NOTES

—

Because spelling and other forms of grammar were still unsettled in the late eighteenth century, reproducing the writing of that time in modern form presents some difficulty. John Adams tended to capitalize all his nouns, and Jefferson always spelled the possessive “its” as “it’s.” To acknowledge all the peculiarities of these writers would inevitably clutter up the text with numerous usages of “[sic].” Therefore, I have chosen to reproduce as accurately as possible the writing of the period as the people at the time wrote it and to leave it to the reader to adjust to the eccentricities of the various writers.

ABBREVIATIONS OF SOURCES

AA: Abigail Adams

AFC: L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 12 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1963– )

AFC–MHS: Adams Family Correspondence in uncorrected typescript at the Massachusetts Historical Society

AHR: American Historical Review

BR: Benjamin Rush

Cappon: Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959)

JA: John Adams

JA, Diary; JA, Autobiography: L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961)

JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775; JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1775–1783: Gordon S. Wood, ed., John Adams: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1783, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 2011)

JA: Writings from the New Nation: Gordon S. Wood, ed., John Adams: Writings from the New Nation (New York: Library of America, 2016)

JER: Journal of the Early Republic

JM: James Madison

JQA: John Quincy Adams

Letters of Rush: Benjamin Rush, Letters, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951)

Old Family Letters: Alexander Biddle, ed., Old Family Letters (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892)

PJA: Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, 18 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1977– )

PJA–MH: Papers of John Adams in uncorrected typescript at the Massachusetts Historical Society

PTJ: Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 41 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950– )

PTJ: RS: J. Jefferson Looney et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 12 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004– )

Republic of Letters: James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1995)

Spur of Fame: John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1980)

TJ: Thomas Jefferson

TJ: Writings: Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984)

WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser.

Works of JA: Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856)

PROLOGUE: THE EULOGIES

1. “Eulogy Pronounced at Boston, Massachusetts, August 2, 1826, by Daniel Webster,” in A Selection of Eulogies Pronounced in the Several States, in Honor of Those Illustrious Patriots and Statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Hartford: D. F. Robinson and Co., 1826), 193. On the Jubilee, see L. H. Butterfield, “The Jubilee of Independence July 4, 1826,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61 (1953): 119–40; and Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee (New York: Knopf, 2001).

2. Samuel L. Knapp, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Boston, Massachusetts, August 2, 1826,” and Caleb Cushing, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Newburyport, Massachusetts, July 16, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 175, 23, 175.

3. Samuel Smith, “Eulogy, Pronounced in Baltimore, Maryland, July 20th 1826,” and William Wirt, “Eulogy, Pronounced at the City of Washington, October 19, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 72, 379.

4. Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Peleg Sprague, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Hallowell, Maine, July, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 7, 300, 48, 149.

5. Knapp, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 184.

6. Cushing, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 28.

7. Knapp, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 185.

8. Wirt, “Eulogy,” Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Smith, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 380, 51, 88.

9. Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Wirt, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 25, 380.

10. Cushing, “Eulogy,” and Webster, “Eulogy,” in Selection of Eulogies, 20, 233.

11. John Tyler, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Richmond, Virginia, July 11, 1826,” and William Johnson, “Eulogy, Pronounced at Charleston, South Carolina, August 3, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 7, 300.

12. Sprague, “Eulogy,” and William F. Thornton, “Eulogy Pronounced at Alexandria, District of Columbia, August 10, 1826,” in Selection of Eulogies, 149, 341.

13. Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 234.

14. BR to JA, 17 Feb. 1812, Letters of Rush, 2:1127.

ONE: CONTRASTS

1. JA to Adrian Van der Kemp, 20 Feb. 1806, PJA–MHS. Russell Kirk, in his influential work The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1985), considered Adams “the founder of true conservatism in America” (p. 71).

2. Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 4 March 1789–5 March 1791, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen Veit, vol. 9, The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 275, 306.

3. JA, Diary, 2:362; Diary of William Maclay, 278, 19, 11, 33.

4. “The Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” in Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 247.

5. Jonathan Sewall to Judge Joseph Lee, 21 Sept. 1787, AFC, 1:136–37n. The editors point out that by 1787 Sewall had taken to spelling his name “Sewell.” (Sewall spelled the possessive “its” the way Jefferson always did, “it’s.”) Adams’s personality seems to have resembled that of Dr. Samuel Johnson as described by James Boswell: “hard to please and easily offended, impetuous and irritable in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent heart.” Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett, eds., Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D (New York: The Literary Guild, 1936), 7.

6. JA to JQA, 22 Jan. 1817, AFC–MHS.

7. JA to Charles Carroll, 2 Aug. 1820, PJA–MHS; JA to TJ, 12 Dec. 1816, Cappon, 2:499.

8. TJ to Nathaniel Burwell, 14 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:532. In 1771 Jefferson told a young man who had asked for advice about building a library that “the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant.” But since the young man admitted that he possessed only the “capacity of a common reader who understands but little of the classics and who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study,” Jefferson wasn’t necessarily speaking for his own tastes, which as an adult did not involve much reading of fiction and novels. TJ to Robert Skipwith, 3 Aug. 1771, PTJ, 1:76–77; Skipwith to TJ, 17 July 1771, ibid., 1:74–75; Douglas L. Wilson, Jefferson’s Books (Lynchburg, Va.: Monticello, 1993), 21–22.

9. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 64. See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 91–164.

10. TJ to JM, 20 Sept. 1785, Republic of Letters, 1:385; TJ to Giovanni Fabbroni, 8 June 1778, PTJ, 2:195–96.

11. Hugh Howard, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 11.

12. Seymour Howard, “Jefferson’s Art Gallery,” The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 583–600.

13. PTJ, 7:383; James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 124.

14. Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, ed. Howard C. Rice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 2:391.

15. JA to J. B. Binon, 7 Feb. 1819, PJA–MHS.

16. JA to George Washington Adams, 27 May 1816, AFC–MHS.

17. JA to AA, 10 May 1777, AFC, 2:235; JA to Henry Laurens, 24 Oct. 1779, PJA, 8:224. Adams’s vivid description of the painting was as follows: “The Picture represents a Coach, with four Horses, running down a steep Mountain, and rushing on to the middle of a very high Bridge, over a large River. The Foundations of the whole Bridge, give Way, in a Moment, and the Carriage, the Horses, the Timbers, Stones, and all, in a Chaos are falling through the Air down to the Water. The Horror of the Horses, the Coachman, the Footman, the Gentlemen and Ladies in the Carriage, is Strongly painted in their Countenances and Gestures, as well as the Simpathy and Terror of others in Boats upon the River and many others on shore, on each side of the River.” The editors of the Adams Papers did not identify the painting, but it is almost certainly The Collapse of a Wooden Bridge, by Casanova, who painted several such disaster paintings. It is now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Rennes and can be viewed online. I owe the identification of this painting to Christopher S. Wood.

18. JA, Autobiography, 3:305. According to Christopher S. Wood, the painting that Adams recalled was probably The Last Supper by Jacob Jordaens, now located in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

19. JA to AA, 27 Apr. 1777, AFC, 2:225; JA to AA, 28 Apr. 1777, ibid., 2:227; JA to John Trumbull, 1 Jan. 1817, PJA–MHS; JA to Benjamin Waterhouse, 26 Feb. 1817, ibid.

20. JA to AA, Apr.–May 1780, AFC, 3:332–33.

21. TJ to JM, 20 Sept. 1785, Republic of Letters, 1:385.

22. TJ to Benjamin Harrison, 12 Jan. 1785, PTJ, 7:600; George Washington to TJ, 1 Aug. 1786, ibid., 10:186; TJ to Nathaniel Macon, 22 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:384–87. By 1800 the much copied Houdon statue of Washington was erected in the Virginia state capitol. The statue by Antonio Canova was installed in the capitol of North Carolina in 1822, but was destroyed by fire in 1831.

23. TJ to Charles McPherson, 25 Feb. 1773, PTJ, 1:96.

24. TJ to Harrison, 12 Jan. 1785, PTJ, 7:600; Washington to TJ, 1 Aug. 1786, ibid., 10:186; TJ to Macon, 22 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 16:385–86.

25. JA to AA, post 12 May 1780, AFC, 3:342.

26. JA to Cotton Tufts, 9 Apr. 1764, AFC, 1:20.

27. JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:86; JA to James Warren, 17 June 1782, ibid., 13:128; JA to Benjamin Franklin, 27 July 1784, ibid., 16:285.

28. TJ to Charles Clay, 29 Jan. 1815, PTJ: RS, 8:212.

29. TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:389.

30. TJ to Marquis de Chastellux, 2 Sept. 1785, TJ: Writings, 826–28.

31. Ellen Randolph Coolidge to TJ, 1 Aug. 1825, in The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 454–57.

32. JA to Jeremy Belknap, 21 Mar. 1795, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 313–14. Prior to the Revolution, JA was involved in four cases in which slaves in Massachusetts sued for their freedom. In each case he was the attorney for the master. “Slavery,” in The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:48.

33. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 51.

34. JA to Robert J. Evans, 8 June 1819, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 647.

35. JA to Evans, 8 June 1819, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 647–48.

36. JA, Diary, 1:39.

37. Lewis Preston Summers, History of Southwest Virginia, 1746–1786 (Richmond: J. L. Hill Co., 1903), 79, 26, 27.

38. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed., Burnaby’s Travels Through North America (New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904), 55. Andrew Burnaby, an English clergyman, traveled in Virginia in 1759–1760.

39. TJ to William Wirt, 5 Aug. 1815, PTJ: RS, 8:641–46; William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817), 33–34; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 164.

40. TJ to Stevens Thompson Mason, 27 Oct. 1799, PTJ, 31:222; TJ to Thomas Leiper, 21 Feb. 1801, ibid., 33:50; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 78.

41. Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 49–50; Lucia Stanton, “Thomas Jefferson: Planter and Farmer,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 2012), 260–61; TJ to Joel Yancey, 17 Jan. 1819, in Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Jefferson’s Farm Book (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1999), 43.

42. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 46–47.

43. McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 47.

44. TJ, Autobiography, in TJ: Writings, 32, 3.

45. TJ, Autobiography, in TJ: Writings, 3.

46. JA, Autobiography, 3:256.

47. JA, Autobiography, 3:257; Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 4–6, 50–51.

48. JA, Diary, 1:12.

49. JA, Diary, 1:33.

50. JA, Diary, 1:25.

51. JA, Diary, 1:67–68.

52. JA, Diary, 1:7–8, 37, 10.

53. TJ to Nichols Lewis, 11 July 1788, PTJ, 13:339–44.

54. Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

55. Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Early Notebooks,” WMQ 42 (1985): 433–41.

56. TJ to Vancey, 17 Jan. 1819, in Betts, Jefferson’s Farm Book, 43.

57. James Reid, “The Religion of the Bible and Religion of K[ing] W[illiam] County Compared,” in The Colonial Virginia Satirist: Mid-Eighteenth Century Commentaries on Politics, Religion, and Society, ed. Richard Beale Davis, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new ser. 57, pt. 1 (1967), 567.

58. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 61.

59. JA to Joseph Hawley, 25 Nov. 1775, PJA, 3:316.

60. JA to Hawley, 25 Nov. 1775, PJA, 3:316; JA to James Warren, 15 June 1776, ibid., 4:316.

61. William Manning, a Billerica farmer and entrepreneur, claimed that in Massachusetts in the 1790s gentlemen constituted one out of eight male citizens. Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., “William Manning’s The Key of Libberty,” WMQ 13 (1956): 220. For a modernized version, see Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, eds., The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 138.

62. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 137.

63. George Washington to Lund Washington, 20 Aug. 1775, in Philander D. Chase, ed., The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985– ), 1:336; G. Washington to Major General Philip Schuyler, 28 July 1775, ibid., 1:188.

64. G. Washington to Richard Henry Lee, 29 Aug. 1775, in Chase, Papers of George Washington, 1:372; G. Washington to L. Washington, 20 Aug. 1775, ibid., 1:335. Other officers from outside New England had similar experiences with the New England soldiers. “The New England troops,” complained General Richard Montgomery, a former officer in the British army, “are the worst stuff imaginable. There is such an equality among them, that the officers have no authority. . . . The privates are all generals.” Hal T. Shelton, General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution: From Redcoat to Rebel (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 106.

65. JA, Diary, 1:198.

66. JA, Diary, 1:198.

67. JA, Diary, 2:107.

68. JA, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, in Works of JA, 6:185.

69. Lisa B. Lubow, “From Carpenter to Capitalist: The Business of Building in Postrevolutionary Boston,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, ed. Conrad Edrick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 181; Jayne E. Triber, A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

70. George Rudé, Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 37, 56–57.

71. Lubow, “From Carpenter to Capitalist,” 185; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 295–322.

72. JA, Diary, 2:38.

73. JA, Diary, 1:294.

74. JA, Diary, 1:54; JA, Diary, 2:99, 107, 105.

75. JA, Diary, 2:61–62, 38.

76. JA, “IV. ‘U’ to the Boston Gazette,” 18 July 1763, PJA, 1:71; Humphrey Ploughjogger to Philanthrop, ante 5 Jan. 1767, ibid., 1:179.

77. Fiske Kimball, “Jefferson and the Arts,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 87 (1943): 239.

78. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 49–87; TJ to John Page, 25 May 1766, PTJ, 1:19–20.

79. TJ to Marquis de Lafayette, 11 Apr. 1787, PTJ, 11:285.

80. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1986), 108.

81. TJ to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 24 Nov. 1808, TJ: Writings, 1195–96.

82. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels Through Life” Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 140–42.

TWO: CAREERS, WIVES, AND OTHER WOMEN

1. TJ to——, 26 July 1764, PTJ, 27:665.

2. L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., The Earliest Diary of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 49–50.

3. JA, Diary, 1:43.

4. JA to TJ, 14 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:374; JA to Nathan Webb, 1 Sept. 1755, PJA, 1:1; Norman S. Fiering, “The First American Enlightenment: Tillotson, Leverett, and Philosophical Anglicanism,” New England Quarterly 34 (1981): 307–44.

5. JA, Diary, 1:23

6. JA, Autobiography, 3:262.

7. JA, Diary, 1:43.

8. JA to Charles Cushing, 1 Apr. 1756, PJA, 1:12–13.

9. JA to Cushing, 1 Apr. 1756, PJA, 1:12–13; JA to Charles Cushing Jr., 13 Mar. 1817, Works of JA, 1:38. In the immediate aftermath of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Adams was overwhelmed by the military spirit that was running through the continent. “Oh that I was a Soldier!—I will be.—I am reading military Books—Every Body must and will be a soldier.” In 1776 he recalled he had once “longed more ardently to be a Soldier than I ever did to be a Lawyer.” But at last he had come to realize that the moment had passed; besides, he had also realized that what he was doing in the Continental Congress was as dangerous as being in the army. In his autobiography, he said that in 1776 he believed that “Courage and reading were all that were necessary to the formation of an Officer.” JA to AA, 29 May 1775, AFC, 1:207; JA to AA, 13 Feb. 1776, ibid., 1:347; JA, Autobiography, 3:446.

10. JA, Diary, 1:55, 53, 51.

11. JA, Diary, 1:8.

12. Jonathan Sewall to JA, 13 Feb. 1760, PJA, 1:39–40.

13. JA to Sewall, Feb. 1760, PJA, 1:41–42.

14. Butterfield, Earliest Diary of John Adams, 77; JA, Diary, 1:337.

15. JA, Diary, 1:80, 73, 72.

16. JA, Diary, 1:80, 73, 78.

17. JA, Diary, 1:337–38.

18. Douglas L. Wilson, Jefferson’s Books (Lynchburg, Va.: Monticello, 1993), 22.

19. JA to AA, 29 June 1774, AFC, 1:113–14.

20. JA to TJ, 28 Oct. 1814, Cappon, 2:440; TJ to JA, 10 June 1815, ibid., 2:443.

21. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 1:53.

22. JA, Diary, 1:220; JA to AA, 31 Jan. 1796, AFC, 11:154.

23. TJ to John Page, 25 Dec. 1762, PTJ, 1:5; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 70; JA, Diary, 1:174, 55.

24. TJ to L. H. Girardin, 15 Jan. 1815, PTJ: RS, 8:200.

25. On Jefferson’s law practice, see Frank L. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, Lawyer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986).

