(I changed the subject line -- and I join many other forum members in 
asking, pleading, that lobbers of the same old Hemings-TJ bombs lob not.)

History professor Kevin Hardwick, after noting that he had shifted from 
Hemings-TJ paternity belief to paternity agnosticism -- an interesting datum 
for those who persist in asserting, without benefit of any actual survey, 
that "most historians" believe the paternity thesis -- wrote concerning the 
paternity question:

> But suppose we did know. What difference
> would it make for the way we commemorate
> [TJ] in our public history?  ... And if in fact it
> does not make any difference, why are we
> spending so much time talking about this?

(Please forgive my ruthless excerpting.)

The Hemings-TJ question matters because the truth matters.

It also matters because people across the country and around the world judge 
that it matters. It comes up from time to time in Nature, the most important 
forum for the international science enterprise. I remember learning in 2002 
of a heated commentary about the question in the South China Morning Post. A 
few days ago, a BBC report featured the question and confidently misreported 
that "DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that Jefferson fathered Sally's 
children." ("Jefferson's hidden slave legacy," Allan Little, BBC News, 
apparently reporting from Monticello: 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/7689734.stm )

The Hemings-TJ question matters because people incorporate it in various 
ways into their thinking. It matters because people are engaged with, and 
are nowhere near through with, a centuries-long, continually evolving 
assessment of the slave era in light of the principles Jefferson led in 
articulating -- and because people intend to compare what Jefferson 
articulated with what Jefferson actually did.

It matters because one of those ways involves the admirable impulse -- maybe 
only a beau geste -- retrospectively to confer a bit of dignity, if 
possible, on those from whom the grotesque, perverted system of slavery 
stole dignity and much else.

It matters because that admirable impulse appears also in discussions like 
the one in this forum about the nature of the society that evolved from 
Jamestown, and like the one about the degree of personal agency in the 
actions of the Fort Monroe Contrabands.

It matters because liberty and dignity and race and women's rights and human 
rights all matter.

It matters because personal honor matters, which means it matters whether TJ 
was something equivalent to, or even remotely akin to, a statutory rapist or 
a rapist outright, and whether he lied about it.

And it matters because love matters, which means it matters whether Sally 
Hemings and TJ had some measure of hidden happiness heretofore mostly 
unimagined.

I'll bet there's a lot more, but I'll just add this: it matters, and is 
going to continue to matter, even if members of this forum are 
understandably tired of the bomb-lobbing.

And this, which may sound partisan, and may sound political, but is 
absolutely not, though it's most definitely corny: it's likely going to 
matter even more starting next Wednesday, when Americans are likely going to 
wake up into a changed American context, and are going to begin 
constructively revisiting -- and constructively revising -- understanding of 
American history, and indeed history itself, in ways that we haven't even 
started to think about.

Thanks.

Steve Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

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