Hemings, SH's brother; he commits suicide five years later; James and Robert Hemings were the only slaves TJ legally emancipated during his lifetime

1797: Callender's Sketches of the History of America has more on the Hamilton affair

1797: TJ and Callender meet for the first time

1797: TJ as president of the American Philosophical Society

1798: The Alien and Sedition Acts, designed to suppress political opposition, under which eventually two dozen journalists arrested, among them Callender, for criticism of the Adams administration

1798: SH's second certain child, Beverley Hemings (son), born

1799: SH's third child (perhaps not so certain), unnamed, born and dies

1800: Callender's vigorously anti-Federalist The Prospect before Us, Callender prosecuted under the Sedition Act by the Adams administration, fined $200, jailed for nine months (the longest jail term of journalists so prosecuted), released on the last day of the Adams administration in 1801

1800: In a fiercely contested election with Aaron Burr, TJ elected president, pardons Callender (who is by this time out of jail) and remits his fine

1801: Callender demands job as Richmond postmaster; TJ refuses

1801: In the Virginia Federalist (September 14), William Rind refers to TJ's "yellow children" and "golden affections" prior to Callender's expose the following year

1801: SH's fourth certain child, another Harriet Hemings, born

1802: Callender sensationalizes a relationship between TJ and SH (as well as TJ's attempted seduction of Elizabeth Moore Walker) in the Richmond Recorder (September 1) and begins the defamation of both; other newspapers join in, either to accuse or defend TJ

1802: Possibility that Jefferson responds to Callender's allegations under the pen name Cato in the National Intelligencer

1803: Callender dies, officially accidental drowning while drunk, taking some of the steam out of the controversy

1803: TJ negotiates the Louisiana Purchase, the "making moment of American history," vastly expanding our territory and eliminating the presence of foreign powers

1804: TJ's daughter Maria (Polly) dies

1804: TJ re-elected president by a landslide, taking more steam out of the controversy

1805: SH's fifth certain child, Madison Hemings, born

1805: Smear against TJ in the Boston Palladium provokes sedition charge and debate in Massachusetts legislature about his character, reawakening the controversy; TJ replies to charges in private letters, denying all but the Walker affair

1805: In order to avoid a duel and a politically damaging political scandal, TJ apologizes to long-time friend John Walker for attempting to seduce his wife in 1768

1807: TJ's disastrous Embargo Acts during hostilities with Britain, closing all American ports to foreign trade

1807: TJ signs a law abolishing the slave trade to take effect in 1808

1808: SH's sixth certain child, Eston Hemings, born

1809: TJ retires to Monticello for good; his last years there are marked by increasing debt

1809: Burdened by debt, TJ's daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Mann Randolph move to Monticello with their family of, ultimately, twelve children

1812: War with England again

1814: TJ sells his library to re-establish the Library of Congress, ravaged by the British during the war of 1812

1815: Randolph Jefferson, suggested as the father of SH's children, dies

1819: The University of Virginia, which TJ saw as the third of his three greatest achievements, is founded

1820: The Missouri Compromise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions, which caused TJ to write famously in his letter to John Holmes that "this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror"

1822: Beverley and Harriet Hemings run away, separately, unpursued by TJ, presumably successfully passing for white

1825: The University of Virginia opens

1826: TJ dies on July 4th, 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on the same day as John Adams, more than $100,000 in debt, freeing several of the Hemings family including Madison and Eston in his will, but not SH

1827: TJ's possessions, including 130 slaves, sold at auction

1827: TJ's daughter Martha (Patsy) frees SH to live in Charlottesville with sons Madison and Eston, which she does till her death five years later

1829: TJ is a contested figure in David Walker's Appeal, a vigorously aggressive anti-slavery work by an African American

1830: SH, Madison, and Eston are recorded in the Albemarle County census as free white people

1831: Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion that kills more whites than any previous uprising

1831: Monticello is sold to James T. Barclay, a local apothecary, who does not maintain it well

1832: SH dies, burial place unknown, shortly thereafter Madison and Eston move to Ohio

1832: Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans, representative of many diatribes against America by such British travelers as Thomas Hamilton, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens in which TJ's relation with his slaves figure prominently

1834: B. L. Rayner's Life of Thomas Jefferson is silent on the scandal

1834: Jefferson admirer Naval officer Uriah P. Levy buys Monticello and starts to restore it

1839: The poem "Jefferson's Daughter," based on a news story that said daughter was auctioned, appears in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, reprinted by William Wells Brown in 1848

1843: George Mifflin Dallas, Oration on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas Jefferson

1847: Jefferson slave Isaac Jefferson describes SH as near-white with long hair (see the 1868 Henry Randall letter for Thomas Jefferson Randolph's description of SH)

