22.JA to TJ, 20 June 1815, Cappon, 2:446; JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, ibid., 2:357.
23.Antoine Destutt de Tracy to TJ, 12 June 1809, PTJ: RS, 1:260–63.
24.TJ to JA, 27 June 1822, Cappon, 2:581. Adams and Jefferson exchanged 158 letters between January 1, 1812, and their deaths in 1826, excluding the 6 letters between Jefferson and Abigail. Of these 158, Jefferson wrote only 49.
25.JA to TJ, 21 May 1819, Cappon, 2:540.
26.AA, note added to JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:358.
27.TJ to AA, 22 Aug. 1813, Cappon, 2:366–67.
28.AA to TJ, 20 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:377–78.
29.TJ to JA, 12 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:383–86.
30.AA to TJ, 15 Dec. 1816, Cappon, 2:500.
31.AA to TJ, 29 Apr. 1817, Cappon, 2:511.
32.JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:358.
33.JA to TJ, 15 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:413.
34.JA to TJ, 3 Mar. 1814, Cappon, 2:426.
35.JA to TJ, 9 July 1813, Cappon, 2:350.
36.JA to TJ, 3 July 1812, Cappon, 2:349.
37.JA to TJ, 19 June 1815, Cappon, 2:444; JA to TJ, 22 June 1815, ibid., 2:446–51; JA to TJ, 24 Aug. 1815, ibid., 2:454-55.
38.TJ to JA, 5 July 1814, Cappon, 2:433; JA to TJ, 3 Mar. 1814, ibid., 2:426–27; JA to TJ, 16 July 1824, ibid., 2:437; JA to TJ, 19 Dec. 1813, ibid., 2:406.
39.TJ to JA, 21 Mar. 1819, Cappon, 2:536–39; JA to TJ, 15 Dec. 1813, ibid., 2:411.
40.TJ to JA, 11 Jan. 1817, Cappon, 2:505; TJ to JA, 14 Oct. 1816, ibid., 2:491; JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1817, ibid., 2:507.
41.TJ to JA, 10–11 Aug. 1815, Cappon, 2:453; JA to TJ, 24 Aug. 1815, ibid., 2:455.
42.JA to TJ, 10 Feb. 1812, Cappon, 2:297.
43.TJ to JA, 20 Apr. 1812, Cappon, 2:299.
44.JA to TJ, 3 May 1812, Cappon, 2:302.
45.JA to TJ, 3 May 1812, Cappon, 2:303–4.
46.JA to William Tudor Sr., 23 Sept. 1818, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 638–41; JA to AA, 19 Aug. 1777, AFC, 2:320.
47.TJ to JA, 11 June 1812, Cappon, 2:305–8.
48.JA to TJ, 28 June 1813, Cappon, 2:338–40.
49.JA to TJ, 10 June 1813, Cappon, 2:326–27; JA to TJ, 14 June 1813, ibid., 2:329–30.
50.TJ to JA, 15 June 1813, Cappon, 2:331–33; TJ to JA, 27 June 1813, ibid., 2:335–38.
51.JA to TJ, 25 June 1813, Cappon, 2:333.
52.JA to TJ, 30 June 1813, Cappon, 2:346–48.
53.JA to TJ, 3 July 1813, Cappon, 2:349; JA to TJ, 9 July 1813, ibid., 2:352; JA to TJ, 12 July 1813, ibid., 2:354.
54.JA to TJ, 13 July 1813, Cappon, 2:354–56; JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, ibid., 2:357–58.
55.JA to TJ, 4 Mar. 1816, Cappon, 2:464–65.
56.JA to TJ, 15 July 1813, Cappon, 2:257–58.
57.JA to TJ, 16 July 1813, Cappon, 2:359–60.
58.JA to TJ, 3 Mar. 1814, Cappon, 2:429.
59.TJ to JA, 22 Aug. 1813, Cappon, 2:368.
60.TJ to JA, 14 Jan. 1814, Cappon, 2:411; JA to TJ, 22 Jan. 1825, ibid., 2:607.
61.JA to TJ, 3 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:404; TJ to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 6 Aug. 1816, and TJ to James Smith, 8 Dec. 1822, in James H. Hutson, The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 217–19.
62.JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, 19 Nov. 1821, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 667; JA to Mordecai M. Noah, 31 Jan. 1818, ibid., 638; JA to BR, 28 Aug. 1811, ibid., 525.
63.JA to JQA, 10 May 1816, AFC–MHS; JA to TJ, 14 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:373–75; JA to TJ, 15 Sept. 1813, ibid., 2:375–76.
