The notes that follow represent my attempt to adopt a sensible approach to the customary rules of scholarly citation. A full accounting of all the books and articles consulted would produce as many pages of notes as there are of text. This strikes me as cumbersome, more than most readers want, and a clear case of conspicuous erudition. I have cited all primary sources quoted in the text, plus those secondary sources that seem to me seminal or those that had a decided impact on my thinking. The awkward truth is that this book represents a distillation of my reading in the historical literature on the revolutionary era over the past thirty years. A faithful recounting of all the scholarly influences that have shaped my interpretation of the revolutionary generation would entail a massive listing that would still fail to capture the whole truth. In partial compensation for my sins of omission, I have littered the notes below with my assessment of the sources cited, thereby giving them the occasional flavor of a bibliographic essay.
ABBREVIATIONS
1. Adams to Nathan Webb, 12 October 1755, Works, vol. 1, 23–34; Adams to Abigail Adams, 2 June 1776, Lyman Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1963), vol. 2, 3; Adams to Benjamin Rush, 21 May 1807, Spur, 89.
2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1993).
3. Benjamin Rush to Adams, 20 July 1811, Spur, 183.
4. Ira Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (Williamsburg, 1972); Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ War: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York, 1999), 291–299.
5. Writings, 517.
6. The seminal study of republican ideology as a defiant repudiation of consolidated power is Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967); as applied to the 1780s, the classic work is Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 1969); as applied to the 1790s, the standard source is Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978).
7. Adams to Benjamin Rush, 10 July 1812, Spur, 231–232.
8. T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” JAH 84 (June 1997): 13–39; John Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, Edward Carter, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987), 334–38.
9. Jefferson to William Fleming, 1 July 1776, Boyd, vol. 1, 411–12; U.S. Bureau of Census, First Census (Baltimore, 1966), 6–8.
10. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1185–1812 (New York, 1990); Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “ ‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic,” JAH 84 (June 1997): 40–66. Another approach has been to study the political culture “from below,” meaning the way attitudes were shaped at the local level in public ceremonies and rituals. The best analysis of emerging nationalism in this mode is David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1176–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997).
11. Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Boston, 1805); John Marshall, The Life of George Washington, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1804–1807).
12. My thinking about the circularity of the debate on the American Revolution was stimulated by the same analysis of the French Revolution by François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elburg Foster (Cambridge, England, 1981).
13. Martin Smelser, “The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,” American Quarterly 10 (Winter 1958): 391–419; see also John R. Howe, Jr., “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” American Quarterly 19 (Summer 1967): 147–165.
14. Whitehead’s assessment is reported as a conversation with Perry Miller in Miller’s collection of essays, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, 1967), 3–4. For a convenient overview of the ninety-nine men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, see Richard D. Brown, “The Founding Fathers of 1776 and 1787: A Collective View,” WMQ 33 (July 1976): 465–480.
15. Douglass Adair, “Fame and the Founding Fathers,” in Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (New York, 1974), 3–26.
1. The most original and recent interpretation of the duel is Joanne Freeman, “Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel,” WMQ 53 (April 1996): 289–318. The fullest narrative of the story is W. J. Rorabaugh, “The Political Duel in the Early Republic,” JER 15 (Spring 1995): 1–23. All the biographers of Burr and Hamilton obviously cover the duel. The standard collection of documents is Harold C. Syrett and Jean G. Cooke, eds., Interview at Weehawken (Middletown, Conn., 1960). The authoritative collection, with an accompanying introductory note of considerable grace and wisdom, is Syrett, vol. 26, 235–349.
2. The standard Burr biography is Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr, 2 vols. (New York, 1979–1982). Still helpful because of its original material is James Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (New York, 1864).
3. There are several excellent Hamilton biographies. The standard account is Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton, 2 vols. (New York, 1957–1962). For sheer readability, John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation (New York, 1964), is quite good, now joined by Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York, 1999). The most incisive and sharply defined portrait is Jacob Ernest Cooke, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York, 1979). Old but reliable, and with an excellent account of the duel, is Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1946).
4. “Statement on Impending Duel with Aaron Burr,” Syrett, vol. 26, 278–281.
5. Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr, 349–355, offers a splendid description of the site as it still appeared about fifty years after the duel.
6. On the history of the duel as an institution, the works I found most helpful were: Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York, 1984); V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honor and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, 1986); Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Dueling … (Boston, 1855); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982).
7. Merrill Lindsay, “Pistols Shed Light on Famed Duel,” Smithsonian, November 1971, 94–98; see also Virginius Dabney, “The Mystery of the Hamilton-Burr Duel,” New York, March 29, 1976, 37–41.
8. Syrett, vol. 26, 306–308.
9. David Hosack to William Coleman, 17 August 1804, ibid., 344–347.
10. Joint Statement by William P. Van Ness and Nathaniel Pendleton on the Duel Between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, 17 July 1804, ibid., 333–336.
11. Benjamin Moore to Coleman, 12 July 1804, ibid., 314–317.
12. Ibid., 322–329.
13. William Coleman, A Collection of the Facts and Documents, Relative to the Death of Major-General Hamilton (New York, 1804), which reviews the newspaper coverage and multiple eulogies for Hamilton. I have also looked over James Cheetham’s editorial assaults on Burr in the American Citizen during July and August of 1804, as well as the pro-Burr editorials in the Morning Chronicle at the same time. The story of the wax replica of Burr in ambush comes from Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr, 616.
14. See the exchange of letters between Van Ness and Pendleton, then “Joint Statement,” Syrett, vol. 26, 329–336.
15. See the several documents and notes in ibid., 335–340.
16. The scholarly consensus accepts the Hamilton version of the duel, primarily because that version dominated the contemporary accounts in the press, and also because it is the only version that fits with Hamilton’s purported remarks about the still-loaded pistol. While absolute certainty is not within our grasp, what we might call “the interval problem” strikes me as an insurmountable obstacle for the Hamiltonian version. For that reason, while the mystery must remain inherently unsolvable in any absolute sense of finality, the interpretation offered here seems most plausible and most compatible with what lawyers would call “the preponderance of the evidence.” It also preserves what the Hamilton advocates care about most; namely, Hamilton’s stated intention not to fire at Burr. There is a pro-Burr version that argues otherwise. See Samuel Engle Burr, The Burr-Hamilton Duel and Related Matters (San Antonio, 1971).
17. Burr to Van Ness, 9 July 1804, Syrett, vol. 26, 295–296. For the tradition of aiming to harm but not kill, see Hamilton Cochrane, Noted American Duels and Hostile Encounters (Philadelphia, 1963); Don C. Seitz, Famous American Duels (New York, 1919); and Evarts B. Greene, “The Code of Honor in Colonial and Revolutionary Times, with Special Reference to New England,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 26 (1927): 367–368.
18. Charles D. Cooper to Philip Schuyler, 23 April 1804, Syrett, vol. 26, 243–246; see also Burr to Hamilton, 18 June 1804, ibid., 241–243.
19. Hamilton to Burr, 20 June 1804, ibid., 247–249.
20. Burr to Hamilton, 21, 22 June 1804, ibid., 249–250, 255.
21. Burr to Van Ness, 25 June 1804; “Instructions to Van Ness,” 22–23 June 1804; Van Ness to Pendleton, 26 June 1804, ibid., 256–269.
22. Burr to Van Ness, 25 June 1804, ibid., 265.
23. Pendleton to Van Ness, 26 June 1804, ibid., 270–271.
24. Burr to Van Ness, 26 June 1804; Van Ness to Pendleton, 27 June 1804, ibid., 266–267, 272–273. The Randolph quotation is in Syrett and Cooke, eds., Interview at Weehawken, 171.
25. Burr’s “Instructions to Van Ness,” 26 June 1804; Van Ness to Pendleton, 27 June 1804, ibid., 266–267, 272–273.
26. Mary-Jo Kline, ed., Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr 2 vols. (Princeton, 1983), vol. 2, 876–883, for the editorial note on Burr and the duel; see also Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr, 352–353, for Burr’s state of mind on the eve of the duel.
27. Douglass Adair, “What Was Hamilton’s ‘Favorite Song’?” WMQ 12 (April 1955): 298–307, for Trumbull’s observation and the song Hamilton probably sang.
28. Editorial notes in Syrett, vol. 26, 292–293; Hamilton to James A. Hamilton, June 1804, ibid., 281–282.
29. Ibid., 279–281.
30. Ibid., 280.
31. Anthony Merry to Lord Harroby, 6 August 1804, Kline, ed., Burr Papers, vol. 2, 891–893.
32. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 8–15, 275; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” JER 17 (1997): 7–8; Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” AHR 95 (1990): 57–74.
33. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 2 vols. (New York, 1986), vol. 1, 429–430.
34. This summary of the political rivalry draws on multiple sources, but the most succinct synthesis is in Syrett, vol. 26, 238–239.