26. TJ to Elbridge Gerry, 28 Aug. 1802, PTJ, 38:308; TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 53, 40; TJ to Judge John Tyler, 17 June 1812, PTJ: RS, 5:135–36; TJ to Judge David Campbell, 28 Jan. 1810, ibid., 2:187.

27. JA to Charles Adams, 10 Jan. 1787, AFC, 7:428; JA, Diary, 1:117.

28. JA to William Tudor, 9 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

29. JA to John Wentworth, ? Oct. 1758, PJA, 1:26.

30. JA, Diary, 1:109, 72, 57.

31. JA, Diary, 1:108–9.

32. JA, Diary, 1:87, 118–19.

33. JA, Diary, 1:68–69, 83.

34. JA, Diary, 1:234.

35. Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009), 7.

36. AA to Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody, 12 Feb. 1796, AFC, 11:173.

37. AA to Peabody, 12 Feb. 1796, AFC, 11:173; Jon Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women (New York: Knopf, 2007), 143–44.

38. AA to JA, 31 Mar. 1776, AFC, 1:370.

39. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels Through Life” Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 144.

40. JA to AA, 28 Apr. 1776, AFC, 1:400.

41. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 441.

42. AA to JA, 22 Sept. 1774, AFC, 1:162.

43. McCullough, John Adams, 506.

44. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 80.

45. TJ to John Page, 7 Oct. 1763, PTJ, 1:11.

46. TJ to Page, 10 Oct. 1763, PTJ, 1:13–15.

47. TJ to William Fleming, 20 Mar. 1765, PTJ, 1:15–17.

48. TJ to Fleming, 20 Mar. 1765, PTJ, 1:15–17; Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 36; Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and British Atlantic World, c. 1700–1820,” in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 52–84.

49. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 35, 226–27. Historians have often described Jefferson’s headaches as migraines. But Kukla points out that TJ himself never used that term even though migraine headaches had been known for centuries. “Recent scholarship,” writes Kukla, “suggests that Jefferson suffered not from migraines but from severe muscular-contraction headaches triggered by tension or stress.” Ibid., 35, 226–28. See also John D. Battle Jr., “The ‘Periodical Head-achs’ of Thomas Jefferson,” Cleveland Clinic Quarterly 51 (1984): 531–39; and A. K. Thould, “The Health of Thomas Jefferson (1784–1826),” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London 23 (1989): 50–52.

50. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 47–51.

51. Douglas L. Wilson, ed., Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3–20; Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 47–73.

52. James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 154. The minor poet Pentadius, who wrote in the third or fourth century AD, entitled his verse “De Femina.” Jefferson did not identify the name of the poet or the poem.

53. Wilson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 82, 73.

54. Wilson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 118, 117; Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 37–39, 231–32; Brian Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 53–90.

55. JA to AA, 11 Aug. 1777, AFC, 2:306.

56. JA to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 8 Apr. 1815, PJA–MHS.

57. JA to TJ, 13 Feb. 1819, Cappon, 2:533.

58. JA, Autobiography, 3:260–61.

59. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 56; Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 60–61.

60. TJ to Robert Smith, 1 July 1805, Founders Online, National Archives.

61. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 69; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 462.

62. TJ to Thomas Adams, 20 Feb. 1771, PTJ, 1:62.

63. Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson (1871; repr., Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 44; Randall, Life of Jefferson, 1:64; Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 68.

64. TJ to Giovanni Fabbroni, 8 June 1778, PTJ, 2:195–96.

65. TJ to T. Adams, 1 June 1771, PTJ, 1:71.

66. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 68.

67. Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 167.

68. Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 144; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 141.

69. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 5.

70. Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” 56.

71. TJ to Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, 12 July 1788, PTJ, 13:347.

72. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 70; TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 4 Apr. 1790, in Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear Jr., eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 51.

73. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 70–71.

74. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 69; TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 46.

75. TJ to Marquis de Chastellux, 26 Nov. 1782, PTJ, 6:203.

76. TJ to John Banister Jr., 15 Oct. 1785, PTJ, 8:636.

77. Richmond Recorder, 1 Sept. 1802, PTJ, 38:323n–325n.

78. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 118–19; Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 196–97.

79. Joshua D. Rothman, “James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, 87.

80. TJ to Edward Coles, 25 Aug. 1814, PTJ: RS, 7:604.

81. “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave,” in James A. Bear Jr., ed., Jefferson at Monticello (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), 4.

82. Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” 167.

83. AA to TJ, 26 June 1787, Cappon 1:178; AA to TJ, 27 June 1787, ibid., 1:179; AA to TJ, 6 July 1787, ibid., 1:183.

84. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemings of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008), 283–84, 345.

85. Gordon-Reed, Hemings of Monticello, 250, 264; “The Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” in Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 246.

86. “Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” 246.

87. Gordon-Reed, Hemings of Monticello, 507.

88. For a particularly sensitive study of TJ’s relationship with Sally Hemings and his medically based sexual needs, see Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York: Perseus, 2005), 146–49, 153–60. Burstein persuasively emphasizes the number of medical treatises TJ owned and relied upon to maintain his health, including his sexual health.

89. “Memoirs of Madison Hemings,” 247.

90. Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” 4.

91. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 86.

92. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 88–89.

93. Abigail Adams 2d to JQA, Jan.–Feb 1786, AFC, 7:15–16.

94. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 102.

95. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 103.

96. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 104.

97. TJ to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1786, TJ: Writings, 866–99. Much to TJ’s surprise, Maria Cosway eventually retired to the Catholic convent and girls’ school that she had founded in Lodi in northern Italy.

THREE: THE IMPERIAL CRISIS

1. JA, Diary, 1:263.

2. JA, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” no.1, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 114–25.

3. JA, Diary, 1:280.

4. JA to Hezekiah Niles, 18 Feb. 1818, Works of JA, 10:288. On the “Dread of the Hierarchy” of the Anglican Church as a much neglected cause of the Revolution, see JA to Jonathan Mason, 31 Aug. 1820, PJA–MHS.

5. JA, “A Dissertation on the Canon,” JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 691.

6. JA to Adrian Van der Kemp, 20 May–11 June 1815, PJA–MHS; JA to Jedidiah Morse, 5 Dec. 1815, Works of JA, 10:190.

7. JA to Nathan Webb, 12 Oct. 1755, PJA, 1:5.

8. JA, “Instructions to Braintree’s Representatives,” Sept.–Oct. 1765, PJA, 1:133.

9. JA, Diary, 1:264–65.

10. JA, Diary, 2:11, 90, 55; 1:306.

11. “Admiralty–Criminal Jurisdiction,” in The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:275–335; JA to William Tudor, 30 Dec. 1816, PJA–MHS; JA to JQA, 8 Jan. 1808, ibid. In a diary entry of December 1769, six months after the trial, JA was still brooding over the trial and expressing resentment that he had not been allowed to present his learned argument, which “would be well worth the Perusal of the Public.” He thought that “a great Variety of useful Learning might be brought into a History of that Case. . . . I have half a Mind to undertake it.” JA, Diary, 1:347.

12. William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817), 60–61.

13. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 5; Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 1:58.

14. François La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America (London: R. Phillips, 1799), 1:408; JA to Richard Rush, 24 Nov. 1814, PJA–MHS.

15. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 51.

16. Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, ed. Howard C. Rice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 2:389–91.

17. TJ to John Page, 21 Feb. 1770, PTJ, 1:34–35.

18. JA, Autobiography, 3:294.

19. Replies to Philantrop, Defender of Governor Bernard, ante 9 Dec. 1766–16 Feb. 1767, PJA, 1:199, 195, 179, 189, 192.

20. JA, Diary, 1:337.

21. JA, Diary, 3:287–88; JA to Tudor, 25 Nov. 1816, PJA–MHS.

22. Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed., The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq. (1884–1886; repr., New York: Lenox Hill, 1971), 2:220.

23. I owe the idea of Adams as the consigliere of the Boston patriots to Hiller Zobel.

24. JA, Autobiography, 3:294.

25. Josiah Quincy Sr. to Josiah Quincy, 22 Mar. 1770, and Josiah Quincy to Josiah Quincy Sr., 26 Mar. 1770, in Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, eds., Portrait of a Patriot: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior: Correspondence and Published Political Writings (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2005–2014), 6:50–52.

26. JA, Autobiography, 3:292.

27. JA, Diary, 2:74. The defense of the soldiers and his patriotic activities had taken a toll on him. He collapsed with illness in 1771 and took a while to recover. He attributed his illness to the “labour and Anxiety” caused by his public service. JA, Autobiography, 3:294.

28. JA, Diary, 2:79. The March 5, 1773, oration that JA declined was delivered by Dr. Benjamin Church, who later became a spy for the British and a Loyalist.

29. JA, Diary, 2:77–78; JA, “On the Independence of the Judges,” 11 Jan.–22 Feb. 1773, PJA, 1:252–309; JA, Autobiography, 3:297–98.

30. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 1:49.

31. William Knox, Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies Reviewed (London, 1769), in The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2015), 1:638.

32. The Speeches of His Excellency Governor Hutchinson to the General Assembly . . . with the Answers of His Majesty’s Council and the House of Representatives Respectively (Boston, 1773), in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:10.

33. JA, Diary, 2:77.

34. JA, Autobiography, 3:305.

35. Speeches of His Excellency Governor Hutchinson, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:62–63.

36. Speeches of His Excellency Governor Hutchinson, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:68, 28, 39.

37. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1954), 198.

38. JA, Diary, 2:85–86; JA to James Warren, 17 Dec. 1773, PJA, 2:1.

39. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 6.

40. TJ, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg, Va., 1774), in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:99.

41. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 8–9.

42. TJ, A Summary View, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:96, 98.

43. H. Trevor Colbourn, “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” WMQ 15 (1958): 56–70. Jefferson had been reading An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, 1771) and had entered passages from it in his commonplace book.

44. TJ, A Summary View, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:105, 101, 96, 93.

45. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), 112.

46. TJ, A Summary View, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:101, 102.

47. TJ, A Summary View, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:106–7.

48. TJ, A Summary View, in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:91, 106.

49. JA, Autobiography, 3:298–302.

50. JA, Diary, 2:96, 93, 97.

51. JA, Diary, 2:120.

52. JA, Diary, 2:96; JA to James Warren, 25 June 1774, PJA, 2:99–100; JA to Warren, 17 July 1774, ibid., 2:109.

53. JA, Diary, 2:131.

54. JA to Tudor, 29 Sept. 1774, PJA, 2:176.

55. JA, Diary, 2:106, 121, 156.

56. JA, Diary, 1:92–93.

57. JA to Tudor, 29 Sept. 1774, PJA, 2:177.

58. “Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, Oct. 14, 1774,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation, 1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York: Norton, 1975), 245.

59. JA to AA, 9 Oct. 1774, AFC, 1:166–67.

60. JA, Diary, 2:156.

61. [JA] Novanglus, no. 1, 23 Jan. 1775, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 1:387.

62. [JA] Novanglus, no. 1, 23 Jan. 1775, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 1:387–88.

63. [JA] Novanglus, no. 5, 20 Feb. 1775, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 1:473.

64. Massachusettensis [Daniel Leonard], no. 1, 12 Dec. 1774, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 1:329; Massachusettensis, no. 5, 9 Jan. 1775, ibid., 1:366; Massachusettensis, no. 11, 20 Feb. 1775. ibid., 1:451; [JA] Novanglus, no. 7, 6 Mar. 1775, ibid., 1:516; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 351.

65. JA to William Tudor Sr., 18 Sept. 1818, PJA–MHS.

FOUR: INDEPENDENCE

1. JA to James Warren, 21 May 1775, PJA, 3:11.

2. JA to Timothy Pickering, 6 Aug. 1822, PJA–MHS.

3. JA to Pickering, 6 Aug. 1822, PJA–MHS.

4. Character of Mr. Adams by Benjamin Rush, post April 1790, PJA–MHS.

5. JA to AA, 17 June 1775, AFC, 1:216.

6. TJ and John Dickinson, “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms,” 6 July 1775, PTJ, 1:217.

7. JA to J. Warren, 24 July 1775, PJA, 3:89.

8. JA to William Tudor, 12 Apr. 1776, PJA, 4:118.

9. “Eulogy Pronounced at Boston, Massachusetts, August 2, 1826, by Daniel Webster,” in A Selection of Eulogies Pronounced in the Several States, in Honor of Those Illustrious Patriots and Statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Hartford: D. F. Robinson and Co., 1826), 212.

10. JA to Tudor, 12 Apr. 1776, PJA, 4:118; JA to AA, 19 Mar. 1776, AFC, 1:363.

11. JA to Mercy Otis Warren, 16 Apr. 1776, PJA, 4:124; JA to AA, 17 May 1776, AFC, 1:411.

12. Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904–1937), 1:342, 357.

13. JA, Autobiography, 3:335, 386; Carter Braxton to Landon Carter, 17 May 1775, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000), 4:19.

14. JA to J. Warren, 15 May 1776, PJA, 4:186; JA to AA, 17 May 1776, AFC, 1:410.

15. TJ to Thomas Nelson, 16 May 1776, PTJ, 1:292; Robert Morris to Horatio Gates, 27 Oct. 1776, and F. L. Lee to Carter, 9 Nov. 1776, in Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, 5:412, 462–63; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 128.

16. TJ, “Third Draft of Constitution,” PTJ, 1:356–64; George Wythe to TJ, 27 July 1776, PTJ, 1:476–77.

17. TJ, “Third Draft of Constitution,” PTJ, 1:357, 359–61.

18. TJ to Edmund Pendleton, 13 Aug. 1776, PTJ, 1:492.

19. TJ to Pendleton, 26 Aug. 1776, PTJ, 1:503–4.

20. Richard Alan Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 180.

21. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, ed. Franz Neumann (New York: Hafner, 1949), 1:bk. xi, sect. 6, p. 156; Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 190.

22. Adams, “Notes for an Oration at Braintree,” 1772, JA, Diary, 2:57–60.

23. JA to Francis Dana, 16 Aug. 1776, PJA, 4:466.

24. [JA] Novanglus, no. 7, 6 Mar. 1775, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 1:517; JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:87. In his draft for the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, JA included in the second paragraph of his chapter 2, The Frame of Government, the phrase “a government of laws and not of men.” The convention moved the phrase to article XXX of the declaration of rights. See “Report of a Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” 1 Sept. 1779, PJA, 8:242; “Massachusetts Constitution of 1780,” in Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, eds., The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1966), 447–48.

25. JA to Dana, 16 Aug. 1776, PJA, 4:466.

26. JA to M. O. Warren, 16 Apr. 1776, PJA, 4:124; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 121.

27. JA to M. O. Warren, 16 Apr. 1776, PJA, 4:124–25; JA to John Penn, 28 Apr. 1776, ibid., 4:149–50.

28. JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:91. Benjamin Rush recalled asking JA in 1777 whether Americans were qualified for republican government. “He said ‘No, and never should be ’till we were ambitious to be poor.’” BR to JA, 24 Feb. 1790, Letters of Rush, 1:535.

29. [JA], Boston Gazette, 8 Feb. 1773, PJA, 1:292.

30. JA, Diary, 2:60; JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:87.

31. JA to AA, 4 June 1777, AFC, 2:255.

32. JA to Dana, 16 Aug. 1776, PJA, 4:466–67; JA, “Thoughts on Government,” ibid., 4:88.

33. JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:89. Ryerson, in his John Adams’s Republic (p. 197), quotes this passage about the upper house acting “as a mediator” between the House of Representatives and the executive without assessing its implications for Adams’s theory of mixed government. By 1780 and more explicitly by 1787, the mediator in JA’s idea of balanced government was no longer the upper house; it had become the governor, standing between the people and the aristocracy.

34. Novanglus [JA], no. 5, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 1:457.

35. JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:89; JA to J. Warren, 12 May 1776, ibid., 4:182; JA to Dana, 16 Aug. 1776, ibid., 4:466.

36. JA to Richard Cranch, 2 Aug. 1776, AFC, 2:74.

37. TJ to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, TJ: Writings, 1396.

38. JA, “Thoughts on Government,” PJA, 4:86.

39. JA, Autobiography, 3:336–37.

40. JA to Pickering, 6 Aug. 1822, Works of JA, 2:512–14.

41. JA, Diary, 2:391–92.

42. JA to AA, 3 July 1776, AFC, 2:30.

43. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), 102.

