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 Dio
dati-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.
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