35. Syrett and Cooke, eds., Interview at Weehawken, 16–17.
36. Hamilton to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., 16 December 1800, Syrett, vol. 25, 257–258.
37. The most favorable interpretation on Burr’s behavior during the presidential drama of 1801 is Lomask, Aaron Burr, vol. 2, 268–295, and it does not find Burr innocent so much as conclude that he was not guilty.
38. The best brief character portrait of Burr, simultaneously fair but critical, is Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1787–1800 (New York, 1993), 743–746.
39. Adams, History, vol. 1, 409–430; see also Henry Adams, ed., Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1100–1115 (Boston, 1905), 46–63, 107–330, 338–365.
40. Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, 10 July 1804, Syrett, vol. 26, 309; see also the editor’s extensive notes in ibid., 310.
41. The best book on the inherent tenuousness of American politics in this era is James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, 1993).
42. The case mentioned here was People v. Croswell, argued in February of 1804, in which Hamilton defended the editor of a small country newspaper, appropriately named The Wasp, for publishing libelous statements against Adams, Jefferson, and Washington. Hamilton argued that, despite lower court rulings against the principle, truth was a legitimate defense against libel. He lost the case, but the New York legislature enacted a new libel law the following year incorporating Hamilton’s language. See the account in Cooke, Alexander Hamilton, 359.
43. The seminal essay on the volatile character of politics in the early republic is John R. Howe, Jr., “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” American Quarterly 19 (Spring 1967): 148–165. The theme is also a thread in the authoritative history of the political culture, Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, especially 3–50.
44. On Burr’s negligible political prospects, see Lomask, Aaron Burr, vol. 1, 302; on Hamilton’s, see Cooke, Alexander Hamilton, 238. See Adams, ed., Documents, 167, for the quotation by John Quincy Adams. The Holmes quotation is from Leonard Levy, ed., American Constitutional Law: Historical Essays (New York, 1966), 57.
I. See Boyd, vol. 17, 205–207, for Jefferson’s version of the dinner. Three scholarly articles capture the interpretive issues at stake: Jacob E. Cooke, “The Compromise of 1790,” WMQ 27 (1970): 523–545; Kenneth Bowling, “Dinner at Jefferson’s: A Note on Jacob E. Cooke’s ‘The Compromise of 1790,’ ” 11128 (1971): 629–648; Norman K. Risjord, “The Compromise of 1790: New Evidence on the Dinner Table Bargain,” WMQ 33 (1976): 309–314.
2. New York Journal, 27 July 1790, quoted in Boyd, vol. 17, 182.
3. Jefferson to James Monroe, 20 June 1790, Boyd, vol. 16, 536–538. See also Monroe to Jefferson, 3 July 1790, ibid., 596–597.
4. Boyd, vol. 17, 207.
5. On Madison as a seminal political thinker, see Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); Drew McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge, 1989); and Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Hanover, N.H., 1981).
6. For the most thorough yet succinct account of Madison’s career in the 1780s, see the introductory essays for his correspondence with Jefferson during those years in Smith, vol. 1, 204–661.
7. The standard Madison biography is Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, 1941–1961). See also Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (New York, 1971), and Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (Glenview, Ill., 1990). The quotation is from Madison to Jared Sparks, 1 June 1831, Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison, 10 vols. (New York, 1890–1910), vol. 9, 460.
8. The quotation is from McCoy, The Last of the Fathers, xiii.
9. Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (New York, 1950). The quote from John Quincy Adams is in Smith, vol. 1, 2.
10. Hamilton to Madison, 12 October 1789, Rutland, vol. 12, 434–435; for Jefferson’s views of the Constitution during the Paris years, see Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 97–105.
11. The authoritative work on Jefferson’s generational argument is Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995).
12. The best secondary account of Madison’s conversion is Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1787–1800 (New York, 1993), 77–92.
13. Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit, in Syrett, vol. 6, 52–168, which includes a helpful editorial note on the chief features of Hamilton’s plan.
14. See Madison’s speech in the House on 11 February 1790, in Rutland, vol. 13, 34–39; see also Madison to Jefferson, 24 January 1790, ibid., 3–4. Benjamin Rush to Madison, 18 February 1790, ibid., 45–47.
15. Ibid., 36–37, 47–56, 58–59.
16. Ibid., 60–62, 65–66, 81–82, 163–174, for Madison’s major speeches in the House against assumption.
17. Madison to Jefferson, 8 March 1790; Madison to Edmund Randolph, 21 March 1790; Madison to Henry Lee, 13 April 1790, ibid., 95, 110, 147–148.
18. Lee to Madison, 4 March, 3 April 1790, ibid., 87–91, 136–137.
19. Madison to Edmund Pendleton, 2 May 1790; George Nicholas to Madison, 3 May 1790; Edward Carrington to Madison, 7 April 1790, ibid., 184–185, 187, 142.
20. Madison to Jefferson, 17 April 1790, ibid., 151.
21. This personality sketch of Hamilton represents my own interpretive distillation from the multiple biographies. The insecurity theme is a central feature of Jacob Ernest Cooke, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography(New York, 1979), v–vi.
22. The hoofprints from several herds of historians and biographers have trampled this ground. Of all the biographers, I found Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1979), 117–188, the most provocatively original on these themes and Cooke, Alexander Hamilton, 73–84, the most reliably sound. The background to the Report on the Public Credit is discussed succinctly and sensibly in the editorial note in Syrett, vol. 6, 51–65.
23. For Hamilton’s arguments against “discrimination,” see Syrett, vol. 6, 70–78, and the editorial documentation provided in ibid., 58–59.
24. Ibid., 70, 80–82.
25. The quotation about “mending fences” is from Cooke, Alexander Hamilton, 94. The interpretation offered here and in the succeeding paragraphs draws on all the standard sources. The two most influential secondary accounts, again as I see it, are Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Reports of Alexander Hamilton, vii–xxiii, and Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 93–136. The latter includes a discussion of Hamilton’s capacity for “projection,” by which the authors mean the tendency to foresee or forecast economic trends. I am suggesting here that the vision Hamilton “projected” was very much a projection of his own distinctive character.
26. Madison to Lee, 13 April 1790, Rutland, vol. 22, 147–148.
27. Hamilton to Lee, 1 December 1789, Syrett, vi, i; Hamilton to William Duer, 4–7 April 1790, ibid., 346–347, for the resignation and editorial note on Duer’s unquestionable thievery. The best modern estimate is that he swindled the federal government for personal profits that totaled about $300,000.
28. The best recent study of the economic predicament of Virginia’s elite is Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planter’s Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison, 1994). Older but still useful studies include T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the American Revolution (Princeton, 1985), and Norman Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1181–1800 (New York, 1978), 84–123. On Jefferson’s economic situation and its psychological implications, see Sloan, Principle and Interest, 86–124.
29. On Jefferson’s condition during the spring, see Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, 9 May 1790, Boyd, vol. 16, 416. On Washington’s health, see Jefferson to Randolph, 16 May 1790; Jefferson to William Short, 27 May 1790, ibid., 429, 444. Jefferson’s primary focus was his Report on Weights and Measures, ibid., 602–675.
30. For Jefferson’s Paris years, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–1981), vol. 2, and Ellis, American Sphinx, 64–117. The quotation is from Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 13 March 1789, Boyd, vol. 14, 650.
31. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), 154–208.
32. Jefferson to Randolph, 18 April 1790; Jefferson to Lee, 26 April 1790; Jefferson to Randolph, 30 May 1790; Jefferson to George Mason, 13 June 1790, Boyd, vol. 16, 351, 385–386, 449, 493.
33. Kenneth Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital(Fairfax, Va., 1991), x–xi, 148.
34. Ibid., 129–138, 161–181.
35. Madison to Pendleton, 20 June 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 252–253; Richard Peters to Jefferson, 20 June 1790, Boyd, vol. 16, 539.
36. Rutland, vol. 12, 369–370, 396, 416–417, for Madison’s speeches in the House.
37. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, 190–191. Though it appeared too late to shape my interpretation, I much admire C. M. Harris’s “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream: Politics, Design, and the Founding of the National Capital,” WMQ 56 (July 1999): 527–564.
38. Ibid., 106–126, 164–166.
39. Madison to Pendleton, 20 June 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 252–253.
40. Risjord, “The Compromise of 1790,” 309; Bowling, The Creation of Washington, 179–185; editorial note in Rutland, vol. 13, 243–246.
41. Cooke, “The Compromise of 1790,” 523–545, emphasizes the absence of a direct link between the two issues—assumption and residence. His interpretation attributes the bargain to multiple meetings conducted prior to the dinner at Jefferson’s. My view is that the latter session sealed the deal by completing the negotiations on Virginia’s debt. Without linkage with the residency issue, however, neither Jefferson nor Madison would have concurred.
