Over the past three decades or so, the period of history covered by this book has experienced a renaissance in historical writing, involving the production of many more books than can be cited in this essay. Consequently, this bibliography is very selective.
Much of the proliferation of works on the early Republic came from the formation of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) in 1977 and the launching of the Journal of the Early Republic (JER) in 1981. This organization and its journal have turned the period into one of the most exciting and significant in American history.
Since there were so many great men in the period, biographies, many of them multivolume, have been written and continue to flourish. Douglas Southall Freeman, seven volumes on Washington (1948–1957); James Thomas Flexner, four volumes on Washington (1965–1972); Dumas Malone, six volumes on Jefferson (1948–1981); Irving Brant, six volumes on James Madison (1941–1961); and Page Smith, two volumes on Adams (1962). Early in the twentieth century Albert Beveridge wrote four laudatory volumes on John Marshall (1916–1919) that still stand up.
It seems that scarcely a year now passes that one or another of the Founders does not have his life portrayed in print. Probably the best single-volume study of Washington is Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (2004). Good single-volume studies of other Founders are the following: Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (1970); for a superb brief life, see R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (2003); Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2004), but Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government(1970) excels in placing this leading Federalist in an eighteenth-century context; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (1992); Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (1971), but for an excellent short biography, see Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic(1990); Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (1996), but for a good short study, see Charles F. Hobson, The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (1996).
Each of these Founders also has his own mammoth papers project under way (or in the case of Hamilton, completed), each promising to publish virtually everything written by and to the great man. Nearly all the leading Founders have volumes of their selected writings available in the Library of America. Jefferson’s exchange of letters with two of his fellow Founders is in two volumes edited by Lester J. Cappon, The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959); and in three volumes edited by James Morton Smith, The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826 (1995).
Even Aaron Burr, forever disgraced but forever fascinating, has had two volumes of his correspondence edited by Mary-Jo Kline and published in 1984. The standard biography of him is Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr, 2 vols. (1979, 1982). The most recent life is a defense of Burr, Nancy Isenberg, Forgotten Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007).
Many secondary figures in the period have excellent biographies. To name only several, see Talbot Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1955); Winifred E. Bernard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1758–1808 (1965); George C. Rogers Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston, 1758–1812 (1962); Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American Federalist (1968); Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765–1848: The Urbane Federalist (1969); Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (1971); George Athan Billias, Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman (1976); John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992); James J. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris: Author, Statesman, and Man of the World (2005); and Walter Stahr, John Jay: Founding Father(2005). Two collective studies of the Founders are Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000) and Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006).
In the 1960s the origins of political parties commanded the attention of political scientists and political sociologists. Since these scholars were not historians, they were primarily concerned with forming generalizations about politics that were applicable to the experience of newly developing nations in the decade or so following World War II. Consequently, they were not always sensitive to the differentness of the past, and their books often presented a very ahistorical and anachronistic view of America’s early political parties. See especially William Nesbit Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809 (1963); Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1963); Rudolph M. Bell, Party and Faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1789–1801(1973); and John F. Hoadley, Origins of American Political Parties, 1789–1803 (1986).
In more recent years, historians more sensitive to time and place have challenged this political science conception of “the first party system.” See Richard Buel Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789–1815 (Ithaca, 1972); Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York, 1983); Ralph Ketcham, Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829 (1984); James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (1993); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (1993), which is a monumental study of the high politics of the 1790s sympathetic to the Federalists; and Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001), which nicely captures the peculiar political culture of the 1790s. The first section of Sean Wilentz’s monumental study The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) is pertinent to the early Republic; Wilentz’s work is a throwback to a traditional approach to politics, focusing on elections, parties, and the maneuvering of elite white males in government.
Most historians nowadays seek to write political history that views politics through the lenses of race, gender, and popular culture. Consequently, they are interested primarily in the symbols and theatrics of politics—the varied ways common people, including women and blacks, expressed themselves and participated in politics, whether in parades, dress, or drinking toasts. For examples, see Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (1998); and Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (2004). On popular politics in the 1790s, see Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (1997); and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997).
Over the past three decades many historians have also developed a new conception of the early Republic, bridging the professional chasm that earlier separated those who concentrated on the colonial and Revolutionary periods from those who focused on the early Republic. Historians now tend to conceive of the Revolution much more broadly than they did in the past and have extended its reach into the early decades of the nineteenth century. Historians now write books that run from 1750 or 1780 to 1820 or 1840. This new periodization makes the Revolution far more significant and consequential for the early nineteenth century than it had been earlier.