44. TJ to JM, 30 Aug. 1823, Cappon, 3:1175-76; TJ to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825, TJ: Writings, 1501.

45. William Byrd, “History of the Dividing Line . . . 1728,” in Louis B. Wright, ed., The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 221; Gov. Fauquier to Jeffrey Amherst, 5 Oct. 1760, in Julie Richter, “The Impact of the Death of Governor Francis Fauquier on His Slaves and Their Families,” The Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter 18, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 2; Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett, eds., Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (New York: The Literary Guild, 1936), 57. In 1815 the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart summed up what the Western world had learned since the mid-eighteenth century: “That the capacities of the human mind have been in all ages the same, and the diversity of phenomena exhibited by our species is the result merely of the different circumstances in which men are placed, had been long received as an incontrovertible logical maxim.” Dugald Stewart, Dissertation, Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe (1815), quoted in Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 1.

46. Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, Vt., 1793), 78, 81.

47. Humphrey Ploughjogger to Philanthrop, ante 5 Jan. 1767, PJA, 1:179; Earl of Clarendon to William Pym, 27 Jan. 1766, ibid., 1:167–68; JA, “IV. ‘U’ to the Boston Gazette,” 18 July 1763, ibid., 1:71.

48. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. II, ch. I, p. 104.

49. JA to Jonathan Sewall, Feb. 1760, PJA, 1:42–43.

50. John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988), 107–8.

51. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 138–42.

52. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 58–62, 141–43.

53. TJ to Marquis de Chastellux, 7 June 1785, PTJ, 8:184–86; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 58–62, 141–42.

54. JA to BR, 25 Oct. 1809, Spur of Fame, 158.

55. JA to Sewall, Feb. 1760, PJA, 1:43.

56. Frank H. Sommer, “Emblem and Device: The Origins of the Great Seal of the United States,” Art Quarterly 24 (1964): 57–77.

57. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 32.

58. TJ to Charles François, Chevalier d’Anmours, 30 Nov. 1780, PTJ, 4:168.

59. TJ to John Page, 30 July 1776, PTJ, 1:482.

60. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 32.

61. TJ to Pendleton, 26 Aug. 1776, PTJ, 1:504.

62. TJ, “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital” (1776–1786), PTJ, 2:492–507; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 269.

63. TJ, “Notes on Locke and Shaftesbury,” Oct.–Dec. 1776, PTJ, 1:548.

64. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 43–44, 44.

65. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 140.

66. JA to Patrick Henry, 3 June 1776, PJA, 4:235.

67. JA to John Lowell, 12 June 1776, PJA, 4:250; JA to J. Warren, 16 Apr. 1776, ibid., 4:122; JA to John Winthrop, 23 June 1776, ibid., 4:332–33.

68. JA to J. Warren, 7 July 1777, PJA, 5:242.

69. JA to J. Warren, 22 Apr. 1776, PJA, 4:137.

70. James Otis, quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 476; JA to Samuel Freeman, 27 Apr. 1777, PJA, 5:161.

71. JA to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, PJA, 4:208.

72. TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, 11 May 1788, PTJ, 13:151–52; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 507.

73. AA to JA, 31 Mar. 1776, AFC, 1:370.

74. JA to AA, 14 Aug. 1776, AFC, 1:382.

75. AA to JA, 17 June 1782, AFC, 4:328.

76. AA to Mary Cranch, 1809, AFC–MHS.

77. On the various interpretations of Abigail, see Edith B. Gelles, “The Abigail Industry,” WMQ 45 (1988), 656–83. See also Edith B. Gelles, First Thoughts: Life and Letters of Abigail Adams (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998); and Edith B. Gelles, Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (New York: William Morrow, 2009).

78. AA to Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody, 19 July 1799, AFC–MHS.

FIVE: MISSIONS ABROAD

1. JA to JQA, 27 July 1777, AFC, 2:289–90.

2. JA to AA, 26 Apr. 1777, AFC, 2:224; JA to AA, 15 May 1777, ibid., 2:239.

3. JA to AA, 8 July 1777, AFC, 2:277; AA to JA, 5 Aug. 1777, ibid., 2:301.

4. JA to AA, 10 July 1777, AFC, 2:278; JA to AA, 16 Mar. 1777, ibid., 2:176–77.

5. JA to AA, 16 Mar. 1777, AFC, 2:176–77.

6. TJ to JA, 16 May 1777, Cappon, 1:4; JA to TJ, 26 May 1777, ibid., 1:6.

7. Edward Rutledge to TJ, 12 Feb. 1779, PTJ, 2:234.

8. TJ to Giovanni Fabbroni, 8 June 1778, PTJ, 2:195.

9. TJ to David Rittenhouse, 19 July 1778, PTJ, 2:203. Actually, Benjamin Franklin had argued the opposite, saying that participation in public affairs always trumped science. In 1750 he cautioned his fellow scientist Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant governor of New York, not to “let your Love of Philosophical Amusements have more than its due weight with you. Had Newton been Pilot of but a single common Ship the finest of his discoveries would scarce have excus’d, or attone’d for his abandoning the Helm one Hour in Time of Danger, how much less if she had carried the Fate of the Commonwealth.” Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 67.

10. Edmund Pendleton to TJ, 11 May 1779, PTJ, 2:266.

11. TJ to William Phillips, 25 June 1779, PTJ, 3:15.

12. JA to AA, 19 Aug. 1777, AFC, 2:319.

13. TJ, “Draft of a Declaration on the British Treatment of Ethan Allen,” 2 Jan. 1776, PTJ, 1:276.

14. TJ to Governor Patrick Henry, 27 Mar. 1779, PTJ, 2:237–44.

15. See Don N. Hagist, “The Women of the British Army in America,” http://www.revwar75.com/library/hagist/britwomen.htm. I owe this reference to Philip C. Mead.

16. Johann Ludwig von Unger to TJ, 13 Nov. 1780, PTJ, 4:117; TJ to Johann Ludwig von Unger, 30 Nov. 1780, ibid., 4:171; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 295.

17. TJ to Edmund Randolph, 29 Nov. 1775, PTJ, 1:268–70.

18. Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labour for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 132.

19. TJ to William Jones, 5 Jan. 1786, PTJ, 11:16; TJ to Alexander McCaul, 19 Apr. 1788, ibid., 9:388; TJ to John Jay, 23 Apr. 1786, ibid., 9:404; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 48–49, 104–5.

20. Gary B. Nash, “The African Americans’ Revolution,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 261. Historians, following the often exaggerated claims of the slaveholding planters, have tended to overestimate the numbers of runaway slaves. See Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” WMQ 62 (2005): 243–64.

21. TJ to Marquis de Lafayette, 10 May 1781, PTJ, 5:113.

22. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 126.

23. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 45.

24. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 361.

25. TJ to Francis Hopkinson, 13 Mar. 1789, PTJ, 14:650–51.

26. TJ to Lafayette, 4 Aug. 1781, PTJ, 6:112.

27. TJ to E. Randolph, 16 Sept. 1781, PTJ, 6:118.

28. E. Randolph to TJ, 9 Oct. 1781, PTJ, 6:128.

29. TJ to George Washington, 28 Oct. 1781, PTJ, 6:129.

30. TJ to James Monroe, 20 May 1782, PTJ, 6:184–86.

31. JM to E. Randolph, 11 June 1782, in JM, Papers, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962– ), 4:333.

32. JA, Diary, 2:351.

33. JA, Autobiography, 3:418–19.

34. Works of JA, 1:58n.

35. JA to AA, 12 Apr. 1778, AFC, 3:17, 10; JA to Richard Henry Lee, 12 Feb. 1779, PJA, 7:407; JA to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 8 Apr. 1815, PJA–MHS.

36. JA, Diary, 2:367; JA to Thomas McKean, 20 Sept. 1779, PJA, 8:162.

37. JA, Autobiography, 4:36; JA to Mercy Otis Warren, 18 Dec. 1778, PJA, 7:282; JA to AA, 25 Apr. 1778, AFC, 3:17; JA, Autobiography, 4:47.

38. JA to James Warren, 2 Dec. 1778, PJA, 7:245; JA, Autobiography, 4:47.

39. JA to Samuel Adams, 21 May 1778, JA, Diary, 4:107.

40. JA to AA, 28 Feb. 1779, AFC, 3:181.

41. JA to AA, 20 Feb. 1779, AFC, 3:175.

42. JA to AA, 13 Nov. 1779, AFC, 3:324.

43. JA, Autobiography, 4:247.

44. Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Huntington, 9 Aug. 1780, in Leonard Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959– ), 33:162.

45. John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (1992; repr., New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 228.

46. Because Jefferson originally declined the invitation to join the peace commission and later was prevented from sailing and Henry Laurens was captured on the high seas by the British and imprisoned in the Tower of London, only Adams, Jay, and Franklin negotiated the final treaty with Britain.

47. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 53.

48. JA, Autobiography, 3:336.

49. Benjamin Vaughn to TJ, 6 July–3 Nov. 1790, PTJ, 17:619–20.

50. “TJ’s Observations on Démeunier’s Manuscript,” 1786, PTJ, 10:58.

51. JA to the President of Congress, 15 Oct. 1781, PJA, 12:15. See also JA to Franklin, 25 Aug. 1781, in Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000), 14:469–70. John Ferling and Lewis E. Braverman have suggested that Adams may have suffered from hyperthyroidism, which would account for some of his ailments and his occasional bouts of illness. See their article “John Adams’s Health Reconsidered,” WMQ 55 (1998): 83–104.

52. TJ to JM, 14 Feb. 1783, PTJ, 6:241.

53. JA to Jonathan Jackson, 8 Nov. 1782, PJA, 14:44.

54. JA to Arthur Lee, 10 Oct. 1782, PJA, 14:525.

55. Franklin to Robert Livingston, 22 July 1783, in Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 195. TJ, like many others, learned of Franklin’s characterization of JA and invoked it later himself. See TJ to JM, 29 July 1789, PTJ, 15:316.

56. Elbridge Gerry to AA, 18 Sept. 1783, AFC, 5:250.

57. JA to the President of Congress, 5 Feb. 1783, PJA, 14:242.

58. JM to TJ, 6 May 1783, PTJ, 6:205; JA to the President of Congress, 5 Feb. 1783, PJA, 14:242–45. JA’s reasoning was based on the Dutch precedent. Before the Netherlands formally recognized the United States, JA had been commissioned to negotiate a Dutch-American commercial treaty. Once diplomatic relations were established, he had become the first minister to the Dutch republic. He thus assumed that the authority to negotiate a commercial treaty with a foreign country was inseparable from the authority normally granted to the minister of a foreign country.

59. JA to C. W. F. Dumas, 28 Mar. 1783, PJA, 14:373.

60. JA to John Jay, 10 Aug. 1785, Works of JA, 8:298.

61. American Commissioners to Friederich Wilhelm, Baron von Thulemeier, 14 Mar. 1785, PTJ, 8:28.

62. JA to Franklin, 17 Aug. 1780, PJA, 10:78.

63. TJ to JA, 28 July 1785, PTJ, 8:317–19. See also TJ to JA, 31 July 1785, Cappon, 1:46–47, where TJ noted JA’s objection to placing natives and aliens on an equal footing.

64. JA to TJ, 4 Sept. 1785, Cappon, 1:61; JA to TJ, 9 Oct. 1787, ibid., 1:202.

65. JA to James Warren, 27 Aug. 1784, PJA, 16:309.

66. JA to AA, 26 July 1784, AFC, 5:399.

67. Adams believed that what he and the other diplomats were doing abroad was indispensable. Indeed, he told James Warren in 1784 that “the Character and the System of our Country had been entirely decided by our foreign affairs.” JA to Warren, 30 June 1784, PJA, 16:262.

68. TJ to JM, 25 May 1788, Republic of Letters, 540; TJ to AA, 25 Sept. 1785, Cappon, 1:71.

69. TJ to Franklin, 13 Aug. 1777, PTJ, 2:27; TJ to Charles Bellini, 30 Sept. 1785, ibid., 8:568; TJ to AA, 21 June 1785, Cappon, 1:34. See also Gaye Wilson, “‘Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe’: Thomas Jefferson and the Creation of an American Image Abroad,” in Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leonard Sadosky et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 155–78.

70. JA to Abigail Adams 2d, 14 Apr. 1783, AFC, 5:123; TJ to Charles Bellini, 30 Sept. 1785, PTJ, 8:569.

71. TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, 7 Feb. 1787, PTJ, 11:122–23; TJ to Bellini, 30 Sept. 1785, ibid., 8:569.

72. TJ to John Banister Jr., 15 Oct. 1785, PTJ, 8:636–37.

73. AA to TJ, 6 July 1787, Cappon, 1:183.

74. AA to Elizabeth Cranch, 8 May 1785, AFC, 6:119.

75. AA to E. Cranch, 8 May 1785, AFC, 6:119.

76. JA to TJ, 22 Jan. 1825, Cappon, 2:606–7.

77. AA to TJ, 6 June 1785, Cappon, 1:28.

78. JA to BR, 25 Oct. 1809, Spur of Fame, 159.

79. Arthur Lee to JA, 12 Aug. 1784, PJA, 16:296; JA to Arthur Lee, 31 Jan. 1785, ibid., 16:510; JA to William Knox, 15 Dec. 1784, ibid., 16:469; JA to Gerry, 12 Dec. 1784, ibid., 16:451; JA to BR, 25 Oct. 1809, Spur of Fame, 159.

80. AA to Mary Cranch, 5 Sept. 1784, AFC, 5:442.

81. TJ to JM, 20 June 1787, PTJ, 11:482.

82. TJ to AA, 4 Sept. 1785, Cappon, 1:57–58.

83. TJ to JM, 25 May 1788, Republic of Letters, 540. For a superb account of AA’s management skills and her financial talents, see Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009).

84. TJ to JA, 25 May 1785, Cappon, 1:23.

85. JA to TJ, 1 Mar. 1787, Cappon, 1:177.

86. AA to TJ, 6 June 1785, Cappon, 1:29; TJ to AA, 21 June 1785, ibid., 1:33; AA to TJ, 12 Aug. 1785, PTJ, 27:749.

87. TJ to AA, 25 Sept. 1785, Cappon, 1:69. In 1788 TJ asked AA if he could continue corresponding with her, to which she gratefully agreed. But it was sixteen years before Abigail and Jefferson resumed their correspondence, which soon went sour.

88. TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, 21 Sept. 1788, PTJ, 16:623–24; TJ to AA, 27 Dec. 1785, Cappon, 1:110; TJ to AA, 9 Aug. 1786, ibid., 1:149.

89. TJ to JM, 25 May 1788, Republic of Letters, 540; TJ to JM, 30 Jan.–5 Feb. 1787, in JM, Papers, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–1991), 9:247–52. TJ’s critical comments were written in code.

90. TJ to David Ross, 8 May 1786, PTJ, 9:474.

91. Works of JA, 1:420.

92. JA, “Notes on a Tour of England with Thomas Jefferson,” April 1786, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 49–51.

93. TJ, “Notes of a Tour of English Gardens,” Apr. 1786, PTJ, 9:369.

94. JA, “Notes on a Tour of England with Thomas Jefferson,” 49–51.

SIX: CONSTITUTIONS

1. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 117.

2. [JA] Novanglus, no. 8, 20 Mar. 1775, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 540.

3. [Charles Inglis], The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, in Certain Strictures on a Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense (1776), in The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 1773–1776, ed. Gordon S. Wood (New York: Library of America, 2015), 2:721.

4. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 261.

5. JA, Boston Gazette, 8 Feb. 1773, PJA, 1:292.

6. TJ, “Drafts of the Virginia Constitution” (1776), PTJ, 1:345, 354, 364.

7. TJ, “Bill for Establishing Freedom of Religion” (1779), PTJ, 2:546–47.

8. TJ, Proposed Revision of the Virginia Constitution, PTJ, 6:280; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 121–25.

9. JA to BR, 10 Sept. 1779, PJA, 8:140.

10. JM, “Vices of the Political System of the United States, April 1787,” in James Madison: Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove (New York: Library of America, 1999), 69–80.

11. Adams had liked the term “Commonwealth,” which Virginia had employed in its constitution of 1776, and had wanted other states, including Massachusetts, to adopt it. JA to Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, 21 July 1776, PJA, 4:397; JA to Francis Dana, 16 Aug. 1776, ibid., 4:466. Near the end of the convention of 1779–1780, an unnamed delegate, not JA, proposed that the state rename itself the “Commonwealth of Oceana,” after James Harrington’s seventeenth-century republican utopia. PJA, 8:261–62n.