64.JA to JQA, 10 May 1816, AFC–MHS; JA to AA, 27 Oct. 1799, ibid.; JA to William White, 29 Oct. 1814, PJA–MHS; JA to JQA, 11 Mar. 1813, AFC–MHS; JA, Diary, 3:234; JA to Samuel Miller, 7 July 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 658.
65.TJ to Salma Hale, 26 July 1818, in Hutson, Founders on Religion, 38.
66.TJ, “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1779), TJ: Writings, 346.
67.JA to AA, 29 Oct. 1775, AFC, 1:318–19.
68.JA to TJ, 25 June 1813, Cappon, 2:334; JA to BR, 1 Sept. 1809, Old Family Letters, 240; JA to BR, 19 June 1789, ibid., 40.
69.JA to TJ, 19 Apr. 1817, Cappon, 2:509.
70.TJ to Moses Robinson, 23 Mar. 1801, PTJ, 33:424.
71.TJ to Edward Dowse, 19 Apr. 1803, PTJ, 40:236.
72.TJ to Charles Thomson, 9 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:340–41.
73.TJ to Ezra Stiles Ely, 25 June 1819, “Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospel,” in Dickinson W. Adams and Ruth W. Lester, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Second Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 387.
74.TJ to Isaac Story, 5 Dec. 1801, PTJ, 36:30; JA to TJ, 3 May 1816, Cappon, 2:469–71; JA to TJ, 8 Dec. 1818, ibid., 2:530; JA to Van der Kemp, 27 Dec. 1816, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 619.
75.JA to TJ, 15 Sept. 1813, Cappon, 2:376; JA to TJ, 9 July 1813, ibid., 2:352.
76.TJ to JA, 27 June 1813, Cappon, 2:335–36; JA to TJ, 13 July 1813, ibid., 2:355.
77.TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:388.
78.TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:388–89.
79.TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:389–90.
80.TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 146.
81.TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 146; TJ to JA, 28 Oct. 1813, Cappon, 2:389–90.
82.TJ to Nathaniel Burwell, 14 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:532–33.
83.JA to Van der Kemp, 8 Apr. 1815, PJA–MHS; JA to Emma Willard, 8 Dec. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 650; JA to Caroline Amelia Smith De Windt, 11 Feb. 1820, PJA–MHS.
84.Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 184–234.
85.TJ to Angelica Schuyler Church, 27 Nov. 1793, PTJ, 27:449.
86.Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 57–58; Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 132–33; TJ to Eliza House Trist, 18 Aug. 1785, PTJ, 8:404; TJ to George Washington, 4 Dec. 1788, ibid., 14:330; TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, 7 Feb. 1787, ibid., 11:122–23.
87.JA to Thomas B. Adams, 17 Oct. 1799, AFC–MHS.
88.JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:397–99.
89.JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:398.
90.JA to TJ, 19 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:409; JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, ibid., 2:400–402.
91.JA to TJ, 25 Dec. 1813, Cappon, 2:409.
92.TJ to JA, 14 Jan. 1814, Cappon, 2:422–25.
93.TJ to JA, 8 Apr. 1816, Cappon, 2: 467.
94.JA to TJ, 6 May 1816, Cappon 2:472–74; TJ to JA, 1 Aug. 1816, ibid., 2:483–85.
95.JA to JQA, 3 July 1816, AFC–MHS; JA to TJ, 4 Nov. 1816, Cappon, 2:493.
96.JA to TJ, 16 Dec. 1816, Cappon, 2:500–501.
97.TJ to William Duane, 16 Sept. 1810, PTJ: RS, 3:86; TJ to JA, 11 Jan. 1817, Cappon, 2:505–6.
98.JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1817, Cappon, 2:506–8.
TWELVE: THE GREAT REVERSAL
1.JA to TJ, 2 Feb. 1817, Cappon, 2:508; TJ to Marquis de Lafayette, 23 Nov. 1818, in Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Letters of Lafayette and Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), 396.
2.JA to TJ, 30 July 1815, Cappon, 2:451.
3.TJ to William Johnson, 4 Mar. 1823, Founders Online, National Archives.
4.TJ to JA, 10–11 Aug. 1815, Cappon, 2:432–53; John Marshall, The Life of George Washington . . . (Philadelphia: C. P. Wayne, 1804–1807), 2:411n; Ph
ilip F. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years,” WMQ 19 (1962): 566.
5.JA to TJ, 24 Aug. 1815, Cappon, 2:455; JA to Thomas McKean, 26 Nov. 1815, PJA–MHS.
