1. Marc Kaufman, “Jefferson Changed ‘Subjects’ to ‘Citizens’ in Declaration of Independence,” Washington Post, July 3, 2010.
2. Or as Madison said in 1794: “the censorial power is in the people over the Government, not in the Government over the people.” Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 103.
3. In the words of Drew McCoy, “They had to define, and then attempt to secure, a form of economy and society that would be capable of sustaining the virtuous character of a republican citizenry.” Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 7.
4. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
5. Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 196.
6. Amar, America’s Constitution, 80. Importantly, this very much included free blacks, who led much of the fight against slavery; see Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 49. See also The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, edited by Alfred Young (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976); and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
7. “Address for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” quoted in Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 102.
8. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 34.
9. Fritz Machlup, The Political Economy of Monopoly: Business, Labor, and Government Policies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1952), 185.
10. An excellent introduction to how the founding generation in the United States thought about corruption, and its connections to corporate structures, is Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
11. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 211.
12. Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution (New York: Viking, 2005), 236.
13. Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 1971), 38–39.
14. Ibid., 39.
15. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York: Grove, 1995), 47.
16. Amar, America’s Constitution, 17.
17. Ibid., 7.
18. John Milton, “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth,” in John Milton Prose, edited by David Loewenstein (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2013).
19. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 179.
20. Ibid., 53.
21. John Adams, “Letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814,” quoted in Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 87–88.
22. Ibid., 45.
23. John Adams in 1776, quoted in Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 202.
24. Ketcham, James Madison, 152.
25. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 55.
26. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 246.
27. Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England: A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, on the 22nd of December, 1820,” in The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1891), 45.
28. C. Ray Keim, “Primogeniture and Entail in Colonial Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 1968): 545–586.
29. Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to John Adams,” October 28, 1813, The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, Series 1. Available online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib021548.
30. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 389.
31. Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 Oct. 1785,” in The Founders Constitution, edited by Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner, 1986, vol. 1, Chapter 15, Document 32. Available online at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html.
32. Amar, America’s Constitution, 408.
33. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 373–374.
34. David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Drew McCoy writes that “it was only the ‘Great Establishments of Manufactures that had no place in republican America—establishments that employed poverty stricken, landless laborers.” McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 65.
35. Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 81.
36. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 284. In Maryland in 1776, “people in five counties who did not meet the property qualifications thronged the polls, threw out the election judges, and insisted that anyone who bore arms was entitled to vote.”
37. McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 65.
38. B. Zorina Kahn, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lewis Hyde, Common Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 89–91.
39. “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), Chapter 5, Section 27, 17.
40. James Madison, “Property,” published originally in the National Gazette, March 29, 1792, in The Selected Writings of James Madison, edited by Ralph Ketcham (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 222. In addition to Locke, Madison could also have adopted this from Smith, who in The Wealth of Nations wrote, “The property which every man has in his own labour, so it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 140.
41. Ketcham, James Madison, 330.
42. James Madison, “Debates in the Federal Convention,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, August 7, 1787. Available online at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_807.asp.
43. Ketcham, James Madison, 220. Here again Madison echoed the more radical voices of the English Revolution, especially Milton, who in 1650 wrote that “meerly by the liberty and right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best,” the people must be allowed to freely choose their own king. John Milton, “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” in John Milton Prose, 252.
44. Ketcham, James Madison, 221.
45. “The Report of a Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 28–31 October 1779,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-08-02-0161-0002. (Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 8, March 1779 – February 1780, ed. Gregg L. Lint, Robert J. Taylor, Richard Alan Reyerson, Celeste Walker, and Joanna M. Revelas [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 236–271.)
46. Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (Boston: Little Brown, 1956), 313.
47. Ibid., 164.
48. Ibid., 420, 462.
49. David Hume, Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 127.
50. Adams in a letter the day after the Tea Party wrote, “This is the grandest, Event, which has ever yet happened Since, the Controversy, with Britain, opened!” He added, “The Sublimity of it, charms me!” John Adams, “Letter to James Warren, Dec. 17, 1773,” in John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755–1775 (New York: Library of America, 2011), 288.
51. Bowen, The Lion and the Throne, 513–514.
52. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 191.
53. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 160.
54. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 285. (In the pamphlet, titled “The Fourth Paper Presented by Major Butler,” Williams also called for the Jews of Britain to be granted full freedom. Andrew Crome, Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850 [Manchester: Macmillan, 2018], 89.) Milton in 1660 expressed a similar vision of democratic community as centering on the liberty of reason. “The happiness of a nation must needs be firmest and certainest,” Milton wrote, “in a full and free Councel of thir own electing, where no single person, but reason only swaies.” John Milton, “The Ready and Easy Way,” 434.
55. Ketcham, James Madison, 73.
56. Madison, “Property.”
57. McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 7.
58. The number of Baptist churches rose from 7 to 54 in Virginia between 1769 and 1774 (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 144). Madison himself in 1774 fought to get six Baptist preachers released from Culpeper county jail (Ketcham, James Madison, 57).