12. BR to JA, 12 Oct. 1779, PJA, 8:200.

13. Report of a Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 28–31 Oct, 1779, PJA, 8:236–71. For the final adopted Massachusetts constitution, see Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, eds. The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1966), 441–72. See also Robert J. Taylor, “Construction of the Massachusetts Constitution,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 90 (1980): 317–40.

14. Report of a Constitution or Form of Government, 8:260.

15. JA, “The Earl of Clarendon to William Pym,” 27 Jan. 1766, PJA, 1:168. Some Virginian planters in 1776 had found Mason’s softer statement that men were “by nature equally free and independent” too radical for a slaveholding society and had forced the addition of the phrase “when they enter into a state of society,” thus excluding the black slaves from the declaration of rights. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), 195.

16. David H. Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” WMQ 21 (1964): 214.

17. Taylor, “Construction of the Massachusetts Constitution,” 333.

18. JA to Elbridge Gerry, 4 Nov. 1779, PJA, 8:276.

19. JA, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, in Works of JA, 4:358; [JA] Novanglus, 6 Mar. 1775, PJA, 2:314.

20. Report of a Constitution or Form of Government, PJA, 8:257.

21. John Louis De Lolme, The Constitution of England; or, An Account of the English Government, ed. David Lieberman (1784; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007).

22. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, ed. Franz Neumann (New York: Hafner, 1949), 1:bk. xi, sect. 6, p. 156.

23. Adams, Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies (1776), in JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1775–1783, 2:52.

24. De Lolme, Constitution of England, book II, chs. i–ii, pp. 139–52.

25. Adams, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:358. De Lolme’s Constitution of England was one of the few books the newly elected vice president in 1789 asked Abigail to have sent to him in New York. JA to AA, 24 May 1789, AFC, 8:358.

26. “Massachusetts Constitution,” in Handlin and Handlin, Popular Sources of Political Authority, 448.

27. Theophilus Parsons, Essex Result (1778), in Handlin and Handlin, Popular Sources of Political Authority, 349, 333–34.

28. “Address of the Convention,” March 1780, in Handlin and Handlin, Popular Sources of Political Authority, 437. The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 granted the senate the power to amend but not the power to initiate money bills. It soon became evident that this limitation, applied in emulation of the practice of the House of Lords, made no sense if the senate was supposed to represent the property of the state. Many pointed out the anomaly, and by the mid-1780s the senate had begun ignoring this constitutional limitation.

29. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 217.

30. TJ to Edmund Pendleton, 26 Aug. 1776, PTJ, 1:508.

31. TJ to François Barbé de Marbois, 5 Dec. 1783, PTJ, 6:374.

32. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 120.

33. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 126–28, 148.

34. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 118.

35. Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 115.

36. JA to Benjamin Franklin, 27 July 1784, PJA, 16:285.

37. Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making It a Benefit to the World (London, 1784; repr., Boston: Powars and Willis, 1784), 76. The letter is reprinted in Works of JA, 4:278–81.

38. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 247–55.

39. “Address of the Convention,” 437.

40. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 119; TJ, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg, Va., 1774), in Wood, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 2:106.

41. Thomas Brand Hollis to JA, 15 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

42. JA to Richard Price, 4 Feb. 1787, PJA–MHS.

43. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 6:10, 95.

44. TJ to JA, 6 Feb. 1787, Cappon, 1:170.

45. JA to TJ, 13 July 1813, Cappon, 2:355.

46. JA to Count Sarsfield, 21 Jan. 1786, Works of JA, 8:370.

47. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911, 1937), 1:288.

48. JA, Defence, in JA: Writings of the New Nation, 158.

49. For a rich account of JA’s obsession with oligarchy, see Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of Oligarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016). The theory of the “iron law of oligarchy” was developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911).

50. JA, Diary, 2:38; 1:207.

51. JA to John Trumbull, 12 Mar. 1790, PJA–MHS.

52. Apparently, neither C. Bradley Thompson nor Richard Alan Ryerson in their monumental works on JA’s political theory (Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998]; Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016]), consulted the essays by “The Free Republican,” even though they both knew that Lincoln’s essays anticipated some of the same issues of balanced government as Adams.

53. Free Republican, no. 5, Independent Chronicle, 22 Dec. 1785, in Essays by “The Free Republican” 1784–1786, ed. Philip C. Mead and Gordon S. Wood (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2016), 37–38.

54. Free Republican, no. 5, Independent Chronicle, 22 Dec. 1785, in Mead and Wood, Essays by “The Free Republican,” 38–39.

55. Free Republican, no. 5, Independent Chronicle, 22 Dec. 1785, in Mead and Wood, Essays by “The Free Republican,” 39; JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 6:185.

56. Unlike Benjamin Lincoln, JA at one point felt compelled to explicitly deny that America contained different orders of men, by which he simply meant, however, that there was no hereditary nobility in America. “Out of office,” he said, “all men are of the same species, and of one blood.” He made this comment out of defensive reaction to French charges that by creating senates Americans had recognized a European-type nobility. Yet his analysis clearly presumed that his aristocracy was an order or power of society different and distinct from that of the common people. All “three branches of power,” he said, “have an unalterable foundation in nature,” and they existed “in every society, natural and artificial.” JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:380, 100.

57. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:395.

58. Free Republican, no. 3, Independent Chronicle, 8 Dec., 1785, in Mead and Wood, Essays by “The Free Republican,” 23. In his Defence, JA accurately quoted from Jonathan Swift’s A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, with the Consequences They Had upon Both Those States (London, 1701), 5: “The true meaning of a balance of power is best conceived by considering what the nature of a balance is. It supposes three things,—first, the part which is held, together with the hand that holds it; and then the two scales, with whatever is weighed therein.” JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:385.

59. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:557; 6:128.

60. In December 1785, JA said that young Lincoln was “personally unknown to me,” but he believed that he had “an undoubted Character as a Man of Honour and abilities in his Profession” of law. JA to Elizabeth Brown, 10 Dec. 1785, PJA–MHS.

61. Free Republican, no. 10, Independent Chronicle, 9 Feb. 1786 in Mead and Wood, Essays by “The Free Republican,” 74–75.

62. JA to Hollis, 11 June 1790, PJA–MHS.

63. JA to TJ, 6 Dec. 1787, Cappon, 1:213; JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:290, 414.

64. JA to President of Congress, 27 May 1781, PJA, 11:340; JA to AA, 4 Sept. 1780, AFC, 3:410.

65. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:290, 414. De Lolme had written that a seat in the House of Lords was supposedly a reward, but in fact for the recipient it was “a kind of Ostracism.” The “favourite of the People” appointed to the House of Lords, said De Lolme, “does not even find in his newly acquired dignity, all the increase of greatness and eclat that might at first be imagined.” Instead, he discovers that he has taken “a great step towards the loss of that power which might render him formidable.” William Pitt’s elevation to the House of Lords as Lord Chatham was often cited as an example of this point. De Lolme, Constitution of England, bk. II, ch. i, pp. 147, 145–46.

66. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 1:512–13.

67. Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 2:202–3, 209–10.

68. Free Republican, no. 10, Independent Chronicle, 9 Feb. 1786, in Mead and Wood, Essays by “The Free Republican,” 67.

69. JA to Marquis de Lafayette, 28 Mar. 1784, PJA, 16:104.

70. AA to JA, 21 July 1783, AFC, 5:210.

71. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:393.

72. TJ to William Duane, 1 Oct. 1812, PTJ: RS, 5:366; TJ to Richard Henry Lee, 17 June 1779, PTJ, 1: 298; TJ to Francis Willis, 18 Apr. 1790, ibid., 16:352–53; TJ to Jean Nicholas Démeunier, 29 Apr. 1795, ibid., 28:340–41.

73. JA to John Jebb, 21 Aug. 1785, 10 Sept. 1785, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 29–38.

74. JA to Elbridge Gerry, 4 Nov. 1779, PJA, 8:276.

75. JA to TJ, 1 Mar. 1787, Cappon, 1:176.

76. Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 43; JA to BR, 28 Aug. 1811, Old Family Letters, 357; JA to John Taylor, 21 Jan. 1815, Works of JA, 6:515. Adams told Francis Adrian Van der Kemp that the Defence “was not the fruit of twenty years labor, like Montesquieu’s and Gibbon’s,” but “was written in haste.” If he had more time, “the Book would have been shorter by one half.” JA to Van der Kemp, 25 Dec. 1799, 30 Jan. 1800, PJA–MHS.

77. JA to Price, 20 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

78. George William Van Cleve, “The Anti-Federalists’ Toughest Challenge: Paper Money, Debtor Relief, and the Ratification of the Constitution,” JER 34 (2014): 549.

79. Cotton Tufts to JA, 15 May 1787, PJA–MHS.

80. Richard Cranch to JA, 24 May 1787, AFC, 8:59–60.

81. JA to Franklin, 27 Jan. 1787, PJA–MHS; JA to James Warren, 9 Jan. 1787, in Massachusetts Historical Society, ed., Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917–1925), 2:281.

SEVEN: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

1. JA to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776, AFC, 2:21.

2. JA to James Warren, 13 Apr. 1783, PJA, 14:402–3; JA to Stephen Higginson, 4 Oct. 1785, ibid., 17:492.

3. JA to John Jay, 8 May 1785, PJA, 17:102.

4. JA to Samuel Adams, 15 Aug. 1785, PJA, 17:336.

5. JA to Elbridge Gerry, 25 Apr. 1785, PJA, 17:42.

6. JA to J. Warren, 9 Jan. 1787, in Massachusetts Historical Society, ed., Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917–1925), 2:280.

7. JA to Matthew Robinson-Morris, 23 Mar. 1786, PJA–MHS.

8. JA, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, in Works of JA, 4:557.

9. JA to Richard Price, 20 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

10. JA to William Walter, 24 Oct. 1797, PJA–MHS.

11. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392.

12. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392.

13. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392.

14. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392; Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., “William Manning’s The Key of Libberty,” WMQ 13 (1956): 218–23.

15. Morison, “William Manning’s The Key of Libberty,” 218–23. Michel Merrill and Sean Wilentz have edited a modern edition, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), but unfortunately they have corrected all his phonetic spelling. In his opening remarks Manning described the 1785–1786 “Free Republican” essays of Benjamin Lincoln Jr. as the best thing he had ever read on the division “between the few & Many.” Manning never mentioned JA’s Defence.

16. JA, Discourses on Davila (1805; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 91; Antonio Pace, ed., Luigi Castiglioni’s Viaggio: Travels in the United States of North America, 1785–87 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 335.

17. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 5:457.

18. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 162–63.

19. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 162–63; David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967).

20. Philanthropos [David Rice], Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy (Lexington, Ky., 1792), 17–18.

21. TJ to Jay, 23 Aug. 1785, PTJ, 8:426.

22. TJ to David Williams, 14 Nov. 1803, PTJ, 41:728.

23. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392–93, 397.

24. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392–93, 397.

25. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:406–7.

26. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:399–400.

27. TJ to Jay, 23 Aug. 1785, PTJ, 8:426.

28. Adams, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:401; Mercy Otis Warren to JA, 28 July 1807, recalling a comment JA made in 1788, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 5th ser., 4 (1878): 361.

29. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:557.

30. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:290, 355, 585.

31. TJ to JA, 23 Feb. 1787, Cappon, 1:174–75. Joyce Appleby, “The Adams-Jefferson Rupture and the First French Translation of John Adams’ Defence,” AHR 73 (1968): 1084–91, has made a persuasive case that TJ permitted the “suppression” of a translation. Certainly his liberal French friends eager to reform their own government found the Defence and its preoccupation with a separate legislative house for an aristocracy deeply objectionable and probably prevented any translation. Whether TJ connived at the suppression of a translation or simply quietly accepted what his French friends wanted seems to be the point of disagreement between Appleby and Julian Boyd. See Julian P. Boyd, “Rights of Man: The ‘Contest of Burke and Paine in America,’” PTJ, 20:279.

32. TJ, “Observations on Démeunier’s Manuscript,” 1786, PTJ, 10:52.

33. TJ to JA, 23 Feb. 1787, Cappon, 1:174.

34. TJ to George Washington, 16 Apr. 1784, PTJ, 7:105–8; TJ to Washington, 14 Nov. 1786, ibid., 10:532; TJ, “Observations on Démeunier’s Manuscript,” 10:49–52.

35. TJ, “Observations on Démeunier’s Manuscript,” 10:52.

36. JA to M. O. Warren, 7 May 1789, PJA–MHS; JA to TJ, 30 Nov. 1786, Cappon, 1:156; AA to TJ, 29 Jan. 1787, Cappon, 1:168.

37. TJ to AA, 21 Dec. 1786, Cappon, 1:159; TJ to AA, 22 Feb. 1787, ibid., 1:173.

38. TJ to William Stephens Smith, 13 Nov. 1787, PTJ, 12:356.

39. TJ to Edward Carrington, 16 Jan. 1787, PTJ, 11:49.

40. TJ to JA, 30 Aug. 1787, Cappon, 1:196; TJ to JA, 13 Nov. 1787, ibid., 1:212.

41. JA to TJ, 6 Dec. 1787, Cappon, 1:213–14.

42. While Madison was describing to the Italian physician and agent for Virginia during the Revolution Philip Mazzei that “the real danger to America & to liberty lies in the defects of energy & stability in the present establishments of the United States,” TJ was telling JM that he was “not a friend to a very energetic government—It is always oppressive.” JM to Philip Mazzei, 8 Oct. 1788, in JM, Papers, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–1991), 11:278; TJ to JM, 20 Dec. 1787, Republic of Letters, 514.

43. TJ to JM, 20 Dec. 1787, Republic of Letters, 513–14. Concern for what TJ might think about his fears of excessive democracy in the states led JM to revise some of his notes of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).

44. TJ to Carrington, 21 Dec. 1787, PTJ, 12:446.

45. JA to TJ, 10 Nov. 1787, Cappon, 1:210; TJ to John Jay, 23 May 1788, PTJ, 13:190; JM to TJ, 17 Oct. 1788, ibid., 14:16–21; TJ to Francis Hopkinson, 13 Mar. 1789, ibid., 14:650–51.

46. TJ to AA, 9 Aug. 1786, Cappon, 1:149.

47. TJ to Madame de Bréhan, 9 May 1788, PTJ, 13:150.

48. TJ to Richard Price, 8 Jan. 1789, PTJ, 14:421.

49. JA to TJ, 10 Dec. 1787, Cappon, 1:214–15.

50. TJ to JA, 2 Aug. 1788, Cappon, 1:230.

51. TJ to James Monroe, 9 Aug. 1788, PTJ, 13:489.

52. TJ to Washington, 4 Dec. 1788, PTJ, 14:330.

53. TJ to Jay, 8 May 1789, PTJ, 15:110–11.

54. TJ to Jay, 29 June 1789, PTJ, 15:223.

55. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 96.

56. TJ to Count de Jean Diodati-Tronchin, 3 Aug. 1789, PTJ, 15:325–26; TJ to Edward Bancroft, 5 Aug. 1789, ibid., 15:333.

57. TJ, Autobiography, TJ: Writings, 92, 97.

58. JA to TJ, 1 Mar. 1789, Cappon, 1:236.

59. JM to TJ, 17 Oct. 1788, Republic of Letters, 1:563.

60. Prior to the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, the electors simply voted for two individuals for president, only one of whom could be from the same state as the elector; the one with the most votes became president, the runner-up, vice president.

61. JA to BR, 17 May 1789, Old Family Letters, 36; JA to William Tudor, 9 May 1789, PJA–MHS; JA to M. O. Warren, 2 Mar. 1789, ibid.

62. A Farmer of New Jersey [John Stevens], Observations on Government, Including Some Animadversions on Mr. Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America: and on Mr. De Lolme’s Constitution of England (New York, 1787). The French liberals wrongly attributed the work to William Livingston, the longtime governor of New Jersey.

