The exhibition focuses on several of the “privileged” slave families at Monticello.  These included the Grangers, who came to occupy managerial positions at Jefferson’s plantation, and the Hemingses.  The Hemings clan descended from Elizabeth Hemings, who bore several children by Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles.  Her chlidren became highly trusted servants for Jefferson.  And her daughter, Sally Hemings, is widely thought to have been the mother of several children with Jefferson, though the matter is still disputed.

What startled me at the exhibition, though, was that eight male descendants of Elizabeth Hemings fought for the Union during the Civil War.  Okay, that’s not all that startling.  But four of them fought as black soldiers in black units, and four fought as white soldiers in white units.  Col. John Wayles Jefferson, one of the descendants, commanded white troops at the Battle of Vicksburg.

Colonel John Wayles Jefferson, Union Army

Only in America.

But the story about Barnes & Noble in this morning’s New York Times coincides with some of my recent thinking, so I want to get a few points off my chest.

• The survival of B&N stores is really important to those the book industry — people working in it and people who enjoy reading books.  Don’t get me wrong — I love independent bookstores.  I’m a devotee of Politics & Prose in this region.  But B&N has over 700 stores and is the remaining premium retail outlet for books in this country.  It is an unrivaled showroom for new books, which is REALLY important to those of us who write them.  Even with all the space devoted to selling its Nook e-reader, its stores are still a good place to browse.
• I’m not opposed to Amazon.  If I can get something on Amazon that I can’t get anywhere else, that’s fine.  But I am trying to change my habits to make Amazon a last resort when I’m book-shopping.  I can get e-books for my Ipad from B&N.  I can get used books from B&N, also, or from www.vialibri.net, an amazing site for more obscure titles (check it out).  If I shop through B&N, I’m supporting their overall business and those all-important showrooms.
• B&N’s website — as near as I can tell — is collecting tax to pay to state governments for sales into that jurisdiction, which is something Amazon has never done.  At the risk of sounding naive, I think that’s terrific.  No, I’m not crazy about paying taxes, but it is the price of being part of civilized society, and it’s lousy when there’s a glaring example of non-compliance which requires that others pay more.  Individual states are slowly forcing Amazon is to collect sales tax, but I like a business that has decided to comply with the law all on its own.

There are more steps I need to take.  I should put a buy-the-book button for Barnes & Noble on this site, though I’m not sure I’ve actually sold any books through this site . . . ever.  And over at the Washington Independent Review of Books, the online book review that I and some amazing people have been operating for almost a year, we are going to install such a button; we do sell books through that site, and would invite you to use it!

But when you’re looking into e-books, used books, or online ordering of real books, think about B&N.  Even though it doesn’t care about us, it’s important to us.

Your intrepid historical traveler before Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor

The location of the site was itself entirely explanatory.  Plunked down in the center of the mouth of the harbor, with spits of land a few hundred yards to either side of it, I could visualize immediately why the few Union troops under the command of Major Robert Anderson had to surrender the fort at the very beginning of the Civil War.  They were sitting ducks, with no practical way to provision themselves.  (This is all wonderfully recounted in Adam Goodheart’s 1861.)

The location of the fort is no accident.  The land on which it rests is entirely man-made, fabricated in the 1820s and 1830s of rocks (most, ironically, hauled down by ship from New England).

And it is surrounded by history.  To the north stands the remains of Fort Moultrie, the site of Confederate artillery in 1861 but also the site of a battle with the British during the Revolutionary War.  In that shipping channel to the north, the Confederate Navy launched theCSS Hunley, an underwater vehicle powered by human guinea pigs, which used a torpedo to sink the USS Housatonic.  Though it was the first submarine to kill in wartime, the Hunley also killed its three crews by sinking three different times, including after the attack on the Housatonic.  Like many new technologies, there were some kinks to be worked out.

The small submarine CSS Hunley was even more lethal for its own crews than for Union ships during the Civil War

To the south of Fort Sumter lies the site of Battery Wagner, where the now-legendary 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-black unit, mounted a bloody and unsuccessful assault on an entrenched Confederate position in July 1863.  Widely celebrated as the moment when African-American troops first demonstrated their courage and bravery under withering fire, the story is retold well in the movie Glory, starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman.

Standing on the rebuilt walls of Fort Sumter, which were largely reduced to rubble during months of Union Army bombardment during the Civil War, it seemed like there was too much history from too many different episodes crammed into that narrow space.

