The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

I am a Jefferson Family Historian and Assistant to Dr E.A. Foster with the controversal Jefferson-Hemings DNA Study. I will restrict my remarks to those about Thomas Jefferson, even though the other founders are also great.Mr. Fleming has done a great service to his readers in explaining the FIASCO, The Jefferson-Hemings DNA Study, an amateurish attempt to sqew and build on the slavery issue studies started in October 1992 at the University of Virginia by Professor Peter Onuf (a seat sponsored by Monticello.) The Monticello misguided study is also challenged by the Scholars Commission Report (13 prominent scholars),([...]) who found NO facts supporting paternity of the Sally Hemings children. A major claim by Madison Hemings (and there are others), was found to be unsupportable by fact, however this Pike County article by abolitionist Samuel Wetmore was one of two major "evidences" accepted by the Monticello Study Group to come to a distorted and unsupported conclusion. The other major source of "evidence" used by this in-house study group was a first book written by a lawyer, Annette Gordon-Reed,charging that earlier historians had not properly evaluated this old Campaign Lie, first published by James Callender in 1802. Of course this LIE was proven to be just that when DNA FAILED to prove a match between Jefferson and Tom Woodson DNA. Annette Gordon-Reed also completely distorted a letter from Ellen Randolph Coolidge to her husband explaining some facts of this issue and Mrs. Gordon-Reed completely REVERSED the meaning of the letter. The African-American Getting Word Project was well represented by Dianne Swann-Wright (Chairman, Monticello Study Group) and ten other prominent African-Americans, including NAACP Chairman, Julian Bond.Tom Fleming gives a great account of all of these conflicting charges. As assistant to Dr Foster I wish to inform the public that HE chose a known carrier of Jefferson DNA, as claimed by the Eston Hemings family. This was to "a Jefferson uncle", NOT Thomas. I advised Dr Foster to inform Nature of this....he would NOT inform them until their second article of Jan 7, 1999 when he gave the facts, but the media had made the most of the false original claim.Dr Foster and Nature colaborated on seeking a FALSE and misleading headline (I have the e-mails from both), and the media ran wild with this "trumpted up" study and finding...........BUT IT WAS FALSE.......I was there and I know how Dr Foster, Dr Dan Jordan (Monticello President at the time), Annette Gordon-Reed, Cinder Stanton, Professor Peter Onuf, Dianne Swann-Wright, African-Ameroican Chairman of Monticello's Study Group, and others fashioned an outlandish scheme to degrade Mr. Jefferson and even REMOVED the word, "MEMORIAL" from their long held title. WHO are they now memoralizing? Read Mr. Fleming's book and find out the details of this attempt at ruining a great founder's image.Please be forewarned Mr and Mrs public........you are being "CONNED" in the name of "political correctness" and you should read all the details in Mr. Fleming's great revealing book and then ask Monticello to do research and CORRECT IT. They own his home........you, the public, own his image and his legacy............TELL THEM THAT!Herbert BargerJefferson Family Historian[...]

I read this highly readable book in an effort to update my own book on George Washington’s Liberty Key (Mount Vernon’s Bastille Key). As with Fleming’s other books, this one was chock full of interesting facts. One I found especially intriguing, even if it’s something of a hypothesis on page 46-47, regards Washington, Hamilton’s Assumption Plan, and the Residence Act of 1790: “Their [Jefferson’s and Madison’s] opposition morphed into a detestation of New York as the national’s capital, because the city’s numerous wealthy merchants supposedly corrupted Congress. The Virginians wanted a rural capital beyond the reach of big-city temptations.” … “The realization that Washington was mortal [he was deathly ill at the time with pneumonia] may have influenced the politicians to reach a major compromise.” However, I did detect one factual flaw with the book. On page 360, Fleming states that during the Bostonians’ “party” in 1773, they threw “9,659 pounds of English tea into Boston harbor.” Wow, that’s almost five tons! But thinking about it a little more, one recalls the party involved 342 chests, making each chest not even 30 pounds in weight…? A quick on-line check revealed that the British ships brought some 2000 chests to Boston, weighing some 600 thousand pounds, or 300 pounds per chest, which sounds more like it. It’s interesting that it would seem that about just 15% of the chests were thrown overboard, but it makes Fleming’s poundage off too few by a factor of 10. Thus, the lost tea weighed not 9,659 pounds but more like 96,590 (almost 50 tons), evidently enough to bring on the Coercive/Intolerable Acts. And I also detected an interesting omission: the Madison slave Paul Jennings in his 1865 memoir mentioned he saw and/or helped two men (not Dolly Madison) save the iconic Gilbert Stuart Lansdowne portrait of George Washington. These items aside, whether Dolly’s claim was folly and whether Americans went on to drink less tea and more coffee, I thought the book was overall very good…to the last drop!Check out one of William J. Bahr’s books:  George Washington's Liberty Key: Mount Vernon's Bastille Key – the Mystery and Magic of Its Body, Mind, and Soul , a best seller at Mount Vernon.

very good