Other Historical Books by James Thompson

The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy explains how the first civil society formed in Virginia, what purposes it served, who its members were, and what happened to it as it aged. The transformation of Virginia’s leading families into an “aristocracy” was the final stage in the development of its first society.

In George Washington’s Mulatto Man: Who was Billy Lee, James Thompson connects the dots from a series of events that began more than twenty-five years before American patriots declared political independence from England and ended more than twenty-five years after they achieved it.
We know of these events because George Washington mentioned them in his papers. The most important are the paragraphs Washington added to his Will a few months before he died. In this passage, he directed that his “mulatto man William” be freed and provided a dwelling and an annuity for the remainder of his life. This unusual act of generosity appears even more peculiar when we learn that Washington shunned his servant through the last nine years of his, Washington’s, life. Nor did the master give his loyal servant an audience as he lay dying. What is George Washington’s connection to his mulatto man? Read Thompson’s book and find out.

Readers who are familiar with Faux Thomas Jefferson, being the caricature created by the Political-Historical Complex in the middle of the 20th century, will probably not recognize the man portrayed in this colorful book.

Rather than an iconic social visionary, the man I present is a wayfarer who escaped from a mountaintop utopia that collapsed when his handsome young wife died in September of 1782. I accompany this wayfarer to France, where he has gone to begin a new life in the society that produced his recent acquaintance, the Marquis de Chastellex.

Background Notes is a self-contained collection of seventeen essays James Thompson wrote to supplement his earlier book, Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment – Paris 1785.

Readers will find in it a host of little-known facts, seldom-mentioned events, and forgotten relationships. Following Thompson through these historical backstreets. they will develop a new insight into the circumspect political loner who drafted the Declaration of Independence alone in his Philadelphia rooms. They will learn how “enlightenment” transformed Thomas Jefferson into the engaged social progressive who later waged and won the Second American Revolution.