Talk:Thomas Jefferson Randolph

Assessment comment
Substituted at 08:38, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Relevance of Sally Hemings - paternity section
It seems the section in his article should be more narrowly focused to his comments and the ultimate resolution. I will work on putting some of the info into notes... rather than getting into side conversations that ended up being irrelevant and there is the main article for that kind of detail.–CaroleHenson (talk) 06:26, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I edited this article yesterday, although I had gone to the genealogy library with limited hours in order to edit other articles about Petersburg politicians who probably were "forgotten" by certain generations of Virginia historians because they cooperated with free blacks and former slaves after the war. I detoured into this article and that of his brother because they probably get more views, and I found them misleading as is. However, I don't have time to figure out this man's complex relationship with slavery, and the encyclopediavirginia article cited is better than the status quo but not as thorough as many in that series. Probably this Randolph's views were influenced by his own plantation operations, as well as interactions with the former University of Virginia professor and Jefferson biographer George Tucker (politician) whose views changed considerably during his lifetime according to that article (which I linked to his brother's article but not here). Two other points that I noticed during my triage were that this Randolph was referred to as "Colonel" in both the 1850 and 1860 census, so he may have had some military experience before the Civil War that wasn't mentioned. A quick ancestry.com search found a War of 1812 colonel of the same name and born in 1792, but he was born in Norfolk and probably wasn't this man. The infobox says this man was a colonel during that war, but doesn't mention a unit, nor any actual battles (unlike his brother's article after my expansion). Perhaps more importantly, the Cynthia Miller Leonard-edited roster of the Virginia General Assembly (considerably more authoritative than the reprinted 1902 Pulliam book available on amazon and at now-closed libraries near me) says this man was a delegate to the secession convention, with no footnote about nonappearance. I don't know whether I'll be able to check a larger and more authoritative book about that convention in the near future.Jweaver28 (talk) 20:01, 20 October 2020 (UTC)