NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedge and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 1–2.

2 James H. Broussard, “Historians and the Early Republic: SHEAR’s Origins and Prospects,” Journal of the Early Republic, II (1982), 66.

3 Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); James M. Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York: Knopf, 1970).

4 Broussard, “Historians and the Early Republic,” 66.

5 William Nesbit Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963).

6 On the differing historical views of the early Republic, see Gordon S. Wood, “The Significance of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, VIII (1988), 1–20, from which some of this introduction is derived.

7 Jim Cullen, review of Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), on History News Network, December 1, 2009.

8 See in particular Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968). Before his untimely death in 1970, Hofstadter planned a multivolume history of the late eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries—the very period that fascinated his mentors. What he completed of his first volume was published posthumously as America in 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1971).

9 Among the best of these was Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (New York: Columbia University Press and Longmans, Green and Co., 1919).

10 For a summary of this anti-Progressive literature, see Bernard Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, LXVII (1962), 339–351.

11 Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967); Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

12 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Make It (New York: Knopf, 1951), esp. 44–66; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

13 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

14 Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).

15 It was these headline events of politics and diplomacy that Henry Adams concentrated on in his classic account of the period. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 9 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889–1891).

16 See, for example, Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters : The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Lee Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Donald M. Scott, From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); Gerard W. Gawalt, The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760–1840 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787–1837 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: the American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change in Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Donald A. Hutslar, The Architecture of Migration: Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986).

17 On the topics of research emerging in the historiography of the early Republic, see John Lauritz Larson and Michael A. Morrison, eds., Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

18 James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978), 3–32; Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992). Crucially important for dating the changes in the Northern economy is Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

19 Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, LXXIX (1992), 25.

20 T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 11.

21 Sir Lewis Namier, Personalities and Powers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 2.

22 For a fuller explanation of the view of the role of ideas in human experience, see Gordon S. Wood, “Intellectual History and the Social Sciences,” in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 27. My approach to the role of ideas has been very much influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner. See James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). For concrete examples of Skinner’s approach applied to history, see “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole,” in Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), 93–128, and John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 26–38.

23 Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), vi, 140.

24 For a major example, see Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

25 Doron Ben-Artar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 10, 11. Of course, there were Southern Republicans who favored Jefferson’s ideas of minimal government because they tended to lessen the threat to slavery, but to contend that the liberal late eighteenth-century Anglo-American belief in minimal government was fed by that concern alone is to grossly misunderstand the period. Radicals like Thomas Paine and William Godwin believed deeply in minimal government, and no one has accused them of being front men for slavery.

26 Gordon S. Wood, “The Creative Imagination of Bernard Bailyn,” in James A. Henretta et al., eds., The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (New York: Knopf, 1991), 38.

27 For examples of heavy-handed present-mindedness in histories of the early Republic, see Lawrence Goldstone, Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution (New York: Walker, 2005); and Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For my review of these two works, see Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 293–308.

28 Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1459.

CHAPTER 1, RHETORIC AND REALITY IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1 This is the title of a recent essay by Edmund S. Morgan in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Morton White, eds., Paths of American Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 11–33.

2 Samuel E. Morison, ed., “William Manning’s The Key of Libberty,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XIII (1956), 208.

3 Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XIV (1957), 14.

4 William Vans Murray, Political Sketches, Inscribed to His Excellency John Adams (London: C. Dilly, 1787), 21, 48.

5 Daniel Leonard, The Origin of the American Contest with Great-Britain . . . [by] Massachusettensis . . . (New York: James Rivington, 1775), 40; Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1961), 159.

6 Simeon Baldwin, An Oration Pronounced Before the Citizens of New-Haven, July 4th, 1788 . . . (New Haven, CT: J. Meigs, 1788), 10; [Murray], Political Sketches, 48; David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: R. Aitken & Son, 1789), 1, 350.

7 Thomas Paine, Letter to the Abbé Raynal . . . (1782), in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), II, 243; John Adams to H. Niles, February 13, 1818, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–1856), X, 282.

8 William Pierce, An Oration, Delivered at Christ Church, Savanah, on the 4th of July, 1788 . . . (Savannah, GA: James Johnston, [1788]), 6; Enos Hitchcock, An Oration; Delivered July 4th, 1788 . . . (Providence, RI: Bennett Wheeler, [1788]), 11.

