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.”

30

Because of the riots, Quinn has had to move the jury across town to a hotel where they deliberate in a conference room for two days while the police battle with rioters in the streets downtown.

Three days later they finally return to the courthouse where burned-out vehicles along Broadway are still smoldering. And they continue to deliberate.

It was that morning that Harry came into my office and reminded me that in our rush to the island, our search for Ginnis, and the forty-eight-hour forensic mayhem after the delivery of the Jefferson Letter, we had forgotten to follow up on one item. He had it in his hand.

It was a copy of the Post-it note on the inside of the jewel-case cover holding the DVD found by Jennifer in the police evidence locker, now nearly two months ago, the one with Ginnis’s name on it.

But it was the other name on the slip that Harry was talking about, the name Edgar Zobel. He hands me a stapled stack of pages, maybe twenty in all.

Edgar Zobel, a French émigré to the United States, came to Virginia with his parents as a young boy. Zobel had always had an interest in writing, not so much with an eye toward content as style. In his youth he had mastered the art of calligraphy. He actually held two U.S. copyrights for scripts that were later developed into type fonts first used on old Selectric typewriters and later incorporated in digitized type fonts for computers, but that would be later in life.

Growing up in Virginia, he was immersed in the Colonial history of the area. Museums in and around Washington often exhibited the private and public letters of historic figures. As a child Zobel marveled at the different colors of ink and the elegant flourishes of script, on paper yellowed by age, the edges of which were often frayed. He practiced the fine styles of penmanship employed by those composing letters that now rested under glass in the display cases of museums. By the time he was fifteen, he possessed his own collection of these in replica form. Several of them were mounted, framed, and hung on the walls of his room.

In an age before computers, when other kids were out playing baseball or swimming, Edgar was busy indulging his fetish, replicating more items for his collection of historic documents. He became adroit in the use of sealing wax and collected old metal stamps created to impress an image in the hot wax that sealed folded letters in the time before envelopes were invented.

By the time he was thirty, Zobel could copy the elegant freestyle script of more than eighteen of the early U.S. presidents so closely that even experienced handwriting experts would have difficulty identifying the replica from the real. Without a thorough analysis of the paper and ink, it would have been impossible to tell.

It was about that time that Zobel was approached by two men who owned a small shop in the historic district of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The shop dealt in antiquities, mostly Civil War memorabilia with an occasional item dating back to the Revolution. The men wanted Zobel to craft some elegant replicas of historic correspondence that they could sell to customers who either couldn’t afford to or didn’t want to pay the high prices of historic originals. To make a few bucks, Zobel was happy to do it.

The copied documents always carried a printed disclaimer, “Hand-Reproduced Replica,” on the back. Almost all of Zobel’s early copies were of well-known historic letters or documents, but they were different from the usual lithograph copy you might find in typical curio shops, much more authentic to the eye in terms of paper texture and ink. They had a kind of three-dimensional quality, including the folds in the paper and its frayed edges, that made them look astonishingly real. Each document was scripted on unique paper. For Colonial documents Zobel would use custom-made paper, large sheets similar to those used in the Colonial period, which were then either cut or torn into quarters to make traditional “quartos,” the quarter pages often used for writing. Sometimes he would employ a smaller “folio” size.