42. Jefferson to George Gilmer, 27 June, 25 July 1790, Boyd, vol. 16, 269, 575. The standard account of the state and federal debt question is E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance (Chapel Hill, 1961). For a few relatively minor revisions, see William G. Anderson, Price of Liberty: The Public Debt of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1983).
43. Quotations from the Daily Advertiser reproduced in Boyd, vol. 17, 452, 460. See also Bowling, The Creation of Washington, 201.
44. “Jefferson’s Report to Washington on Meeting Held at Georgetown,” 14 September 1790, Boyd, vol. 17, 461–462.
45. Thomas Lee Shippen to William Shippen, 15 September 1790, ibid., 464–465, for the Jefferson-Madison tour of the region in September; Jefferson to Washington, 17 September 1790, ibid., 466–467, for the conversation at Mount Vernon. “Memorandum on the Residence Act,” 29 August 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 294–296, for Madison’s concurrence on the executive strategy as the preferred solution. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, 212–213, for Washington’s land holdings within the designated site.
46. Jefferson to Washington, 27 October 1790, Boyd, vol. 17, 643–644; Madison’s speech in the House is reprinted in Rutland, vol. 12, 264–266.
47. John Harvie, Jr., to Jefferson, 3 August 1790, Boyd, vol. 17, 296; Carrington to Madison, 24 December 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 331–332, which includes the language of the Virginia resolution quoted here.
48. Federal Gazette, 20 November 1790, quoted in Boyd, vol. 17, 459.
49. “Conjectures About the New Constitution,” 17–30 September 1787, Syrett, vol. 6, 59; Hamilton to John Jay, 13 November 1790, Syrett, vol. 7, 149–150.
50. Three scholarly books touch upon these themes in different ways: Richard Buel, Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1/89–1815 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972); Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, 1993), which is especially good on the contingent character of the constitutional settlement; and Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, which includes the problematic theme within its panoramic scope.
51. Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, 24 November 1818, Adams, reel 122.
52. On the construction of Washington, D.C., in the 1790s, see Bob Arnebeck, Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1/90–1800 (Lanham, Md., 1991). The seminal study on the distinctive physical conditions the new capital imposed on political life is James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York, 1966).
53. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 163–193, for an extended reflection on the national and cultural implications of making the new capital a pastoral place.
1. Linda Grant De Pauw et al., Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States, 15 vols. (Baltimore, 1972), vol. 12, 277–87. The debates over the Quaker petitions are mentioned in passing in most secondary accounts of the period. See, for example, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1787–1800 (New York, 1993), 151–152. The fullest and most recent scholarly treatment is by Richard S. Newman, “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the First Federal Congress,” JER 16 (1996): 571–599. See also Howard Ohline, “Slavery, Economics, and Congressional Politics,” JSR 46 (1980): 355–360.
2. First Congress, vol. 12, 287–288.
3. Ibid., 289–290.
4. First Congress, vol. 3, 294. The text of the petitions are most readily available in Alfred Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), 159–160.
5. More, much more, on this subject shortly. For now, the best surveys of the topic are Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (New York, 1971), 201–247; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 122–131; Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1974), 37–39; Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (London, 1996), 1–33. See also Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991).
6. First Congress, vol. 12, 296.
7. Ibid., 307–308.
8. Ibid., 308–310.
9. Ibid., 297–298, 310–311. There are several versions of the debate recorded in First Congress, based on the several newspaper accounts published at the time and the official account in the Congressional Register. The accounts seldom disagree, though they vary in length and detail.
10. Ibid., 308.
11. Ibid., 296–297, 307.
12. Ibid., 298–299, 305–306.
13. Ibid., 311.
14. Ibid., 312.
15. First Congress, vol. 3, 295–296.
16. Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, 1990), 3–24, offers the most robust neoabolitionist interpretation of the revolutionary era. All the standard treatments of the subject emphasize the exuberant expectations generated by the revolutionary ideology: Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 48–55; Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 98–130; Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1110–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 269–314. On the resonant and quasi-religious power of the Declaration of Independence, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997). See also the collection of essays in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1983).
17. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 124–129; MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution, 21–29; Quaker Petition to the Continental Congress, 4 October 1783, Record Group 360, National Archives, Washington, D.C. The best collection of documents on this phase of the antislavery movement is Roger Burns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1188 (New York, 1977), 397–490. On slavery itself, the authoritative work is Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country(Chapel Hill, 1998).
18. Zilversmit, The First Emancipation, 109–138.
19. Robert McColley, Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana, Ill., 1964), 141–162. For Jefferson’s early leadership, see Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 144–146.
20. This paragraph represents my attempt to negotiate the scholarly minefield that confronts anyone trying to explain the anomalous character of slavery within the ideological legacy of the American Revolution. The standard account, still quite impressive for its subtle treatment of the ironies and intellectual disjunctions, is Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. The most forceful argument for the radical implications of the revolutionary ideology is Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), which emphasizes the egalitarian legacy that then seeped out slowly to create the democratic society that Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1830s. If, however, one makes slavery the acid test of the revolutionary ideology, the legacy looks less than radical. The best treatment of that version is William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” in William W. Freehling, ed., The Reinterpretation of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994), 76–84.
21. The Madison quotation is from the debates at the Constitutional Convention (28 June 1787) in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1/8/, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1937), vol. 1, 486–487. The most succinct recent study of the role of slavery at the convention is Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, 1–33. The groundbreaking scholarly analysis is Staughton Lynd, ed., Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays (Indianapolis, 1967). The most comprehensive assessment within the larger context of “original intent” is Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996), 58, 70–74, 90–93.
22. Records, vol. 2 221–223, 364–365, 396–403.
23. Records, vol. 1, 605; vol. 2, 306.
24. Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, 34–57, for the most recent scholarly assessment of the Northwest Ordinance, which emphasizes its inherent ambiguity. A more optimistic interpretation is suggested in William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” AHR 77 (1972): 81–93. See also Peter Onuf, “From Constitution to Higher Law: The Reinterpretation of the Northwest Ordinance,” Ohio History 94 (1985): 5–33.
25. Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, 19–31; Rakove, Original Meanings, 85–89.
26. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896), vol. 2, 41, 149, 484.
27. Elliot, ed., Debates, vol. 4, 286.
28. McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, 120, 163–190. For Madison’s remark on the three-fifths clause, see Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers (New York, 1961), 338–339.
29. Elliot, ed., Debates, vol. 3, 273, 452–453, 598–599. An excellent overview of the larger set of issues raised by the ambiguity of the Constitution on slavery is William Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1/60–1840 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977).
30. First Congress, vol. 12, 649–662.
31. This is a large claim, but it is rooted in the evidence (coming up in the next few pages) and in keeping with the best scholarly overview of the subject by Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987).
32. First Congress, vol. 12, 719–721, 725–735.
33. Ibid., 750–761.
34. Tise, Proslavery, 97–123, which claims that even the “positive good” argument was part of the Deep South’s position in the revolutionary era. I cannot go quite that far, even though the Deep South did argue that Africans actually preferred slavery to impoverished freedom or to life in Africa. What is missing in the revolutionary era, however, is the claim that the conditions of life for slaves in the South were preferable to the conditions for factory workers in the North, which would have been a historic impossibility, since factories had yet to appear. The late-eighteenth-century proslavery position, I believe, was more defensive. See, for example, Eric R. Papenfuse, The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery (Philadelphia, 1997), and John P. Kaminski, ed., A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution (Madison, 1994).
35. The most elegant argument for the creation of a distinctive racial ideology in this period is Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 95–118. The magisterial argument for the long-standing existence of racial attitudes and convictions is Jordan, White Over Black. What I am attempting to argue here is that a coherent or explicit racial ideology had been unnecessary before this period, because slavery institutionalized the presumption of white Anglo-Saxon superiority and rendered an explicit or systematic racial ideology superfluous. Just as the most virulent racial legislation in American history appeared after slavery was ended in the late nineteenth century, the most potent racial arguments surfaced when slavery was threatened in the late eighteenth century. But the underlying values on which all the formal arguments and laws were based had been present for centuries. For a discussion of the racial implications of the proposed seal for the United States, see Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 135.
36. The phrase about “revolutionary time” is from Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 306. On the one hand, Davis’s book remains the most sophisticated and comprehensive assessment of the extended historical moment when the fate of slavery seemed to hang in the balance after the Revolution. On the other hand, because it considers the fifty-year period as a single piece, the patterns within the period are blurred into the larger whole and the inevitability of the eventual failure shadows the entire survey. The strongest case for the viability of a national antislavery program is Nash, Race and Revolution, which emphasizes the historic opportunity without putting a specific date on the closing of that opportunity, but which ignores altogether the powerful forces confronting any antislavery initiative and then makes the rather bizarre claim that the chief responsibility, even culpability, for the failure rests with the North. The argument here, which strikes me as incontrovertible, is that the key was Virginia.