1850: The Fugitive Slave Law, which declared that all runaway slaves be brought back to their masters

1852: Frederick Douglass refers to a TJ granddaughter in Liberia in the North Star

1853: William Wells Brown's Clotel; or The President's Daughter, perhaps the first novel by an African American, is based on the oral tradition that SH and her family were sold into slavery

1856: Eston Hemings dies

1857: In the Dred Scott case, the United States Supreme Court denies an African American's suit for freedom

1858: Ellen Randolph Coolidge, TJ's grand-daughter, advances the "character defense" and names Samuel Carr as the father of SH's children

1858: Henry Stephens Randall's The Life of Thomas Jefferson defends TJ by attacking Callender's character

1861: The Civil War, during which both sides claim TJ as a symbol for their causes

1862: In H. W. Pierson's Jefferson at Monticello, Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon describes TJ as a kind master who disliked slavery, puts SH at Martha Jefferson's deathbed, and claims first-hand knowledge of "another man" in a relationship with SH

1862: Monticello owner Levy dies, leaving the property to the United States government; the Confederacy confiscates and auctions the property during the war

1863: The Emancipation Proclamation

1868: In a letter to James Parton, Randall recounts a personal conversation with TJ grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in which Randolph employs the "character defense" and names Peter Carr as the father of SH's children, describing SH as "light colored and decidedly good looking"

1871: Great-grand-daughter Sarah Randolph's Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, a benign portrait of TJ drawn from family letters and reminiscences designed specifically to combat the scandal

1873: Madison Hemings' memoir, part of a series by editor Samuel Wetmore in the Ohio Pike County Republican, contains, for the first time, SH's story of the relationship with TJ and the "extraordinary agreement" for her children made in France

1873: Newspaper editor John Jones rebut's Madison's story, asserting a "victim syndrome" argument that slaves typically claim illustrious parentage to bolster their pride

1873: Ex-slave Israel Jefferson backs up Madison's story in another article in Wetmore's series

1873: TJ's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph rebuts Israel's story, reiterating the "other man" defense and advancing hatred of the Southern white man as motivation for the continued attacks on TJ's character

1874: James Parton's Life of Thomas Jefferson, in which Parton uses part of the Randall letter to bury the "campaign lie" about SH

1877: Madison Hemings dies

1879: Jefferson Monroe Levy purchases Monticello at public auction and endeavors to maintain it as a memorial to TJ

1898: Ex-slave Peter Fossett reminisces about TJ as a good master

1913: The Monticello Association, made up of Jefferson family descendants, is founded

1923: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchases Monticello and remains its current owner

1929: Gilbert Chinard's Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism refers to TJ's relation to Callender as "unfortunate," but mentions the scandal not at all, and the name Hemings appears nowhere

1936: TJ's face on Mount Rushmore dedicated

1943: Bi-centennial of TJ's birth; Jefferson Memorial in Washington dedicated

1946: The first volume of Dumas Malone's six-volume biography of TJ, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975; Malone would be referred to as the dean of the "Jefferson Establishment," scholars who defended Jefferson in the controvery

1950: The first volume of TJ's thirty-nine volume Papers edited by Julian P. Boyd, a member of the Jefferson Establishment

1954: In Brown v. Board of Education, landmark Civil Rights Era case, the Supreme Court declares school segregation unconstitutional

1954: Malcolm X promoted to Minister of Nation of Islam's New York Temple

1954: Lerone Bennett publishes an article on TJ's "Negro Grandchildren" in Ebony, the country's largest mass-circulation African American magazine, signaling a revival of interest in the scandal

1955: Ohio Historical Society administrator James H. Rodabaugh rediscovers the Madison Hemings memoir originally published in 1873

1955: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott

1955: W. E. Debnam's anti-integration and widely distributed Then my old Kentucky home, good night! portrays the TJ-SH relationship

1956: Autherine Lucy integrates the University of Alabama

1956: In Goodbye to Uncle Tom, a widely reviewed (for instance, by Time) Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, J. C. Furnas includes the TJ-SH relationship

1957: Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deploys the National Guard to block integration of Little Rock Central High School, causing President Eisenhower to counter with federal troops

1960: Jefferson Establishment member Douglass Adair's "The Jefferson Scandals" (published in 1974): "Sally Hemings's pathetic story simply cannot be assimilated to the known character of the real Thomas Jefferson"

1960: Jefferson Establishment member Merrill Peterson's The Jefferson Image in the American Mind: "The story is utterly incredible. . . . the Negroes' pathetic wish for a little pride."