But that is a pattern in human history.  John Keegan’s Face of Battle recounts the pivotal battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme,  fought across five centuries apart and all in the same neighborhood of Belgium.  Crossroads of trade and human traffic have always been where our murderous proclivities flare into epic combat.

Some of the men who faced the former vice president were rugged frontier types and able river pilots.  Others were bored schoolteachers and dancing masters.  All had been lured by Burr’s promises of riches and adventure.  They were the material with which Burr and his principal ally, American Army General-in-Chief James Wilkinson, hoped to change history.

View of the Ohio River from Fort Massac State Park in Illinois, close to where Aaron Burr first addressed his adventurers in December 1806. The statue is of George Rogers Clark, not Burr.

But there were so few of them.  Burr had commissioned the building of enough boats to transport 1500 men down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans.  At a time when the entire U.S. Army numbered 3,300, it would have been an immensely powerful force.

But because of sensational reports of his true aims, as well as a Kentucky prosecutor’s attempt to throw Burr himself into jail, popular support for the expedition had fizzled.  No more than 100 men surrounded him.  Burr had to hope that Wilkinson would swell their ranks on the lower Mississippi with a large group of soldiers.

After greeting each of the adventurers personally, Burr mounted a small rise to address his band.  They waited expectantly for inspiring words from the great man before them, who had almost been elected president of the United States just six years before.  The moment was charged with electricity.

Burr noticed that local residents had come down to the riverside to see and hear him.  For frontier residents, the arrival of a group of 100 men, led by the former vice president, was a major event.  Burr, a man who dreamt huge dreams, suddenly had a fit of caution.  He did not want to say something unwise, something that might be used against him,  in front of people who were not part of his expedition.

So Burr made a short statement that had to be deflating.  According to several men who were there, he pointed to the bystanders and said he could not speak of the expedition’s true destination.  The men could ask their captains where they were headed.  And then he stopped.  The men boarded their boats and headed downriver.

Almost a year later, when Burr was facing criminal charges growing out of the expedition, Chief Justice John Marshall zeroed in on that moment on the Ohio River shore.  If Burr’s intentions were innocent, Marshall stressed, he surely could have told his men where they were headed and what his plan was.

But he didn’t.

In October, the U.S. Attorney in Kentucky tried to prosecute him for organizing an illegal private invasion of Mexico.  A grand jury in Frankfort refused to indict the former vice president, but the episode snarled Burr’s planning and discouraged many of his recruits — who fully expected to invade Mexico behind Burr’s sword, or even to begin the secession of America’s Western territories. 

Then William Eaton issued a deposition claiming that Burr had proposed to take over Washington, D.C. and fling President Thomas Jefferson and Congress out of office.  And Jefferson himself, after more than a year of ignoring warnings that Burr was organizing treason or secession or something equally evil, issued a proclamation that matters were afoot in the West that were threatening to the Union and good Americans should abhor them.

The backlash against Burr, who had ordered the construction of boats to accommodate 1500 stout-hearted adventurers, began to unravel his expedition.  He hurried off to Nashville to try to persuade Andrew Jackson, then a Tennessee militia general, to continue with their expedition, but to no avail. Jackson, troubled by the reports of Burr’s nefarious purposes, withdrew his prior pledges to support the expedition and join it.  Burr hired a couple of boatmen to steer him and a few livestock down the Cumberland River.

Burr’s captains from Western New York descended the Ohio River with but forty men, fleeing Blennerhassett Island (opposition the current Parkersburg, WV) on the night of December 11, one step ahead of the Ohio militia and a posse of Virginia vigilantes.

It was near Christmas when Burr finally joined his expedition, which had swelled to about 100 worthies.  The rendezvous happened below where the Cumberland River flowed into the Ohio, in what is now Illinois.  And there, on the banks of the Ohio, sleeping outdoors and patching up their boats, Burr and his men spent Christmas 1806.

Here’s hoping your holiday is merrier than theirs was!

National Archives HQ

Then he presented his soft-covered volume, which turned out to be an “ARC” (“Advance Reader Copy”).  ARCs are distributed for free to potential reviewers and media types months before publication of the book.  Every ARC says on the front, “NOT FOR SALE.”

I asked where he got it.

“I bought it from my local bookstore.”

I pressed.  “Where?”

Shifting on his feet, he answered after a pause.  “Here in D.C.”

“Where?”

He didn’t answer.  I looked down at the page and thought for a moment.  I didn’t want to discourage this fellow.  After all, he evidently liked the book enough to come to my talk, and then wait to ask for my signature.  This is a valuable relationship.  I should be polite, I thought.  But, no.