37. The Fairfax and Tucker plans are conveniently reprinted in Nash, Race and Revolution, 146–165. The best analysis of the components contained in all gradual emancipation plans coming out of Virginia is Jordan, White Over Black, 555–567.
38. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 6–8, offers the most specific economic estimates and the clearest negative judgment, concluding that “slavery could not have been eliminated by political processes during the founding period.” Nash, Race and Revolution, 5–6, 20, offers no economic evidence that emancipation was feasible, but it assumes the failure to take decisive action was moral and political, emphasizing the lack of leadership in the North, thereby implying the costs were not prohibitive. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” 76–84, takes a more circumspect middle course, providing no systematic economic argument but suggesting that the combination of political, economic, and racial factors converged to limit the options and virtually assure that slavery would persist. For Jefferson’s backward evolution from the vanguard to the rear guard of the antislavery movement, see Ellis, American Sphinx, 146–152.
39. The Tucker plan, for example, would have freed only female slaves at twenty-eight years of age, then their children when they reached the same age. (The gradual emancipation plans adopted in New York and New Jersey had analogous provisions, designed to stagger the effect of liberation as well as the costs.) Tucker emphasized the time delay as a central feature of his plan, which was cost-free to the present generation. He did not provide specific estimates of the compensation levels, and my own estimate of the size of the sinking fund, about $50 million, is no more than an educated guess. Nevertheless, my estimate is designed to expose the realistic economic parameters implicit in the most practical of the available plans. Perhaps there should have been a sliding compensation scale that encouraged earlier emancipations by rewarding slave owners who acted before the legal deadline.
40. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” 83, makes the same point even more assertively: “no such color-blind, ethnically-blind, gender-blind social order had ever existed, not on these shores, not anywhere else.”
41. P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York, 1961), is the standard history. See also George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 181/–1114 (New York, 1971). Of all the prominent statesmen at the time, Madison gave the African option the most thought. For an elegant summary of this thinking, see Drew McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge, 1989), 279–283.
42. The great Franklin biography remains Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938). The best recent biography is Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, 1986). For Franklin’s contribution as a scientist, see I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers (New York, 1995), 135–195. The classic effort to undermine Franklin’s historical reputation is D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1924), 15–27. On the changing images of Franklin, see Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture (Philadelphia, 1994). A perceptive appraisal of Franklin’s character emerges in Robert Middlekauf, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley, 1996). And these scholarly sources are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For Jefferson’s ranking of Franklin as next to Washington, with all others “on the second line,” see Jefferson to William Carmichael, 12 August 1788, Boyd, vol. 13, 502.
43. For Franklin’s early career in Pennsylvania politics, see William Hanna, Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics (Stanford, 1964). For his English phase, see Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1950). For his Parisian phase, see Claude-Ann Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, 1990).
44. Records, vol. 3, 361, for Franklin’s antislavery petition at the Constitutional Convention. Tench Coxe was the member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society who urged him to withdraw the petition on the grounds that “it would be a very improper season & place to hazard the Application” (quoted in Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 321).
45. Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10 vols. (New York, 1907), vol. 10, 87–91.
46. First Congress, vol. 12, 809–810, 812–822, 825–827.
47. Of all the prominent statesmen who chose to regard silence as the highest form of leadership at this moment, Washington is the most intriguing, in part because he was the largest slave owner (over three hundred slaves lived on his several plantations), and in part because he, perhaps alone, possessed the stature to have altered the political context if he had chosen to do so. The Washington quotation is from Washington to John Mercer, 9 September 1786, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931–1944), vol. 29, 5. See also Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (St. Louis, 1997). For a conversation with the editors of the modern edition of the Washington papers on this topic, see Sarah Booth Conroy, Washington Post, February 16, 1998. Of course, Washington was the supreme example in the founding generation of what John Adams called “the gift of silence.” In hindsight, this was one occasion when one could only have wished that the gift had failed him.
48. Madison to Edmund Randolph, 21 March 1790; Madison to Benjamin Rush, 20 March 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 109–110.
49. Madison to Rush, 20 March 1790; Thomas Pleasants, Jr., to Madison, 10 July 1790; Madison to Robert Pleasants, 30 October 1791, Rutland, vol. 13, 109, 271, vol. 14, 117. See also McColley, Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia, 182.
50. Madison to Rush, 20 March 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 109. The shrewdest assessment of Madison’s inherently equivocal thinking about slavery is McCoy, The Last of the Fathers, 217–322.
51. Madison to Randolph, 21 March 1790, Rutland, vol. 13, 110.
52. First Congress, vol. 12, 832–844. John Pemberton to James Pemberton, 16 March 1790, quoted in Nash, Race and Revolution, 41.
53. First Congress, vol. 3, 338–339, for the debate and vote on the committee report.
54. Ibid., 340–341.
55. Ibid., 341, for the final version of the resolution. Madison’s comment is from First Congress, vol. 12, 842. The Washington quotation is from Washington to David Stuart, 28 March 1790, Fitzpatrick, vol. 31, 28–30.
56. In the petition of 1792, see Annals of Congress, 2d Congress, 2d Session, 728—731. For the Webster comment, see Daniel Webster to John Bolton, 17 May 1833, Charles Wiltse, ed., The Papers of Daniel Webster, 7 vols. (Hanover, N.H., 1974–1986), vol. 3, 252–253.
57. First Congress, vol. 3, 375.
1. On the Washington mythology, three books provide excellent surveys: Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington, Man and Monument (Boston, 1958); Paul Long-more, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, 1988); Barry Schwartz, The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987).
2. Longmore, The Invention, 24; Schwartz, The Making of an American Symbol, 127; Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York, 1996), 22–23.
3. Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10 vols. (New York, 1907), vol. 10, 111–112.
4. Jefferson to Washington, 23 May 1792, Boyd, vol. 22, 123; Schwartz, The Making of an American Symbol, 38–39; Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York, 1984).
5. Victor H. Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address (New York, 1935), 2–3.
6. Matthew Spalding and Patrick J. Garrity, A Sacred Union of Citizens: George Washington’s Farewell Address and the American Character (Lanham, Md., 1996) is the most recent and comprehensive scholarly study. On the historiography, see Burton J. Kaufman, Washington’s Farewell Address: The View from the Twentieth Century(Chicago, 1969). The account in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1787–1800 (New York, 1993), 489–528, provides the best incisive summary of the larger implications of Washington’s retirement within the political culture of the 1790s.
7. Spalding and Garrity, A Sacred Union, 45–48; Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 308–309.
8. Syrett, vol. 20, 169–173, for an excellent editorial note on Hamilton’s role; Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 30–31; Smith, vol. 2, 940, for the Ames quotation; Madison to Monroe, 14 May 1796, Smith, vol. 2, 941. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793–1799 (Boston, 1972), 292–307.
9. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 January 1797, quoted in Smith, vol. 2, 895. For Jefferson’s version of the Ciceronian posture, see Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 139–141.
10. Schwartz, The Making of an American Symbol, 18–19, for an excellent physical description of Washington, which also includes the quotation from Rush. Brookhiser, Founding Father, 114–115, is also excellent on Washington’s physical presence. Mantle Fielding, Gilbert Stuart’s Portraits of Washington (Philadelphia, 1933), 77–80, offers the best contemporary description of Washington’s physical features as rendered by an artist whose eye was trained to notice such things. Washington to Robert Lewis, 26 June 1796, Fitzpatrick, vol. 35, 99, provides Washington’s own testimony on aging.
11. Adams to Benjamin Rush, 22 April 1812, Alexander Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters (Philadelphia, 1892), 161–173, 375–381, for Adams on Washington and “the gift of taciturnity.”
12. The Jefferson quotation is from his “Anas” in Ford, vol. 1, 168. In the same vein, see Jefferson to Madison, 9 June 1793, Smith, vol. 2, 780–782. For the manifestations of physical decline, see Flexner, George Washington, 156–157.
13. Aurora, 17 October 1796.
14. Ibid., 6 March 1796; Schwartz, The Making of an American Symbol, 68, 99; John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston, 1995), 430–452.
15. Washington to David Humphreys, 12 June 1796, Fitzpatrick, vol. 35, 91–92.
16. The newspaper quotation is quoted in Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York, 1948–1957), vol. 7, 321. On Washington’s royal style, see especially Schwartz, The Making of an American Symbol, 48–61.
17. The most insightful contemporary commentator on Washington’s unique and highly paradoxical status was John Adams, who recognized the utter necessity of a singular leader to focus the national government, and who simultaneously recognized the dangers inherent in making Washington superhuman. The most explicit discussion of this dilemma occurs in the letters Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush soon after his own retirement. See Spur, 185–186.
18. The best synthesis of the different scholarly interpretations of the Farewell Address is Arthur A. Markowitz, “Washington’s Farewell and the Historians,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 94 (1970): 173–191. See especially, Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1961).
