Shadow of Power

29

We have rested our case. The trial of Carl Arnsberg is over, and so we await the verdict.

I’m home watching television. It’s nighttime, the courthouse is closed, but the sky is lit up. Two of the buses used to barricade the front of the building are burning, black smoke spiraling into the sky. People have been gathering since after the revelations of the letter, and now thousands of demonstrators have converged on the courthouse. They have smashed windows on storefronts and set fire to vehicles. There is talk of calling out the National Guard. Riots have broken out in Detroit and Chicago, and so far three people are dead.

There is now concern that when the rest of the world wakens to news of the Jefferson Letter and the pictures of violence in America, mayhem may spread and go international. There are preparations being made in some of the nations of Africa and on the island of Haiti, where martial law has already been declared.

All the best-laid plans went forth, Quinn’s press release went out to the world. The problem was, the world wasn’t listening, or at least the media world wasn’t. The release was nothing negative, nothing terrible. They treated it like a footnote to a nonstory. The impending reading of the Jefferson Letter was much more exciting, promising better ratings and better revenue. The governor went on the air and emphasized the points in the release. They ran fifteen-second clips between weather and sports. By then the rioters weren’t home watching television-they were out on the street burning cars.

Having Quinn’s courtroom go dark for twenty-four hours only served to delay the inevitable. Angry minds were already on the streets. The delay in releasing the letter, rather than quell the mob, seemed to fire their passions. When the letter was finally released, the revelations surpassed even their wildest suspicions.

To read the letter to the jury, Harry and I employed the talents of an antiquarian and historian, a professor from Stanford who was an expert on the colonial period. Rather than lending credence to the letter, the witness testified that he could not verify the authenticity of the writing based on the copy. He stated that while the handwriting certainly appeared genuine, he was guarded, in that certain stylistic features in the letter and word usage left him harboring doubt. At one point he went so far as to say he was dubious. Then he read and explained the contents of the letter to the jury.

First was the revelation that some of the Founding Fathers, most notably John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, while publicly excoriating the practice of slavery and rebuking the slave trade, were in fact profiting from it through secret investments with northern shipowners whose vessels regularly carried slaves. Together with Jefferson, who owned slaves all his life, the three men carefully choreographed a political theater for the public and for posterity that allowed them to posture during debates over independence. This dance included a vigorous fight to retain language in the Declaration of Independence that would have ended slavery in the new nation-a fight that of course the three revered founders lost.

But the worst part was reserved for the last three pages of the letter.

If true, this revelation so tarnishes the experiment in American liberty as to unmask it as a virtual fraud.

Based on its contents, the letter was written by Jefferson in 1787, in Paris, where he was serving as ambassador to France. Under instructions contained in the letter itself, it was carried by a private courier and personally delivered to Adams and Franklin, who at the time were heavily involved in the framing of the Constitution. Also according to instructions in the letter, neither Adams nor Franklin was allowed to retain the letter, only to read it. The original and only copy was then returned by the courier to Jefferson in Paris, where presumably it remained with his papers in his private library until he returned home to Virginia.

The letter was intended to press Adams and Franklin on the issue of slavery and to ensure that the practice would not be abolished in the Constitution. Jefferson reminded the two men of their earlier performance in Philadelphia in 1776 and the fact that Jefferson retained evidence of their former “investments in shipping enterprises” in New England.

But what makes the letter truly infamous is the revelation that the founders, including the three icons-Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson-had at the time of the debate on independence in 1776 entered into secret negotiations with powerful slaving interests in Britain to enlist their political support in convincing the Crown and the British government to let the American colonies go. The British slaving interests included shipowners and tycoons with highly profitable plantation holdings and investments in the West Indies. According to the letter, the secret deal that was offered to the British slaving interests was that if they could assist the colonies in securing their independence through political negotiations rather than war, the new government that was formed from the old colonies would agree to provide by treaty and by its “organic law”-what would first become the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution-a perpetual safe haven for slave traffic and for the institution of slavery itself in every part of the new nation, even if Great Britain were to eventually abolish slavery in the British Empire.

When news of this last item in the letter hit the airwaves, it was as if someone had pushed a red button in Alamogordo. The nation erupted.

I look at the flickering images on my set.

Riots on the half screen, the news anchor in the foreground, talking over the swirling firestorm in Detroit, flipping to Chicago and then L.A., indistinguishable flames as the voice of the anchor intones:

“The ancient rust-colored ink, presumably in Jefferson’s own hand, revealing that the cornerstone of liberty, before it was pried from Britain with blood, had first been laid on the auction block in an attempted deal with the devil, is threatening to fracture the country’s confidence in its own national identity.”

I flip the channel and see another talking head.

“While the court tried to put distance between itself and the letter, it appears that the terrible proof may in fact be there, in God’s own hand, Jefferson’s words.

“The social experiment conceived in the Age of Reason by intellectual giants, men who labored against a flawed world, who struggled against all odds, and who in the end were forced by terrible circumstance to make an agonizing compromise that left slavery alive and crawling on American soil at its birth, may in fact be a myth.”