Thomas Jefferson was taking questions from the audience, all reverential, about the Louisiana Purchase, his interest in wine making and the men who shaped his mind . ( Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon and John Locke, he replied . ) Skittish about breaking the weird decorousness of the event at Colonial Williamsburg, which was a supposed conversation with the retired third president, I nonetheless asked if Jefferson had changed his opinion about the newspapers of his day after they printed the " scurrilous rumors " about Sally Hemings, the slave with whom he is thought by many modern historians, on the basis of DNA evidence, to have fathered a child.