As a result, there is a stronger sense of the changes that took place over this extended Revolutionary period, not just politically but socially and culturally. On this subject, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). Over the past generation increasing numbers of historians have turned to social and cultural subjects rather than just focusing on prominent individuals. They now write about extended social developments that cut through the Revolutionary era and transcended the traditional political dates—the role of women and families, the emerging professions, the decline of apprenticeship, the rise of counting, the transformation of artisans, the changing of urban mobs, the development of the postal system, and so on. On these subjects, see Donald M. Scott, From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750–1850 (1986); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age (1986); Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (1982); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979); Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufactures in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (1981); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984); Paul A. Gilge, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (1987); and Richard R. John, Spreading the News: the American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995).
Even legal historians have become less interested in the decisions of Chief Justice Marshall and more interested in the relation between law and society. For examples, see William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (1975); and Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977). Much of this new legal research was inspired by James Willard Hurst. See his “Old and New Dimensions of Research in United States Legal History,” American Journal of Legal History, 23 (1979), 1–20.
One of the most important contributors to this new look at the relation of the Revolution to the first few decades of the early Republic is the extraordinarily ambitious and fruitful project Perspectives on the American Revolution, supported by the United States Capitol Historical Society and conceived and led by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. For nearly twenty years, from the early 1980s to the end of the twentieth century, Hoffman and Albert, supplemented by occasional guest editors, brought out almost a dozen and a half volumes on various important issues connected with the American Revolution and its aftermath—everything from women, slavery, and Indians to religion, social developments, and patterns of consumption.
A host of issues has been enlivened by connecting the Revolution to the decades of the early Republic and emphasizing its cultural implications. The Enlightenment, for example, has been broadened to include politeness and civility and not just the growth of deism and reason. On this cultural conception of the Enlightenment, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997); and Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1994). Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976), Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1997), Gary L. McDowell and Jonathan O’Neill, eds., America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism(2006), and Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (1999) are important studies. On the influence of antiquity, see Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994); and Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (2002). On the origins of American exceptionalism, see Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (1993). The authoritative history of early American Freemasonry is Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (1996). The best historical study of citizenship is James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (1978).
On the creation of the new national government, see the surveys by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (1993); and John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789–1801 (1960). On the creation of a federal bureaucracy, see the pathbreaking work by Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (1948). For the English model of a “fiscal-military” state, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1788 (1989). Particularly important for understanding the Hamiltonian vision of this “fiscal-military” state is Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003). For other accounts of state-building in the 1790s, see Carl Prince, The Federalists and the Origins of the U.S. Civil Service (1978); and especially Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995). Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (1975) is important for understanding the Federalists’ goals. Samuel Flagg Bemis’s, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (1923) and Pinckney’s Treaty: A Study of America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800 (1926) are classics on foreign policy in the 1790s. Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers (1970) is broader than its title would suggest.
On the origins of the Bill of Rights, see Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminiski, eds., The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties (1991); Richard Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (2006); and Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (1999). For a modern analysis of the constitutional significance of the Bill of Rights, see Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstitution (1998).
On financial matters in the 1790s, see E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of Public Finance, 1776–1790 (1961); and Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700–1815 (1994).
Leland D. Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels: The Story of a Frontier Uprising (1939) and William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (2006) are narratives of the insurrection, while Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (1986) is more analytical.
Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (1969) is a lucid account that does not quite break from the anachronistic secondary sources on which it is based. For the emergence of the Republican party, see Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (1957). Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978) is crucial for understanding the intellectual fears that held the Republican party together; but Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (1984) better captures the optimistic market orientation of the Northern Republicans. For the classic account of the ideology that underlay the Revolution and the Republicans’ fear of state power, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). On the extralegal associations that promoted the Republican party, see Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (1942); and Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (2007).
On the French Revolution in America, see Charles D. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (1897). Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800 (2007) has brief but stirring accounts of the French Revolution and Catherine the Great’s Russia, along with a discussion of America in the 1790s. On French influence in American affairs, see Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (1973).
