David Boaz

Several years ago newspapers reported that a study of DNA proved that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Now some African-Americans want a genetic history to prove that they are descended from James Madison, the father of the US constitution. But DNA can't prove what they want.

The Washington Post reports that Bettye Kearse, an African-American physician, wants to confirm her family's oral tradition that they are direct descendants of Madison. This past weekend she attended the Montpelier slave descendants reunion at the fourth president's mansion. "Working with Bruce Jackson, co-director of the Roots Project, which helps African Americans trace their genetic histories," Kearse wants to:

compare the Y chromosomes - which are identical across generations - of male descendants in Madison's family to the Y chromosomes of some of Kearse's male cousins. Jackson and Kearse have been searching for Madison relatives in England but recently located a descendant of one of Madison's brothers in North Carolina.

begins with a kidnapped African slave, Mandy, who Kearse says was impregnated at Montpelier by Madison's father. The child, Coreen, later gave birth to Madison's child, whom she named James Madison.

Jackson, speaking to attendees Saturday about how genetic research is conducted, noted that if Kearse's claim proves correct, it would mean Madison's only living direct descendants are African American.

A more accurate headline, of course, would have been "A Jefferson - not necessarily Thomas Jefferson - fathered" Sally Hemings' youngest child.) The article on the DNA test results was accompanied by an article "Founding father," co-authored by Professor [Joseph] Ellis, which proclaimed that the DNA analysis "confirms that Jefferson was indeed the father of at least one of Hemings' children."

Jefferson's place in American history - his central role in our nation's founding and the evolution of its system of government - justly derives from his ideas. As I see it, genealogy is irrelevant: the true "children" of Jefferson today are those who understand his ideas and work to keep them alive. His lasting legacy is the body of ideas he has given us, ideas still quite relevant today, to the perennial problems of protecting individual rights and limiting the powers of government.

Amazing Grace is a beautiful song, but I've never been entirely comfortable with it. I didn't like that line "saved a wretch like me". I don't think I'm a wretch. Nor are most of my friends.

But once I learned the story behind the song (with a little help from my friends at the Mackinac Center), I became more sympathetic: John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, really was a wretch. Now a new movie is going to bring that story to millions of people.

Dan Glaister reports that actor Kirk Douglas is celebrating his 90th birthday with a new book and a jeremiad on the state of the world.

"Let's face it," he writes to "America's young people":

"THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it. Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, Aids, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable."

Genes can't tell us if US president James Madison fathered a child with a slave.

Several years ago newspapers reported that a study of DNA proved that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Now some African-Americans want a genetic history to prove that they are descended from James Madison, the father of the US constitution. But DNA can't prove what they want.

The Washington Post reports that Bettye Kearse, an African-American physician, wants to confirm her family's oral tradition that they are direct descendants of Madison. This past weekend she attended the Montpelier slave descendants reunion at the fourth president's mansion. "Working with Bruce Jackson, co-director of the Roots Project, which helps African Americans trace their genetic histories," Kearse wants to:

compare the Y chromosomes - which are identical across generations - of male descendants in Madison's family to the Y chromosomes of some of Kearse's male cousins. Jackson and Kearse have been searching for Madison relatives in England but recently located a descendant of one of Madison's brothers in North Carolina.

The Kearse family's oral history:

begins with a kidnapped African slave, Mandy, who Kearse says was impregnated at Montpelier by Madison's father. The child, Coreen, later gave birth to Madison's child, whom she named James Madison.

So there's your problem. Even if Kearse and her genetic consultants manage to find a match between the DNA of her African-American cousins and that of Madison family descendants, it would only prove a genetic link between the two families. It would not prove that President Madison himself fathered a child with one of the Kearse ancestors. Indeed, since the Kearse family's oral history claims descent from both Madison and his father, there would be no reason to assume that President James Madison junior, rather than his father, James Madison senior, had provided the Madison DNA to the Kearse family.

