Would someone please explain to me why the Jefferson-Hemings paternity issue
is so important?  Is the issue so important because a hidden motive is
behind this argument?  It appears to me, that many people forget that Thomas
Jefferson was neither a God nor perfect.



-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Baugh [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 12:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Jefferson-Hemings-Woodson DNA Study


Was anyone denying the obvious about those thousands of mulatto children
born before emancipation?  The fact that many white men had sexual relations

with slave women does not prove that any one man did, however.  Neither
that,
nor strong personal opinion, have any probative value in regard to the
paternity
of Sally Heming's children.

"Papa says, Mama knows" is an amusing little aphorism, but not universally
true.
If it was, one would never see billboards advertising 1-800-WHOSDAD in
letters
ten feet high.  The only absolute proof is in the DNA.  However, western
society
as reflected in its legal code has long afforded children born within
wedlock a strong
presumption of true paternity, while holding the claims of unacknowledged,
illegitimate
paternity to a higher standard of scrutiny and proof (one that's
increasingly transcendant
of the subjective and circumstantial thanks to developments in genetic
technology). Is
there some valid reason why the descendants of Patsy Jefferson, Martha
Jefferson,
and/or Sally Hemings should be considered exceptional to that?


It seems to me that the salient issue is what information from the results
of the DNA
study will be incorporated into the general and enduring public awareness
about our
third president.  Will the well-obscured fact that he may *not* have been
the father
of any of Sally Hemings' children be a part of that?  Or will we firmly
hypostatize a
relationship that may never have existed?


Rgds.,
Judy Baugh


Harold S. Forsythe wrote


One may doubt paternity in any case. As the old saying goes: "Papa says,

Mama knows." That the white Jeffersons would be so sure of their own
paternal descent from the great founder, but so

doubtful about the often mocked paternity of self-described black
descendants of Thomas Jefferson, has always seemed to me

about everything but actual descent.

As Joel Williamson so powerfully depicted in The Crucible of Race and New
People, the increasing number of mulattoes in the

ante-bellum South was a subject often remarked upon. No one claimed that
black men were responsible for this mixing, given

who they would have to have reproduced with to produce mulattoes. Now, in
the antebellum South, elite white men had the

most ready access to enslaved women of African (and Native American)
descent. They, after all, owned these women.

I really do not want to offend descent people, who have believed in the
purity of an ancestor. I do not want to undermine the

moral consciousness of present day southerners. But what this debate
constitutes, to my mind, is a denial of what slavery and a

slave- based society really was. It was a system where the wealthiest and
most honored men and women in the society owned

the bodies and labor of another entire class of people. This implications of
this ownership claim are staggering: involving

ownership of offspring, accumulated fruits of labor, and quite often of
total sexual access. This latter was not a privilege

necessarily extended to the 3/4 of the white population who did not own
slaves; as the southern folklore often implies. Sexual

access, like control over labor and ownership of children, was a privilege
of slaveownership.

Face it!



Harold S. Forsythe

History & Black Studies

Fairfield University





Date sent: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 10:45:16 -0600

From: Judy Baugh

Subject: Re: Jefferson-Hemings-Woodson DNA Study

To: [log in to unmask]

Send reply to: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history





I believe "fiasco" refers to the widespread conclusion, based on the
findings of the initial Jefferson DNA

study (as reported in 'Nature', 1998), that TJ sired one or more of Sally
Hemings' children.




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