The portrait that historians have traditionally painted of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson is long overdue for a major overhaul.

That was the consensus of the participants in the Feb. 12 forum on "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: The Facts and Their Significance." The event focused on recent reports that DNA evidence supports the long-debated contention that the third U.S. president had a 38-year affair with his slave and fathered several of her children.

Among the featured speakers at the forum was Kenneth Kidd, professor of genetics and psychiatry at Yale, who explained the science used by British researchers to determine whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children.

The study looked at certain characteristics of the Y chromosome that are passed down "essentially intact from father to son," explained Kidd, noting that this technique is widely used today to determine paternity. The study compared the Y chromosome of a "direct male-to-male" descendant of one of Hemings' sons, Eston, with that of a male descendant of one of Jefferson's brothers. (There are no direct male descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha, because their union produced only daughters.)

In this case, the genetic match was near-perfect, explained the geneticist, noting, "If you find two Y chromosomes that are essentially identical, the probability of that happening by chance is infinitesimally small." However, Kidd cautioned, this does not prove that Jefferson is the father of Eston Hemings "in the strict scientific sense," but that "somewhere in the past [the descendants tested] had a common ancestor." It does confirm, however, that Jefferson or "a relatively close male relative" fathered at least one of Hemings' children, he said.

Allegations that there was an affair between Jefferson and Hemings are hardly new. The first published reports about their relationship appeared in 1802, during Jefferson's first term as president (he refused to comment on the story), and Madison Hemings, another of Sally Hemings' sons, wrote an article about his family's history in 1878.

Yet, as late as the 1970s, there was "a generally hostile academic reaction" to those publications that gave credence to the Jefferson-Hemings connection, noted David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition (part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies), which sponsored the event. Davis moderated the forum, which attracted a capacity crowd to the Luce Hall auditorium.

Even today, the news of the link between the DNA of Jefferson's and Hemings' descendants has caused "dismay" among some historians, said Annette Gordon-Reed, a member of the faculty of the New York Law School and author of the 1997 book "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy."

Historians' centuries-long refusal to credit the Jefferson-Hemings story is due in part to a "long-held prescription against blacks' equal participation in history," particularly their reluctance to rely on black testimony about historical events, contends Gordon-Reed. She noted that this reveals how "class and status and the story historians want to believe" determines what can "pass muster" as historical fact. She believes that continued discussion about Jefferson's relationship with Hemings will give the nation both "a deeper understanding of slavery" and "a deeper understanding of who we are as Americans."

Barbara Oberg, who has sifted through historical documents as editor of the "Papers of Benjamin Franklin" at Yale and is the newly named editor-in-chief of the "Papers of Thomas Jefferson" at Princeton University, admitted that "history is a terrible mess, a big jumble of stuff." Unlike some of the previous editors of Jefferson's papers, who were vehement in their dismissal of the patriot's alleged affair with Hemings, Oberg said she expects to use the DNA evidence as a springboard to review the historical records and "reevaluate Jefferson in the midst of that historical jumble."

Peter Onuf, chair of the Corcoran history department at the University of Virginia, agreed that the new revelations provide a "wonderful opportunity for rethinking and reconstructing Jefferson."

Onuf pointed out that, although Jefferson attempted to limit the expansion of slavery in the new nation, he did own many slaves, and the only ones he ever freed were Hemings' children. Furthermore, said Onuf, Jefferson contended that mixing the races was immoral and believed the solution to slavery was "emancipation, expatriation and colonization." Because of these views, noted the historian, Jefferson was "the patron saint of passive resistance to desegregation" during the 1940s.

"We are now able to see some things that were invisible to previous generations," said Onuf, author of "Jeffersonian Legacies." He added, "If Jefferson's days as an icon are limited, perhaps he will serve better as a touchstone to reflect where we are today and how we can move on."

At Monticello, Jefferson's home in Virginia, the process of reevaluating history has already begun, according to Daniel Jordan, director of the facility and president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. In recent years, he noted, the staff at Monticello has operated under "two working assumptions -- that you cannot understand Thomas Jefferson unless you understand slavery, and that you cannot understand Monticello unless you understand the African-American community that lived there." Toward that end, there is now a project underway to identify and interview the descendants of Monticello's slaves, he noted.

Even before the story about the DNA match was published, the Monticello staff, which includes several noted historians, met with the study's lead investigator to discuss the findings and their possible interpretations, noted Jordan. An internal committee has since been appointed to study the DNA findings in the context of the other historical evidence. "We are determined to follow the Jeffersonian path to truth, wherever it might lead us," said Jordan, adding as a final quip, "Whoever said history was dull?"

The scholarly discussion turned into a family reunion of sorts during the question-and-answer period with the audience, when members of two African-American families that trace their lineage to the Jefferson-Hemings union stood up to describe their feelings about the central figures in the controversy.

"I like to think of Jefferson's human side," as opposed to the portrait painted in history books, said one of the women, who had traveled from New Jersey to attend the forum. "I tend to think more about Sally," said the other, a New Haven resident, as the two women, who had learned about each other's existence only at that moment, embraced.

-- By LuAnn Bishop

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