1961: Pearl Graham's "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings" in the Journal of Negro History accepts the relationship, locates descendants of Harriet Hemings

1962: James Meredith becomes the first black student at the University of Mississippi

1963: The March on Washington during which Martin Luther King gives his "I Have a Dream" speech

1964: Cassius Clay changes his name to Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam

1965: "Bloody Sunday," the march from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King

1965: Malcolm X, assassinated this year, blasts TJ and other slave-owning Founding Fathers in Malcolm X on Afro-American History

1968: Martin Luther King assassinated

1968: Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: "The charge has been dragged after Jefferson like a dead cat. . . . Jefferson was simply not capable of violating every rule of honor and kindness"

1970: In Jefferson the President: The First Term, Dumas Malone dubs the relationship a "miscegenation legend": "The abuse of his moral reputation . . . is ironical indeed in the view of . . . his supreme emphasis on the dignity of every human being"

1970: Merrill Peterson's Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography

1972: Watergate, the scandal that caused the resignation of President Nixon two years later and which instituted a wave of disrespect for and distrust of public officials

1972: Fawn Brodie's "The Great Jefferson Taboo" outlines the core argument she will make in her 1974 biography

1974: Fawn Brodie's best-selling Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History accepts the relationship with SH and institutes a wave of revisionist history as well as another round of defenses

1974: Eminent scholar Garry Wills' slashingly negative review of Brodie in the prestigious New York Review of Books

1974: Premier Jefferson scholar Dumas Malone prints the 1858 Ellen Coolidge letter in the prestigious New York Times and later, with an expanded introduction, in a scholarly journal, highlighting the letter's key role in exonerating Jefferson

1975: Carlyle Douglas publishes an article on the scandal on the occasion of Brodie's biography in the same African-American oriented Ebony magazine that kicked off the revival of interest in the story in 1954

1975: Virginius Dabney's attack on Brodie in a speech at William and Mary is referenced in Time and other major media

1976: The United States' Bicentennial, a surge of patriotism and reverence for the Founding Fathers as well as occasion for critical reflection

1976: In a note in the Journal of Southern History, Dumas Malone and Stephen Hochman publish pieces that contextualize Madison Hemings' 1873 memoir, framing it in a way to diminish its significance

1977: John Chester Miller's The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, the first major scholarly work on the subject after Brodie, vigorously rejects her perspective

1977: Tina Andrews, the African American half of "soapdom's only interracial couple" and later writer of the television mini-series Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, is fired from NBC's Days of Our Lives because of negative public reaction to the fictional romance

1979: African American Barbara Chase-Riboud's best-selling Sally Hemings: A Novel, a Literary Guild Book Club selection and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best novel by an American woman, imagines the relationship from SH's perspective

1979: Warner Bros. buys the movie rights, sells them to CBS, but CBS drops option to do a mini-series on Chase-Riboud's novel after Dumas Malone, Virginius Dabney, and others campaign against it

1981: Virginius Dabney's The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal calls TJ a "victim of the current orgy of debunking"

1983: Cyrus Cassell's poem "Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson" in Callaloo, dedicated to Barbara Chase-Riboud and his family, "thought to be the direct descendants of Hemings and Jefferson"

1984: Tina Andrews visits Monticello and commits to writing about SH

1985: Andrews's play The Mistress of Monticello premieres at the Chicago Dramatists Workshop

1987: Minnie Shumate Woodson's The Sable Curtain, about Hemings' decendants

1987: Unauthorized play version of Chase-Riboud's novel titled Dusky Sally, leading to a successful plagiarism suit in 1991

1988: Saturday's Children, a play by Karyn Traut, ironically wife of future Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society Scholars Commission member Thomas Traut [see 2001], points to TJ's brother Randolph as Sally's partner

1990: Judith Justus's Down from the Mountain: The Oral History of the Hemings Family

1991: Ann Rinaldi, "affected . . . deeply" by Fawn Brodie, writes Wolf by the Ears, a young person's novel about SH's daughter Harriet Hemings

1992: Jeffersonian Legacies conference at Williamsburg at which Robert Cooley identifies himself as a TJ and SH descendant via Tom Woodson

1993: Peter S.Onuf's Jeffersonian Legacies is the record of the 1992 conference

1993: 250th anniversary of TJ's birth

1993: Steve Erickson's Arc d'X, with its nasty view of TJ

1994: Barbara Chase-Riboud's The President's Daughter, about SH's daughter Harriet Hemings

1995: The Jefferson in Paris feature film depicts Sally likable but utterly clueless, dependent, and powerless

1995: President William Clinton and 22-year-old White-House intern Monica Lewinsky begin a sexual relationship

1997: Mrs. Winifred Bennett conceives the idea to use DNA to investigate the TJ-SH relationship and engages Dr. Eugene Foster to conduct the test; Foster, in turn, engages the aid of Jefferson family historian Herbert Barger in locating descendants