19. The most incisive account of Washington’s dramatic sense of departure is Wills, Cincinnatus, 3–16.
20. For his speech to the army, then his address to the Congress upon resigning, see Writings, 542–545, 547–550. For the remark by George III, see Wills, Cincinnatus, 13.
21. The two outstanding scholarly books on the subject are Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens, Ga., 1985), and Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character (Chapel Hill, 1979).
22. Washington to John Barrister, 21 April 1778, Fitzpatrick, vol. 6, 107–108.
23. The decision to execute André was Washington’s most unpopular decision during the war and generated a spirited correspondence. See Writings, 387–390.
24. Washington to Henry Laurens, 14 November 1778, Fitzpatrick, vol. 13, 254–257. The significance of this observation was emphasized by Edmund S. Morgan in his biographical essay on Washington in The Meaning of Independence (New York, 1976), 47–48.
25. Writings, 516–517.
26. Ibid., 517.
27. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London, 1954).
28. Washington to Humphreys, 3 March 1794, Fitzpatrick, vol. 32, 398–399.
29. Writings, 840; Washington to Charles Carroll, 1 May 1796, Fitzpatrick, vol. 37, 29–31.
30. Lawrence Kaplan, Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson (Kent, Ohio, 1987), emphasizes the consensus that existed among American political leaders; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 375–450, take the party divisions as more serious expressions of deep division. I tend to think they are closer to the truth.
31. Three scholarly accounts are seminal here: Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New Haven, 1962); Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Background of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley, 1970); Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 375–450.
32. Smith, vol. 2, 882–883; Adams to William Cunningham, 15 October 1808, Correspondence Between the Honorable John Adams … and William Cunningham, Esq. (Boston, 1823), 34; Washington to Edmund Randolph, 31 July 1795, Fitzpatrick, vol. 34, 266.
33. Madison to Jefferson, 4 April 1796, Smith, vol. 2, 929–930; Jefferson to Edward Rutledge, 30 November 1795, Ford, vol. 7, 39–40.
34. Smith, vol. 2, 887–888; Jefferson to Monroe, 21 March 1796, Ford, vol. 7, 67–68.
35. Jefferson to Madison, 27 March 1796; Madison to Jefferson, 9 May 1796, Smith, vol. 2, 928, 937; Jefferson to Monroe, 12 June 1796, Ford, vol. 7, 80. Jefferson’s political assessment of the reasons for passage of Jay’s Treaty were shrewd, but Washington’s influence, while crucial, was aided immeasurably by a shift among voters primarily concerned with access to lands in the West. The English promise to withdraw from forts, in effect to implement commitments made in the Treaty of Paris (1783), was itself important in producing the shift. But equally important was the news of Pinckney’s Treaty, in which Spain granted access to the Mississippi River and thereby enhanced the prospects for settlements and commerce in the vast American interior.
36. For a fuller version of this side of Jefferson’s mentality, see Ellis, American Sphinx, especially 151–152.
37. This is the conspiratorial perspective Jefferson embraced in his “Anas,” the collection of anecdotes and gossip he gathered for eventual publication during his retirement years. For the anecdotes themselves, see Ford, vol. 1, 168–178. The best analysis of the “Anas” is Joanne Freeman, “Slander, Poison, Whispers and Fame: Jefferson Anas’ and Political Gossip in the Early Republic,” 11115 (1995): 25–58. The most revealing statement by Jefferson, which includes the “They all live in cities” remark, was “Notes on Professor Ebeling’s Letter of July 30, 1785,” Ford, vol. 7, 44–49.
38. On the Whiskey Rebellion, see Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York, 1986). On Washington’s response to the insurrection, see Richard H. Kohn, “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion,” JAH 59 (1972): 567–574.
39. Jefferson to Mann Page, 30 August 1795, Ford, vol. 7, 24–25. See also Jefferson to Monroe, 26 May 1795, Ford, vol. 7, 16–17; Jefferson to Madison, 30 October 1794, Smith, vol. 2, 858. The standard assessment of Jefferson’s conspiratorial perspective is Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978).
40. Jefferson to Phillip Mazzei, 24 April 1796, Ford, vol. 7, 72–78. The letter was eventually published in a New York newspaper, The Minerva, on March 14, 1797. After its publication, all correspondence between Mount Vernon and Monticello ceased.
41. The quotation is from Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1 June 1795, Ford, vol. 7, 22.
42. Jefferson to Coxe, 1 May 1794; Jefferson to William Short, 3 January 1793, Ford, vol. 6, 507–508, 153–156.
43. Jefferson to Monroe, 16 July 1796, Ford, vol. 7, 89.
44. Washington to Jefferson, 6 July 1794, Writings, 951–954. For the pro-Jefferson version of this episode, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Times, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–1981), vol. 3, 307–311.
45. The best analysis of Monroe’s behavior as minister to France is Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 497–504. The correspondence in which Washington tried to fathom Monroe’s statements includes: Washington to Hamilton, 26 June 1796, Syrett, vol. 20, 239; Washington to Secretary of State, 25 July and 27 July, 1796; Washington to Monroe, 26 August 1796, Fitzpatrick, vol. 35, 155, 157, 187–190. See also the note on Monroe’s support for French seizures of American shipping in Fitzpatrick, vol. 35, 155, 157, 187–190. See also the note on Monroe’s support for French seizures of American shipping in Syrett, vol. 20, 227.
46. The most succinct summary of Randolph’s fiasco in the modern scholarly literature is Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 424–431. See also two old but helpful accounts: W. C. Ford, “Edmund Randolph on the British Treaty, 1795,” AHR 12 (1907): 587–599; Moncure D. Conway, Omitted Chapters in the History Disclosed in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph (New York, 1988).
47. The correspondence on the episode includes: Randolph to Washington, 20, 29, 31 July 1795; Washington to Randolph, 22 July, 3 August 1795, Fitzpatrick, vol. 34, 244–255; see also Washington to Hamilton, 29 July 1795, Syrett, vol. 18, 525. Randolph’s reputation is defended in a somewhat excessive fashion in Irving Brant, “Edmund Randolph. Not Guilty!” WMQ 7 (1950): 179–198.
48. For a convenient summary of the debate over the authorship question, see Spalding and Garrity, A Sacred Union, 55–58.
49. Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 160–163, 212–217, 227.
50. Ibid., 14–15, 241–243. The story is nicely summarized in Spalding and Garrity, A Sacred Union, 46–49.
51. Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 242.
52. Ibid., 246–247; the “first draft” Washington sent to Hamilton is reproduced in ibid., 164–173.
53. Ibid., 249–250.
54. Ibid., 250–253, 257. See also Syrett, vol. 20, 265–268, 292–293.
55. Washington to Hamilton, 25 August 1796, Syrett, vol. 20, 307–309. The “incorporating draft” that Washington did not like as well is reproduced in ibid., 294–303. On the editorial process and the changes Washington made, see Spalding and Garrity, A Sacred Union, 53–54.
56. Writings, 968.
57. Ibid., 974–975.
58. Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 260.
59. Ibid., 172.
60. Ibid., 252–253.
61. Ibid., 258–259.
62. Ibid., 245–257; Writings, 972.
63. For Washington’s Eighth Annual Address, see Writings, 978–985. The Hamilton draft is in Syrett, vol. 20, 382–388.
64. Flexner, George Washington, 324–327, and Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 495–496, call attention to the strongly nationalistic message Washington delivered. While some historians dismiss the message as Hamilton’s handiwork, and therefore as evidence that Washington capitulated to the Hamiltonian wing of the Federalist party in his last executive statement, it seems to me this interpretation misses the larger point, which is that Washington required no instruction from Hamilton on these issues, and retained his own reasons for regarding the enhanced powers of the federal government as indispensable instruments, the chief reason being that his own departure created a vacuum that would need to be filled by federal institutions. Even Jefferson, who ascended to the presidency in 1801 fully intending to dismantle rather than buttress those institutions and policies, discovered in his first term that Washington’s projection, though the great man was now in the grave, still haunted the political landscape. Even with the Jefferson triumph in the early years of the nineteenth century and the parallel defeat of the Federalist party as a national force, the core of Washington’s vision remained alive, because without it the American nation itself would have ceased to exist. A reincarnated Washington, I am suggesting, would have gone with Lincoln and the Union in 1861.
65. Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 252–253.
66. Though inadequate, the only book-length treatment of the subject is Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (St. Louis, 1997). Still valuable for its discussion of Washington’s posture as a slave owner is Flexner, George Washington, 432–448. The most thorough assessment in the recent works is Robert E. Dalzell, Jr., and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (New York, 1998), 112, 211–219.