63. C. Bradley Thompson, for example, says that Stevens and JA did not differ over the form of government—a bicameral legislature with an independent executive. “Stevens’s principal disagreement with Adams was over how that government was to be explained and justified.” That’s correct, but Thompson seems to believe that such an explanation and a justification were just minor matters. “For Stevens, government was an artificial construction and delegation of the people’s power. Adams saw government in the very same way but he also thought it necessary to go a step further and take into account the social manifestations of human nature.” Those “social manifestations of human nature” involved the inevitable emergence of aristocracies that, according to Adams, had to be ostracized in upper houses of the legislatures: in other words, JA believed in social orders like those in the English constitution—precisely Stevens’s point. C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 255.

64. [Stevens], Observations on Government, 25.

65. Examen du Governement D’Angleterre, Comparé aux Constitutions des États-Unis (Paris, 1789). Joyce Appleby says that TJ brought home with him a copy of the Examen though he never mentioned the book to JA. Appleby, “The Adams-Jefferson Rupture,” 1091.

66. Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 81–85.

67. TJ to JM, 6 Sept. 1789, Republic of Letters, 1:631–36.

68. JM to TJ, 4 Feb. 1790, Republic of Letters, 1:650–53.

69. JA to TJ, 25 Aug. 1787, Cappon, 1:192; JA to TJ, 9 Oct. 1787, ibid., 1:202; Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 4 March 1789–5, March 1791, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen Veit, vol. 9, The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 254.

70. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 161.

71. TJ to Baron von Geismar, 6 Sept. 1785, PTJ, 8:500; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 156–72.

72. TJ to William Short, 8 Jan. 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 10:332–34. See also Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 204, for the difficulty TJ had in 1789–1790 adjusting to “the new political world.”

73. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 54, 74–75; JA to Tudor, 9 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

74. TJ to Short, 8 Jan. 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), 16:93–95.

75. Louise Burnham Dunbar, A Study of Monarchical Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801 (1922; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 99.

76. JA to Benjamin Lincoln, 19 June 1789, PJA–MHS; TJ to Short, 8 Jan. 1825, in Writings of TJ, 10:332.

77. Diary of Maclay, 9; Baltimore Maryland Journal, 6 July 1787.

78. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 4:392.

79. Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution (New York: Library of America, 1993), 2:760, 770.

80. Adams later declared that an aristocrat was anyone who could influence a single person, which certainly expanded the category of the aristocracy. JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:398.

81. JA to BR, 9 June 1789, Old Family Letters, 37.

82. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 5:453.

83. JA to Roger Sherman, 17 July 1789, Works of JA, 6:427–28; Sherman to JA, 20 July 1789, ibid., 6:437.

84. JA to Sherman, 18 July 1789, Works of JA, 6:430; JA to Sherman, 17 July 1789, ibid., 6:428–29.

85. Sherman to JA, 20 July 1789, Works of JA, 6:438; Sherman to JA, post–20 July 1789, ibid., 6:441.

86. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 5:488.

87. JA, Defence, in Works of JA, 6:95. 97; JA to BR, 4 Apr., 1790, Old Family Letters, 57.

88. BR to JA, 13 Apr. 1790, Letters of Rush, 1:546; JA to BR, 18 Apr. 1790, Old Family Letters, 59.

EIGHT: FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS

1. TJ, “The Anas, 1791–1806,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 1:165–66.

2. JA to George Washington, 17 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

3. Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 4 March 1789–5 March 1791, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen Veit, vol. 9, The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 6.

4. AA to Mary Smith Cranch, 9 Aug. 1789, AFC, 8:399–400.

5. Diary of William Maclay, 16–17.

6. Diary of William Maclay, 27; JA to BR, 5 July 1789, Old Family Letters, 42–43.

7. JA to William Tudor, 3 May 1789, quoted in Page Smith, John Adams (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 2:755; JA to Benjamin Lincoln, 8 May 1789, PJA–MHS.

8. Diary of William Maclay, 16–17, 19, 28–29, 33; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (1992; repr., New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 304; Jack D. Warren Jr., “In the Shadow of Washington: John Adams as Vice-President,” in John Adams and the Founding of the Republic, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 130–31.

9. TJ to JM, 29 July 1789, PTJ, 15:316.

10. TJ, “The Anas,” Ford, Writings of TJ, 1:162–66.

11. TJ, “The Anas,” Ford, Writings of TJ, 1:164–65.

12. Alexander Hamilton to Washington, 5 May 1789, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1987), 5:335–37.

13. JA to BR, 9 June 1789, Old Family Letters, 38.

14. JA to Tench Coxe, May 1792, PJA–MHS; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 100.

15. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, ed. Franz Neumann (New York: Hafner, 1949), 1:bk. xx, ch. 13, p. 323.

16. TJ, “Final State of the Report on Commerce,” 16 Dec. 1793, PTJ, 27:574.

17. TJ to JM, 25 Mar. 1793, Republic of Letters, 765–66.

18. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 105; TJ to JM, 20 Dec. 1787, Republic of Letters, 514.

19. TJ to BR, 23 Sept. 1800, PTJ, 32:167.

20. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 66.

21. TJ to JM, 1 Oct. 1792, Republic of Letters, 740.

22. TJ to John Taylor, 28 May 1816, PTJ: RS, 10:89; TJ to Col. Charles Yancey, 6 Jan. 1816, ibid., 9:329; Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 139–46 (quote at 141), 148–50.

23. The most important of these tie-breaking votes determined that the president did not have to have the consent of the Senate in order to remove an individual from an office that had required the Senate’s approval for appointment. Wood, Empire of Liberty, 87–88.

24. Warren Jr., “In the Shadow of Washington,” 132.

25. JA to AA, 23 Nov. 1794, AFC, 10:270.

26. AA to JA, 12 Jan. 1794, AFC, 10:36.

27. JA to AA, 9 Jan. 1793, AFC, 9:376; Hammond, Banks and Politics, 188–89, 196.

28. Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008), 9, 160.

29. JA to Richard Cranch, 4 July 1786, AFC, 7:240–41.

30. JA to AA, 11 Mar. 1794, AFC, 10:109.

31. JA, Discourses on Davila: A Series of Papers on Political History, in Works of JA, 6:227–399 (quote at 232).

32. JA, Discourses on Davila, in Works of JA, 6:246. Zoltán Haraszti, in John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 169–70, claims that JA borrowed largely from Adam Smith’s chapter on “The Origins of Ambition and the Distinction of Ranks” in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Although JA did tend to borrow heavily from writings that seemed to answer his emotional needs at the moment, his account of the passion for distinction seems actually richer than Smith’s treatment, at least in that particular chapter.

33. JA, Discourses on Davila, in Works of JA, 6:233–34, 245, 256; “Discourse on Davila,” Gazette of the United States, 27 Apr. 1791. In 1805 all the essays of Discourses on Davila, except the last one (dated 21 April 1791), were gathered together and published in Boston as a book. Presumably because it so emphatically endorsed hereditary succession over elections, this final essay was omitted from the 1805 reprint and from Charles Francis Adams’s edition of the work.

34. TJ to C. W. F. Dumas, 23 June 1790, PTJ, 16:552.

35. Julian P. Boyd, “Jefferson’s Alliance in 1790 with Fenno’s Gazette of the United States,” PTJ, 16:244.

36. JA to Mercy Otis Warren, 25 Dec. 1787, PJA–MHS.

37. Notes of a Conversation Between A. Hamilton and TJ, 13 Aug. 1791, Ford, ed., Writings of TJ, 1:168–69.

38. JA to Washington, 17 May 1789, in The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series, ed. Dorothy Twohig (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987– ), 2:313–14; TJ to BR, 4 Oct. 1807, PTJ, 41:471; AA to Cranch, 11 Oct. 1789, AFC, 8:421; AA to JA, 20 Oct. 1789, ibid., 8:426; T. H. Breen, George Washington’s Journey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 66, 17–18.

39. JA to John Trumbull, 9 Mar. 1790, PJA–MHS.

40. TJ to JM, 9 May 1791, PTJ, 20:293.

41. AA to Cranch, 3 Apr. 1790, AFC, 9:40.

42. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels Through Life” Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 181.

43. JA to TJ, 2 Jan. 1789, Cappon, 1:234.

44. Rush assured JA that in his correspondence “you may rely upon secrecy whenever your letters are confidential.” BR to JA, 21 Feb. 1789, Letters of Rush, 1:502.

45. JA to BR, 4 Apr. 1790, Old Family Letters, 57; JA to BR, 19 June 1789, ibid., 40; JA to BR, 5 July 1789, ibid., 41; JA to BR, 28 July 1789, ibid., 48; JA to BR, 24 July 1789, ibid. 46–47; JA to BR, 9 June 1789, ibid., 37–38; JA, Diary, 1:355.

46. JA to BR, 4 Apr. 1790, Old Family Letters, 55–57.

47. TJ to Washington, 8 Mar. 1791, PTJ, 20:291.

48. TJ to Sir John Sinclair, 24 Aug. 1791, PTJ, 22:72; TJ to George Mason, 4 Feb. 1791, ibid., 19:241.

49. TJ to Mason, 4 Feb. 1791, PTJ, 19:241.

50. TJ to Mason, 4 Feb. 1791, PTJ, 19:241; TJ to Washington, 8 May 1791, ibid., 20:291; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., 15 May 1791, ibid., 20:416.

51. TJ to Jonathan B. Smith, 20 Apr. 1791, PTJ, 20:290. In this volume, the last he edited, Julian P. Boyd composed several lengthy notes, one of which was “Rights of Man: The ‘Contest of Burke and Paine in America,’” PTJ, 20:268–90.

52. Tobias Lear to Washington, 8 May 1791, quoted in Boyd, “Rights of Man,” PTJ, 20:277; TJ to Washington, 8 May 1791, ibid., 20:292.

53. TJ to T. M. Randolph Jr., 3 July 1791, PTJ, 20:296; JM to TJ, 12 May 1791, ibid., 20:294.

54. [JQA] Publicola, “Observations on Paine’s Rights of Man,” Boston Columbian Centinel, 8 June 1791.

55. Madison told TJ that Publicola was not Adams himself, but probably his son John Quincy Adams. JM to TJ, 13 July 1791, PTJ, 20:295–99.

56. TJ to JA, 17 July 1791, PTJ, 20:302.

57. JA to TJ, 29 July 1791, PTJ, 20: 305–7.

58. JA to Henry Knox, 19 June 1791, PJA–MHS. Abigail too was much offended by TJ’s note, blaming “envy and jealousy” for the incident. AA to Martha Washington, 25 June 1791, AFC, 9:218–19.

59. TJ to JA, 30 Aug. 1791, PTJ, 20:310–11.

60. TJ to Thomas Paine, 29 July 1791, PTJ, 20:308–9; TJ to Paine, 19 June 1792, ibid., 20:312.

61. TJ to JA, 25 Nov. 1791, Cappon, 1:252; TJ to JA, 1 Mar. 1793, ibid., 1:252–53.

62. S. W. Jackman, “A Young Englishman Reports on the New Nation: Edward Thornton to James Bland Burges, 1791–1793,” WMQ 18 (1961): 110.

63. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 248–55, 364; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 249.

64. National Gazette, 20 Feb. 1792.

65. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 285.

66. TJ to Edmund Randolph, 17 Sept. 1792, PTJ, 24:387.

67. TJ, “Notes of Conversations with the President,” 28–29 Feb. 1792, in Ford, Writings of TJ, 1:174–78.

68. TJ to Washington, 23 May 1792, PTJ, 23:535–40.

69. TJ to Thomas Pinckney, 3 Dec. 1792, PTJ, 24:696.

70. JA to AA, 28 Dec. 1792, AFC, 9:360; TJ to Pinckney, 3 Dec. 1792, PTJ, 24:697.

71. JA to AA, 19 Dec. 1793, AFC, 9:477.

72. TJ to David Humphreys, 2 Jan. 1793, PTJ, 25:9.

73. On JA’s unpopularity in Virginia, see Archibald Stuart to TJ, 6 Dec. 1792, PTJ, 24:704–5. Governor George Clinton of New York was spreading rumors that Hamilton in 1787 had sought to establish a monarchical government in the United States and that JA at the same time had endorsed British overtures to help bring this about. There is no credible evidence for either plan, and TJ remained skeptical upon hearing the rumors. PTJ, 26:220–22n.

74. JA to AA, 3 Feb. 1793, AFC, 9:390.

75. TJ, “Notes of a Cabinet Meeting and Conversations with Edmond Charles Genet,” 5 July 1793, PTJ, 26:438.

76. JA to AA, 28 Dec. 1792, AFC, 9:360; JA to AA, 3 Feb. 1793, ibid., 9:390. TJ’s heavy lingering debts came not simply from his lavish style of living but also from the debts incurred when he inherited his father-in-law’s estate in 1774.

77. TJ to JM, 19 May 1793, Republic of Letters, 2:775.

78. JA to Henry Marchant, 4 May 1794, PJA–MHS.

79. JA to AA, 27 Jan, 1793, AFC, 9:381.

80. JA to AA, 17 Feb. 1793, AFC, 9:406.

81. JA to Charles Adams, 18 Mar. 1793, AFC, 9:419; TJ, “Notes on John Adams and the French Revolution,” 15 Jan. 1793, PTJ, 25:63–64; JA to Francis Van der Kemp, 11 Dec. 1793, PJA–MHS.

82. JA to John Stockdale, 12 May 1793, PJA–MHS; JA to C. Adams, 19 May 1794, AFC, 10:183.

83. TJ to William Short, 3 Jan. 1793, PTJ, 25:14. With its extreme statements, this letter led the Irish historian and journalist Conor Cruise O’Brien to say that “the twentieth-century statesman whom Thomas Jefferson of 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot,” the brutal leader of the Khmer Rouge, which killed an estimated two million people in Cambodia in the 1970s. O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1789–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 150.

84. Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 144.

85. James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 79.

86. TJ to JM, 28 Apr. 1793, PTJ, 25:619.

87. JA to Coxe, 25 Apr. 1793, PJA–MHS; TJ to JM, 11 Aug. 1793, PTJ, 26:652; Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 45.

88. Enoch Edwards to TJ, 28 Oct. 1793, PTJ, 27:276.

89. TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, 27 Nov. 1793, PTJ, 27:449.

90. TJ to Washington, 31 July 1793, PTJ, 26:593.

91. JA to AA, 26 Dec. 1793, AFC, 9:484-85; JA to JQA, 3 Jan. 1794, AFC, 10:3–4.

92. JA to AA, 6 Jan. 1794, AFC, 10:29–30.

93. JA to TJ, 4 Apr. 1794, Cappon, 1:252, 253.

94. TJ to JA, 25 Apr. 1794, Cappon, 1:254.

95. JA to TJ, 11 May 1794, Cappon, 1:255.

96. JA to TJ, 31 Jan. 1796, Cappon, 1:259.

97. TJ to JA, 28 Feb. 1796, Cappon, 1:259–60.

98. “Documents Relating to the 1796 Campaign for Electors in Virginia,” PTJ, 29:194.

99. JA to Joseph Priestley, 12 May 1793, PJA–MHS.

100. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 71.

101. TJ to Coxe, 1 May 1794, PTJ, 28:67.

102. JA to AA, 9 Feb. 1794, AFC, 10:74.

103. JA to TJ, 30 June 1813, Cappon, 2:346–47.

104. TJ to Coxe, 1 May 1794, PTJ, 28:67.

105. JA to Jeremy Belknap, 18 Feb. 1793, PJA–MHS; JA to Stockdale, 12 May 1793, PJA–MHS.

106. JM to TJ, 25 May 1794, Republic of Letters, 2:845; JA to AA, 19 Apr. 1794, AFC, 10:148, JA to AA, 14 June 1795, ibid., 10:450.

107. TJ to Philip Mazzei, 8 Sept. 1795, PTJ, 28:457.

108. TJ to William Branch Giles, 27 Apr. 1795, PTJ, 28:337.

109. JA to C. Adams, 9 Jan 1794, AFC, 10:19–20; JA to C. Adams, 24 Feb 1794, ibid., 10:27–29; JA to C. Adams, 11 May 1794, ibid., 10:173–74.

110. JA to C. Adams, 24 Dec. 1794, AFC, 10:319–20. In December 1794 the Virginia congressman William Branch Giles proposed an amendment to the naturalization bill requiring aliens to renounce all hereditary titles before being granted American citizenship. AFC, 10:349n.

NINE: THE PRESIDENT VS. THE VICE PRESIDENT

1. TJ to David Humphreys, 18 Mar. 1789, PTJ, 14:679; James Wilson, “Lectures on Law” (1790–91), in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:288.