9 Petition to the King, October 1774, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904–1937), 1, 118.

10 Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont . . . (Walpole, NH: Isaiah Thomas and David Carlisle Jr., 1794), vii, 372–373; Pierce, Oration . . . 4th July, 1788, 8.

11 Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), I, 8–9.

12 For a bald description of the assumptions with which this generation of historians worked, see Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, 3rd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1921), 5, 45, 48–49, 83, 94, 96, 118, 122, 156.

13 Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1935), x, viii.

14 While the Progressive historians were attempting to absorb and use the latest scientific techniques of the day, nonbehaviorists in government departments and others with a traditional approach to political theory—men like Andrew C. McLaughlin, Edwin S. Corwin, William S. Carpenter, Charles M. McIwain, and Benjamin F. Wright—were writing during this same period some of the best work that has ever been done on Revolutionary constitutional and political thought. However, because most of them were not, strictly speaking, historians, they never sought to explain the causes of the Revolution in terms of ideas.

15 Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 133, 203, 207.

16 Quoted in Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 141, 150, 373.

17 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1958), 34. For examples of the scientific work on which the propagandist studies drew, see note 1 in Sidney I. Pomerantz, “The Patriot Newspaper and the American Revolution,” in Richard B. Morris, ed., The Era of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 305.

18 Davidson, Propaganda, 59; Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence, 20.

19 Davidson, Propaganda, xiv, 46.

20 Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence, 44; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 179.

21 Edmund S. Morgan, “Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power, 1764–1766,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., V (1948), 311, 341; Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 306–307; Page Smith, “David Ramsay and the Causes of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XVII (1960), 70–71.

22 Jack P. Greene, “The Flight from Determinism: A Review of Recent Literature on the Coming of the American Revolution,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXI (1962), 257.

23 This revisionist literature of the 1950s is well known. See the listings in Bernard Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, LXVII (1961–1962), 341n; and in Greene, “Flight from Determinism,” 235–259.

24 Greene, “Flight from Determinism,” 237, 257; Thad W. Tate, “The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia: Britain’s Challenge to Virginia’s Ruling Class, 1763–1776,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XIX (1962), 323–343, esp. 340.

25 Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas,” 339–351.

26 Bernard Bailyn, ed., assisted by Jane N. Garrett, Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965–), I, viii, 60, x, 20. The 200-page general introduction is entitled “The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution.”

27 This is not to say, however, that work on the Revolutionary ideas is in anyway finished. For examples of the reexamination of traditional problems in Revolutionary political theory, see Richard Buel Jr., “Democracy and the American Revolution: A Frame of Reference,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXI (1964), 165–190; and Bailyn’s resolution of James Otis’s apparent inconsistency in Revolutionary Pamphlets, I, 100–103, 106–107, 121–123, 409–417, 546–552.

28 Smith, “Ramsay and the American Revolution,” 72.

29 Morgan, “Revisions in Need of Revising,” 13.

30 Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, ix. In the present neo-Whig context, Sidney S. Fisher, “The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution,” in American Philosophical Society, Proceedings, LI (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1912), 53–75, takes on a renewed relevance.

31 Bailyn, Revolutionary Pamphlets, I, 87, ix.

32 [Moses Mather], America’s Appeal to the Impartial World. . . (Hartford, CT: Ebenezer Watson, 1775), 59; [ John Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford, 1768), in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Memoirs, XIV [Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895]), II, 348. Dickinson hinged his entire argument on the ability of the Americans to decipher the “intention” of parliamentary legislation, whether for revenue or for commercial regulation. Ibid., 348, 364.

33 See Herbert Davis, “The Augustan Conception of History,” in J. A. Mazzeo, ed., Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 226–228; W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought, 1500–1700 (New York: University of Hull/Oxford University Press, 1964), 166; R. N. Stromberg, “History in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XII (1951), 300. It was against this “dominant characteristic of the historical thought of the age,” this “tendency to explain events in terms of conscious action by individuals,” that the brilliant group of Scottish social scientists writing at the end of the eighteenth century directed much of their work. See Duncan Forbes, “ ‘Scientific’ Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal, VII (1954), 651, 653–654. While we have had recently several good studies of historical thinking in seventeenth-century England, virtually nothing has been done on the eighteenth century. See, however, J. G. A. Pocock, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution—A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Historical Journal, III (1960), 125–143; and Stow Persons, “The Cyclical Theory of History in Eighteenth Century America,” American Quarterly, VI (1954), 147–163.

