about the authenticity of the letter.
“So let me make a suggestion. Tomorrow you turn off the lights in the courtroom and we go dark. The eyes of the world are on this place right now. The federal government is threatening to come and take the letter away. The court sends out a press release tonight, to every media outlet it can find. In the press release, you tell the world that there is a letter. It purports to be in the hand of Jefferson, but the court cannot verify whether the letter is real or not. Furthermore we may never be able to answer the question of whether it’s real, because we don’t have the original; we don’t know where it is or whether it even exists. That should pour cold water on hot heads. When they realize that the party favor may not pop, that there’s no there there, we can hope their feet will get sore from standing around and they’ll go home. If we’re lucky.”
“Or,” says Tuchio, “the court could order that the letter not be read in court. Much simpler,” he says.
“But to draw the jury right to the edge of the railing,” I tell Quinn, “to produce evidence of blood-spattered paper and to argue in closing that this paper is the reason the victim was murdered without telling them what was written on it is to invite them to take out their disappointment on the defendant.”
“No, I like Mr. Madriani’s idea,” says Quinn. “Besides, his analysis on the law is right. There’s no legal basis to keep the letter out. If I let you convince me to do that, and you convict his client, it’s just going to get overturned on appeal. Waste of time and money. On top of that, whether the letter gets read here or someplace else, the problem is the same-fires all over. So as long as I still have the letter, why don’t we do something judicious with it?”
There’s a knock on the door. It opens, and the bailiff sticks his head in. “Your Honor, the governor’s on the phone.”
“The governor?”
“Yeah, they got a big problem up in South Central L.A. He wants to talk to you.”
“Man has a problem. And I have a solution. Good timing!” says Quinn. “Is my secretary out there?”
“No.” The bailiff is halfway down the hall. “She went home.”
He looks at me. “You any good at writing press releases? I have to take a phone call.”
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
