Who’s Your Founding Father?

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Who's Your Founding Father? is David Fleming’s epic journey to discover the first, true Declaration of Independence, an adventure deep into one of the most astonishing untold stories in American history featuring a centuries-old, secret document that might just unravel the origin story of America and reveal the intellectual crime of the millennia.

In 1819 John Adams came across a stunning story in his hometown Essex Register that he breathlessly 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. The genuine sense of America at that moment was never so well expressed before, nor since.” The story claimed that a full 14 months before Jefferson crafted his own Declaration of Independence, a misfit 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.

Composed during a clandestine all-night session inside the Charlotte courthouse, the Mecklenburg Declaration was signed on May 20, 1775—a date that’s still featured on the state flag of North Carolina. A year later, in 1776, Jefferson is believed to have plagiarized the MecDec while composing his own, slightly more famous Declaration and then, as he was wont to do, covered the whole thing up. Which is exactly why Adams always insisted the MecDec needed to be “thoroughly investigated” and “more universally made known to the present and future generation.” Eleven U.S. Presidents and many of today’s most respected historical scholars agree.

Now, with Who’s Your Founding Father?, David Fleming picks up where Adams left off, leaving no archive, no cemetery, no bizarre clue or wild character (and definitely no Dunkin’ Donuts) unexplored while traveling the globe to bring to life one of the most fantastic, important—and controversial—stories in American history.David Fleming in a senior writer at ESPN. During the last three decades at Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and ESPN he has written more than 35 cover stories on a wide range of the most compelling topics and highest-profile subjects in sports and culture across the globe. Fleming’s work has earned numerous national awards. He is also the author of two books, Noah's Rainbow: A Father’s Emotional Journey from the Death of his Son to the Birth of his Daughter and Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship. A native of Detroit, Fleming and his wife, Kim, live in North Carolina with their daughters.

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