67. Writings, 956–957.
68. Ibid., 957–960.
69. Paltsits, ed., Washington’s Farewell Address, 261–262; William Duane, A Letter to George Washington … Containing Strictures of His Address (Philadelphia, 1786), 11-12; Aurora, 17 October 1796; Washington to Benjamin Walker, 12 January 1797, Fitzpatrick, vol. 35, 363–365.
70. Washington to Citizens of Alexandria, 23 March 1797, Fitzpatrick, vol. 35, 423.
71. Washington’s opinion concerning the state of Virginia’s politics is best expressed in Washington to Patrick Henry, 9 October 1795, ibid., 335. His views of the Republican party in the state after his retirement are illustrated in Washington to Henry Knox, 2 March 1797, Writings, 986–987, and Washington to Lafayette, 25 December 1798, Fitzpatrick, vol. 37, 66. Jefferson’s immediate opinion of Washington was equally critical: “The President is fortunate to get off just as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag.… He will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit from the good arts of others, and leaving to them that of his errors.” See Jefferson to Madison, 8 January 1797, Smith, vol. 2, 955, and Malone, Jefferson and His Times, vol. 3, 307–311, who tries to paper over the rift. For Washington’s role in the construction of the nation’s capital, and his dedication to national rather than Virginia priorities, see C. M. Harris, “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream: Politics, Design, and the Founding of the National Capital,” WMQ 56 (July 1999): 527–564.
72. Flexner, George Washington, 456–462.
1. Merrill Peterson, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue (Oxford, 1978), views the collaboration from Jefferson’s perspective. I have offered two accounts of the Adams-Jefferson partnership: Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York, 1993), 113–142; and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 235–251.
2. Abigail Adams to Jefferson, 6 June 1785, Cappon, vol. 1, 28.
3. This sketch of Adams’s career draws on the standard biographies: Gilbert Chi-nard, Honest John Adams (Boston, 1933); Page Smith, John Adams, 2 vols. (New York, 1962); Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill, 1976). The most satisfying one-volume life, covering his entire public career with respect for the history in which it was imbedded, is John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992). Two succinct and shrewd appraisals of the Adams temperament are Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1990), 3–21; and Edmund S. Morgan, “John Adams and the Puritan Tradition,” NEQ 34 (1961): 518–529. The freshest and fullest study of Adams as a political thinker is C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence, Kans., 1998).
4. Adams to Abigail Adams, 19 December 1793, Charles Francis Adams, ed., Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, 2 vols. (Boston, 1841), vol. 2, 133. There is no satisfactory book on the Adams vice presidency. Ferling, John Adams, 185–217, offers the fullest coverage among the biographies. See also Linda Dudek Guerrero, John Adams’s Vice-Presidency i/8p—p/: The Neglected Man in the Forgotten Office (New York, 1982).
5. Adams to Abigail Adams, 19 December 1793, 12 March 1794, Adams, reel 377; Adams to Thomas Brand-Hollis, 19 February 1792, Adams, reel 375.
6. See the exchanges between Adams and Abigail, most especially during the period from 1794 to 1796, Adams, reels 378–381. Adams to Benjamin Rush, 4 April 1790, Alexander Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters (Philadelphia, 1892), 168–170.
7. Adams to Ebenezer Stokes, 20 March 1790, Adams, reel 115.
8. James H. Hutson, “John Adams’s Title Campaign,” 11141 (1968): 30–39; Jefferson to Madison, 29 July 1789, Boyd, vol. 15, 315–316.
9. Adams to William Tudor, 28 June 1789; Adams to Rush, 5 July 1789, Adams, reel 115.
10. For an analysis of Adams’s political thought as reflected in Discourses on Davila, see Ellis, Passionate Sage, 143–173, and Thompson, John Adams, 149–173. For a convenient synthesis of the press coverage of Adams as a closet monarchist, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Times, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–1981), vol. 3, 283–285.
11. Discourses on Davila first appeared as a series of thirty-one articles in the Gazette of the United States, starting in April of 1790. Jefferson to Washington, 8 May 1791, Ford, vol. 5, 328–330; see also Jefferson in his “Anas,” Ford, vol. 1, 166–167; Jefferson to Adams, 30 August 1791; Adams to Jefferson, 39 July 1791, Cappon, vol. 1, 245–250.
12. Jefferson to Adams, 30 August 1791, Cappon, vol. 1, 250. For Jefferson’s latter-day recollection of the episode, in which he emphasizes his abiding sense of Adams as a traitor to the republican tradition, see Jefferson to William Short, 3 January 1825, Ford, vol. 10, 328–335. Jefferson simply told Adams a different version of the story than he told everyone else.
13. Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 February 1793, Adams, reel 376.
14. For a convenient summary of Adams’s most colorful fulminations against the French Revolution, see Ellis, Passionate Sage, 91–98. For his assessment of Jefferson’s motives for supporting the French Revolution, see Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 February, 26 December 1793, Adams, reel 376.
15. Adams to Abigail Adams, 6 January 1794, Adams, reel 377.
16. Adams to John Quincy Adams, 3 January 1794, ibid.
17. The seminal study of the Jefferson-Madison collaboration is Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (New York, 1950). Madison to Jefferson, 5 October 1794, Smith, vol. 2, 857.
18. Jefferson to Madison, 5 October 1794, 27 April 1795, Smith, vol. 2, 857, 897–898; Jefferson to Adams, 25 April 1794, Cappon, vol. 1, 254; Jefferson to Washington, 14 May 1794, Ford, vol. 6, 509–510. And these are merely illustrative of the much larger exchange in this vein.
19. See Malone, Jefferson and His Times, vol. 3, 276–283, for an incisive discussion of the Burr visit and the political context in Virginia at this time. See Ellis, American Sphinx, 121–133, for Jefferson’s capacity to seclude himself at Monticello while silently and surreptitiously launching a campaign for the presidency.
20. Madison to Monroe, 26 February 1796, Smith, vol. 2, 940–941; Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 4 January 1797, Ford, vol. 7, 103.
21. Three modern biographies of Abigail Adams are especially useful: Charles W. Akers, Abigail Adams: An American Woman (Boston, 1980); Lynne Withey, Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York, 1981); Phyllis Lee Levin, Abigail Adams: A Biography (New York, 1987). Though not a full life, the best character study of Abigail is Edith B. Gelles, Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (Blooming-ton, IL, 1992). For the quotations, see Adams to Abigail Adams, 5 December, 16 December 1794, Adams, reel 378; Abigail Adams to Adams, 5 January 1795, Adams, reel 379.
22. Adams to Abigail Adams, 2 December, 1793, 12 March 1794; Abigail Adams, 6 December 1794, Adams, reel 378.
23. Abigail Adams to Adams, 4 January 1795; Adams to John Quincy Adams, 25 August 1795, Adams, reel 379.
24. Adams to Abigail Adams, 2, 6 December 1794, Adams, reel 378; Abigail Adams to Adams, 10 April 1796, Adams, reel 381.
25. Adams to Abigail Adams, 10 February 1796, Adams, reel 381.
26. Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 February 1796, ibid.
27. Abigail Adams to Adams, 21 January, 20 February 1796; Adams to Abigail Adams, 15, 19 March 1796, ibid.
28. Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 January 1796, ibid.; Abigail Adams to Adams, 31 December 1796, 1 January 1797, Adams, reel 382.
29. Adams to Abigail Adams, 8 April, 8, 12 December 1796, Adams, reels 381, 382.
30. Jefferson to Madison, 1 January 1797, Smith, vol. 2, 953; Jefferson to Stuart, 4 January 1797, Ford, vol. 7, 102–103; Abigail Adams to Adams, 31 December 1796, Adams, reel 382.
31. Jefferson to Madison, 22 January 1797, Smith, vol. 2, 959–960; Abigail Adams to Adams, 15 January 1797, Adams, reel 382.
32. Fisher Ames to Rufus King, 24 September 1800, Charles R. King, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, 6 vols. (New York, 1895), vol. 3, 304; Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 20 February 1797, Adams, reel 117.
33. Madison to Jefferson, 22 January 1797, Smith, vol. 2, 961.
34. Adams to Abigail Adams, 15 March 1797, Adams, reel 382.
35. Jefferson to Edward Rutledge, 27 December 1796, Ford, vol. 7, 93–95; Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, 28 November 1796, quoted in Malone, Jefferson and His Times, vol. 3, 290–291; Jefferson to Madison, 16 January 1797, Smith, vol. 2, 958–959.
36. Jefferson to Madison, 8 January 1797, Smith, vol. 2, 955; Merrill D. Peterson, Visitors to Monticello (Charlottesville, 1989), 31.