1997: Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson wins the National Book Award; Ellis finds the TJ-SH relationship unlikely

1997: The Ken Burns' widely respected PBS documentary Thomas Jefferson

1997: African American Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy deconstructs white historians who created the official narrative of TJ's non-involvement with SH

1998: Newsweek (January) decides not to print a story on the Clinton-Lewinski affair, but others do, and the scandal erupts

1998: President Clinton's denial (January): "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky"

1998: Foster receives the DNA results (June) and decides to publish them in a scientific journal without prior consultation with Bennett or Barger

1998: President Clinton becomes the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury investigating his conduct (August) and admits on national television that he had an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky

1998: The House Judiciary Committee votes (October) to launch a congressional impeachment inquiry against President Clinton, in a situation that would invite comparison with TJ and SH, for lying about sexual liaisons with Lewinsky

1998: Nature (November 5) publishes DNA test results that show a match between the Jefferson male line and descendants of Eston Hemings, essentially "convicting" TJ in the popular mind

1998: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello) promises that it "will follow truth regarding the DNA results wherever it may lead us" and appoints a staff research committee to investigate

1998: William Clinton is impeached (December)

1999: The Senate formally begins the impeachment trial of President Clinton (January) on two charges of perjury and obstruction of justice

1999: Oprah Winfrey television show (January) brings the "black" and "white" family together

1999: Barger, upset at the conclusions he felt unfairly drawn from the DNA results, publishes a statement (February, later revised in 2000) indicating Randolph Jefferson and others as legitimate candidates for paternity of SH's children

1999: The Senate (February) acquits President Clinton on both impeachment charges

1999: Conference of historians at Monticello and the University of Virginia to discuss what the DNA findings mean results in Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf)

1999: Second edition of Joseph Ellis's prize-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson with revised appendix showing his acceptance of the DNA results

1999: Hemings family members attend the Jefferson family reunion for the first time, but the Monticello Association declines opening membership to them

2000: Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman, Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family, more on the Hemings descendants co-edited by a descendant (Lanier)

2000: Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, an extremely popular television mini-series, written by African American Tina Andrews, depicts Sally as a strong but tragic heroine

2000: PBS Frontline documentary Jefferson's Blood depicts present-day situation of and tension between the "black" and "white" descendants of TJ and SH

2000: William and Mary Quarterly, the leading scholarly journal on early American history, publishes a group of articles by historians responding to the DNA evidence

2000: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation's "Report of the Monticello Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings" supports the implications of the DNA findings; one member files a minority report

2001: President Bush conducts a White House tribute to the Hemings family, widely recognized as White House acceptance of the TJ-SH relationship

2001: Slave burial ground discovered at Monticello

2001: The "Report on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter" by The Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission formed by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society rejects the implications of the DNA findings

2001: Byron Woodson's A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson

2002: The Monticello Family Association votes 74-6 to deny Hemingses membership

2003: After his death, it is revealed that segregationist senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina fathered and supported a child with his family's African-American maid; resemblance to TJ and SH obvious

2003: Organized by Julia Westerinen, the Hemings family begins holding their own reunions at Monticello, separate from the Monticello Association

2008: Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family wins the National Book Award for non-fiction and the following year the Pulitzer Prize for History, the SHEAR Book Award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and other awards

2009: Literally In Defense of Thomas Jefferson, William Hyland argues that "Randolph Jefferson is Sally's most likely sexual partner"

2009: Clarence Walker finds acceptance of America as a Mongrel Nation from its founding the valuable lesson of the TJ-SH relationship and the source of anxiety for the "post DNA critics"

2009: Lehigh University undergraduate and graduate students do a first draft of the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy web site in a course called "Early American Scandals"

2010: The international peace-making organization Search for Common Ground honors three TJ and TJ-SH descendants -- David Works, Julie Jefferson Westerinen, and Shay Banks-Young -- for "their work to bridge the divide within their family and heal the legacy of slavery"

2010: Lehigh University first-semester undergraduate students do a second draft of the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy web site in an advanced placement literature seminar

2010: Annette Gordon-Reed is awarded the National Humanities Medal -- America's "highest medal for achievement in her field" -- and receives the prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship Award

2011: A Lehigh University English major senior seminar produces a third draft of the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy web site

2011: The 2001 report of the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission formed by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society rejecting the implications of the DNA findings is finally published as The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (ed. Robert F. Turner)

2012: A fourth draft of the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy web site by first-semester undergraduate students in an advanced placement literature seminar

2013: Lehigh University publishes the first edition of the Jefferson-Hemings Controversy web site