Friends Divided
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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.