34 [Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer, in Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson, 388.

35 Bailyn has noted that Oliver M. Dickerson, in chapter 7 of his The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), “adopts wholesale the contemporary Whig interpretation of the Revolution as the result of a conspiracy of ‘King’s Friends.’ ” Bailyn, Revolutionary Pamphlets, I, 724.

36 Morgan, “Revisions in Need of Revising,” 7, 13, 8; Greene, “Flight from Determinism,” 237.

37 Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 51.

38 Greene, “Flight from Determinism,” 258; Morgan, Birth of the Republic, 3.

39 Bailyn, Revolutionary Pamphlets, I, vii, ix.

40 Ibid., vii, viii, 17.

41 J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXII (1965), 550.

42 Sir Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 131.

43 Ibid., 129.

44 Bailyn, Revolutionary Pamphlets, I, 90, x, 169, 140. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 173: “American experience had taught the men of the Revolution that action, though it may be started in isolation and decided upon by single individuals for very different motives, can be accomplished only by some joint effort in which the motivation of single individuals. . . no longer ounts. . . .”

45 See Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 16; Sir Lewis Namier, “Human Nature in Politics,” in Personalities and Power: Selected Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 5–6.

46 Bailyn, Revolutionary Pamphlets, I, 22. The French Revolutionaries were using the same group of classical writings to express their estrangement from the ancien régime and their hope for the new order. Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 22–23.

47 The relation of ideas to social structure is one of the most perplexing and intriguing in the social sciences. For an extensive bibliography on the subject, see Norman Birnbaum, “The Sociological Study of Ideology (1940–60),” Current Sociology, IX (1960).

48 Jacob Duché, The American Vine, A Sermon, Preached . . . Before the Honourable Continental Congress, July 20th, 1775 . . . (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1775), 29.

49 For recent discussions of French and Puritan Revolutionary rhetoric, see Peter Gay, “Rhetoric and Politics in the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, LXVI (1960–1961), 664–676; Michael Walzer, “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” History and Theory, III (1963), 59–90. This entire issue of History and Theory is devoted to a symposium on the uses of theory in the study of history. In addition to the Walzer article, I have found the papers by Samuel H. Beer, “Causal Explanation and Imaginative Re-enactment,” and Charles Tilly, “The Analysis of a Counter-Revolution,” very stimulating and helpful.

50 Bryan A. Wilson, “Millennialism in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, VI (1963–1964), 108. See also Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 83, 120, 383.

51 Tate, “Coming of the Revolution in Virginia,” 324–343.

52 Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705–1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964), 236; Alexander White to Richard Henry Lee, 1758, quoted in J. R. Pole, “Representation and Authority in Virginia from the Revolution to Reform,” Journal of Southern History, XXIV (1958), 23.

53 Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette ( Williamsburg), April 11, 1771; Rind’s Virginia Gazette, October 31, 1771. See Lester J. Cappon and Stella F. Duff, eds., Virginia Gazette Index, 1736–1780 (Williamsburg, VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1950), I, 351, for entries on the astounding increase in essays on corruption and cost of elections in the late 1760s and early 1770s.

54 The Defence of Injur’d Merit Unmasked; or, the Scurrilous Piece of Philander Dissected and Exposed to Public View. By a Friend to Merit, wherever found (n.p., 1771), 10. Robert Carter chose to retire to private life in the early 1770s rather than adjust to the “new system of politicks” that had begun “to prevail generally.” Quoted in Louis Morton, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century ( Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Inc., 1941), 52.

