The part played by Sally Hemings in the life of Thomas Jefferson has been regarded as provocatively dubious since political enemy James Callender claimed in 1802 that Jefferson was the father of several of Hemings's children. Historian Merrill Peterson, observing that paternity is hard to prove, wrote in 1960 that no concrete evidence was ever produced to support the accusation. Peterson also noted that Jefferson never issued a public denial of the charge. The legend of Sally Hemings has invited endless speculation while remaining apparently impervious to disproof. Perhaps most notably, the story has been periodically recycled to illustrate Jefferson's moral hypocrisy and white society's oppression of blacks. In recent years Annette Gordon-Reed's 1997 study, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," stands out as the most vigorous and determined effort to defend the legend. Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, argued that historians treated the story as "too impossible to believe," on the assumption that Jefferson was "so high as to have been something more than human" and Hemings "so low as to have been something less than human." The legend of Sally Hemings becomes a parable of moral and social enlightenment. Gordon-Reed notes that the Jefferson-Hemings story "has been an article of faith among black Americans." The contradictions that make Jefferson a mystery to some whites make him more accessible to blacks, "who find his conflicted nature a perfect reflection of the America they know: a place where high-minded ideals clash with the reality of racial ambivalence." (Contains 34 footnotes.)