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 Rando
lph, 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.
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