2. Diego de Gardoqui, quoted in Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015), 339.

3. JA to AA, 5 Jan. 1796, AFC, 11:122; JA to AA, 20 Jan. 1796, ibid., 11:141; JA to AA, 7 Jan. 1796, ibid., 11:130; JA to AA, 2 Feb. 1796, ibid., 11:149.

4. JA to AA, 5 Jan. 1796, AFC, 11:122; JA to AA, 7 Jan. 1796, ibid., 11:131.

5. TJ to Francis Hopkinson, 13 Mar. 1789, PTJ, 14:650; JA to Jonathan Jackson, 2 Oct. 1780, PJA, 10:192.

6. JA to AA, 10 Feb. 1796, AFC, 11:171.

7. JA to AA, 10 Feb. 1796, AFC, 11:172.

8. TJ to JM, 27 Apr. 1795, Republic of Letters, 2:877; TJ to JM, 9 June 1793, ibid., 2:781.

9. TJ to Mary Jefferson Eppes, 3 Mar. 1802, PTJ, 36:676; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 74.

10. TJ to William Branch Giles, 31 Dec. 1795, PTJ, 28:566.

11. TJ to JM, 27 Apr. 1795, Republic of Letters, 2:877. Sometime later, someone crossed out “Southern” and substituted “Republican” on TJ’s copy of the letter. Madison’s recipient copy reads “Southern.” Since Jefferson later claimed that “the republicans are the nation,” it is likely that it was he who made the change. TJ to William Duane, 28 Mar. 1811, PTJ: RS, 3:8. See also TJ to JM, 27 Apr. 1795, in JM, Papers, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–1991), 16:2n; and James Roger Sharp, “Unraveling the Mystery of Jefferson’s Letter of April 27, 1795,” JER 6 (1986): 411–18.

12. Joanne B. Freeman, “The Presidential Election of 1796,” in John Adams and the Founding of the Republic, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 145.

13. Jeffrey L. Pasley, The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 224.

14. James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 149.

15. JA to AA, 18 Dec. 1796, AFC, 11:447; JA to Charles Adams, 30 Dec. 1796, ibid., 11:469; JA to Henry Knox, 30 Mar. 1797, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 336–37; Freeman, “The Presidential Election of 1796,” 148; JA to AA, 12 Dec. 1796, AFC, 11:444.

16. TJ to Benjamin Banneker, 30 Aug. 1791, PTJ, 22:97–98; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 159; Pasley, First Presidential Contest, 29, 263, 254.

17. JA, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America: A New Edition (London: John Stockton, 1794), 3:296; Pasley, First Presidential Contest, 283.

18. JA to AA, 9 Jan. 1797, AFC, 11:487.

19. JM to TJ, 19 Dec. 1796, Republic of Letters, 2:951.

20. JA to AA, 20 Dec. 1796, AFC, 11:451.

21. TJ, “Notes on Comments by John Adams,” 26 Dec. 1796, PTJ, 29:593.

22. AA to Elbridge Gerry, 31 Dec. 1796, AFC, 11:476; Gerry to AA, 7 Jan. 1797, ibid., 11:486; Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 158.

23. JA to AA, 9 Jan. 1797, AFC, 11:487; JA to AA, 27 Dec. 1796, ibid., 11:451.

24. AA to JA, 15 Jan. 1797, AFC, 11:499.

25. TJ to JM, 8 Jan. 1797, Republic of Letters, 2:955.

26. TJ to JM, 17 Dec. 1796, Republic of Letters, 2:950; TJ to JM, 1 Jan. 1797, ibid., 2:953.

27. Enclosure, TJ to JA, 28 Dec. 1796, Republic of Letters, 2:954.

28. JM to TJ, 15 Jan. 1797, Republic of Letters, 2:957.

29. TJ to John Langdon, 22 Jan. 1797, PTJ, 29:270.

30. TJ to JM, 15 Jan. 1797, Republic of Letters, 2:957; JA to AA, 1 Jan. 1796, AFC, 11:480–81; JA to AA, 3 Jan. 1796, ibid., 11:482.

31. TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, 22 Jan. 1797, PTJ, 29:273–74.

32. JA to Benjamin Lincoln, 10 Mar. 1800, PJA–MHS; JA to BR, 19 Mar. 1812, Spur of Fame, 214; JM to TJ, 11 Feb. 1797, PTJ, 29:304–5. Actually, as vice president and president of the Senate, Adams had cast a crucial tie-breaking vote denying that the Senate’s consent was needed for presidential removals from office.

33. JA to BR, 23 Aug. 1805, Spur of Fame, 36; JA to BR, 19 Mar. 1812, ibid., 214; TJ to Gerry, 13 May 1797, PTJ, 29:362.

34. JA, “Correspondence Published in the Boston Patriot,” 1809, Works of JA, 9:284–86.

35. JA to Gerry, 6 Apr. 1797, PJA–MHS.

36. TJ, “The Anas, 1791–1806,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 1:272–73; TJ, “Notes on Conversations,” post 13 Oct. 1797, PTJ, 29:551–52.

37. JA, “Correspondence Published in the Boston Patriot,” 9:285.

38. JA to AA, 5 Mar. 1797, AFC, 12:9; JA to AA, 9 Mar. 1797, ibid., 12:17.

39. JA, Inaugural Address, 4 Mar. 1797, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 330, 333.

40. JA to AA, 5 Mar. 1797, AFC, 12:10; JA to AA, 17 Mar. 1797, ibid., 12:33.

41. Paine to TJ, 1 Apr. 1797, PTJ, 29:340–44.

42. JA to BR, 23 Aug. 1805, Spur of Fame, 36; JA, “Correspondence Published in the Boston Patriot,” 9:284–86. Ironically, on this issue JA’s ministers were more High Federalist than Hamilton himself; he had actually suggested that Madison be part of a commission to negotiate with the French. Only someone with JM’s Republican credentials, Hamilton had said, could convince the French of America’s good faith.

43. TJ, “The Anas,” Ford, Writings of TJ, 1:273.

44. JA to AA, 13 Mar. 1797, AFC, 12:23.

45. JQA to JA, 4 Apr. 1796 and 3 Feb. 1797, Founders Online, National Archives; Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 205–6.

46. JA, “Speech to Congress,” 16 May 1797, Works of JA, 9:114.

47. TJ to Peregrine Fitzhugh, 4 June 1797, PTJ, 29:416–17.

48. JA to Uriah Forrest, 28 June 1797, Works of JA, 8:546–47.

49. “Extract Printed in the New York Minerva,” 2 May 1797, PTJ, 29:86; for the original letter, see TJ to Mazzei, 24 Apr. 1796, PTJ, 29:82. See also François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 358.

50. AA to JQA, 15 June 1797, AFC, 12:164-65.

51. JQA to AA, 29 July 1797, AFC, 12:224-25.

52. JA to Gerry, 3 May 1797, PJA–MHS.

53. AA to JQA, 3 Nov. 1797, AFC, 12:278.

54. AA to Thomas Boylston Adams, 16 July 1797, AFC, 12:207; TJ, “Notes on a Conversation with Benjamin Rush,” 5 Apr. 1798, PTJ, 30:248.

55. TJ to Edward Rutledge, 24 June 1797, PTJ, 29:455–56; TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, 11 Jan. 1798, ibid., 30:23.

56. TJ to JM, 8 Feb. 1798, Republic of Letters, 2:1017.

57. TJ, “Notes on a Conversation with John Adams,” 15 Feb. 1798, PTJ, 30:113.

58. TJ to Gerry, 13 May 1797, PTJ, 29:363.

59. JA to JQA, 31 Mar. 1797, AFC, 12:56.

60. JA to Timothy Pickering, 23 Sept. 1799, PJA–MHS; JA to AA, 1 Jan. 1799, AFC–MHS.

61. George A. Billias, Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 274.

62. TJ to JM, 21–22 Mar. 1798, Republic of Letters, 2:1029; JM to TJ, 2 Apr. 1798, ibid., 2:1032.

63. AA to JQA, 4 Apr. 1798, AFC, 12:481, AA to Mary Cranch, 9 Apr. 1798, ibid., 12:491; AA to Cranch, 4 Apr. 1798, ibid., 12:485.

64. TJ to JM, 6 Apr. 1798, Republic of Letters, 2:1035; TJ to JM, 19 Apr. 1798, ibid., 2:1039; TJ to James Monroe, 5 Apr. 1798, PTJ, 30:247.

65. TJ to JM, 6 Apr. 1798, Republic of Letters, 2:1035; TJ to Peter Carr, 12 Apr. 1798, PTJ, 30:267; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 12 Apr. 1798, ibid., 30:269–70; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 19 Apr. 1798, ibid., 30:283.

66. “Address from the Grand Inquest of the United States of America, for the District of Pennsylvania,” 13 Apr. 1798, in James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), 97; “Address from the Inhabitants of Richmond,” 1 June 1798, PJA–MHS.

67. JA, “To the Second Battalion of Militia of Prince George County, Virginia,” 6 June 1798, in JA: Writings from the New Nation, 367; JA, “To the Grand Jury for Plymouth County, Massachusetts,” 28 May 1798, ibid., 366; JA, “To the Young Men of the City of Philadelphia, the District of Southwark, and the Northern Liberties, Pennsylvania,” 2 May 1798, in Works of JA, 9:188.

68. TJ, “Notes on JA’s Replies to XYZ Addresses,” ante 6 Oct. 1800, PTJ, 32:196–202; TJ to JM, 3 May 1798, ibid., 30:322; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 3 May 1798, ibid., 30:326. Jefferson sent his notes on Adams’s answers to the Philadelphia Aurora, believing that excerpts from them could benefit the Republican cause.

69. TJ to William G. Munford, 18 June 1799, PTJ, 31:128.

70. JA, “To the Society of the Cincinnati, South Carolina,” 15 Sept. 1798, PJA–MHS.

71. AA to Cranch, 13 May 1798, AFC–MHS.

72. TJ to JM, 17 May 1798, PTJ, 30:353; AA to JQA, 21 Apr. 1798, in Edith Gelles, ed., Abigail Adams: Letters (New York: Library of America, 2016), 617; Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (New York: Scribner, 1966), 82; TJ to A. Church, 11 Jan. 1798, PTJ, 30:23.

73. JA to TJ, 30 June 1813, Cappon, 2:347.

74. JA to TJ, 30 June 1813, Cappon, 2:347; AA to Cranch, 10 May 1798, in Gelles, Abigail Adams: Letters, 622–24.

75. AA to Cranch, 26 Apr. 1798, 21 Apr. 1798, AFC, 12:531, 520.

76. JA to William Tudor, 19 Jan. 1817, PJA–MHS.

77. Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French, 115.

78. TJ to JM, 6 Apr. 1798, Republic of Letters, 2:1034–35.

79. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 26.

80. Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French, 375.

81. DeConde, The Quasi-War, 328.

82. AA to JQA, 14 July 1798, AFC–MHS; AA to JQA, 29 Mar. 1798, in Gelles, Abigail Adams: Letters, 608; AA to JQA, 26 May 1798, ibid., 626; Page Smith, John Adams (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 2:979.

83. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 84–85.

84. Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French, 97, 91, 109.

85. AA to Cranch, 20 May 1798, in Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 53.

86. JA to TJ, 14 June 1813, Cappon, 2:329; TJ to JM, 31 May 1798, PTJ, 30:379; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 9 May 1798, ibid., 30:341.

87. JA to Pickering, 17 Sept. 1798, PJA–MHS; Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts, eds., Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey, 1793–1798 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947), 253.

88. TJ to JM, 19 Apr. 1798, Republic of Letters, 2:1042.

89. Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 116; John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789–1801 (New York: Harper, 1960), 233.

90. JA to James Lloyd, 11 Feb. 1815, Works of JA, 10:117; JA to BR, 28 Aug. 1811, ibid., 9:636.

91. Boston Evening Post, 1 Dec. 1766.

92. For JA’s evolving ideas of free speech, see Richard D. Brown, “The Disenchantment of a Radical Whig: John Adams Reckons with Free Speech,” in John Adams and the Founding of the Republic, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 171–85.

93. TJ to Monroe, 5 May 1811, PTJ: RS, 3:607; TJ to Thomas McKean, 19 Feb. 1803, PTJ, 39:553; Leonard W. Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 42–69.

94. JA, Boston Patriot, 10 June 1805, Works of JA, 9:305–6.

95. TJ to John Taylor, 4 June 1798, PTJ, 30:388–89.

96. TJ to Stevens Thomas Mason, 11 Oct. 1798, PTJ, 30:560; TJ to Gerry, 26 Jan. 1799, ibid., 30:646.

97. TJ to T. M. Randolph, 2 Feb. 1800, PTJ, 31:358; TJ to BR, 23 Sept. 1800, ibid., 32:167.

98. TJ to Monroe, 7 Sept. 1797, PTJ, 29:527; TJ to Taylor, 26 Nov. 1798, ibid., 30:589.

99. TJ, “Draft of Kentucky Resolutions of 1798,” ante 4 Oct. 1798, PTJ, 30:531–32, 536–41.

100. JA to Oliver Wolcott Jr., 24 Sept. 1798, Works of JA, 8:603–4. Although this letter was never sent, it fully expressed JA’s passionate feelings at the time. Hamilton was born in Nevis in 1755, which, of course, was then just as much a British colony as Massachusetts.

101. JA to James McHenry, 22 Oct. 1798, Works of JA, 8:613.

102. TJ to JM, 3 Jan. 1798, PTJ, 30:610.

103. JA to Charles Lee, 29 Mar. 1799, PJA–MHS.

104. JA to Pickering, 23 Apr. 1800, PJA–MHS.

105. A. Roger Ekirch, American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 2017), 133, 143–67; TJ to Charles Pinckney, 29 Oct. 1799, TJ to T. M. Randolph, 2 Feb. 1800, TJ to JM, 4 Mar. 1800, TJ, “Notes on John Marshall’s Speech,” post 7 Mar. 1800, PTJ, 31: 227, 358, 408, 421, 181–82n.

106. Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 116–74; JA to Benjamin Stoddert, 21 Sept. 1799, PJA–MHS.

107. McHenry to JA, 31 May 1800, PJA–MHS, recounting the conversation of the previous day.

108. Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 397.

109. Alexander Hamilton to McHenry, 6 June 1800, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, eds. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1987), 24:573.

110. Gouverneur Morris, 13 May 1800, The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 2:387.

111. George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull Jr., 21 July 1799, in The Papers of George Washington: Retirement Series, eds. Dorothy Twohig et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998–1999), 4:202.

112. AA to JA, 3 Mar. 1799, PJA–MHS.

113. Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 111; JA to Lloyd, 28 Jan. 1815, Works of JA, 10:113.

114. TJ, “First Inaugural Address,” 4 Mar. 1801, TJ: Writings, 494.

115. JA to John Trumbull, 10 Sept. 1800, PJA–MHS.

TEN: THE JEFFERSONIAN REVOLUTION OF 1800

1. TJ to Spencer Roane, 6 Sept. 1819, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 10:140.

2. TJ, “First Inaugural Address,” 4 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:148–52.

3. Elbridge Gerry to TJ, 4 May 1801, PTJ, 34:23.

4. David Austin to TJ, 15 May 1801, PTJ, 34:111; JA to Thomas Boylston Adams, 9 Sept. 1801, PJA–MHS.

5. Michael A. Bellesiles, “‘The Soil Will Be Soaked with Blood’: Taking the Revolution Seriously,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, ed. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Horn (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 59; John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 136–37, 145.

6. TJ to Aaron Burr, 11 Feb. 1799, PTJ, 31:22; TJ to JM, 12 Feb. 1799, ibid., 31:229–30. See also Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791–1806,” JER 2 (1982): 361–79.

7. TJ to BR, 16 Jan. 1811, PTJ: RS, 3:305–6.

8. JA to Gerry, 30 Dec. 1800, Works of JA, 9:578; AA to T. B. Adams, 25 Jan. 1801, PJA–MHS.

9. AA, “A Conversation Between Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” Jan. 1801, PJA–MHS.

10. JA to Samuel Smith, 7 Feb. 1801, PJA–MHS.

11. TJ to John Dickinson, 6 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:196; TJ to Joseph Priestley, 21 Mar. 1801, ibid., 33:393–94.

