Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  31. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 232.

  32. James Wilson, 3 Dec. 1787, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification by the States: Pennsylvania, ed. Merrill Jensen et al., (Madison, WI, 1976), 2: 463.

  33. White, Somewhat More Independent, 51.

  34. Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville, 1997), 129.

  35. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 415–18, 428–33, 652–54; Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, UK, 1974), 29.

  36. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 13.

  37. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 281; Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 13.

  38. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 25–26, 31, 34.

  39. Philip Morgan, “Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760–1810,” in Berlin and Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 114–15, 124–25. Still, compared to the Upper South the number of free blacks in South Carolina was negligible; as late as 1800 only about three thousand free blacks lived in the state. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 491.

  40. GW to Robert Lewis, 17 Aug. 1799, Papers of Washington: Retirement Ser., 4: 256.

  41. Richard S. Newman, “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the First Federal Congress,” JER, 16 (1996), 571–72; JM to BR, 20 Mar. 1790, Papers of Madison, 13: 109.

  42. GW to John Francis Mercer, 9 Sept 1786, Washington: Writings, 607; Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York, 2006), 297.

  43. Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), 33; Ellsworth quoted in J. J. Spengler, “Malthusianism in Late Eighteenth-Century America,” American Economic Review, 25 (1935), 705.

  44. Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia, 1981); Stanley Lemons, “Rhode Island and the Slave Trade,” Rhode Island History, 60 (2002), 95–104; Steven Doyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), 19.

  45. Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Berlin and Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 49–82.

  46. James Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800–1816 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 11.

  47. Broussard, Southern Federalists, 89–90, 235–40, 364–68, 371–73, 377–81, 390–91.

  48. George C. Rogers Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Columbia, SC, 1969).

  49. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Daily Life in the Early Republic, 1790–1820: Creating a New Nation (Westport, CT, 2004), 68.

  50. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990), 220.

  51. Rothman, Slave Country, 47–51.

  52. Rothman, Slave Country, 77–78, 83, 94; Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South (Lexington, KY, 1953); John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Baton Rouge, 1970), 219, 275.

  53. James K. Paulding, “Slaves and Rivermen: Western Virginia, 1816,” in Warren S. Tyron, ed., A Mirror for Americans: Life and Manners in the United States, 1790–1870, as Recorded by American Travelers (Chicago, 1952), 259.

  54. Drew R. Mccoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge, UK, 1989), 222–23.

  55. Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006), 220, 232, 249, 236; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “A New Meaning for Turner’s Frontier: Part II: The Southwest Frontier and New England,” Political Science Quarterly, 69 (1954), 572–76.

  56. Garry Wills, ‘Negro President’: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston, 2003).

  57. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001).

  58. Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789–1831 (Arlington Heights, IL, 1993), 89; David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001).

  59. James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 39–48; Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (New York, 1979), 364.

  60. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 15.

  61. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 40.

  62. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 49, 51; Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords, 97.

  63. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 102.

  64. Monroe to the Speaker of the General Assembly, 5 Dec. 1800, in Stanislaus M. Hamilton, ed., Writings of James Monroe (New York, 1900), 3: 208–9.

  65. Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, 22 Sept. 1800, in Gordon S. Wood, ed., The Rising Glory of America, rev. ed. (Boston, 1990), 361.

  66. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 114.

  67. Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution (Cambridge, UK, 1974), 155–58; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1975), 36–41; Jordan, White over Black, 580.

  68. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975), 196.

  69. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, 138–43.

  70. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, 138–43; TJ to James Monroe, 24 Nov. 1801, to Edward Coles, 25 Aug. 1814, Jefferson: Writings, 270, 1097, 1345.

  71. Duncan J. MacLeod, “Toward Caste,” in Berlin and Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom, 235.

  72. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, 138.

  73. JM, Memorandum on an African Colony for Freed Slaves, ca. 20 Oct. 1789, Papers of Madison, 12: 438.

  74. Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill, 2006), 224, 355; MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution, 163; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961), 81.

  75. Harvey Strum, “Property Qualifications and Voting Behavior in New York, 1807–1816,” JER, 1 (1981), 360–61; Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2003), 58–60.

