The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Jefferson escaped losing Monticello, for he died soon after this correspondence, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that he wrote—July 4, 1826, the same day John Adams died. But Madison was telling the unvarnished truth about his own financial plight. He too had problems that went beyond bad crops and low prices. For if the Madisons seemed like Adam and Eve to one visitor, Montpelier had its requisite “serpent in the Garden of Eden,” as Madison’s secretary put it.172 That was Dolley’s surviving son, John Payne Todd, whom Madison, another childless Founding Father, treated as his own. A prototypical dissolute Southern Gothic wastrel, Todd never married, couldn’t hold a job, drank, and gambled his way into perpetual debt and sometimes into debtors’ prison. Madison kept bailing him out, to the tune of at least $40,000—equal to nearly $1 million today.173 By the time the ex-president died at eighty-five on June 28, 1836, he had sold his thousand acres of investment land in Kentucky, his turnpike stock, and half his ancestral Piedmont acreage. Visitors had begun to remark that Montpelier was looking run-down, and its rooms needed painting.174

  In 1844, Dolley sold the estate and moved back to Washington, to her dead sister’s house on Lafayette Square, which Madison had owned. A living link to the Founders, she went out everywhere—including often to the White House, since she knew all of the first twelve presidents—and she had her own seat in the House of Representatives’ gallery. She sent the first private telegraph message and laid the Washington Monument’s cornerstone. But she was so poor that she kept wearing her old trademark dresses, shawls, and turbans from a vanished age, and Paul Jennings, the valet who had attended Madison on the day he died and now worked for Senator Daniel Webster to earn his freedom, often brought her baskets of provisions from Webster and sometimes gave her money himself. When she died at eighty-one in 1849, Washington gave her the biggest funeral in its history.175 She lay first in one temporary vault and then in another until 1858, when Montpelier’s new owners at last gave permission for her to be buried beside her husband in the red Virginia clay, as the Civil War was about to sweep over it, making way for America’s new birth of freedom.176

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: The Americanness of the American Revolution

  1John Locke, Second Treatise, IX, §123.

  2Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. x, 19.

  3Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1965), p. 73.

  4Bailyn, op. cit., p. 67.

  5William Livingston, The Independent Reflector, Milton M. Klein, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1965[IR]), XXXVIII, p. 323.

  6Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 255–56.

  7IR, XXII, p. 213.

  8James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, in James Madison, Writings, Jack N. Rakove, ed. (Library of America, 1999 [Madison LoA]), p. 33.

  9Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 3; George Washington to Marquis de Lafayette, 25 July 1785, in George Washington, Writings, John Rhodehamel, ed. (Library of America, 1997 [Washington LoA]), p. 583; Exodus 33, v. 1–3; Matthew 11, v. 28–30.

  10Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 32–33.

  11Locke, op. cit., V, §48–49, 40.

  12James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787 (Madison LoA, p. 150).

  13James Madison, Federalist 10 (Madison LoA, p. 167).

  14George Washington to Bryan Fairfax, 24 August 1774 (Washington LoA, p. 158).

  15IR, II, p. 62.

  16George Washington to Bryan Fairfax, 20 July 1774 (Washington LoA, pp. 155–56).

  17Bailyn, op. cit., p. 346.

  18Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 6, in Alexander Hamilton, Writings, Joanne B. Freeman, ed. (Library of America, 2001 [Hamilton LoA]), p. 176.

  19James Madison, Federalist 55 (Madison LoA, pp. 319–20).

  20IR, XXIX, p. 257.

  21IR, IV, p. 79; Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 135–36.

  22James Madison, Federalist 57 (Madison LoA, p. 328).

  23John C. Hamilton, Life of Alexander Hamilton (Boston: Riverside, 1879), VII:686.

  CHAPTER 1: Conceived in Liberty: William Livingston and the Case for Revolution

  1John Adams, “The ‘American Revolution,’ ” Niles’ Weekly Register, March 7, 1818.

  2Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 1.

  3Milton M. Klein, The American Whig: William Livingston of New York, revised edition (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 305–6.

  4Clare Brandt, An American Aristocracy: The Livingstons (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), pp. 12–21.

  5Ibid., pp. 38, 41–42, 45–48.

  6Klein, op. cit., p. 10; Brandt, op. cit., p. 59.

  7Brandt, op. cit., pp. 37, 40.