“You know” I said in a voice loud enough for people to hear from some distance around.  “Do you know that this is theft?  No one has ever paid for this book.  It was given away for free, and it says “NOT FOR SALE” right here on the cover.”

He shrugged.  “It’s like a used book?” he suggested.

“No.  Used books were bought by somebody sometime, and I got a royalty from that sale and the publisher got paid.  No one ever paid for this book, the store got it for free, and you paid them for it.  No one else received a dime for it.”

“You don’t have to sign it,” he said.

“Where did you get it?”

He refused to name the store.  I gave him his volume back, unsigned.  I said I was sorry I couldn’t sign it, that I appreciated his support for the book, but that I couldn’t party to a theft.  I asked him never to buy an ARC again.

I don’t know where he bought it.  There aren’t that many bookstores in the District of Columbia, sad to say.  I don’t believe Politics and Prose would do this; and Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million couldn’t afford to put their relations with publishers at risk by doing it.

Busboys and Poets?  They claim to be a “fair trade” market; how could they participate in this kind of theft?  Kramerbooks?  I’d hate to think so.  I used to shop there 40 years ago and think of it fondly. Bridge Street Books?  I spoke with the owner at a party for a while and I don’t think he would be part of such a thing.  Second Story Books?  Seems more possible, since they’re all about used books, but I don’t know.

I do know that selling ARCs is wrong, and theft.  It’s not a victimless crime.  The victims are the entire maddening, half-assed, sometimes (but not always) well-intentioned chain of production for books — the authors, book designers, distributors, publishers, and honorable retailers.  So, please don’t do it.

In the Watergate era, the mantra was, “Don’t buy books by crooks.”  The message:  The Watergate wrongdoers can profit from their ill deeds only if you are dumb enough to plunk down the purchase price of their hateful memoirs.

Don’t buy books from crooks, either.  Please.

Wait, I said.  He wasn’t really a scoundrel.

Really?  She answered.  He was a traitor, wasn’t he?

And we were off.  It was a great interview.  She jumped around, kept changing the subject on me, and it stayed fresh and fun.  I’ve had some great interviews on the trail for American Emperor, but this was right near the top.  Keep an eye — and an ear — on Ms. Geerges.  She knows her job.

Oh, and here’s when and where you can listen to her:

Sirius XM Satellite Radio – National and Canada XM – Channel 163, Sirius Channel 117

Thursday at 8am Eastern / 5am Pacific

Sunday at 9am Eastern / 6am Pacific

WEBR – Fairfax, VA (cablecast channel 37) Sunday at 8am and Wednesday at noon WALF 89.7 FM – Alfred, NY Friday at 7pm and Sunday at 4pm

WECI 91.5 FM – Richmond, IN Tuesday at noon

WRYR 97.5 FM – Churchton, MD Monday at 7:30pm and Wednesday at 10am

WCSU – Baltimore, MD Friday at 2pm

KCFV 89.5 FM – St. Louis, MO Tuesday and Thursday at 8am

WRIR 97.3 FM – Richmond, VA Monday at 1pm

WYAP 101.7 FM – Clay, WV Thursday pm

WSLN 98.7 FM The Line – Delaware, OH Sunday at 4pm

KUMC 93.3 FM – Western Idaho Wednesday at 7pm

WOOL 100.1 FM – Bellows Falls, VT Monday at 10am, Tuesday at 7am, and Monday at 12am

KDRT 101.5 FM – Davis, CA Saturday at 11am

WLRI 92.9 FM – Gap, PA Saturday at 5pm, and Sunday at 5pm

WSOU 89.5 FM – Northern NJ and NY City Saturday at 7am

• Hundreds of recruits stayed away, scared off by a criminal prosecution of Burr in Kentucky (which failed), by a lurid statement by William Eaton that attributed frankly treasonous intentions to Burr, and by a proclamation by President Thomas Jefferson that good Americans would avoid those dangerous men who were up to no good out West.
  

  William Eaton, former army officer and Burr accuser

  • Burr wasn’t even on the island, having hustled down to Nashville to try to reassure Tennessee Militia General Andrew Jackson and keep him involved in the expedition.  Burr failed.  Spooked by the public accusations against Burr, Jackson pulled out.
  • The Ohio militia seized a dozen boats constructed for Burr in Marietta boatyards, while vigilantes in Wood County, Virginia, assembled on the riverbank to storm the bucolic island owned by Harman Blennerhassett.
    