On John Adams and the crisis of the late 1790s, see Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War: Politics and Diplomacy in the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801 (1966); Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams: The Collapse of Federalism, 1795–1800 (1957); and John Patrick Diggins, John Adams (2003). Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (1953) captures some of the desperation of the High Federalists in 1798. On Adams’s public life, in addition to John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (1992), see James Grant, John Adams: A Party of One (2005). David McCullough, John Adams (2001) is more a sensitive account of Adams’s marriage to Abigail than an analysis of his public career. Other perceptive studies of Adams’s character include Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (1993); and Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (1976). For Adams’s political theory, see John R. Howe Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (1964); and C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (1998).
On the press in the 1790s, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of the Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001); and Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Origins of American Politics (2009). On immigration in the 1790s, see Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (1998); and Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (1997). The Alien and Sedition Acts are best covered in James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties(1956). But for understanding the peculiar eighteenth-century context in which freedom of the press has to be viewed, see Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (rev. ed., 1985). For the Republicans’ response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, see William J. Watkins, Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy (2004).
The watershed election of 1800 has attracted much recent historical attention. See James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (2002); Susan Dunn, Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Electoral Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism (2004); John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (2004); Bruce Ackerman, The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy (2005); and Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign (2007). An earlier work, Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (1974), tries to capture the radical meaning of Jefferson’s election, but it does not succeed as well as James S. Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (1966), which, despite an unhistorical focus, rightly stresses the Republicans’ fear of power.
For the Jeffersonians in power, see Marshall Smelser, The Democratic Republic, 1801–1815 (1968); Nobel E. Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801–1809 (1963); and Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1976).
On banking in Jeffersonian America, see Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics from the Revolution to the Civil War (1957); Howard Bodenhorn, State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History (2003); and J. Van Fenstermaker, The Development of American Commercial Banking: 1782–1837 (1965). For Jefferson’s problems with debt, both public and private, see the illuminating study by Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (1995). On urban development, see David T. Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790–1825 (1967).
On Gallatin, see Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879); and Raymond Walters Jr., Albert Gallatin: Jeffersonian Financier and Diplomat (1957). Theodore J. Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809 (1987) and Robert M. S. McDonald, Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: The Founding of West Point (2004) explain the paradox of the warhating, anti-military Jefferson founding West Point.
On Jefferson’s dismantling of the Federalist bureaucracy, see Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (1951). See also Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Process of Government Under Jefferson (1979); and Robert M. Johnstone Jr., Jefferson and the Presidency (1979). Of course, as in all periods of Jefferson’s life, the appropriate volumes of Dumas Malone’s biography are helpful.
David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (1965), looks at party competition in the early nineteenth century with fresh eyes. Indispensable for understanding politics in the early Republic is Philip Lampi’s monumental Collection of American Election Data, 1787–1825. The collection of data for presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative elections is available online via the American Antiquarian Society’s Web page: “A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787–1825.” On the right to vote, see Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (1960); and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000).
On the Federalists’ cultural reaction to the Jeffersonian victory, see Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent (1970); and William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801–1811 (1999). See also James H. Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800–1816 (1978). For John Randolph and the spirit of ‘98, see Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson (1965). Fine studies of politics in two states are Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793–1821 (1998) and Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (2004).
On the society of the early Republic, see Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (2006); Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phrases of American Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War (1962); and especially Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (2000). J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (2008) is a sensitive and subtle study of ambition in the early Republic. On the excessive drinking in the early Republic, see W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979). On rioting in the colleges, see Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798–1815 (1977). Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (1996), is the best survey of the general subject of rioting.
On the development of the West, see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (3rd ed., 2008); and Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783–1815 (1970). On the new cities of the West, see Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, and St. Louis (1964). Andrew R. L. Cayton has become the premier modern historian of the early Midwest. See his The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (1986); Frontier Indiana(1996); and a series of jointly edited volumes: Cayton and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Mid-West and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region (1990); Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830(1998); Cayton and Susan E. Gray, eds., The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (2001); and Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs, eds., The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic (2005).
Two especially important books that deal with the West and land speculation are Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995); and Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1996). Land policy and land laws are covered in Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (1968).
Writing on the Lewis and Clark expedition is immense. See Stephen Dow Beckham et al., The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays (2003). For a fast read, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996). For a more scholarly study, see James P. Ronda, Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark (2001). Arthur Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals (1999) and Thomas P. Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (2003) treat the journals very imaginatively. There are many selectively edited versions of the explorers’ journals. One example is Frank Bergon, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1995).