37. Jefferson to Adams, 28 December 1796, Smith, vol. 2, 954–955.
38. Madison to Jefferson, 15 January 1797, ibid., 956–958.
39. Jefferson to Madison, 30 January 1797, ibid., 962–963.
40. Ford, vol. 1, 272–273; Smith, vol. 2, 966–997.
41. Adams to Abigail Adams, 9, 17, 27 March 1797, Adams, reel 383.
42. This is my own interpretive synthesis based on the standard accounts of the Adams presidency: Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795–1800 (Philadelphia, 1957); Manning Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore, 1953); Ralph A. Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence, KS, 1975). The authoritative account of this entangled moment in American politics is Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1787–1800 (New York, 1993), 513–528.
43. Jefferson to Rutledge, 24 June 1797, Ford, vol. 7, 154–155; Jefferson to John Wise, 12 February 1798; Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 17 May 1798, Smith, vol. 2, 996, 1063.
44. Adams to John Quincy Adams, 3 November 1797, Adams, reel 117.
45. Abigail Adams to Cotton Tufts, 8 June 1798, Adams, reel 392; Smith, John Adams, vol. 2, 933.
46. Adams to John Quincy Adams, 2 June 1797, Adams, reel 119.
47. Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, 20 March 1798, Stewart Mitchell, ed., New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788–1801 (Boston, 1947), 146–147.
48. Smith, John Adams, vol. 2, 937.
49. Ibid, 958; Abigail Adams to William Smith, 20, 30 March 1798, Adams, reel 392; Smith, vol. 2, 1010.
50. The standard work on the Alien and Sedition Acts is James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Letters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956). Among Adams’s biographers, Smith, John Adams, vol. 2, 975–978, tends to defend Adams by playing down the severity of the threat to civil liberties; Ferling, John Adams, 365–368, sees this episode as a major blunder by Adams. The discussion in Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 590–593, 694–695, is elegantly balanced and warns against imposing our modern notion of civil liberties or freedom of the press on an age that was still groping toward a more expansive version of First Amendment protections. This latter warning, which strikes me as historically, if not politically, correct, clearly needs to be underlined. As a monumental example of how to make all the presentistic mistakes, see Richard Rosenfeld’s blunderbuss of a book, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns (New York, 1997).
51. Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 25 April 1798, quoted in Ferling, John Adams, 365; Abigail Adams to Cranch, 26 April 1798, Mitchell, ed., New Letters, 165; Smith, vol. 2, 1003–1005.
52. Richard Welch, Theodore Segwick, Federalist: A Political Portrait (Middletown, Conn., 1965), 185–186; Syrett, vol. 22, 494–495; Abigail Adams to Adams, 3 March 1799, Adams, reel 393.
53. Adams to Abigail Adams, 31 December 1798, 1 January 1799; Abigail Adams to Adams, 27 February 1799, Adams, reels 392, 393.
54. Abigail Adams to Elizabeth Peabody, 7 April 1799, Adams, reel 393.
55. Adams to James McHenry, 22 October 1798, Adams, reel 119. The standard work on the threat posed by the New Army is Richard W. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Beginnings of the Military Establishment in America (New York, 1975). See also Syrett, vol. 22, 452–454.
56. Abigail Adams to William Smith, 7 July 1798, Adams, reel 392.
57. Jefferson to Madison, 2, 21, 22 March 1798, Smith, vol. 2, 1024, 1029.
58. Madison to Jefferson, 18 February 1798, ibid., 1021.
59. Jefferson to Madison, 6 April 1798; Madison to Jefferson, 15 April 1798, 13, 20 May 1798, ibid., 1002, 1036–1038, 1048–1049, 1051.
60. Jefferson to Madison, 24 May 1798, 3 January, 19, 26 February 1799, ibid., 1053, 1056, 1085, 1086.
61. For Callender’s career, see Michael Durey, With the Hammer of Truth: James Thomas Callender and America’s Early National Heroes (Charlottesville, 1990). Jefferson to Monroe, 26 May 1801, 15 July 1802, Ford, vol. 8, 57–58, 164–168. The best scholarly study of the Republican effort to smear Adams is C. O. Lerche, Jr., “Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear,” WMQ 8 (1948): 467–491.
62. Jefferson to Monroe, 5 April 1798, Ford, vol. 7, 233; Madison to Jefferson, 18 February 1798; Theodore Sedgwick to Rufus King, 9 April 1798, Smith, vol. 2, 997, 1021.
63. Jefferson’s draft of the Kentucky Resolutions is reprinted in Smith, vol. 2, 1080–1084. The introductory essay in ibid., 1063–1075, provides the fairest and fullest coverage of the context. The previous account, more charitable toward Jefferson, is Adrienne Koch and Harry Ammon, “The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions: An Episode in Jefferson’s and Madison’s Defense of Civil Liberties,” WMQ 5 (1945): 170–189.
64. Smith, vol. 2, 1108–1112; see also the editorial notes in Rutland, vol. 17, 199–206, 303–307.
65. Jefferson to Madison, 23 August 1799, Smith, vol. 2, 1118–1119; Jefferson to Wilson Cary Nicholas, 5 September 1799, Ford, vol. 7, 389–392. For an elegant appraisal of the Madisonian influence on Jefferson, and the huge constitutional gap the two colleagues managed to ignore, see Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge, 1989). See also Leonard Levy, The Emergence of a Free Press (New York, 1985), 315–325.
66. Madison to Jefferson, 4 April 1800, Smith, vol. 2, 1131–1132. For the enforcement of the Sedition Act, see Smith, Freedom’s Letters, 176–187.
67. Smith, Freedom’s Letters, 270–274; Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 694–713; Ellis, American Sphinx, 217–219. The scientific evidence establishing Jefferson’s paternity of at least one of Sally’s children, Eston Hemings, was published in Nature, November 1998, 27–28. See also the explanatory note by Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “DNA Analysis: Founding Father,” Nature, November 1998, 13–14.
68. Jefferson to John Breckenridge, 29 January 1800, Ford, vol. 7, 417–418; Jefferson to Madison, 4 March 1800, Smith, vol. 2, 1128–1130. For an overview of the election from the Jeffersonian perspective, see Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York, 1974).
69. Ferling, John Adams, 403–404; Abigail Adams to Cranch, 5 May 1800, Mitchell, ed., New Letters, 251, 265.
70. Syrett, vol. 25, 178–202, for the text of Hamilton’s pamphlet as well as the correspondence by Adams and other Federalists in response to it.
71. Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, 25 October 1802, Ford, vol. 8, 175–176; see the concluding thoughts of Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 750–754.
72. The first Adams quotation is from Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, 1953), 57; Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 24, 26 January 1801, Adams, reel 400; Ferling, John Adams, 405–413, provides a nice summary of Adams’s sense of resignation.
73. Adams to Gerry, 30 December 1800, Adams, reel 399. This is a much-condensed version of the historic vote in the House to choose between Jefferson and Burr. The standard account is now Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 743–750.
74. Jefferson to Madison, 19 December 1800, Smith, vol. 2, 1154, for Jefferson’s expectations concerning civility. I have told the story of these last days of the Adams presidency more fully in Passionate Sage, 19–25.
1. Adams to Samuel Dexter, 23 March 1801; Adams to Benjamin Stoddert, 31 March 1801, Works, vol. 10, 580–582.
2. Abigail Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 12 July 1801, Adams, reel 400; Adams to Francis Vanderkemp, 25 January 1806, Adams, reel 118.
3. Adams to William Cranch, 23 May 1801, Adams, reel 118; Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, 29 October 1805, Worthington C. Ford., ed., Statesman and Friend: The Correspondence of John Adams and Benjamin Waterhouse, 1184–1822 (Boston, 1927), 31.
4. Abigail Adams to Jefferson, 20 May 1804, Cappon, vol. 1, 268–269.
5. Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 14 June 1804, ibid., 270–271.
6. Abigail Adams to Jefferson, 1 July 1804, ibid., 271–274.
7. Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 22 July, 11 September 1804, ibid., 274–276, 279–280.
8. Abigail Adams to Jefferson, 25 October 1804, ibid., 280–282.
9. Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, 13 March 1789, Boyd, vol. 14, 650.
10. Adams postscript, 19 November 1804, Cappon, vol. 1, 282.
11. Adams to Benjamin Rush, 18 April 1808, Spur, 107.
12. Adams to Rush, 30 September 1805, Alexander Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters (Philadelphia, 1892), 86; Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1961), vol. 3, 335–336; Adams to Rush, 21 June 1811, Spur, 182.
13. I have covered these early years of the Adams retirement in greater detail in Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York, 1993), 57–83. Mercy Otis Warren to Adams, 7, 15 August 1807, Charles Francis Adams, ed., Correspondence Between John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, reprinted in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 4 (1878), 422–423, 449; Adams to William Cunningham, 22 February, 31 July 1809, Correspondence Between the Honorable John Adams … and William Cunningham, Esq. (Boston, 1823), 93, 151; Adams to Nicholas Boylston, 3 November 1819, Adams, reel 124.
