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 State
s, 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 wh
at 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.
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