Word: dabney
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bicentennial is, of course, an appropriate time for a revisionist look at a nation's beginnings. Two recent books became bestsellers by taking just such a view, each portraying the revered Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in a new and unflattering light. Last week Virginius Dabney, a proud Virginian, historian and retired editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, came to the defense of the founding fathers in an outspoken Charter Day address at Virginia's venerable College of William and Mary. He sharply assailed Fawn Brodie, author of Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, and Gore Vidal, who wrote...
...Dabney's primary target was Brodie, who portrayed Jefferson in Freudian'terms as suffering from a guilt complex stemming from his paternity of mulatto children at Monticello. The trouble with that tidy theory, Dabney argued, is that it only works if Jefferson was indeed the father and he insisted that there is no reliable evidence to support that assertion-and much evidence to the contrary. Dabney enlisted statements from three Jefferson historians to refute the paternity claim. He said that Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson of the University of Virginia and Julian P. Boyd, editor of the papers...
According to Dabney, the report that Jefferson had fathered the children was spread in a newspaper article in 1802 by one James T. Callender, whom Dabney described as "a vicious unscrupulous drunkard" who was angry at President Jefferson for refusing to appoint him postmaster at Richmond. An Ohio newspaper revived this charge in 1873, citing what Dabney termed the "testimony of two aged blacks." Historian Malone called the testimony a contrived bit of "abolitionist propaganda...
MOUNTAIN SPIRITS: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America 's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life by JOSEPH EARL DABNEY 242 pages. Scribners...
...them migrated to the American colonies, bringing their whisky-making tools and techniques with them. By 1750, moonshine was a necessity of life on the frontier, and brewing corn whisky was a major industry. From fusty books and firsthand interviews with oldtimers, with many facts and much affection, Joseph Dabney has put together a splendid and often hilarious history...