The Washington Post reported:

Jackson, speaking to attendees Saturday about how genetic research is conducted, noted that if Kearse's claim proves correct, it would mean Madison's only living direct descendants are African American.

But since Jackson is a geneticist, it seems likely that he was not saying that a DNA match would prove that, but only that a DNA match plus some other form of evidence could prove such a claim.

A few facts about Madison's family point away from President Madison. James Madison had no children with his wife Dolley. His father, on the other hand, fathered 12 children. And some of Madison's brothers had children, whose descendants are being sought for the DNA testing. Dolley Madison had two sons with her first husband. So we know that Madison's father, brothers, and wife were fertile, yet he himself fathered no known children. It seems quite possible that he was infertile.

This story is reminiscent of the 1998 bombshell about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Apparently confirming two centuries of rumors and accusations, the November 5, 1998 issue of the journal Nature ran an article bearing the headline, "Jefferson fathered slave's last child." The article was more cautious: it reported that DNA analysis pointed conclusively to some member of the Jefferson family having fathered at least one of Sally Hemings's children, and argued that the historical evidence (it cited oral history) pointed to Thomas Jefferson.

As the Jefferson historian David Mayer wrote in a critique of the research and the media coverage of it:

A more accurate headline, of course, would have been "A Jefferson - not necessarily Thomas Jefferson - fathered" Sally Hemings' youngest child.) The article on the DNA test results was accompanied by an article "Founding father," co-authored by Professor [Joseph] Ellis, which proclaimed that the DNA analysis "confirms that Jefferson was indeed the father of at least one of Hemings' children."

But in fact all the DNA analysis could confirm was that some of Sally Hemings's descendants were also descended from a male Jefferson. Sally's children could well have been fathered by Jefferson's brother or nephews. There is much debate over whether non-DNA evidence - the Hemings family's oral history, the accusations in Federalist newspapers, the ages of Jefferson and his relatives, their whereabouts nine months before the births of Sally's children - tends to point to Jefferson, his brother, or his nephews as the most likely fathers. But DNA can't prove more than the family connection.

Does any of this matter? It matters to the people who might be descended from Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. It's a common human trait to take pride in one's ancestry. It matters because truth always matters. And it seems to matter to some people in that it takes Thomas Jefferson down a peg. (The Madison story is new and much less discussed.) It makes him less the hero of the marble statue, or even the loving and lustful husband of the musical 1776, but rather a man of normal, even salacious, appetites - a man who (allegedly) engaged in sexual relations that were not just outside marriage but possibly outside the bounds of decency. Some have argued for a genuine love affair between the brilliant older man and the beautiful young woman who was the half-sister of his late wife. But most of us cannot escape the feeling that sex between a master and a slave is uncomfortably close to rape. Can a slave withhold her consent? So it matters because it lessens our admiration for Jefferson (or Madison), which is exactly what some critics want.

On the other hand, do we really need this story to point out to us the flaw in Jefferson's character? The cognitive dissonance endured by the man who declared, "All men are created equal," yet owned some men as slaves? Jefferson and Madison produced some of the greatest writing on freedom in history. We owe to them the theory and the institutions of American liberty. And yet they owned slaves. What can we say about that? That all men are imperfect, that most of us fall short of our ideals, but that the ideals still matter. We are all - white Americans, black Americans, people in other countries - better off because Jefferson and Madison fought for American freedom and wrote the documents they did.

As Mayer wrote:

Jefferson's place in American history - his central role in our nation's founding and the evolution of its system of government - justly derives from his ideas. As I see it, genealogy is irrelevant: the true "children" of Jefferson today are those who understand his ideas and work to keep them alive. His lasting legacy is the body of ideas he has given us, ideas still quite relevant today, to the perennial problems of protecting individual rights and limiting the powers of government.

The same is true of Madison. If we found that - as with the claims about Shakespeare - the Declaration of Independence and the constitution were not really written by Jefferson and Madison but by some tradesman lost to history, it would not change the power and importance of those ideas, though it would of course change our view of Jefferson and Madison as men. So it is with these possible revelations about their personal lives.