6.JA to John Holmes, 10 Aug. 1815, PJA–MHS; JA to JQA, 2 Sept. 1815, AFC–MHS; JA to Hezekiah Niles, 13 Feb. 1818, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 629–36.
7.JA to BR, 23 July 1806, Old Family Letters, 104–9.
8.JA to BR, 23 July 1806, Old Family Letters, 104–9.
9.JA to BR, 31 Aug. 1809, Old Family Letters, 238–39.
10.JA to Jedidiah Morse, 4 Mar. 1815, Works of JA, 10:133–34.
11.JA to TJ, 18 May 1817, Cappon, 2:516.
12.Benjamin Waterhouse to TJ, 20 Feb. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:493–97.
13.TJ to Waterhouse, 3 Mar., 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:517–19.
14.TJ to JA, 17 May 1818, Cappon, 2:523–24.
15.JA to TJ, 29 May 1818, Cappon, 2:525.
16.Thomas Ritchie to TJ, 13 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:530–31.
17.TJ to Ritchie, 20 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:548–49.
18.JA to William Cunningham, 15 Mar. 1804 and 24 Feb. 1804, in Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams, Late President of the United States, and the Late William Cunningham (Boston: E. M. Cunningham, 1823), 18, 15.
19.Correspondence Between Adams and Cunningham, vi–vii.
20.TJ to JA, 12 Oct. 1823, Cappon, 2:600–601.
21.JA to TJ, 10 Nov. 1823, Cappon, 2:601.
22.TJ to William 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), 16:92–93.
23.TJ to JA, 21 Jan. 1812, Cappon, 2:292, 292n; TJ to JA, 17 May 1813, ibid., 2:323.
24.Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence,” 557–74.
25.Irma B. Jaffe, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence (London: Penguin, 1976), 64–66.
26.JA to John Trumbull, 1 Jan. 1817, PJA–MHS; JA to Trumbull, 18 Mar. 1817, ibid.
27.Trumbull to JA, 3 Mar. 1817, in Jaffe, Trumbull, 95; Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 345–51.
28.TJ to Trumbull, 10 Jan. 1817, PTJ: RS, 10:655.
29.Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence,” 569–70.
30.JA to BR, 30 Sept. 1805, Old Family Letters, 86; JA to BR, 21 June 1811, ibid., 287; JA to TJ, 12 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:393.
31.JA to Nathan Webb, 12 Oct. 1755, PJA, 1:4–6; JA to Cunningham, 27 Sept. 1809, in Correspondence Between Adams and Cunningham, 167.
32.JA to Richard Rush, 22 July 1816, PJA–MHS.
33.TJ to Joseph Delaplaine, 12 Apr. 1817, PTJ: RS, 11:252.
34.William Henry Hoyt, The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: A Study of Evidence Showing That the Alleged Early Declaration of Independence by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20th, 1775, Is Spurious (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907), 3–7.
35.JA to TJ, 22 June 1819, Cappon, 2:542; JA to William Bentley, 15 July 1819, Works of JA, 10:381.
36.TJ to JA, 9 July 1819, Cappon, 2:543.
37.Joseph J. Ellis, in his Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 121, claimed that Adams was guilty of duplicity. He writes that JA agreed with TJ that the Mecklenburg declaration was a fiction while saying something else to friends. Ellis cited only a letter to Van der Kemp of August 21, 1819, in which JA said, “I could as Soon believe that the dozen flowers of the Hydrangia now before my Eyes were the Work of Chance, as that the Mecklenburg Resolves and Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration were not derived, the one from the other.” Not only does Ellis cite the wrong letter—JA made this statement in an August 21, 1819, letter to William Bentley—but, more important, all JA was saying is that the two documents were so similar that “either these Resolutions are from Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, or Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is a Plagiarism from those Resolutions.” Perhaps deep down he wished the latter were true, but he never said so and in fact said the opposite. What JA meant was that the two documents were just too similar to be a matter of chance. In a subsequent August 30, 1819, letter to Bentley, he used a French idiom (en bon train) to bid farewell to the Mecklenburg declaration and told Bentley, “Vive la Vérité.” Unfortunately, Pauline Maier, in her American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 173, cited Ellis’s book to show that JA continued to believe the Mecklenburg declaration was authentic.
38.JA to TJ, 21 July 1819, Cappon, 2:545; JA to William Bentley, 20 July 1819, PJA–MHS; JA to Bentley, 28 July 1819, ibid., JA to Bentley, 27 Aug. 1819, ibid. Dr. Alexander’s father had been at a meeting in Charlotte, in May 1775, at which the militia companies had issued some resolves. When these were discovered in 1838, they were very different from those Alexander claimed were the authentic resolutions. Since that original document had been burned in 1800, Alexander’s father had apparently reconstructed it from memory.
