"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 <[log in to unmask]> 
Subject: Re: Jefferson-Hemings-Woodson DNA Study 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Send reply to: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history 
<[log in to unmask]> 

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.