Editing One-drop rule (section)

==Antebellum conditions==
{{further|Partus sequitur ventrem|Children of the plantation|Quadroon|High yellow}}
{{see also|Casta}}

Before the [[American Civil War]], free individuals of mixed race ([[free people of color]]) were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or [[quadroon|one-quarter African ancestry]] (only in Virginia).<ref name=Rothman>[[Joshua D. Rothman]], ''Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861'' (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2003), p. 68.</ref> Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry.

Based on late 20th-century [[DNA]] analysis and a preponderance of historical evidence, US president [[Thomas Jefferson]] is widely believed to have fathered the six [[mixed-race]] children with his slave [[Sally Hemings]], who was herself three-quarters white and a paternal half-sister of his wife [[Martha Jefferson|Martha Wayles Jefferson]].{{#tag:ref|"Ten years later [referring to its 2000 report], TJF [Thomas Jefferson Foundation] and most historians now believe that, years after his wife's death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson's records, including Beverly, [[Harriet Hemings|Harriet]], [[Madison Hemings|Madison]] and [[Eston Hemings]]."<ref name="Sally Hemings 2011">[http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings-jefferson_contro.html "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account"], Monticello Website. Retrieved 22 June 2011.</ref>|group="quote"}} Four of them survived to adulthood.<ref name="Sally Hemings 2011"/> Under Virginia law of the time, while their seven-eighths European ancestry would have made them legally white if they'd been free, being [[partus sequitur ventrem|born to an enslaved mother]] made them automatically enslaved from birth. Jefferson allowed the two oldest to escape in 1822 (freeing them legally was a public action he elected to avoid because he would have had to gain permission from the state legislature); the two youngest he freed in his 1826 will. Three of the four entered white society as adults. Subsequently, their descendants identified as white.

Although [[racial segregation]] was adopted legally by southern states of the former Confederacy in the late 19th century, legislators resisted defining race by law as part of preventing interracial marriages. In 1895, in [[South Carolina]] during discussion, [[George D. Tillman]] said,

<blockquote>It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of&nbsp;... colored blood&nbsp;.... It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed.<ref name="courier"/></blockquote>

The one-drop rule was not formally codified as law until the 20th century, from 1910 in [[Tennessee]] to 1930 as one of [[Virginia]]'s [[Racial Integrity Act of 1924|"racial integrity laws"]], with similar laws in several other states in between.