Alex and Lawrence I think that the earliest draft of the story has Driscoll as Tom's father, but I don't have a source for that at hand. Henry Nash Smith conjectures that Judge Driscoll is "from the standpoint of imaginative coherence" the father and adds that "Mark Twain places the unmentionable fact of sexual intercourse between master and slave at two removes from the actual story--first by making Roxy, Tom's mother, the slave of a shadowy brother of Judge Driscoll at the time of Tom's birth;and then by the further precaution of creating an even more shadowy figure, Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, to be his biological father." Barbara -- Barbara Ladd Emory University