  8Ibid., pp. 59–62.

  9Klein, op. cit., pp. 15–17.

  10Ibid., pp. 32–37.

  11Ibid., pp. 37–38.

  12Ibid., pp. 39, 50, 161; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 34–35, 43–44.

  13Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1965), p. 60.

  14Klein, op. cit., pp. 45–48.

  15Ibid., pp. 16, 70, 60–63; Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), p. 509.

  16Klein, op. cit., p. 64.

  17Ibid., pp. 60, 68–69; IR, XLIII, p. 360.

  18Klein, op. cit., pp. 70–72.

  19James Alexander, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, Stanley Nider Katz, ed., 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 8–9; John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, Ronald Hamowy, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), I:29, 87, 94, 103–4, 110, 114–15, 138–39, 141–42, 176–80, 228–30, 233–37, 239–40, 255–58, 405–8, 413–18, 423, 427–29.

  20Alexander, op. cit., pp. 3–4, 133.

  21Ibid., pp. 7–8, 111, 17, 19–20, 49–50.

  22Ibid., pp. 18, 20, 21, 53, 56–57.

  23Ibid., p. 30; William Smith, Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, Michael Kammen, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1972), II:19–20.

  24Alexander, op. cit., pp. 22, 62.

  25Ibid., pp. 63, 69, 78. Andrew Hamilton was not related, as far as is known, to the much younger Alexander Hamilton.

  26Ibid., pp. 78, 81, 84, 87.

  27Ibid., pp. 91, 99; Colbourn, op. cit., pp. 9–10, 44–45; Bailyn, op. cit., p. 78.

  28Alexander, op. cit., pp. 89, 86, 84.

  29Ibid., pp. 75, 99, 29; William Smith, Jr., op. cit., II:20.

  30Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 30–31, 33, 53–54, 67–69.

  31Benson Lossing, ed., Harper’s Encyclopedia of United States History (New York, 1902), s.v. Zenger.

  32Klein, op. cit., pp. 96–98, 100–101.

  33Ibid., pp. 101, 116.

  34Ibid., pp. 102–3, 106–7.

  35Ibid., p. 79.

  36Ibid., pp. 92–93, 233–34, 188.

  37Ibid., pp. 123, 104, 126, 131, 152.

  38Ibid., pp. 110–11.

  39Ibid., p. 189; William Livingston, The Independent Reflector, Milton M. Klein, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 447.

  40IR, I, pp. 56–57.

  41IR, XI, pp. 128, 133; Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, lines, 208–11.

  42IR, X, pp. 120–22.

  43IR, VI, pp. 89–91.

  44Klein, op. cit., p. 249.

  45IR, p. 5.

  46Ibid., p. 22.

  47Ibid., pp. 184, 271.

  48IR, VIII, pp. 181–82.

&
nbsp; 49IR, XVII, p. 174; IR, XVIII, p. 180.

  50IR, XVII, pp. 174, 173.

  51IR, XVII, pp. 172, 174.

  52IR, XX, pp. 192–95; IR, XVIII, p. 180.

  53IR, XLVI, p. 391; James Madison, Federalist 10, in James Madison, Writings, Jack N. Rakove, ed. (Library of America, 1999), p. 167.

  54IR, XLVI; Klein, op. cit., p. 232.

  55IR, XXII, pp. 210–11; Robbins, op. cit., pp. 81–83; IR, XXXVIII, p. 320.

  56Klein, op. cit., pp. 319, 340, 352–53.

  57IR, p. 291.

  58IR, XXXVI, pp. 306–7; IR, XXXVIII, p. 323.

  59IR, XXXIII, pp. 287–88; IR, XXXVI, p. 306.

  60IR, XXXIII, p. 286.

  61IR, XXXVI, p. 307.

  62IR, XXXIII, p. 286; IR, XXXIX, p. 328.

  63IR, XXXIII, p. 289.

  64Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, Merrill D. Peterson, ed. (Library of America, 1984), p. 121.

  65Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 273–74, 276–77, 279–84, 289–90, 297–99.

  66IR, XXXIII, pp. 287–88, 290.

  67Klein, op. cit., pp. 287, 252, 171.

  68IR, IV, p. 77; IR, XXVIII, p. 326.

  69IR, XXXVI, p. 310; IR, XXXIII, p. 287.

  70IR, p. 335.