55 Jay B. Hubbell and Douglass Adair, “Robert Munford’s The Candidates,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., V (1948), 238, 246. The ambivalence in Munford’s attitude toward the representative process is reflected in the different way historians have interpreted his play. Cf. ibid., 223–225, with Brown, Virginia, 236–237. Munford’s fear of “men who aim at power without merit” was more fully expressed in his later play, The Patriots, written in 1775 or 1776. Courtlandt Canby, “Robert Munford’s The Patriots,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., VI (1949), 437–503, quotation from 450.

56 [John Randolph], Considerations on the Present State of Virginia ([Williamsburg], 1774), in Earl G. Swem, ed., Virginia and the Revolution: Two Pamphlets, 1774 (New York, 1919), 16; Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, November 25, 1773.

57 Rind’s Virginia Gazette, September 8, 1774; Brown, Virginia, 252–254; Morton, Robert Carter, 231–250.

58 See George Washington to George Mason, April 5, 1769, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1931–1944). II, 502; Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 5, 10, 14, 16; Emory G. Evans, “Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XIX (1962), 518–519.

59 Rind’s Virginia Gazette, August 15, 1766. See Carl Bridenbaugh, “Violence and Virtue in Virginia, 1766: or The Importance of the Trivial,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, LXXVI (1964), 3–29.

60 Quoted in Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 27. See also Morton, Robert Carter, 223–225.

61 John A. Washington to R. H. Lee, June 20, 1778, quoted in Pole, “Representation and Authority in Virginia,” 28.

62 Evans, “Planter Indebtedness,” 526–527.

63 Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), I, 560. Most of our knowledge of entail and primogeniture in Virginia stems from an unpublished doctoral dissertation, Clarence R. Keim, “Influence of Primogeniture and Entail in the Development of Virginia” (University of Chicago, 1926). Keim’s is a very careful and qualified study and conclusions from his evidence—other than the obvious fact that much land was held in fee simple—are by no means easy to make. See particularly pp. 56, 60–62, 110–114, 122, 195–196.

64 Emory S. Evans, “The Rise and Decline of the Virginia Aristocracy in the Eighteenth Century: The Nelsons,” in Darrett B. Rutman, ed., The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernethy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 73–74.

65 Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 1, 56; Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 14, 16.

66 John Adams, “Novanglus,” in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–1856), IV, 14.

67 Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908), 152.

AFTERWORD TO CHAPTER 1

1 Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Richard R. Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); Jack P. Greene, “Society, Ideology, and Politics: An Analysis of the Political Culture of Mid-Eighteenth Century Virginia,” in Richard M. Jellison, ed., Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 14–57; Jack P. Greene, “ ‘Virtus et Libertas ’: Political Culture, Social Change, and the Origins of the American Revolution in Virginia, 1763–1766,” in Jeffery J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 55–65; Jack P. Greene, “Character, Persona, and Authority: A Study of Alternative Styles of Political Leadership in Revolutionary Virginia,” in W. Robert Higgins, ed., The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), 3–42.

CHAPTER 2, THE LEGACY OF ROME IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1964); Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 90.

2 1 Samuel 8:19–20.

3 John Adams to Richard Cranch, August 2, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), II, 74; see also Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 49–51; John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, July 20, 1807, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 5th ser., IV (1878), 353; Adams to J. H. Tiffany, April 30, 1819, Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, X, 378.

4 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Franz Neumann, ed., pt. I, bk. ix, ch. 13 (New York: Hafner Press, 1949), 167; James William Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 91–105; Richard Jenkyns, ed., The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 26.

5 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation—The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966).

6 Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 52, 414; Johnson, Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 239–240.

7 Johnson, Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 93, 246; Gay, Enlightenment: Rise of Paganism, 109; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 25.

8 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Johnson, Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 222–224; Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 30–31.

9 David Hume, “The British Government,” in Eugene Miller, ed., Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 51; Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” Past and Present, 102 (1984), 94–129; Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990 )

10 Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 35, 39.

11 South Carolina Gazette, July 29, 1749, quoted in Hennig Cohen, The South Carolina Gazette, 1732–1775 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 218.

12 James Thomson, “Liberty,” v, in The Poetical Works of James Thomson (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1863), 369.

13 Adams to Warren, July 20, 1807, 353; Adams to J. H. Tiffany, April 30, 1819, 378; Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, 71.