  1. Russell B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York, 1960), 257; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston, 1909–14), 8: 339.

  2. Linda Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, 1970), 3n; Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, 2008).

  3. TJ to John Hollis, 19 Feb. 1809, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 12: 252–54; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (Boston, 1974), 661.

  4. On the cosmopolitanism of the Revolutionaries, see Arthur L. Ford, Joel Barlow (New York, 1971), 27, 31, 59, 61; and Allan Guttman, “Copley, Peale, Trumbull: A Note on Loyalty,” American Quarterly, 11 (1959), 178–83.

  5. Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (New York, 1999), 165–66.

  6. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), 50; David Ramsay, An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence (1778), in Robert L. Brunehouse, ed., “David Ramsay, 1740–1815: Selections from His Writings,” American Philosophical Society, Trans., 55 (1965), 185.

  7. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York, 1976), 10.

  8. Berkeley quoted in Lewis P. Simpson, ed., The Federalist Li
terary Mind: Selections from the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, 1803–1811 (Baton Rouge, 1962), 34.

  9. Silverman, Cultural History of the American Revolution, 10–11; Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York, 1979), 7.

  10. Andrew Burnaby, Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America: In the Years 1759 and 1760 (1775; Ithaca, 1960). Early in the nineteenth century John Adams recalled that ever since he was a young lawyer in Massachusetts it had been a common observation that the “arts, sciences, and empire had traveled westward” and that “the next leap would be over the Atlantic into America.” JA to BR, 21 May 1807, in Adams, ed., Works, 9: 600.

  11. Silverman, Cultural History of the American Revolution, 230.

  12. Ezra Stiles, “Election Sermon” (1783), in John Wingate Thornton, ed., The Pulpit of the American Revolution; or, the Political Sermons of the Period (Boston, 1876), 460.

  13. On neoclassicism, see Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism (Harmondsworth, UK, 1968), and the exhibition catalogue of the Royal Academy and the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Age of Neo-Classicism (London, 1972).

  14. For these cultural changes, see R. G. Saisselin, “The Transformation of Art into Culture: From Pascal to Diderot,” in Theodore Besterman, ed., Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 70 (Geneva, 1970), 3–25; R. G. Saisselin, “Tivoli Revisited or the Triumph of Culture,” in Paul Fritz and David Williams, eds., The Triumph of Culture: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives (Toronto, 1972), 3–25; J. H. Plumb, “The Public, Literature and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century,” ibid., 27–48; and Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton, 1970).

  15. JA to Abigail Adams, 9 Oct. 1774, 25 April 1778, April–May 1780, in Lyman Butterfield et al., eds., The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762–1784 (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 79, 210, 256; Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966), 33–34; Wendell D. Garrett, “John Adams and the Limited Role of the Fine Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio, 1 (1964), 243–55.

  16. Stanley Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens, OH, 1967), 250; Lawrence Klein, “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (1984–85), 186–214.

  17. Winckelmann quoted in Eric Slauter, “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley,” Early American Studies (Spring 2004), 101.

  18. Caroline Winterer, “From Royal to Republican: The Classical Image in Early America,” JAH, 91 (2005), 1264–90; Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, 2002); Meyer Reinhold, ed., The Classick Pages: Classical Readings of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, PA, 1975); Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994).

  19. Constantin François Volney, A New Translation of Volney’s Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolution of Empire (Paris, 1802); American Museum, 8 (1790), 174–76; J. Meredith Neil, Toward a National Taste: America’s Quest for Aesthetic Independence (Honolulu, 1975), 143.

  20. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, 1986), 9.

  21. “Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Coll., 71 (1914), 661–66.

  22. Trumbull to TJ, 11 June 1789, Papers of Jefferson, 15: 176–79; Irma B. Jaffe, John Trumbull: Patriot Artist of the American Revolution (Boston, 1975).

  23. Harris, Artist in American Society, 42.

  24. Massachusetts Magazine, 4 (1792), 434.

  25. Neil, Toward A National Taste, 145.

  26. GW to Lafayette, 28 May 1788, Washington: Writings, 680–81.

  27. Frank H. Sommer, “Emblem and Device: The Origin of the Great Seal of the United States,” Art Quarterly, 24 (1961), 57–77; Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 132–34; Steven C. Bullock, “‘Sensible Signs’: The Emblematic Education of Post-Revolutionary Freemasonry,” in Donald R. Kennon, ed., A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic (Charlottesville, 1999), 203, 210.