  71IR, II, p. 62.

  72IR, XXXVII, p. 313; IR, XXXVI, p. 308.

  73IR, XLVI, p. 391.

  74IR, XXXVII, p. 315.

  75IR, XLVII, p. 399.

  76IR, L, p. 419 (probably by William Smith, Jr.).

  77IR, XIII, p. 147.

  78IR, XLVII, p. 398; IR, XIII, p. 143.

  79IR, XL, pp. 336–37.

  80Klein, op. cit., p. 170; Colbourn, op. cit., pp. 16–18, 24.

  81Klein, op. cit., pp. 294–95.

  82Ibid., pp. 402–3; Bailyn, op. cit., p. 106.

  83Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 78; Klein, op. cit., pp. 161–64.

  84Klein, op. cit., pp. 403–5.

  85Ibid., p. 410; Bailyn, op. cit., pp. 106–7.

  86Bailyn, op. cit., p. 107.

  87Klein, op. cit., pp. 432–33.

  88Ibid., pp. 413–16.

  89Colbourn, op. cit., pp. 44–45.

  90Klein, op. cit., p. 419.

  91IR, XXXII, pp. 281, 284; Colbourn, op. cit., pp. 32–33, 43–45, 53.

  92Klein, op. cit., p. 419, 424.

  93Ibid., pp. 421–22.

  94Ibid., p. 422.

  95Ibid., pp. 448–49, 459; Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 35–36.

  96Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 230ff.

  97Paul C. Nagel, The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 62–63.

  98“Slave Petition to the Governor, Council, and House of Representatives of the Province of Massachusetts,” 25 May 1774 (Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 5th ser., 3:432–33), in Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, The Founders’ Constitution, Volume 1, Chapter 14, Document 9 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

  99Klein, op. cit., p. 353.

  100Ibid.,

  pp. 487–88.

  101Bailyn, op. cit., p. 53.

  102Klein, op. cit., pp. 535, 544–47, 109, 155–56.

  103Ibid., pp. 546–47, 552–53.

  104Ibid., pp. 556–60.

  105Kitty Livingston to John Jay and Sarah L. Jay, 21 November 1777, in Linda M. Freeman, Louise V. North, and Janet M. Wedge, eds., Selected Letters of John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), p. 52.

  106Sarah L. Jay to Susanna French Livingston, 15 April 1783, in Linda M. Freeman, Louise V. North, and Janet M. Wedge, eds., op. cit., p. 132.

  107Klein, op. cit., pp. 559–65.

  108Ibid., pp. 544–45.

  109National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: U.S. History 2010 (National Assessment of Educational Progress, June 2011).

  110Private communication, William Schroh, Jr., Director of Museum Operations, Liberty Hall Museum, Union, NJ.

  CHAPTER 2: Conservative Revolutionaries: The Lees of Stratford Hall

  1Paul C. Nagel, The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 97.

  2Charles Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (Baton Rouge, LA: State University Press, 1994), p. 202.

  3J. Kent McGaughy, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 4; Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, VA: Whittet & Shepperson, 1907), pp. 18, 103, 215.

  4Nagel, op. cit., p. 14; McGaughy, op. cit., p. 5.

  5McGaughy, op. cit., p. 7; Nagel, op. cit., p. 11.

  6McGaughy, op. cit., p. 9; Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 40.

  7McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 8–9; Nagel, op. cit., pp. 14–16.

  8Nagel, op. cit., pp. 21–22, 17, 27.

  9Ibid., pp. 24; McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 9–10.

  10Nagel, op. cit., pp. 26–27, 29–32.

  11Ibid., pp. 33–37.

  12Ibid., pp. 38–39, 44.

  13Ibid., p. 36.

  14Ibid., pp. 44–45.

  15Ibid., pp. 13, 41–42.

  16John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, 9th edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 514–15.

  17Nagel, op. cit., p. 43.

  18Richard M. Ketchum, Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), pp. 21–22; Edmund Burke, “Speech for the Conciliation with the Colonies,” 22 March 1775.

  19Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 6–7, 15; John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783, revised edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 27, 29.

  20Selby, op. cit., pp. 13–15.

  21Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Russel B. Nye, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 73–74.

  22Selby, op. cit., p. 30.

  23Wood, op. cit., p. 13; Selby, op. cit., p. 26.

