I think that Mr. Dixon deserves a lot of credit for discovering the error in
the transcription of the Ellen Coolidge letter in the Gordon-Reed book.  The
Coolidge letter is one of the essential documents in the Hemings controversy
and the Gordon-Reed transcription completely reverses the meaning of that
particular sentence, which is a very important one.  I am convinced that it
was an inadvertent mistake, but we are fortunate that Mr. Dixon and others
have loudly called attention to it.  If they had not, the erroneous
"evidence" might be widely quoted.  Gordon-Reed did not make reference to
that sentence in her main text and did not build any of her arguments on it,
as far as I can tell.

For what it's worth, there have been errors in the transcriptions of the
newspaper statement of Madison Hemings about his ancestor, Captain Hemings.
 In the original newspaper column Madison said Captain Hemings commanded a
"trading vessel."  In the Gordon-Reed transcription this appears as a
"tracking vessel" and in the Fawn Brodie transcription it is a "whaling"
vessel.

I am embarrassed to say that in my first published piece about Thomas
Jefferson I stated with certainty that Monticello is in the Blue Ridge.  I
was then residing in New York and to a Yankee one Virginia mountain range
was as good as another.  No power on earth, even the Internet, can fully
expunge that error of mine, and I still cringe when I see Monticello, from
the top of my street, firmly fixed in the Southwest Mountains with the Blue
Ridge in the misty distance.

Henry Wiencek
Charlottesville

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