A Patriot is a dangerous post;
When wanted by his country most,
Perversely comes in evil times,
When virtues are imputed crimes.
SWIFT2063
Dear Reader,
The election of 1800 shifted power to the Republicans for the next quarter century. Thomas Jefferson served as president for two terms (1801-1809). His Secretary of State, James Madison, succeeded him to the presidency for two terms (1809-1817), and Madison’s Secretary of State, James Monroe, succeeded him to the presidency for two terms (1817-1825). France and Britain remained important.
During Jefferson’s presidency, James Monroe returned to France as Jefferson’s special envoy, and, in 1803, just two years after Jefferson took office, France ceded to the United States, for less than three cents an acre, all the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.2064 By this Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson and France doubled the size of the United States of America and reduced their common enemy, Federalist New England, to a small fraction of the country. During Madison’s presidency, a Republican majority in Congress responded to continuing British naval provocations with a Declaration of War against Britain, and, during the ensuing War of 1812, a British army marched into Washington and set fire to all U.S. government buildings, including the presidential mansion (which was later rebuilt and repainted as the White House). During Madison’s presidency, the British finally vanquished Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, thereby restoring France to a monarchy, under Louis XVI’s brother, French King Louis XVIII.
During this time, William Duane remained at the Aurora’s helm, finally relinquishing the paper in 1822. His son, William John (who was beaten, with his father, by federal army officers in 1799), worked at the paper for several years, married one of Benjamin Bache’s younger sisters, Deborah, entered Pennsylvania politics, and, in 1833, became Secretary of the Treasury under President Andrew Jackson.
William and Peggy Duane were married for thirty-five years. They had five children. When William Duane died, in 1835, at the age of seventy-five, Peggy followed him the very next year.
William Cobbett (Peter Porcupine) finally returned to America in 1817 but, two years later, announced plans to take Tom Paine’s remains (then ten years in the grave) back to England, hired two gravediggers to exhume Paine’s bones, and departed America, the bones in his baggage, never to return. What Porcupine did with those bones, no one—not even in England—knows.
On March 9, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in the landmark case of The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects a newspaper’s honest criticism of government officials, even when that criticism is false and defamatory. In rendering the court’s opinion, Mr. Justice Brennan wrote:
This is the lesson which is to be drawn from the great controversy over the Sedition Act of 1798 … which first crystallized a national awareness of the First Amendment …
Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court (the act expired by its terms in 1801), the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history … The invalidity of the Act has also been assumed by Justices of this Court …2065
Obviously, American Aurora concurs.
I hope American Aurora will also add credence to the following propositions: First, that historians and publishers need not fear exposing the public to large quantities of history’s source materials which comprise, after all, our safest vehicle for time travel. Second, that the public need not eschew footnotes or resort to historical fiction to find the past exciting. History’s first-person/present-tense materials, properly presented, can be thrilling. Third, that those who value democracy and truth must always defend America’s Bill of Rights, even against those boasting the credentials of our founding fathers. Fourth, that it is not by chance that America’s Presidents and senators are, on average, wealthier than members of the House of Representatives; it is by design, &c. Fifth, that, as Poor Richard sagaciously, perhaps tautologically, and much too quietly observed,
Historians relate not so much what is done,
as what they would have believed.2066
The historian’s testimony is, at best, only hearsay.
Those who view the past as prologue may recognize monarchy and aristocracy (enemies to the American Aurora) in the America of today, entrenched in our Constitution (as this work explains) and revealed in such contemporary issues as “the imperial presidency,” “legislative deadlock,” “vested interests,” “term limits,” “campaign financing,” “lobbying,” “the military-industrial complex,” and “civil liberties.” They will see “Democratic-Republicans” still championing the will of the majority against the wiles of the “establishment” and the freedoms of our Bill of Rights against them both. Not least of all, they will find ghosts of Poor Richard, Young Lightning Rod, and the Rat-Catcher still stalking our nation’s pressrooms, reminding the sentinels of our freedoms that, at the aurora of this great nation, the true “Father of His Country” wanted “the republic for which it stands” to be a truly democratic republic.
I wish to thank Yale University’s Sterling Professor of History Emeritus Edmund S. Morgan for his review of matters historical, novelist Leslie Epstein for his review of my presentation method, editor extraordinaire Robert Weil, writer Samia Serageldin, and research assistant Scott Hovey for their very helpful editing, my friend Laurel Cohen for a final proofing, and friends Anne-Marie Soullière, Jonathan Matson, Thomas Cottle, Michael Fenlon, David Emmons, Beverly Head, Ronald Sampson, David Levington, Steve Sohmer, Gaddis Smith, and John Roberts for special words of encouragement. I also thank historian Anna-Coxe Toogood of Philadelphia’s Independence National Historic Park, the staffs at Boston College’s O’Neil Library and Burns Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Library of Congress. I gratefully acknowledge that my interest in America’s political history was first excited by an extraordinary high school history teacher, the late Richard S. Wickenden at Tabor Academy, and that my passion for equality and human rights was first kindled by the moral teachings and courageous example of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Yale’s chaplain when I was at Yale in the early 1960s. I thank my wife, Anne, whose love provides the safety net for all my endeavors, and our unique and wonderful gifts, Jill and Tadd. Finally, I thank and love my country for recognizing the right to publish a work such as this.
I take leave of you, dear reader, with a remembrance of Monday, September 17, 1787, the last day of the Federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. James Madison records:
Whilst the last members were signing [the new U.S. Constitution], Doctr FRANKLIN, looking towards the President’s Chair at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him that painters found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have, said he, often … in the … vicissitudes of my hopes and fears … looked at that [sun] behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.2067
May it always be so.
Appreciatively,
RICHARD N. ROSENFELD
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Monday, August 26, 1996