12. TJ to Priestley, 21 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:393–94. Although in 1799 Timothy Pickering had wanted Priestley deported, JA told his secretary of state that it would not be wise to do so. “Poor Priestly . . . is as weak as water. . . . His influence is not an Atom in the World.” JA had been much more eager to deport Frenchmen. JA to Timothy Pickering, 13 Aug. 1799, PJA–MHS. See also Priestley to TJ, 10 Aug. 1801, PTJ, 33:567, in which Priestley explained that although JA as president could not have directly opposed his deportation, he had used “circuitous” means to prevent it.

13. TJ to JM, 19 Dec. 1800, PTJ, 32:323.

14. TJ to JA, 17 Jan. 1801, PTJ, 32:476.

15. Elizabeth House Trist to TJ, 1 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:115; TJ, “First Inaugural Address,” 4 Mar. 1801, ibid., 33:149.

16. Fisher Ames to Rufus King, 24 Sept. 1800, 26 Aug. 1800, Charles R. King, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 3:304, 295–97.

17. TJ to BR, 16 Jan. 1811, PTJ: RS, 3:305–6. See TJ, “The Anas,” Ford, Writings of TJ, 1:313, for a somewhat different account of the meeting with JA. See also Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 8.

18. Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 41.

19. TJ to JA, 8 Mar. 1801, JA to TJ, 24 Mar. 1801, Cappon, 1:264.

20. Thomas Paine, Common sense: The Rights of Man: Part Second, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 1:4, 356.

21. James Wilson, “Lectures on Law” (1790), in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:214.

22. TJ to Thomas Law, 13 June 1814, PTJ: RS, 7:414.

23. Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, Vt., 1792), 83–85.

24. TJ to Peter Carr, 10 Aug. 1787, PTJ, 12:15; TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 142–43.

25. Paine, The Rights of Man: Part Second, 1:373; TJ to Governor John Langdon, Mar. 5, 1810, TJ: Writings, 1221.

26. JA to AA, 29 Oct. 1775, AFC, 1:318.

27. JA to T. B. Adams, 2 Feb. 1803, PJA–MHS; JA to T. B. Adams, ? Feb. 1803, ibid.

28. JA to T. B. Adams, ? Feb. 1803, PJA–MHS.

29. Washington National Intelligencer, 6 Mar. 1801; Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 388.

30. Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 383, 387, 93.

31. TJ, “Circular to the Heads of Departments,” 6 Nov. 1801, PTJ, 35:577.

32. TJ, “First Annual Message,” 8 Dec. 1801, TJ: Writings, 504.

33. Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Process of Government Under Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 22.

34. TJ, “First Annual Message,” 504.

35. TJ to William Branch Giles, 23 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:413–14; TJ to William Findley, 24 Mar. 1801, ibid., 33:427–28; TJ to George Jefferson, 27 Mar. 1801, ibid., 33:465.

36. TJ to James Monroe, 20 June 1801, PTJ, 34:398–99; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, 18 June 1801, ibid., 34:384.

37. TJ to Samuel Adams, 26 Feb. 1800, PTJ, 31:395.

38. Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (New York: Norton, 2006), 285.

39. TJ to Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, 18 Jan. 1802, in Ford, Writings of TJ, 8:127; Richard Beale Davis, ed., Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America Collected in the Years 1805–6–7 and 11–12 by Sir Augustus John Foster (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1954), 3.

40. TJ to Dickinson, 19 Dec. 1801, PTJ, 36:165–66.

41. Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 458, 462.

42. JA to William Tudor, 20 Jan. 1801, PJA–MHS.

43. JA, Diary, 3:253.

44. JQA to JA, 19 Nov. 1804, AFC–MHS.

45. JA to JQA, 20 Nov. 1804, AFC–MHS; JA to JQA, 6 Dec. 1804, ibid.; JA to JQA, 22 Dec. 1804, ibid.

46. JA, Autobiography, 3:298.

47. JA to T. B. Adams, 11 July 1801, AFC–MHS.

48. JA, “Minutes Occasioned by Remarks in the National Intelligencer of August 4, 1802,” PJA–MHS; JA to John Trumbull, 8 July 1805, ibid.

49. JA to William Cranch, 29 June 1801, AFC–MHS.

50. JA to JQA, 6 Dec. 1804, AFC–MHS.

51. JA to T. B. Adams, 11 July 1801, AFC–MHS.

52. JA to BR, 23 Aug. 1805, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 432; JA to JQA, 6 Dec. 1804, AFC–MHS.

53. TJ to John Wayles Eppes, 22 Jan. 1801, PTJ, 31:333; TJ to Harry Innes, 23 Jan. 1806, ibid., 31:336; TJ to John Breckinbridge, 20 Jan. 1800, ibid, 31:343; TJ to William Wardlaw, 28 Jan. 1800, ibid., 31:345; TJ to William Bache, 2 Feb. 1800, ibid., 31:354; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 2 Feb. 1800, ibid., 31: 358; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 4 Feb. 1800, ibid., 31:360; TJ to S. Adams, 26 Feb. 1800, ibid., 31:395.

54. TJ to Innes, 23 Jan. 1806, PTJ, 31:336–37.

55. TJ to Innes, 23 Jan. 1806, PTJ, 31:336; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 4 Feb. 1800, ibid., 31:360; TJ to Breckinbridge, 20 Jan. 1800, ibid., 31:345.

56. JA to T. B. Adams, 11 July 1801, AFC–MHS; JA, “Minutes Occasioned by Remarks in the National Intelligencer of August 4, 1802”; JA to Marquis de Lafayette, 6 Apr. 1801, PJA–MHS.

57. TJ to JM, 28 Aug. 1801, Republic of Letters, 2:1193–94.

58. JA to JQA, 6 Dec. 1804, AFC–MHS.

59. JA to BR, 25 July 1808, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 501–2.

60. JA to BR, 22 Dec. 1806, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 458–59; JA to BR, 2 Feb. 1807, ibid., 459–61; JA to BR, 11 Nov. 1807, ibid., 486; JA to BR, 21 May 1807, ibid., 467.

61. JA to William Cunningham, 16 Jan 1814, in Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams, Late President of the United States, and the Late William Cunningham (Boston: E. M. Cunningham, 1823), 7–11.

62. JA to BR, 1 Sept. 1807, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 483; JA to BR, 2 Feb. 1807, ibid., 461.

63. TJ to JM, 28 Aug. 1789, Republic of Letters, 1:629.

64. JA to BR, 25 July 1808, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 503; JA to Joseph B. Varnum, 26 Dec. 1808, ibid., 510.

65. JA to Josiah Quincy III, 23 Dec. 1808, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 506–8.

66. JA to Quincy III, 23 Dec. 1808, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 506–8.

67. JA to BR, 8 Jan. 1812, PJA–MHS; JA to John Adams Smith, 10 Oct. 1819, AFC–MHS; JA to John T. Watson, 23 July 1818, PJA–MHS.

68. JA to BR, 29 Dec. 1812, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 542.

69. Benjamin Waterhouse to TJ, 1 Sept. 1815, PTJ: RS, 9:5.

70. JA to TJ, 19 Apr. 1817, Cappon, 2:508.

71. JA to TJ, 3 July 1813, Cappon, 2:350.

72. James Thomson Callender, Richmond Recorder, 1 Sept. 1802, PTJ, 38:323n–25n.

73. “Original Poetry,” The Port-Folio, 30 Oct. 1802; Linda K. Kerber and Walter John Morris, “Politics and Literature: The Adams Family and the Portfolio,” WMQ 23 (1966): 457; Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), 51.

74. JA to Joseph Ward, 8 Jan. 1810, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 517.

75. JA to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley, 24 Jan. 1801, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 406; JA to Thomas Crafts, 25 May 1790, PJA–MHS.

76. JA to J. Jeremy Belknap, 21 Mar. 1795, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 406; L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., The Legal Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:48–67.

77. JA to Belknap, 21 Mar. 1795, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 313–14.

78. JA to J. Belknap, 22 Oct. 1795, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 314–15.

79. JA to Churchman and Lindley, 24 Jan. 1801, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 406–7.

80. Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 79–87, 153–57.

81. TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, 27 Nov. 1793, PTJ, 27:449; TJ to T. M. Randolph, 23 Jan. 1801, ibid., 32:499–500; Gordon-Reed and Onuf, “Most Blessed of Patriarchs,” 79–87; Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 62.

82. AA to TJ, 20 May 1804, Cappon, 1:268–69; TJ to John Page, 25 June 1804, in Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 3:103.

83. TJ to AA, 13 June 1804, Cappon, 1:269–71.

84. AA to TJ, 1 July 1804, Cappon, 1:271–74.

85. TJ to AA, 22 July 1804, Cappon, 1:274–76.

86. AA to TJ, 18 Aug. 1804, Cappon, 1:276–78.

87. TJ to AA, 11 Sept. 1804, Cappon, 1:278–80.

88. AA to TJ, 25 Oct. 1804, and JA, postscript, 19 Nov. 1804, Cappon, 1:280–82. See Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 424, on TJ’s notion that any reconciliation with JA would have to exclude AA.

ELEVEN: RECONCILIATION

1. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His “Travels Through Life” Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 103.

2. JA to BR, 6 Feb. 1805, Old Family Letters, 61.

3. JA to BR, 27 Feb. 1805, Old Family Letters, 63.

4. JA to BR, 18 Apr. 1808, Old Family Letters, 181.

5. JA to BR, 4 Mar. 1809, Old Family Letters, 219.

6. BR to JA, 17 Oct. 1809, Letters of Rush, 2:1021–22. See L. H. Butterfield, “The Dream of Benjamin Rush: The Reconciliation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” Yale Review 40 (1950–1951): 297–319.

7. JA to BR, 25 Oct. 1809, Old Family Letters, 246.

8. BR to TJ, 2 Jan. 1811, Letters of Rush, 2:1075.

9. TJ to BR, 16 Jan. 1811, PTJ: RS, 3:304–8.

10. BR to TJ, 1 Feb. 1811, Letters of Rush, 2:1078.

11. TJ to BR, 5 Dec. 1811, PTJ: RS, 4:312–14.

12. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 3:639–40.

13. TJ to BR, 5 Dec. 1811, PTJ: RS, 4:312–13.

14. BR to JA, 16 Dec. 1811, Letters of Rush, 2:1110–11.

15. BR to TJ, 17 Dec. 1811, Letters of Rush, 2:1111–12.

16. JA to BR, 25 Dec. 1811, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 128–31.

17. JA to TJ, 1 Jan. 1812, Cappon, 2:290.

18. TJ to JA, 21 Jan. 1812, Cappon, 2:290–92.

19. TJ to BR, 21 Jan. 1812, PTJ: RS, 4:431.

20. TJ to JA, 23 Jan. 1812, Cappon, 2:292–93.

21. JA to TJ, 3 Feb. 1812, Cappon, 2:293–96. Roger Acherley (1665–1740) was an Englishman who wrote on law and the English constitution. Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1676–1751), was an English Tory politician and philosopher whose works were widely read by the American revolutionaries, especially by JA. Henry Neville (1626–1694), an English republican, was the author of Plato Redivivus, or a Dialogue Concerning Government (1681). Marchmont Nedham (1620–1678) was an English writer whose book The Excellency of a Free State, or the Right Constitution of Government (1656) JA took very seriously; in fact, he spent over two hundred pages of volume 3 of his Defence carefully refuting it. See Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945).

22. JA to TJ, 20 June 1815, Cappon, 2:446; JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, ibid., 2:357.

23. Antoine Destutt de Tracy to TJ, 12 June 1809, PTJ: RS, 1:260–63.

24. TJ to JA, 27 June 1822, Cappon, 2:581. Adams and Jefferson exchanged 158 letters between January 1, 1812, and their deaths in 1826, excluding the 6 letters between Jefferson and Abigail. Of these 158, Jefferson wrote only 49.

25. JA to TJ, 21 May 1819, Cappon, 2:540.

26. AA, note added to JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:358.

27. TJ to AA, 22 Aug. 1813, Cappon, 2:366–67.

28. AA to TJ, 20 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:377–78.

29. TJ to JA, 12 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:383–86.

30. AA to TJ, 15 Dec. 1816, Cappon, 2:500.

31. AA to TJ, 29 Apr. 1817, Cappon, 2:511.

32. JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:358.

33. JA to TJ, 15 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:413.

34. JA to TJ, 3 Mar. 1814, Cappon, 2:426.

35. JA to TJ, 9 July 1813, Cappon, 2:350.

36. JA to TJ, 3 July 1812, Cappon, 2:349.

37. JA to TJ, 19 June 1815, Cappon, 2:444; JA to TJ, 22 June 1815, ibid., 2:446–51; JA to TJ, 24 Aug. 1815, ibid., 2:454-55.

38. TJ to JA, 5 July 1814, Cappon, 2:433; JA to TJ, 3 Mar. 1814, ibid., 2:426–27; JA to TJ, 16 July 1824, ibid., 2:437; JA to TJ, 19 Dec. 1813, ibid., 2:406.

39. TJ to JA, 21 Mar. 1819, Cappon, 2:536–39; JA to TJ, 15 Dec. 1813, ibid., 2:411.

40. TJ to JA, 11 Jan. 1817, Cappon, 2:505; TJ to JA, 14 Oct. 1816, ibid., 2:491; JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1817, ibid., 2:507.

41. TJ to JA, 10–11 Aug. 1815, Cappon, 2:453; JA to TJ, 24 Aug. 1815, ibid., 2:455.

42. JA to TJ, 10 Feb. 1812, Cappon, 2:297.

43. TJ to JA, 20 Apr. 1812, Cappon, 2:299.

44. JA to TJ, 3 May 1812, Cappon, 2:302.

45. JA to TJ, 3 May 1812, Cappon, 2:303–4.

46. JA to William Tudor Sr., 23 Sept. 1818, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 638–41; JA to AA, 19 Aug. 1777, AFC, 2:320.

47. TJ to JA, 11 June 1812, Cappon, 2:305–8.

48. JA to TJ, 28 June 1813, Cappon, 2:338–40.

49. JA to TJ, 10 June 1813, Cappon, 2:326–27; JA to TJ, 14 June 1813, ibid., 2:329–30.

50. TJ to JA, 15 June 1813, Cappon, 2:331–33; TJ to JA, 27 June 1813, ibid., 2:335–38.

51. JA to TJ, 25 June 1813, Cappon, 2:333.

52. JA to TJ, 30 June 1813, Cappon, 2:346–48.

53. JA to TJ, 3 July 1813, Cappon, 2:349; JA to TJ, 9 July 1813, ibid., 2:352; JA to TJ, 12 July 1813, ibid., 2:354.

54. JA to TJ, 13 July 1813, Cappon, 2:354–56; JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, ibid., 2:357–58.

55. JA to TJ, 4 Mar. 1816, Cappon, 2:464–65.

56. JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:257–58.

57. JA to TJ, 16 July 1813, Cappon, 2:359–60.

58. JA to TJ, 3 Mar. 1814, Cappon, 2:429.

59. TJ to JA, 22 Aug. 1813, Cappon, 2:368.

60. TJ to JA, 14 Jan. 1814, Cappon, 2:411; JA to TJ, 22 Jan. 1825, ibid., 2:607.

61. JA to TJ, 3 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:404; TJ to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 6 Aug. 1816, and TJ to James Smith, 8 Dec. 1822, in James H. Hutson, The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 217–19.

62. JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, 19 Nov. 1821, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 667; JA to Mordecai M. Noah, 31 Jan. 1818, ibid., 638; JA to BR, 28 Aug. 1811, ibid., 525.

63. JA to JQA, 10 May 1816, AFC–MHS; JA to TJ, 14 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:373–75; JA to TJ, 15 Sept. 1813, ibid., 2:375–76.

64. JA to JQA, 10 May 1816, AFC–MHS; JA to AA, 27 Oct. 1799, ibid.; JA to William White, 29 Oct. 1814, PJA–MHS; JA to JQA, 11 Mar. 1813, AFC–MHS; JA, Diary, 3:234; JA to Samuel Miller, 7 July 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 658.

65. TJ to Salma Hale, 26 July 1818, in Hutson, Founders on Religion, 38.

66. TJ, “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1779), TJ: Writings, 346.

67. JA to AA, 29 Oct. 1775, AFC, 1:318–19.

68. JA to TJ, 25 June 1813, Cappon, 2:334; JA to BR, 1 Sept. 1809, Old Family Letters, 240; JA to BR, 19 June 1789, ibid., 40.

