Thomas Jefferson, by John Trumbull, 1788 (detail) This portrait captures Jefferson when he lived in Paris as a diplomat with his daughters and slave Sally Hemings. In 1802, a scandal erupted when a journalist charged that Jefferson had fathered children by Hemings. DNA evidence and historical evidence of Jefferson’s whereabouts at the start of Hemings’s pregnancies make a powerful case that he did father some and perhaps all of her children.
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Cornelia Cruger, 1923 (24.19.1). Image source: Art Resource, NY.