14. Adams to Rush, 23 July 1806, Spur, 61.
15. Rush to Adams, 23 March 1805; Adams to Rush, 29 November 1812, ibid., 25, 254–255.
16. Adams to Rush, 22 December 1806, ibid., 72–73.
17. Adams to Rush, 17 August 1812, Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters, 420.
18. Adams to Rush, 12 June, 17 August 1812, Spur, 225, 242.
19. Adams to Rush, 20 June 1808, 14 November 1812, ibid., 110, 252.
20. Adams to Rush, 30 September 1805, 14 March 1809, 21 June 1811, 11 November 1807, 8 January, 14 May 1812, Spur, 39–42, 97–99, 181, 204, 216–217.
21. Ellis, Passionate Sage, 143–173; Adams to Rush, 27 September 1809, Spur, 155; John Ferling and Lewis E. Braverman, “John Adams’s Health Reconsidered,” WMQ 55 (1998): 83–104.
22. Adams to Cunningham, 16 January 1804, Correspondence Between the Honorable John Adams … and William Cunningham, Esq., 7–9; Adams to Rush, 18 April 1808, Spur, 107–108.
23. Adams to Rush, September 1807, Spur, 93.
24. Adams to Rush, 10 October 1808, ibid., 122–123.
25. Adams to Rush, 23 March 1809, ibid., 139.
26. Rush to Adams, 16 October 1809, ibid., 156–157.
27. Adams to Rush, 25 October 1809, ibid., 158–159.
28. Rush to Jefferson, 2 January 1811, quoted in Spur, 157–158.
29. Jefferson to Rush, 5 December 1811, Ford, vol. 9, 300. See also Lyman H. Butterfield, “The Dream of Benjamin Rush: The Reconciliation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” Yale Review 40 (1950–1951): 297–319.
30. Adams to Rush, 25 December 1811, Spur, 200–202.
31. Adams to Jefferson, 1 January 1812, Cappon, vol. 2, 290; Adams to Rush, 10 February 1812, Adams, reel 118; Rush to Adams, 17 February 1812, Spur, 211I; the remark about “a brother sailor” is in Donald Stewart and George Clark, “Misanthrope or Humanitarian? John Adams in Retirement,” NEQ 28 (1955): 232.
32. The quotation is from Adams to Jefferson, 15 July 1813, Cappon, vol. 2, 357. I have explored the Adams-Jefferson correspondence in two previous books: from the Adams perspective in Passionate Sage, 113–142; from the Jefferson perspective in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997), 281–300. My account here represents an attempt to combine the perspectives of both men and to assess the correspondence as a self-conscious capstone to the work of the revolutionary generation.
33. Jefferson to Adams, 12 October 1823; Adams to Jefferson, 10 November 1823, Cappon, vol. 2, 600–602. A typical letter took from a week to ten days to go from Quincy to Monticello, or vice versa, and both men were amazed at the relative speed of delivery, seeing it as a measure of technological progress and the arrival of a “new age” quite different from that of their time.
34. Jefferson to Adams, 21 January 1812; Adams to Jefferson, 3 February 1812, ibid., 291–292, 295.
35. Jefferson to Adams, 5 July 1814; Adams to Jefferson, 16 July 1814, ibid., 430–431, 435.
36. Jefferson to Adams, 11 June 1812; Adams to Jefferson, 11 June 1813; Jefferson to Adams, 12 September 1820, ibid., 305–307, 328, 566–567. The Adams quotation on Samuel Johnson comes from his correspondence with Catherine Rush, 23 February 1815, Adams, reel 118.
37. Adams to Jefferson, 1 May 1812; Jefferson to Adams, 27 May 1813, Cappon, vol. 2, 301, 324.
38. Adams to Jefferson, 10 June 1813; Jefferson to Adams, 15 June 1813, ibid., 326–327, 331–332.
39. Jefferson to Adams, 15 June 1813, ibid., 331–332.
40. Adams to Jefferson, 14, 25, 28, 30 June 1813, ibid., 329–330, 333–335, 338–340, 346–348.
41. Adams to Jefferson, 15 July 1813, ibid., 358.
42. Jefferson to Adams, 27 June 1813, ibid., 335–336.
43. Jefferson to Adams, 27 June 1813, ibid., 336–338.
44. Jefferson to Adams, 27 June 1813, ibid., 337.
45. Adams to Jefferson, 9 July 1813, ibid., 350–352.
46. Adams to Jefferson, 9, 13 July, 14 August, 19 December 1813, ibid., 351–352, 355, 365, 409.
47. Jefferson to Adams, 28 October 1813, ibid., 387–392.
48. Jefferson to Adams, 24 January 1814, ibid., 421–425.
49. Adams to Jefferson, 15 November 1813, 16 July 1814, ibid., 397–402, 438.
50. Adams to Jefferson, 2, 15 September, 15 November 1813, ibid. 371–372, 376, 398.
51. Works, vol. 6, 461–462.
52. Jefferson to Adams, 11 January 1816, Cappon, vol. 2, 458–461.
53. Adams to Jefferson, 2 February 1816, ibid., 461–462.
54. Adams to Jefferson, 16 December 1816, ibid., 500–501.
55. Adams to Jefferson, 16 December 1816, ibid., 501–503.
56. Adams to Jefferson, 2 February 1816, ibid., 462.
57. Adams to Reverend Coleman, 13 January 1817, Adams, reel 124; Jefferson to George Logan, 11 May 1805, Ford, vol. 9, 141.
58. Jefferson to Adams, 10 December 1819, 20 January 1821, Cappon, vol. 2, 448–450, 569–570. Jefferson’s extreme reaction to the Missouri crisis is a major problem for his more admiring biographers. See Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Times, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–1981), vol. 6, 328–344. More balanced and critical assessments include Robert Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” 11172 (1976): 529–556, and Donald S. Fehrenbacher, “The Missouri Controversy and the Sources of Southern Separatism,” Southern Review 14(1978): 653–667. My own appraisal is in American Sphinx, 314–334.
59. Adams to Jefferson, 23 November 1819, Cappon, vol. 2, 547–548; Adams to William Tudor, 20 November 1819; Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, 29 January 1820, Adams, reel 124.
60. Jefferson to John Holmes, 22 April 1820, Ford, vol. 10, 157–158; Adams to Jefferson, 3 February 1821, Cappon, vol. 2, 571–572. If one were to take the generational argument literally, the Adams family provides a perfect example of the unwritten rules. John Adams sustained his commitment to silence and avoidance, but his son John Quincy Adams became a leader in the antislavery movement. Moreover, John Quincy’s leadership was rooted in his personal knowledge of the sectional compromise consented to by his father and his strong sense that the South, especially Virginia, had not kept its end of the bargain.
61. Adams to Jefferson, 22 June 1819; Jefferson to Adams, 9 July 1819; Adams to Jefferson, 21 July 1819, Cappon, vol. 2, 542–546; Adams to Vanderkemp, 21 August 1819, Adams, reel 124. For the best and most recent scholarly study of the Mecklenburg matter, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), 172–177.
62. Butterfield, ed., The Diary and Autobiography, vol. 3, 335–352.
63. For the deathbed scene with Abigail, see Paul C. Nagel, Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (New York, 1983), 129–130; Jefferson to Adams, 1 June 1822, Cappon, vol. 2, 578–579.
64. Jefferson to Adams, 12 October 1823; Adams to Jefferson, 25 February 1825, Cappon, vol. 2, 599–601, 610.
65. Jefferson to Adams, 11 April 1823; Adams to Jefferson, 25 February 1825, ibid., 591–594, 610; Adams to Vanderkemp, 27 December 1816, Works, vol. 10, 235.
66. Adams to Jefferson, 10 February 1823; Jefferson to Adams, 25 February 1823, Cappon, vol. 2, 587–589.
67. Bennett Nolan, ed., Lafayette in America: Day by Day(Baltimore, 1934), 247–257; Jefferson to Madison, 18 October 1825, Smith, vol. 2, 1942, for the Browere incident; Jefferson to Adams, 25 March 1826, Cappon, vol. 2, 613–614.
68. Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, Ford, vol. 10, 390–392. The handwritten draft, with its multiple deletions and revisions, is reproduced in Ellis, Passionate Sage, 207.
69. Douglass Adair, “Rumbold’s Dying Speech, 1685, and Jefferson’s Last Words on Democracy, 1826,” in Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (New York, 1974), 192–202.
70. Adams to John Whitney, 7 June 1826, Works, vol. 10, 416–417; Lyman H. Butterfield, “The Jubilee of Independence, July 4, 1826,” VMHB 61 (1953): 119–140.
71. Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 1978), 422–432, for Jefferson’s last hours and words; see also Ellis, American Sphinx, 280–281. For the deathbed scene at Quincy, see Eliza Quincy, Memoirs of the Life of Eliza S. M. Quincy (Boston, 1861); see also Ellis, Passionate Sage, 209–210.