On the Louisiana Purchase, see the superb narrative by Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (2003) and the relevant chapters in George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1803 (1960). For more analytical and contextual studies of the Purchase, see Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004); and Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (1976). On the Burr conspiracy, see the books cited earlier on Burr, together with Thomas Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy (1954); and Buckner F. Melton Jr., Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason (2002).
On the theories of America having a deleterious effect on all living creatures, Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (1973) is basic. On the native peoples in this period, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (1992); Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (1967); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (1962); and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Tragic Fate of the First Americans (1999). For a sensitive study of the irony in that tragic fate, see Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (1973). For a pathbreaking work on Indian-white relations, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991). With the Iroquois in upstate New York and Canada, the ground was different, according to Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution(2006). On the Cherokees, see two superb books by William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (1984) and Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986).
On the politics of the judiciary in this period, see William R. Casto, The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth (1995); Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (1971); Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (2004); and Maeva Marcus, ed., Origins of the Federal Judiciary: Essays on the Judiciary Act of 1789 (1992). Indispensable for understanding the Supreme Court in its earliest years is Maeva Marcus et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789–1800 (1985–). On the Court, see also the relevant volumes in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, the multi-volume history of the Court endowed by Justice Holmes on his death: Julius Goebel, Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801: History of the Supreme Court of the United States (1971); George Lee Haskins and Herbert A. Johnson, Foundations of Power: John Marshall, 1801–1815 (1981).
In addition to the books on Marshall cited earlier, see R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001); see also Newmyer’s superb biography of Story, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985).
The origins of judicial review are treated in Edward S. Corwin, The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law (1955); and Charles G. Haines, The American Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy (1932). For an important corrective to the idea that judicial review meant judicial supremacy, see Larry Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (2004). Efforts to place Marbury v. Madison in historical context include Christopher Wolfe, The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law(1986); J. M. Sosin, The Aristocracy of the Long Robe: The Origins of Judicial Review in America (1989); Robert Lowry Clinton, Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review (1989); and William E. Nelson, Marbury v. Madison: The Origins and Legacy of Judicial Review (2000). Especially important in understanding the development of judicial review is Sylvia Snowiss, Judicial Review and the Law of the Constitution (1990).
On the development of the corporation see Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (1947, 1969); E. Merrick Dodd, American Business Corporations Until 1860, with Special Reference to Massachusetts (1954); Ronald E. Seavoy, The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784–1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Service During Industrialization (1982); Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (1983); and Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (2008).
Benjamin Rush has yet to find a biographer worthy of his importance. But see Nathan G. Goodman, Benjamin Rush: Physician and Citizen, 1746–1813 (1934); Carl Binger, Revolutionary Doctor: Benjamin Rush, 1746–1813 (1966); and David F. Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly(1971). On education in the early Republic, see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (1980); and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (1983). Important for understanding newspapers and the spread of information in the period are Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (1989); Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (1996); and Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of American Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940 (1941). On the emergence of humanitarian institutions, see Conrad E. Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Post-Revolutionary New England (1992).
On criminal punishment and penal reform, see Louis Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (1989); Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (1996); and Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (1992).
John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (2001) is the best study of the politics of internal improvements in the period.
On the development of various moral reform associations, see Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (1960); and Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (1960). On missionaries, see Oliver Wendell Elsbree, The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790–1815 (1928); and William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (1987).
On women in the period, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980); and Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2006). Linda K. Kerber has two important books on women in the early Republic: Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980) and Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (1997). Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic(2007) is a particularly significant study.
The literature on slavery has been growing rapidly in the past several decades. Basic for understanding the subject are David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and his The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975). For the best and most thorough account of slave life in the Chesapeake and in the Low-country of South Carolina and Georgia, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and the Lowcountry (1998). Also indispensable are two books by Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (2003). Additional studies of slave culture are John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Anti-Bellum South (1972); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); and Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (2005). Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005) and Steven Doyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005) are important for the domestic slave trade. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) remains a classic.
For studies of the plantations of two important Founders, see Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (1998); Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America(2003); and Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (2000). But for a detailed study of slavery at a less well known plantation, see Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (1997).
On Gabriel’s Rebellion, see Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (1993); and James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (1997).
On free blacks, see Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974); and Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (1961). Gary B. Nash has several important books on blacks in the Revolution and in the following decades: Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (1988); Race and Revolution (1990); and The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006). See also Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America(2009). For abolitionism, see Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); and especially Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (2002). Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (1974) demonstrates how republican equality helped to create racism.
