Thank you, Mr. Treynor, for recirculating the material that I posted on
Saturday afternoon about Professor Hardwick's item 7. (I've retained that
material deliberately at the bottom in the present reply message. I should
note that I'm not sure that my messages are being circulated listwide by
the software.)
This, by the way, is what I meant about the occasional, legitimate
necessity for repetition in my plea this morning to those who
understandably cry "enough!" -- though maybe that plea didn't get
circulated listwide. I was planning to re-explain my Treynor-recirculated
point tomorrow, and also to append the January 1999 letter to the journal
Nature that, to my knowledge, was the first public mention of the idea of
what I call the actual radius of the circle of paternity candidates. But I
see now that Mr. Treynor is right -- let's just re-run what I already
wrote, re-submitting it that way for the consideration of Professor
Hardwick, who appears to me not to have accounted for it in the most recent
update of his list of what all can agree on factually.
In any case, I've pasted in a copy of that 1999 Nature letter just below.
It appeared alongside two other letters. One of those objected that in the
original Foster et al. scientific paper, published in Nature a couple of
months before, "[n]o mention was made of Thomas Jefferson’s brother
Randolph (1757–1815), or of his five sons." The other, a reply to both
letters from Dr. Foster, included Dr. Foster's famous -- but understated --
mea culpa about the single thing that has most confused a worldwide
audience about the DNA: the headline "Jefferson fathered slave's last
child." Dr. Foster wrote, "The title assigned to our study was misleading
in that it represented only the simplest explanation of our molecular
findings ... ."
Here's the 1999 letter enlarging the radius of the circle of paternity
candidates, followed by one more brief repetition of something important,
if only to me:
Scientific Correspondence
Nature 397, 32 (7 January 1999) | doi:10.1038/16179
The Thomas Jefferson paternity case
If the data of Foster et al. are accurate, then any male ancestor in Thomas
Jefferson's line, white or black, could have fathered Eston Hemings.
Plantations were inbred communities, and the mixing of racial types was
probably common. As slave families were passed as property to the owner's
offspring along with land and other property, it is possible that Thomas
Jefferson's father, grandfather or paternal uncles fathered a male slave
whose line later impregnated another slave, in this case Sally Hemings.
Sally herself was a light mulatto, known even at that time to be Thomas
Jefferson's wife's half sister.
Gary Davis
Evanston Hospital, 2650 Ridge Avenue,
Evanston, Illinois 60201, USA
One more brief repetition: At TJscience.org I've posted a lengthy essay
called "Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and the Authority of Science." Its
thumbnail summary says, "Whether or not Hemings and Jefferson had children
together, misreported DNA and misused statistics have skewed the paternity
debate, discrediting science itself."
Thanks.
Steve Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
Original Message:
-----------------
From: Sam Treynor [log in to unmask]
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:50:11 -0500
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] What we know about Sally Hemings
Excellent point, which shows that any claim of certainty on this subject is
seriously overstated.
Sam Treynor
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of S. Corneliussen
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 2:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] What we know about Sally Hemings
> 7. The father of one of her children was descended
> from Thomas Jefferson's paternal grandfather--that
> is to say, we can narrow the list of possible fathers
> for this child to Thomas Jefferson, his paternal uncles,
> and his paternal cousins
Yes to all before the sentence dash, but what follows the sentence dash
appears to exclude the possibility of paternity by some unknown carrier of
the DNA marker within the enslaved population. We know that the DNA marker
crossed the race line. We do not know whether it crossed the race line in a
generation earlier than the one that produced Eston Hemings. Now, this may
well be an outlandish possibility in terms of the historical evidence. But
because the DNA evidence says nothing whatsoever about it, the circle of
paternity candidates must actually -- whenever the context is what the DNA
did and did not prove -- be defined as wider than the circle of males in
the known, acknowledged, extended Jefferson family. As a matter of DNA
science, we do not know the radius of the circle of paternity candidates.
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