WHILE I HAVE DRAWN on a large literature about the late colonial and revolutionary period, I am indebted most to Bernard Bailyn, notably the General Introduction to his edition of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, I, 1750–1765 (1965) [I, 447], which has since appeared, revised and expanded, as The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967); and to his stimulating and pioneering essay, The Origins of American Politics (1968). See also Bailyn’s long Introduction, followed by a full bibliography, Education in the Forming of American Society (1960), like everything he has done a fine specimen of the social history of ideas and social history in general. I do not, however, fully accept the dichotomies he suggests in his interesting article “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, LXVII, 2 (January 1962), 339–51 [I, 446], for reasons I indicate in my exploratory essay in comparative history, “The Enlightenment,” in C. Vann Woodward, ed.: The Comparative Approach to American History (1968), 34–46.
The American Enlightenment, as Bailyn has shown, needs and deserves further work. Adrienne Koch’s anthology, The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (1965), has generous selections from the writings of Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton; but her introductions, like her collection of essays, Power, Morals and the Founding Fathers (1961), are too admiring to be wholly penetrating; these men were too great to need uncritical treatment. Herbert M. Morais: Deism in Eighteenth-Century America (1934) has not yet been, but needs to be, surpassed. Conrad Wright: The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (1955) [I, 536], is very useful. Alan Heimert’s scholarly Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966) argues, à la Perry Miller, that the real revolutionaries were the Calvinists, a stimulating but hardly convincing thesis; see the review by Edmund S. Morgan in William and Mary Quarterly (third series), XXIV, 3 (July 1967), 454–9.
Among general treatments of the Revolutionary period, I learned most from the succinct Introduction by Edmund S. Morgan: The Birth of the Republic, 1763–1789 (1956), as well as Edmund and Helen M. Morgan: The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (2d edn., 1963). Richard B. Morris: The American Revolution Reconsidered (1967) is a stimulating reassessment, opening with a survey of the historiography. Carl Bridenbaugh: Cities in Revolt (cited above, chap. i, section 1), is excellent. Charles McLean Andrews: The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (1924), is not out of date. Beard’s famous dissection of the Founding Fathers in his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (2d edn., 1935), has itself been dissected effectively, if with a churlish tone, by Robert E. Brown: Charles Beard and the American Constitution (1956); Brown’s revisionist Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780 (1955), offers an alternative to Beard. One other anti-Beard book must be mentioned—Benjamin Fletcher Wright’s compact Consensus and Continuity, 1776–1787 (1958). The whole controversy, which threatens to produce an unmanageably large literature, has been reviewed and judged in magisterial fashion in Richard Hofstadter: The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968), chaps. vi and vii. While New-Left American historians are complaining that the anti-Beardians are drowning the real conflicts in American society in the swamp of consensus, it appears rather that Beard failed not only to give all of the right answers but even to ask some of the right questions.
Many of the titles mentioned give space to the intellectual origins of the American Revolution—which were, in large part, the work of the American Enlightenment before 1775. Louis B. Wright: The Cultural Life of the American Colonies (cited above, 577), is an articulate summary. The relevant chapters in Merle Curti: The Growth of American Thought (2d edn., 1951), are helpful. Charles F. Mullett: “Classical Influences on the American Revolution,” The Classical Journal, XXXV, 2 (November 1939), 92–104; and Richard Gummere: The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition (1963), a fine collection of essays, deal with a subject of particular importance to the Enlightenment [I, 460, and other titles there]. In addition, note H. Trevor Colbourn: The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1965); the older but still useful Randolph G. Adams: Political Ideas of the American Revolution (1922); and Carl Becker: The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922) [I, 447]. They should be supplemented by Edward S. Corwin’s significant The ‘Higher Law’ Background of American Constitutional Law (1957); and the brief essay by David G. Smith: The Convention and the Constitution: The Political Ideas of the Founding Fathers (1965). Clinton Rossiter: Seedtime of the Republic (1953) has the facts, but celebrates more than it analyzes. The Constitution Reconsidered, ed. Conyers Read (1938; rev. edn. Richard B. Morris, 1968), has dated very little; many of the articles remain immensely interesting, and the comparative dimension (added by such distinguished European historians as Hajo Holborn) makes this a stimulating collection. The relation of Europe to America—both the transmission of ideas in both directions and America as a complex ideology for Europeans—deserves further work, although much is being done. See again Durand Echeverria: Mirage in the West (cited above, 605). Among Gilbert Chinard’s many contributions to this subject, note “Eighteenth-Century Theories of America as a Human Habitat,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XCI (1947), 27–57. Felix Gilbert: To The Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (1961) puts these ideas into a Western framework [I, 447]. See also Michael Kraus: Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (1949); and the first volume of R. R. Palmer: The Age of the Democratic Revolution (cited before), chaps. vi–ix.