The standard surveys of culture in the period are Russell B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (1960) and Jean V. Matthews, Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800–1830 (Boston, 1990). Especially important are Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theater in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington (1976); and Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (1979).
On the theater, see Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theater, and Identity in the American New Republic (2005); and Heather Nathans, Early American Theater from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (2003). On painting, see Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (1966); and James Thomas Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies: American Painting, 1760–1835 (1969). Harris’s book is particularly rich and imaginative. On the novel, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America(1986).
On Charles Willson Peale, see David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and its Audience (1995); and Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (1947) and Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (1980).
The most important work on religion in the early Republic is Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989). On the separation of church and state, see Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (1986); and A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (1985). Other important studies of religion in the early Republic are Edwin S. Gaustad, Neither King nor Prelate: Religion and the New Nation, 1776–1826 (1993); Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln(2002); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1997); and Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture(2000). The essays collected in Elwyn A. Smith, ed., The Religion of the Republic (1971), are important in relating evangelical Protestantism to republicanism.
Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (1998) is important for the Unitarian controversy in Massachusetts. For the background to the Unitarian movement, see Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (1955). On the New Divinity movement, see Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (1981). John R. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1805 (1972) and Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (1977) are important for evangelical revivalism. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (1985), is an excellent survey of American Catholicism.
The issue of the Founders and religion has generated an enormous amount of writing, especially in the past two decades. Among the most moderate and sensible accounts are James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (1998); Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006); Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (2003); and Forrest Church, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State (2007).
On millennialism, see James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (1977); J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (1979); and Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (1985).
The underlying eighteenth-century liberal assumptions about international politics are explored in Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (1961). Gilbert’s book has not been taken as seriously as it ought to have been, largely because he relied heavily on French instead of English sources; but the English materials back up his thesis. On another important work that investigates the thinking behind the commercial and foreign policy of the Jeffersonians, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America(1980). On the foreign policy itself, see Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (1968); and Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (1990). Lawrence S. Kaplan, Jefferson and France: An Essay on Politics and Political Ideas (1967) captures the idealism of Jefferson. On the embargo, see Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (1979). On the Southern Spanish-American borderlands, see J.C.A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821 (2009).
On the Barbary pirates, see Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (1995); and Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (2005).
J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (1983) is indispensable for understanding the War of 1812, as, of course, is Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administration of James Madison(1889–1891). Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812 (1964) and Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (1987) have imaginative accounts of America’s willingness to go to war. See also Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (1964).
Of the many brief accounts of the war, the best is Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (1989). See also his Don’t Give Up the Ship: Myths of the War of 1812 (2006). Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (2007) views the war from a British or Canadian point of view. Richard Buel Jr., America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic (2005) provocatively indicts the Federalists for their seditious behavior. James M. Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (1970) superbly describes the Federalists’ attitudes and stresses their moderate purposes in calling the Convention.
On the economy of the period, see Curtis P. Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (1962); Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century (2000); Douglas C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (1966); and James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concepts of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (1998). Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (1984) is the best study of that extraordinary entrepreneur.
The origins of liberal capitalism have generated a great deal of controversy among historians. Some historians have suggested that many farmers, especially in New England, were still pre-modern in their outlook, interested far more in patrimony and kin than in capitalistic aggrandizement. See James A. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Selected Essays (1991); Allan Kukikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (1992); and Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (1990). Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (1992) sought to clear the “transition to capitalism” debate of a lot of theoretical cant by asking some basic questions about the rural New England economy that could be empirically verified.
Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (2000) and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), using other evidence, endorse Rothenberg’s view that rural capitalism arose at the end of the eighteenth century. Appleby, in particular, nicely captures the early nineteenth-century culture out of which the myth of the self-made man arose. On capitalism, see also Paul A. Gilje, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic (1997). Of the many works on artisans, see Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (1978); Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (1980); Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (1993); Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (1984); and Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (1996). Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (1989) is the best study of the development of the middle class out of an eighteenth-century society divided between a gentry elite and commoners.
On debt and bankruptcy, see Peter J. Coleman, Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt and Bankruptcy, 1607–1900 (1974); Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005); and Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of the American Independence (2002).
Susan Dunn, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison and the Decline of Virginia (2007) is the best book on the decay of the once most powerful state in the Union.