I do not “consider hereditary Monarchy or Aristocracy as Rebellion against Nature.” On the contrary, I esteem them both as Institutions of admirable wisdom and exemplary Virtue … and I am clear that America must resort to them as an asylum during discord, Seditions and Civil War … Our country is not ripe for it in many respects … but our ship must ultimately land on that shore or be cast away.
JOHN ADAMS,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797-18011688
[T]he energy of [William Duane’s Aurora], when our cause was laboring and all but lost under the overwhelming weight of its powerful adversaries, its unquestionable effect in the revolution [it] produced in the public mind … arrested the rapid march of our government towards monarchy …
THOMAS JEFFERSON,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1801-18091689
Dr. Franklin’s behavior had been so excessively complaisant to the French ministry … I had been frequently obliged to differ from him and sometimes to withstand him to his face; so that I knew he had conceived an irreconcilable hatred of me and that he had propagated and would continue to propagate prejudices, if nothing worse, against me in America from one end of it to the other. Look into Bache’s Aurora and Duane’s Aurora for twenty years and see whether my expectations have not been verified.
JOHN ADAMS,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797-18011690
[B]y a singular fortune, your Great Grandfather [Benjamin Franklin] has been for more than thirty years of my life the constant idol of my affections as a politician—he has been my hero—and it is a felicity to me that I am so nearly connected with his posterity …
WILLIAM DUANE. EDITOR,
AURORA GENERAL ADVERTISER, 1798-1822 (IN LETTER TO BENJAMIN BACHE’S FIRSTBORN SON)1691
I have always regarded Duane, and still regard him, as a sincere friend of liberty, and as ready to make every sacrifice to its cause but that of his passions.
JAMES MADISON,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1809-18171692