69. JA to TJ, 19 Apr. 1817, Cappon, 2:509.

70. TJ to Moses Robinson, 23 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:424.

71. TJ to Edward Dowse, 19 Apr. 1803, PTJ, 40:236.

72. TJ to Charles Thomson, 9 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:340–41.

73. TJ to Ezra Stiles Ely, 25 June 1819, “Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospel,” in Dickinson W. Adams and Ruth W. Lester, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Second Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 387.

74. TJ to Isaac Story, 5 Dec. 1801, PTJ, 36:30; JA to TJ, 3 May 1816, Cappon, 2:469–71; JA to TJ, 8 Dec. 1818, ibid., 2:530; JA to Van der Kemp, 27 Dec. 1816, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 619.

75. JA to TJ, 15 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:376; JA to TJ, 9 July 1813, ibid., 2:352.

76. TJ to JA, 27 June 1813, Cappon, 2:335–36; JA to TJ, 13 July 1813, ibid., 2:355.

77. TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:388.

78. TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:388–89.

79. TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:389–90.

80. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 146.

81. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 146; TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:389–90.

82. TJ to Nathaniel Burwell, 14 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:532–33.

83. JA to Van der Kemp, 8 Apr. 1815, PJA–MHS; JA to Emma Willard, 8 Dec. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 650; JA to Caroline Amelia Smith De Windt, 11 Feb. 1820, PJA–MHS.

84. Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 184–234.

85. TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, 27 Nov. 1793, PTJ, 27:449.

86. Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 57–58; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 132–33; TJ to Eliza House Trist, 18 Aug. 1785, PTJ, 8:404; TJ to George Washington, 4 Dec. 1788, ibid., 14:330; TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, 7 Feb. 1787, ibid., 11:122–23.

87. JA to Thomas B. Adams, 17 Oct. 1799, AFC–MHS.

88. JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:397–99.

89. JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:398.

90. JA to TJ, 19 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:409; JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, ibid., 2:400–402.

91. JA to TJ, 25 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:409.

92. TJ to JA, 14 Jan. 1814, Cappon, 2:422–25.

93. TJ to JA, 8 Apr. 1816, Cappon, 2: 467.

94. JA to TJ, 6 May 1816, Cappon 2:472–74; TJ to JA, 1 Aug. 1816, ibid., 2:483–85.

95. JA to JQA, 3 July 1816, AFC–MHS; JA to TJ, 4 Nov. 1816, Cappon, 2:493.

96. JA to TJ, 16 Dec. 1816, Cappon, 2:500–501.

97. TJ to William Duane, 16 Sept. 1810, PTJ: RS, 3:86; TJ to JA, 11 Jan. 1817, Cappon, 2:505–6.

98. JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1817, Cappon, 2:506–8.

TWELVE: THE GREAT REVERSAL

1. JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1817, Cappon, 2:508; TJ to Marquis de Lafayette, 23 Nov. 1818, in Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), 396.

2. JA to TJ, 30 July 1815, Cappon, 2:451.

3. TJ to William Johnson, 4 Mar. 1823, Founders Online, National Archives.

4. TJ to JA, 10–11 Aug. 1815, Cappon, 2:432–53; John Marshall, The Life of George Washington . . . (Philadelphia: C. P. Wayne, 1804–1807), 2:411n; Philip F. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years,” WMQ 19 (1962): 566.

5. JA to TJ, 24 Aug. 1815, Cappon, 2:455; JA to Thomas McKean, 26 Nov. 1815, PJA–MHS.

6. JA to John Holmes, 10 Aug. 1815, PJA–MHS; JA to JQA, 2 Sept. 1815, AFC–MHS; JA to Hezekiah Niles, 13 Feb. 1818, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 629–36.

7. JA to BR, 23 July 1806, Old Family Letters, 104–9.

8. JA to BR, 23 July 1806, Old Family Letters, 104–9.

9. JA to BR, 31 Aug. 1809, Old Family Letters, 238–39.

10. JA to Jedidiah Morse, 4 Mar. 1815, Works of JA, 10:133–34.

11. JA to TJ, 18 May 1817, Cappon, 2:516.

12. Benjamin Waterhouse to TJ, 20 Feb. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:493–97.

13. TJ to Waterhouse, 3 Mar., 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:517–19.

14. TJ to JA, 17 May 1818, Cappon, 2:523–24.

15. JA to TJ, 29 May 1818, Cappon, 2:525.

16. Thomas Ritchie to TJ, 13 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:530–31.

17. TJ to Ritchie, 20 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:548–49.

18. JA to William Cunningham, 15 Mar. 1804 and 24 Feb. 1804, in Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams, Late President of the United States, and the Late William Cunningham (Boston: E. M. Cunningham, 1823), 18, 15.

19. Correspondence Between Adams and Cunningham, vi–vii.

20. TJ to JA, 12 Oct. 1823, Cappon, 2:600–601.

21. JA to TJ, 10 Nov. 1823, Cappon, 2:601.

22. TJ to William Short, 8 Jan. 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), 16:92–93.

23. TJ to JA, 21 Jan. 1812, Cappon, 2:292, 292n; TJ to JA, 17 May 1813, ibid., 2:323.

24. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence,” 557–74.

25. Irma B. Jaffe, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence (London: Penguin, 1976), 64–66.

26. JA to John Trumbull, 1 Jan. 1817, PJA–MHS; JA to Trumbull, 18 Mar. 1817, ibid.

27. Trumbull to JA, 3 Mar. 1817, in Jaffe, Trumbull, 95; Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 345–51.

28. TJ to Trumbull, 10 Jan. 1817, PTJ: RS, 10:655.

29. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence,” 569–70.

30. JA to BR, 30 Sept. 1805, Old Family Letters, 86; JA to BR, 21 June 1811, ibid., 287; JA to TJ, 12 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:393.

31. JA to Nathan Webb, 12 Oct. 1755, PJA, 1:4–6; JA to Cunningham, 27 Sept. 1809, in Correspondence Between Adams and Cunningham, 167.

32. JA to Richard Rush, 22 July 1816, PJA–MHS.

33. TJ to Joseph Delaplaine, 12 Apr. 1817, PTJ: RS, 11:252.

34. William Henry Hoyt, The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: A Study of Evidence Showing That the Alleged Early Declaration of Independence by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20th, 1775, Is Spurious (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907), 3–7.

35. JA to TJ, 22 June 1819, Cappon, 2:542; JA to William Bentley, 15 July 1819, Works of JA, 10:381.

36. TJ to JA, 9 July 1819, Cappon, 2:543.

37. Joseph J. Ellis, in his Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 121, claimed that Adams was guilty of duplicity. He writes that JA agreed with TJ that the Mecklenburg declaration was a fiction while saying something else to friends. Ellis cited only a letter to Van der Kemp of August 21, 1819, in which JA said, “I could as Soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the Work of Chance, as that the Mecklenburg Resolves and Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration were not derived, the one from the other.” Not only does Ellis cite the wrong letter—JA made this statement in an August 21, 1819, letter to William Bentley—but, more important, all JA was saying is that the two documents were so similar that “either these Resolutions are from Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, or Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is a Plagiarism from those Resolutions.” Perhaps deep down he wished the latter were true, but he never said so and in fact said the opposite. What JA meant was that the two documents were just too similar to be a matter of chance. In a subsequent August 30, 1819, letter to Bentley, he used a French idiom (en bon train) to bid farewell to the Mecklenburg declaration and told Bentley, “Vive la Vérité.” Unfortunately, Pauline Maier, in her American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 173, cited Ellis’s book to show that JA continued to believe the Mecklenburg declaration was authentic.

38. JA to TJ, 21 July 1819, Cappon, 2:545; JA to William Bentley, 20 July 1819, PJA–MHS; JA to Bentley, 28 July 1819, ibid., JA to Bentley, 27 Aug. 1819, ibid. Dr. Alexander’s father had been at a meeting in Charlotte, in May 1775, at which the militia companies had issued some resolves. When these were discovered in 1838, they were very different from those Alexander claimed were the authentic resolutions. Since that original document had been burned in 1800, Alexander’s father had apparently reconstructed it from memory.

39. TJ to JM, 30 Aug. 1823, Republic of Letters, 3:1875–76.

40. TJ to JQA, 18 July 1824, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of TJ, 19:278.

41. TJ to Ellen W. Coolidge, 14 Nov. 1825, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of TJ, 18:349–50; Maier, American Scripture, 186–87.

42. Robert E. Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” Journal of Southern History 42 (1976): 529–65.

43. TJ to JA, 14 Jan. 1814, Cappon, 2:424–35.

44. TJ to JA, 17 May 1818, Cappon, 2:523; TJ to Albert Gallatin, 16 Oct. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:95–96.

45. TJ to Gallatin, 11 Apr. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:664; TJ, “Title and Prospectus for Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy,” c. 6 Apr. 1816, ibid., 9:631.

46. Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Treatise on Political Economy, trans. Thomas Jefferson, ed. Jeremy Jennings (1817; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011), 107, 182.

47. Destutt de Tracy, Treatise on Political Economy, 152, 151.

48. TJ to Gallatin, 16 Oct. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:95–96.

49. JA to BR, 13 Feb. 1811, Old Family Letters, 281.

50. JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:401–2.

51. JA to TJ, 29 Jan 1819, Cappon, 2:532.

52. JA to TJ, 29 May 1818, Cappon, 2:526.

53. JA to TJ, 16 May 1817, Cappon, 2:517–18.

54. JA to TJ, 15 July 1817, Cappon, 2:519.

55. A tragic sense of life is not the same as pessimism, as historian Maurizio Valsania seems to imply. Indeed, by becoming aware of the circumstances impinging on and limiting people’s actions a sense of the tragedy of life merely clarifies what is possible; it does not deny the freedom to act. Maurizio Valsania, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 18, 117.

56. TJ to JA, 1 Aug. 1816, Cappon, 2:485.

57. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 5 Jan. 1808, in Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear Jr., eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 319; TJ to Mrs. Elizabeth Trist, 26 Dec. 1814, PTJ: RS, 8:163–64.

58. TJ to Edward Coles, 25 Aug. 1814, PTJ: RS, 7:603–5.

59. TJ to Thomas Humphreys, 8 Feb. 1817, PTJ: RS, 11: 61.

60. TJ to Waterhouse, 3 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:518.

61. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 734.

62. Gordon-Reed and Onuf, in their biography of Jefferson, point out that “in the empire of this stalwart Virginian’s imagination, the perfect republican society looked a great deal like New England, and almost nothing like Virginia.” Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 30.

63. Ellen Raudolph Coolidge to TJ, 1 Aug. 1825; TJ to Ellen Randolph Coolidge, 27 Aug. 1825, in Betts and Bear, Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, 454–56, 457.

64. Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 218–37; Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 485.

65. TJ, “Essay on New England Religious Intolerance,” c. 16 June 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:380–81.

66. TJ to Ritchie, 21 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:379.

67. TJ to JM, 17 Feb. 1826, Republic of Letters, 3:1965.

68. TJ to Joseph Cabell, 11 Jan. 1825, Founders Online, National Archives.

69. TJ to JA, 19 Jan. 1819, Cappon, 2:532.

70. JA to TJ, 26 May 1817, 22 Jan. 1825, Cappon, 2:518, 607.

71. TJ to Cabell, 26 Feb. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:511; TJ to Thomas Cooper, 9 Mar. 1822, Founders Online, National Archives.

72. TJ to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, TJ: Writings, 1401.

73. TJ to William H. Crawford, 15 Feb. 1825, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of TJ, 19:282–83.

74. TJ to Ritchie, 21 Dec. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1445–46.

75. TJ to Ritchie, 21 Dec. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1445–46.

76. TJ to Spencer Roane, 6 Sept. 1819, TJ: Writings, 1425–28.

77. TJ to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824, Founders Online, National Archives.

78. TJ to John Holmes, 22 Apr. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1434.

79. TJ to Gallatin, 26 Dec. 1820, Founders Online, National Archives.

80. JA to TJ, 21 Dec. 1819, Cappon, 2:551.

81. JA to TJ, 21 Feb. 1820, Cappon, 2:561.

82. JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, 13 Jan. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 654.

83. TJ to JA, 22 Jan. 1821, Cappon, 2:569-70.

84. JA to TJ, 3 Feb. 1821, Cappon, 2:571.

85. TJ to JM, 24 Dec. 1825, with enclosure, Republic of Letters, 3:1943–46.

86. JM to TJ, 28 Dec. 1825, Republic of Letters, 3:1947–48.

87. TJ to Claiborne W. Gooch, 9 Jan. 1826, Founders Online, National Archives.

88. TJ to Holmes, 22 Apr. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1434; TJ to Bernard Peyton, 21 Feb. 1826, Founders Online, National Archives; Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee (New York: Knopf, 2001), 261; TJ to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 8 Feb. 1826, in Betts and Bear, Family Letters of TJ, 469; TJ to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 11 Jan. 1825, Founders Online, National Archives.

89. JA to JQA, 26 July 1816, AFC–MHS; Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past (1883; repr., Boston: Little, Brown, 1926), 59–60. 63–64.

90. JA to David Sewall, 22 May 1821, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 664.

91. Ellis, Passionate Sage, 80–81.

92. JA to JQA, 14 May 1815, AFC–MHS.

93. John Taylor to JA, 8 Apr. 1824, and JA to Taylor, 8 Apr. 1824, Works of JA, 10:411–13.

94. JA to Taylor, 15 Apr. 1814, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 577; JA to Matthew Carey, 9 Sept. 1820, PJA–MHS; JA to Charles Holt, 4 Sept. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 660–61.

95. JA to Holt, 4 Sept. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 660–61.

96. JA to Van der Kemp, 13 July 1815, Works of JA, 10:169; Ellis, Passionate Sage, 80–81; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (1992; repr., New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 442.

97. JA to TJ, 21 May 1819, Cappon, 2:540.

98. JA to Joseph B. Varnum, 26 Dec. 1808, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 509–12.

99. JA to Waterhouse, 17 Sept. 1813, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927), 111.

100. JA to TJ, 16 May 1817, Cappon, 2:517–18.

101. TJ to JA, 8 Sept. 1817, Cappon, 2:520; JA to TJ, 10 Oct. 1817, ibid., 2:521–22.

102. JA to TJ, 15 Feb. 1825, Cappon, 2:610.

103. JA to Richard Rush, 20 Nov. 1813, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 576.

104. JA to L. C. Adams, 13 Jan. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 654.

105. Quincy, Figures of the Past, 64.

106. TJ to JA, 18 Dec. 1825, Cappon, 2:612; Quincy, Figures of the Past, 65.

EPILOGUE: THE NATIONAL JUBILEE

1. JA to John Whitney, 7 June 1826, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 674–75.

2. TJ to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, TJ: Writings, 1517.

3. Andrew Burstein, America’s Jubilee (New York: Knopf, 2001), 261.

4. Burstein, America’s Jubilee, 266; William Cranch, Memoir of the Life, Character, and Writings of John Adams . . . (Washington, D.C.: S. A. Eliot, 1827), 57–58.

5. JA, Rex v. Wemms, 4 Dec. 1770, in The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1965), 3:269.

6. JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1816, Cappon, 2:461–63.

7. JA, “Note for an Oration on Government,” Spring 1772, JA: Revolutionary Writings, 1755–1775, 215; JA to TJ, 25 June 1813, Cappon, 2:334; JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1816, ibid., 2:461–63.

8. JA to William Steuben Smith, 30 May 1815, AFC–MHS; JA to TJ, 28 June 1813, Cappon, 2:339; JA to William Tudor Sr., 25 Feb. 1800, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 389.

9. JA to John Taylor, 19 Apr. 1814, JA: Works, 6:452.

10. JA to Taylor, 19 Apr. 1814, JA: Works, 6:453–54.

11. JA to Taylor, 5 Mar. 1814, JA: Works, 6:519–20.

12. JA to John Langdon, 12 Dec. 1810, PJA–MHS.

13. Hezekiah Niles to TJ and JM, 1 Nov. 1817, PTJ: RS, 12:160–64.

14. Abraham Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce and Others, 6 Apr. 1859, in Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832–1865, ed. Don. E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1974), 2:19; Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois,” 19 July 1858, ibid., 1:456.

15. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” 22 Feb. 1861, in Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 2:213.