39.TJ to JM, 30 Aug. 1823, Republic of Letters, 3:1875–76.
40.TJ to JQA, 18 July 1824, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of TJ, 19:278.
41.TJ to Ellen W. Coolidge, 14 Nov. 1825, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of TJ, 18:349–50; Maier, American Scripture, 186–87.
42.Robert E. Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” Journal of Southern History 42 (1976): 529–65.
43.TJ to JA, 14 Jan. 1814, Cappon, 2:424–35.
44.TJ to JA, 17 May 1818, Cappon, 2:523; TJ to Albert Gallatin, 16 Oct. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:95–96.
45.TJ to Gallatin, 11 Apr. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:664; TJ, “Title and Prospectus for Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy,” c. 6 Apr. 1816, ibid., 9:631.
46.Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Treatise on Political Economy, trans. Thomas Jefferson, ed. Jeremy Jennings (1817; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011), 107, 182.
47.Destutt de Tracy, Treatise on Political Economy, 152, 151.
48.TJ to Gallatin, 16 Oct. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:95–96.
49.JA to BR, 13 Feb. 1811, Old Family Letters, 281.
50.JA to TJ, 15 Nov. 1813, Cappon, 2:401–2.
51.JA to TJ, 29 Jan 1819, Cappon, 2:532.
52.JA to TJ, 29 May 1818, Cappon, 2:526.
53.JA to TJ, 16 May 1817, Cappon, 2:517–18.
54.JA to TJ, 15 July 1817, Cappon, 2:519.
55.A tragic sense of life is not the same as pessimism, as historian Maurizio Valsania seems to imply. Indeed, by becoming aware of the circumstances impinging on and limiting people’s actions a sense of the tragedy of life merely clarifies what is possible; it does not deny the freedom to act. Maurizio Valsania, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 18, 117.
56.TJ to JA, 1 Aug. 1816, Cappon, 2:485.
57.TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 5 Jan. 1808, in Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear Jr., eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 319; TJ to Mrs. Elizabeth Trist, 26 Dec. 1814, PTJ: RS, 8:163–64.
58.TJ to Edward Coles, 25 Aug. 1814, PTJ: RS, 7:603–5.
59.TJ to Thomas Humphreys, 8 Feb. 1817, PTJ: RS, 11: 61.
60.TJ to Waterhouse, 3 Mar. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:518.
61.Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 734.
62.Gordon-Reed and Onuf, in their biography of Jefferson, point out that “in the empire of this stalwart Virginian’s imagination, the perfect republican society looked a great deal like New England, and a
lmost nothing like Virginia.” Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 2016), 30.
63.Ellen Raudolph Coolidge to TJ, 1 Aug. 1825; TJ to Ellen Randolph Coolidge, 27 Aug. 1825, in Betts and Bear, Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, 454–56, 457.
64.Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 218–37; Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 485.
65.TJ, “Essay on New England Religious Intolerance,” c. 16 June 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:380–81.
66.TJ to Ritchie, 21 Jan. 1816, PTJ: RS, 9:379.
67.TJ to JM, 17 Feb. 1826, Republic of Letters, 3:1965.
68.TJ to Joseph Cabell, 11 Jan. 1825, Founders Online, National Archives.
69.TJ to JA, 19 Jan. 1819, Cappon, 2:532.
70.JA to TJ, 26 May 1817, 22 Jan. 1825, Cappon, 2:518, 607.
71.TJ to Cabell, 26 Feb. 1818, PTJ: RS, 12:511; TJ to Thomas Cooper, 9 Mar. 1822, Founders Online, National Archives.
72.TJ to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, TJ: Writings, 1401.
73.TJ to William H. Crawford, 15 Feb. 1825, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Writings of TJ, 19:282–83.
74.TJ to Ritchie, 21 Dec. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1445–46.
75.TJ to Ritchie, 21 Dec. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1445–46.
76.TJ to Spencer Roane, 6 Sept. 1819, TJ: Writings, 1425–28.
77.TJ to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824, Founders Online, National Archives.
78.TJ to John Holmes, 22 Apr. 1820, TJ: Writings, 1434.
79.TJ to Gallatin, 26 Dec. 1820, Founders Online, National Archives.
80.JA to TJ, 21 Dec. 1819, Cappon, 2:551.
81.JA to TJ, 21 Feb. 1820, Cappon, 2:561.
82.JA to Louisa Catherine Adams, 13 Jan. 1820, JA: Writings from the New Nation, 654.
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