Author Talk: Who’s Your Founding Father?

In 1819 John Adams came across a stunning story in his hometown newspaper that claimed that a full fourteen months before Jefferson crafted his own Declaration of Independence, a band of zealous Scots-Irish patriots, whiskey-loving Princeton scholars, and a fanatical frontier preacher in a remote corner of North Carolina had become the first Americans to formally declare themselves “free and independent” from England. The Mecklenburg Declaration was signed on May 20, 1775.  Which is exactly why Adams always insisted the MecDec needed to be “thoroughly investigated.” David Fleming picks up where Adams left off, leaving no archive, no cemetery, no bizarre clue or wild character unexplored while traveling the globe to bring to life one of the most fantastic, important—and controversial—stories in American history.