On the Founding Fathers themselves, the biographical material is enormously rich. I have used the early volumes of the Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton papers, all being sumptuously edited. I have space only to mention the volumes I found most useful—Carl Van Doren: Benjamin Franklin (1938), to which should be added Alfred Owen Aldridge: “Benjamin Franklin and the philosophes,” VS, XXIV (1963), 43–65, and Claude-Anne Lopez: Mon cher Papa (1966). See Gilbert Chinard: Honest John Adams (1933). Dumas Malone: Jefferson and His Time, 3 vols. so far, Jefferson the Virginian (1948), Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951), Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962), are all impressive in their scholarship and broad humanity, but need perhaps, for all that, the counterblast of Leonard Levy’s Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (1963), which strenuously but effectively concentrates on the failings of a national hero. For Madison, see Irving Brant: James Madison, 6 vols. (1941–61); for Hamilton, among a particularly rich crop, John C. Miller: Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (1959).
While the literature on The Federalist is growing, a good book on that masterpiece is still needed. I used the reliable critical edition by Jacob E. Cooke (1961). The critical edition by Benjamin Fletcher Wright (also 1961), has a long and impressive introduction. I found Wright’s essay, “The Federalist on the Nature of Political Man,” Ethics, LIX, 2, part II (January 1949), 1–31, very instructive. On the most celebrated of the papers, the Tenth, see especially Douglass Adair: “The Tenth Federalist Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly (third series), VIII, 1 (January 1951), 48–67, which conclusively refutes Charles Beard’s misreading of the paper as an instance of the economic interpretation of history; see also Adair: “ ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science,’: David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, XX, 4 (August 1957), 343–60. For Madison, author of the most significant papers in The Federalist, see the useful articles by Irving Brant: “Madison: On the Separation of Church and State,” William and Mary Quarterly (third series), VIII, 1 (January 1951), 4–23. Edward S. Corwin: “James Madison: Layman, Publicist and Exegete,” New York University Law Review, XXVII (April 1952), 277–98; Ralph L. Ketcham: “James Madison and the Nature of Man,” JHI, XIX 1 (January 1958), 62–76; and three articles by Neal Riemer—“The Republicanism of James Madison,” Political Science Quarterly, LXIX, 1 (March 1954); “James Madison and the Current Conservative Vogue,” Antioch Review, XIV (December 1954), 458–70; and “James Madison’s Theory of the Self-Destructive Features of Republican Government,” Ethics, LXV, 1 (October 1954), 34–43. Hamilton’s thought has been neatly captured in Cecelia M. Kenyon: “Alexander Hamilton: Rousseau of the Right,” Political Science Quarterly, LXXIII, 2 (June 1958), 161–78. On the vexing and important question of disagreements among the authors of The Federalist—the “debate” between Madison and Hamilton not wholly concealed by their common pseudonym—see the important article by Alpheus T. Mason: “The Federalist—A Split Personality,” American Historical Review, LVII, 3 (April 1952), 625–43. A general review of the literature is Douglass Adair: “The Federalist Papers,” William and Mary Quarterly (third series), XXII, 1 (January 1965), 131–9.