  28. Ellis, After the Revolution, 51.

  29. David C. Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley, 2004), 146.

  30. Neil, Toward a National Taste, 57–58; Ward, Peale, 16–17.

  31. Lillian B. Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1966), 90.

  32. Ward, Peale, 103–4.

  33. Charles Willson Peale, Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Science of Nature (1800), in Gordon S. Wood, ed., The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, rev. ed. (Boston, 1990), 224, 225; David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, DC, 1995), 36; Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York, 1980), 26–27; Sidney Hart, “‘To Encrease the Comforts of Life’: Charles Willson Peale and the Mechanical Arts,” Penn. Mag. of Hist. and Biog. 110 (1986), 323–57; Ward, Peale, 105–7.

  34. John Saillant, “The American Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (1998), 264.

  35. Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Ideas and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax, VA, 1991), 5.

  36. On the French revolutionary efforts, see James A. Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France, 1750–1799 (Toronto, 1965); David Lloyd Dowd, Pageant Master of the Republic: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution (Lincoln, NE, 1948).

  37. David Humphreys, “Poem on the Industry of the United States of America” (1804), in Vernon Louis Parrington, ed., The Connecticut Wits (New York, 1954, new ed. 1969), 401.

  38. John W. Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton, 1967), ch. 1.

  39. Neil, Toward a National Taste, 150–51.

  40. TJ to William Buchanan and James Hay, 26 Jan. 1786, to JM, 20 Sept. 1785, Papers of Jefferson, 9: 220–22, 8: 534–35.

  41. Lawrence J. Friedman, Inventors of the Promised Land (New York, 1975), 9; Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theater, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge, UK, 2005), 2, 4; Heather Nathans, Early American Theater from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge, UK, 2003), 86; Edward J. Nygren and Bruce Robertson, eds., Views and Visions: American Landscape Before 1830 (Washington, DC, 1986), 25, 137–43.

  42. Latrobe, “Anniversary Oration,” Port Folio, 3rd Ser., 5 (1811), 4.

  43. Harris, Artist in American Society, 22.

  44. Ruth M. Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, NE, 1964), 223; Michael T. Gilmore, “The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 548.

  45. Gilmore, “The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods,” 548–49.

  46. Nathans, Early American Theater, 13–36; G. Thomas Tanselle, Royall Tyler (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 5; William J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington, IN, 1977), 61.

  47. Kenneth R. Bowling, “A Capital Before a Capitol: Republican Visions,” in Kennon, ed., A Republic for the Ages, 51.

  48. Ellis, After the Revolution, 133.

  49. Nathans, Early American Theater, 37–70; Silverman, Cultural History of the American Revolution, 546–556; Ellis, After the Revolution, 129; American Museum, 5 (1789), 185–90.

  50. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (New York, 1964), 133.

  51. Bowling, “Capital Before a Capitol,” Kennon, ed., A Republic for the Ages, 51.

  52. Playbill, in Wood, ed., Rising Glory o
f America, 281; Nye, Cultural Life of the New Nation, 264; Ellis, After the Revolution, 133–34; Richards, Drama, Theater, and Identity in the American New Republic, 69, 2; Nathans, Early American Theater, 86–88.

  53. William Haliburton, The Effects of the Stage . . . on the Manners of a People (Boston, 1792), 11, 15, 21.

  54. Silverman, Cultural History of the American Revolution, 554; Ellis, After the Revolution, 134; David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago, 1968), 8; Meserve, Emerging Entertainment, 104–5.

  55. Meserve, Emerging Entertainment, 154.

  56. Elson, Guardians of Tradition, 233.

  57. Latrobe, “Anniversary Oration,” Port Folio, 3rd Ser., 5 (1811), 30.

  58. Joseph Hopkinson, “Annual Discourse, Delivered Before the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts” (1810), in Wood, ed., Rising Glory of America, 334.