  24Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1952), pp. 11, 18–19, 78–81, 83–84.

  25Nagel, op. cit., p. 39.

  26Ibid., pp. 46, 65.

  27McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 46–47.

  28Nagel, op. cit., pp. 67, 43.

  29Ibid., pp. 66–67.

  30Ibid., pp. 66–68, 70–71.

  31McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 24–25.

  32Ibid., pp. 31–32.

  33Ibid., pp. 48, 51–53.

  34Nagel, op. cit., pp. 77, 79–80; Selby, op. cit., p. 38.

  35Richard H. Lee, The Life of Richard Henry Lee by His Grandson (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1825), I:7.

  36Ibid., I:17–19, 20–21.

  37McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 80–84.

  38Ketchum, op. cit., pp. 32–33, 35–36.

  39Ibid., pp. 38–40.

  40Ibid., pp. 40–45; Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, 12th edition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890), p. 291.

  41Ketchum, op. cit., pp. 42, 46–47, 71–73, 77, 81.

  42Ibid., p. 86; Richard H. Lee (RHL) to [a gentleman in London], 31 May 1764, in James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (New York: Macmillan, 1911) [RHL Let.], I:5–7.

  43RHL to Lord Shelburne, 31 May 1769 (RHL Let., I:37).

  44RHL to Landon Carter, 22 June 1765 (RHL Let., I:8).

  45A Virginia Planter [RHL], “To the Good People of Virginia,” Richard H. Lee, op. cit., I:37.

  46RHL to [J.R., a London Merchant], after 27 June 1768; RHL to A
rthur Lee, 4 July 1765; RHL to Gouverneur Morris, 25 May 1775 (RHL Let., I:28, 10, 140).

  47McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 77, 55, 60, 63; RHL to William Lee, 12 July 1772 (RHL Let., I:75–6); Nagel, op. cit., p. 84.

  48RHL to William Lee, 12 July 1772 (RHL Let., I:70–71).

  49McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 78, 80; RHL to the editor of the Virginia Gazette, 25 July 1766 (RHL Let., I:16–17).

  50“Articles of Association, by the citizens of Westmoreland,” 27 February 1766 (Richard H. Lee, op. cit., I:34–35; McGaughy, op. cit., p. 79.

  51McGaughy, op.cit., pp. 52, 56; Richard H. Lee, op. cit., I:107.

  52RHL to Arthur Lee, 19 May 1769 (RHL Let., I:35).

  53McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 56–57; RHL to William Lee, 17–20 December 1769 (RHL Let., I:40).

  54RHL to William Lee, 23 October 1772 (RHL Let., I:78).

  55RHL to General William Whipple, 29 November 1778 (RHL Let., I:454).

  56For example, RHL to William Lee, 7 July 1770, 15 January 1773; RHL to Arthur Lee, 26 June 1774 (RHL Let., I:50, 81, 118).

  57Morgan, op. cit., pp. 7–8; Richard H. Lee, op. cit., I:246. Thomas Jefferson practiced a more manipulative version of spare-the-rod child-rearing. See Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), pp. 239–40, on how he prevented his daughter Martha from becoming a nun.

  58RHL to Edmund Pendleton, 22 May 1788 (Richard H. Lee, op. cit., II:92).

  59RHL to John Dickinson, 25 July 1768 (RHL Let., I:29).

  60RHL to a Gentleman of Influence in England, 27 March 1768 (RHL Let., I:26).

  61RHL to John Dickinson, 25 July 1768 (RHL Let., I:29).

  62RHL to John Dickinson, 26 November 1768 (RHL Let., I:30–31).

  63Wood, op. cit., p. 33.

  64RHL to William Lee, 7 July 1770 (RHL Let., I:45–46).

  65RHL to Samuel Adams, 4 February 1773 (RHL Let., I:52–53).

  66RHL to Samuel Adams, 24 April 1774 (RHL Let., I:108); Arthur Lee to RHL, 18 March 1774 (Richard H. Lee, op. cit., I:94).

  67RHL to Arthur Lee, 26 June 1774 (RHL Let., I:114–16).

  68Joseph Warren, Suffolk Resolves, 9 September 1774.

  69McGaughy, op. cit., pp. 110–11; Wood, op. cit., pp. 47–49.

  70McGaughy, op. cit., p. 114.