Thomas Jefferson Randolph was the son of Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. and Martha Jefferson Randolph, the oldest son and the second born of their eleven children who survived. His mother was the eldest daughter, and he was the eldest grandson of United States President Thomas Jefferson. Part of the time, he grew up at Monticello and was close to his grandfather, who died when Randolph was 34.
A planter, Randolph was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates and served four years. He had been close to his grandfather and was appointed executor of his estate in his will of 1826. Randolph had begun to manage Monticello for his mother and grandfather for a short period during Jefferson's last years. Because the estate was heavily encumbered by debt, Randolph ordered the sale of Monticello goods and property, including the 130 slaves. His mother withheld Sally Hemings from the auction and gave her "her time," which informally allowed her to live freely in Charlottesville, Virginia with her two younger sons. Jefferson had formally freed Madison and Eston in his will, after allowing their older sister and their older brother to "run away" in 1822. In 1829, Randolph published Memoir, Correspondence and Miscellanies: from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson. It was the first collection of Jefferson's writings. After Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831, Randolph introduced a post natiemancipation plan in the Virginia House of Delegates. This would have provided for gradual emancipation of children born into slavery after they served an apprenticeship and came of age. It was defeated. In 1850, Randolph was elected to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850. He was one of four delegates elected from the central Piedmont delegate district made up of his home district of Albemarle County, as well as Nelson and Amherst Counties. From 1857 to 1864, Randolph served as the rector of the University of Virginia, where he succeeded Andrew Stevenson. During the American Civil War, he held a colonel's commission in the Confederate Army. Most planters were excused from active service. Continuing to be active in politics after the war, Randolph served as the temporary chairman of the 1872 Democratic National Convention.
Jefferson–Hemings controversy
The historian Henry S. Randall, in an 1868 letter to James Parton, also a historian, wrote that "The 'Dusky Sally Story'--the story that Mr. Jefferson kept one of his slaves, as his mistress and had children by her, was once extensively believed by respectable men..." According to Randall, after Thomas Jefferson had died, his oldest grandson Randolph talked with the historian and personally noted the strong resemblance of the Hemings' children to his grandfather, their master. In the 1850s, Randolph told the biographer Henry Randall that Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr had been the father of Hemings' children. He also said that his mother had told him that Jefferson had been absent for 15 months prior to the birth of one of Sally Hemings' children, so could not have been the father. In 1998, the Carrs were disproved as possible fathers of Eston Hemings, Sally's youngest son, by the results of a Y-DNA study of their male descendants; no genetic link existed between the Carr and Hemings lines for the descendants of Eston Hemings. The test results did show a match between the Jefferson male line and the descendant of Hemings, though it showed nothing about the descendants of Sally Hemings's other children. The historian Andrew Burstein has said, "he white Jefferson descendants who established the family denial in the mid-nineteenth century cast responsibility for paternity on two Jefferson nephews whose DNA was not a match. So, as far as can be reconstructed, there are no Jeffersons other than the president who had the degree of physical access to Sally Hemings that he did."
