MacNaul gathers the documents behind a claim that Thomas Jefferson secretly sent the Baptist preacher James Lemen to Illinois to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory. Delivered before the Chicago Historical Society, his account reprints the so-called Lemen Family Notes and related papers; later historians have judged those notes spurious, so the book is best read as a record of a disputed tradition.
A fascinating case study in frontier history, church memory and how historical legends take shape. Download the free EPUB.