    The mansion of Harman Blennerhassett has been reconstructed on his island in the Ohio River

    • Some thirty-five men had arrived from Western New York and Pennsylvania, but Blennerhassett was able to produce no volunteers from the Marietta area.
    • About ten boats and all the men slipped into the river in the middle of a cold, cold night, evading both the Ohio militia and the Wood County vigilantes (who showed up the next morning and spent most of the day in Blennerhassett’s wine cellar).

    It was no way to start an expedition!

Among the malefactors?  Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

But I started thinking as a student of the early years of the American Republic.  In that time of conspicuous civic virtue, mythologized by conservatives and progressives alike, would similar conduct have been tolerated?

I think so.  Actually, it was.

The best way to make money in early America was through speculation in frontier lands.  It was a fever that infected virtually all of our early leaders.  So, did anyone have “inside” information about frontier lands, the sort of inside information that was gained through official duties supposedly undertaken for the public interest.

Yes, again.

Surveyors!  Those intrepid souls tramped through forests to map and draw those lines across previously-uncharted wilderness, allowing people to carve it up into chunks that could be sold.  Today, we might call that a “monetization” process, converting an asset into something that could be traded. The surveyors had a real advantage when it came time to trade.  They knew where the water was, where the soil was rich or rocky, where the terrain was steep or flat, and what parcels were sacred to native Americans.

So, who were these folks with such inside information about land trades?  Surely they were not tied to the great men who founded our nation!

Well, there was Peter Jefferson of Virginia, who surveyed much of his colony’s frontier lands in the 1750s, land in which he was speculating.  When Peter Jefferson died in 1757, his eldest son — Thomas — was only 14 years old.  The wealth left to Thomas by his father bankrolled an extraordinary political career.

Then there was Colonel Thomas Marshallof Virginia, who was appointed Surveyor General of Kentucky in 1780 by Governor Thomas Jefferson (!!!).

Col. Thomas Marshall

Marshall proceeded to acuire 500,000 acres of prime Kentucky land, which served as the basis of the fortune of his immense family.  His eldest son John Marshall became the nation’s greatest Chief Justice, his nephew Humphrey a senator, and so on.

Map prepared by George Washington, surveyor

And we can’t overlook George Washington, who began surveying frontier lands as a teenager.  In his life, Washington “surveyed more than 200 tracts of land and held title to more than sixty-five thousand acres in thirty-seven different locations.”

Not all use of inside information was confined to the surveyors.  William Duerwas the first deputy secretary of the Treasury and famously traded in public securities on inside information.  Duer, cursed by many contemporaries after his speculations triggered a financial panic, spent his last seven years in debtors’ prison, where he died.  Though many tried to tie Duer’s activities to Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, they never were able to do so.

William Duer

So, does that mean that they were all crooks?  It all depends on the standard you apply, and whether you think that standard should evolve.

Did those frontier surveyors (and Duer) have inside information?  Yup.

Did they acquire that inside information (and Duer) while being paid by the government?  Yup.

Could other people have acquired that information?  Yup.  All they had to do was go West themselves, or chat up some Treasury officials.

Then again, most inside information can be acquired by the astute and energetic, or just the fortunate.  Quite a few people figured out that the real estate market in 2008 was a bubble and sold out their positions to save themselves; a few bet against the market and made huge bundles. The information was not that difficult to figure out . . . or so we can see in hindsight.

I still find myself recoiling in disgust from our current-day legislators whose first thought, upon learning confidential information relating to their public duties, was to convert that information into profit.  They are not, however, the first Americans to do so.  Indeed, they are in distinguished company.

Our standards for public conduct should have evolved beyond the one applied in the eighteenth century.  The behavior revealed in recent days is entirely unacceptable.  But the situation puts the Founders in a light that many of their most fervent acolytes may find awkward, or worse.

• Monday, 7:30 p.m.:  Princeton NJ Public Library
• Tuesday, noon:  92Y/Tribeca (NYC)
• Wednesday, 5:30 p.m.:  John Carter Brown Library, Providence
• Thursday, Boston [private event]
• Friday, noon:  Federal Bar Ass’n meeting, DC.

John Carter Brown Library, Providence

Two radio pieces can be heard on the web.  I did a commentary for NPR’s All Things Considered on great books about the Early American Republic, and an interview with Barry Lynn on his “Culture Shocks” show (he’s got great rock riffs for his lead-in music; I had a pang of disappointment when the tunes faded out and I had to start talking again).  Also, American Emperor picked up a nice endorsement from Joan Biskupic at Washington Week.