Review Exercise for Section 26 Use commas correctly.
Add any necessary commas, delete any that are unnecessary, and replace commas with periods or semicolons as needed.
“All men are created equal” wrote Thomas Jefferson but his deeds did not always match his eloquent words. Like most of the other aristocratic landowners in Virginia, Jefferson the author of the Declaration of Independence founder of the University of Virginia and third president of the United States, owned slaves. One of them was a woman named, Sally Hemings who was one-quarter African, and was probably the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and a half-African slave, if this genealogy is correct Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha. Indeed observers at the time noted that, Hemings looked remarkably like Martha Jefferson, who had died on September 6 1782, when Jefferson was thirty-nine.
In 1802 a disgruntled former employee reported that President Jefferson, was the father of Hemings’s three children. Jefferson never responded publicly to the charge but, many people noticed the resemblance between him and the Hemings children. The believable scandalous rumors continued to circulate for years after Jefferson’s death in 1826. A few historians speculated, that Jefferson’s nephews might have fathered the Hemings children but, most ignored the story altogether. Yes it was true that slaveholders had often been known to impregnate slave women, yet such an act was difficult for many white Americans to reconcile with their views of one of the country’s founders.
In the 1990s DNA tests were used to determine whether Jefferson could have been the father of Sally Hemings’s children. The tests showed a match between the DNA of Jefferson’s closest male relative’s descendants, and the descendants of Hemings’s youngest son, Eston. Clearly either Jefferson or a close relative was Eston’s father. Most historians are now convinced that, Jefferson did father at least one of the Hemings children. A recent biography of Jefferson was called American Sphinx and the third president does, indeed seem to have hidden many secrets. Whether the revelations about his relationship with Hemings will change the way Americans feel about this Founding Father, remains to be seen.