You’re Welcome, America

A former ESPN writer's new book argues that Thomas Jefferson plagiarized the Declaration of Independence.

A decade ago, David Fleming, a senior writer at ESPN, was waiting at his daughter’s school in Davidson, North Carolina when he noticed the state flag had the date May 20, 1775, on it.

Thinking it odd that the N.C. flag would boast a date 14 months before the fledgling country even declared independence, Fleming’s curiosity was piqued.

“Of course, I googled it, and I’ve been down this incredible rabbit hole ever since,” he says.

As the author of several books, including “Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team” and “The Stolen 1925 Championship,” Fleming has carved out a niche as a longform writer and storyteller at Sports Illustrated, ESPN and currently Meadowlark.

Googling that date led him to the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, produced over a year before Jefferson crafted his own Declaration of Independence.

“My writing is built around stories that are both profoundly strange and strangely profound, and so as soon as I learned about the MecDec, the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” he remembers. “I knew right away this was a perfect fit for me.”

His book, “Who’s Your Founding Father? One Man’s Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True Declaration of Independence, will be the focus of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s Marshall Scholar Series on Jan. 15. Fleming tackles a history not often taught of how a band of zealous Scots Irish patriots, whiskey-loving Princeton scholars, and a fanatical frontier preacher in a remote corner of North Carolina became the first Americans to formally declare themselves free and independent from England.

The cover of David Fleming’s “Who’s Your Founding Father? One Man’s Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True Declaration of Independence.”

But he didn’t start to think of it as a book until he read the exchanges between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As soon as he read them, he knew what he’d be doing for the next three years. However, he was determined not to write another dry, overly serious history book. “I felt stuck until I mentioned the MecDec tale to a friend who suggested I write it in my own voice, as a kind of gonzo-style, wild adventure and travelogue,” Fleming says.

From the start he was all in on every clue, every weird character, every graveyard and every archive, digging through files in Boston, D.C., Kentucky, Charleston, London and all over the Carolinas. “The research was a blast,” he says. “Most of the modern-day characters were just as funny and compelling as the original MecDec men.”

Thomas Jefferson, plagiarist?

The saga began in 1819 when John Adams came across a stunning story in his hometown newspaper, one that he described to his political frenemy Thomas Jefferson as “one of the greatest curiosities and one of the deepest mysteries that ever occurred to me . . . entitled the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.”

Adams was downright giddy.

“I think he always suspected TJ of being a lightweight, erudite poser and a massive hypocrite who had covertly cultivated far too much credit for authoring the Declaration of Independence,” Fleming says. “And now, finally, with the MecDec, Adams had receipts.”

In what surely must be one of the first documented cases of throwing shade in American history, Adams wrote of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: “Mr. Jefferson, who must have seen it, in the time of it … has copied the spirit, the sense, and the expressions of it verbatim into his Declaration!” Oops.

Fleming points out that what Jefferson did would likely get any freshman at University of Virginia expelled for plagiarism. One Jefferson scholar says it “strains credulity and common sense to the breaking point” to think that Jefferson didn’t draw liberally from several other documents while drafting his declaration. That’s exactly what he was asked to do, though.

His crime, as Fleming sees it, is that a few decades later when the Declaration of Independence was elevated to a sacred text, Jefferson tried to claim that he thought it all up himself.

“It was my great instincts as a journalist that helped me uncover this secret plot. Naw, I’m just joking, these idiots put the entire scheme in writing.”

“From a local perspective the ‘Richmond Junto,’ a kind of Virginia frat-boy-style cabal of diehard Jeffersonians, did most of the covering up trying to protect TJ’s reputation against accusations of plagiarism,” he says. “This group included author, politician and crony George Tucker, longtime AG William Wirt and ambassador Andrew Stevenson, who used his authority to destroy MecDec evidence in the British National Archives. It was my great instincts as a journalist that helped me uncover this secret plot. Naw, I’m just joking, these idiots put the entire scheme in writing.”

Because Adams wrote that he hoped the MecDec would be “thoroughly investigated … and more universally made known to the present and future generations,” Fleming sees his book as simply following Adams’ orders, “because I don’t want to be haunted by the angry ghost of John Adams.”

He jokes that a funny title for the book would be “America: You’re Welcome.”

But his goal was for more people to know and understand the critical role the brave, crazy MecDec’ers played in both declaring and winning America’s independence. “It’s bizarre. They’ve been robbed of their proper place in history,” he says. “I’d also love to hear from my high school history teacher who had me convinced for 25 years that Thomas Jefferson was a perfect saint and a sage.”

One thing Fleming learned in writing about American history is that it’s far more colorful, compelling and ridiculous than writing about sports.

On the differences between the MecDec and the Declaration of Independence, Fleming is clear. “One was a cut-and-paste job on what amounted to overdue paperwork that’s been mythologized into one of the most important documents in human history,” he says. “The other was an original, bold, simple but soaring declaration of freedom, crafted by scrappy, brave patriots who were almost eager to risk their lives leading us to independence, only to be forgotten and abandoned by the very nation they helped create.”

The Marshall Scholar Series lecture, “Who’s Your Founding Father?: One Man’s Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True Declaration of Independence,” will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 15 at 5:30 p.m. at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Tickets

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