14 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), 172; William L. Vance, America’s Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 1, 17, 15; John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 7; Conyers Middleton, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 2 vols. (London: James Bettenham, 1741), I, ix.

15 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Issac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

16 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, 1931), I, 164–165; W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 171–172.

17 William L. Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 255; Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 47–48, 53, 62, 64; Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 249–266; Carl J. Richard, “A Dialogue with the Ancients: Thomas Jefferson and Classical Philosophy and History,” Journal of the Early Republic, IX (1989), 445; Meyer Reinhold, ed., The Classick Pages: Classical Readings of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, PA: American Philological Association, 1975), 100; Johnson, Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 226, 297, Hume, “Of the Parties of Great Britain,” Essays, Miller, ed., 72.

18 Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in Aubrey Williams, ed., Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 41, lines 118–121.

19 Bertrand A. Goldar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 3, 22–23, 26, 135, 147–148, 158–159; Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 95–105; Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 5.

20 Johnson, Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought, 168.

21 Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” Richard Rorty, et al., eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 193–221; Michael Ignatieff, “John Millar and Individualism,” in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 329–330.

22 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. N. Nidditch, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 587; Benjamin Franklin to Cadwallader Colden, October 11, 1750, Labaree, et al., eds., Papers of Franklin, IV, 68.

23 Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions Throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740–1775 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 182.

24 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, William Peden, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 165.

25 Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 240; Cicero, Selected Works, Michael Grant, ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 188.

26 Robert R. Livingston, quoted in Bernard Friedman, “The Shaping of the Radical Consciousness in Provincial New York,” Journal of American History, LVI (1970), 786. For a discussion of Cicero’s distinction between gentlemanly and vulgar callings, see Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 95–100.

27 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed., R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I, 50–51; II, 781–783; Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy in Three Books . . . (London: R. and A. Foulis, 1755), II, 113.

28 Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 83, 287–88, 290–92.

29 James Wilson, “On the History of Property,” in McCloskey, ed., Works of James Wilson, II, 716; James Thompson, The Seasons and the Castle of Indolence, James Sambrook, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), x; Virginia C. Kenny, The Country-House Ethos in English Literature, 1688–1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 8–9; Jack P. Greene, Landon Carter: An Inquiry into the Personal Values and Social Imperatives of the Eighteenth-Century Virginia Gentry (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965), 86–87.

30 William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).

31 John Dickinson, “Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania” (1768), in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson: I, Political Writings, 1764–1774 (Pennsylvania Historical Society, Memoirs, XIV [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1895]), 307.

32 Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), 12–32; Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I, 32; Tamara Platkins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life Among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 31.

33 Reinhold, Classica Americana, 98.

34 David Humphreys, “A Poem on the Industry of the United States of America,” in Vernon L. Parrington, ed., The Connecticut Wits (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1954), 401.

35 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 12; Stephen Botein, “Cicero as Role Model for Early American Lawyers: A Case Study in Classical Influence,” The Classical Journal, LXXIII (1977–1978), 313–321; Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980), 33, 34, 47; Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1984).

36 Ezra Stiles, Election Sermon (1783), in John Wingate Thornton, ed., The Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1876), 460; John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 25, 1778, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 210; Benjamin Rush to———, April 16, 1790, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1, 550.

37 Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 42.

38 Eleanor Davidson Berman, Thomas Jefferson Among the Arts: An Essay in Early American Esthetics (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 84; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 153; Jefferson to Madison, Sept. 20, 1785, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–); VIII, 535; Jefferson to William Buchanan and James Hay, Jan. 26, 1786, in Papers of Jefferson, IX, 221.

39 Reinhold, Classica Americana, 129; Benjamin Rush to James Hamilton, June 27, 1810, in Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, II, 1053.

40 Edward Everett, “An Oration Pronounced at Cambridge . . . 1824,” in Joseph L. Blau, ed., American Philosophic Addresses, 1700–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 77.

AFTERWORD TO CHAPTER 2

1 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 23–26.

CHAPTER 3, CONSPIRACY AND THE PARANOID STYLE

1 Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” Journal of Social History, III (1970), 189–220.

2 Kenneth S. Lynn, A Divided People ( Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 105. Cf. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977).

3 The best and most restrained of these efforts is Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,” Perspectives in American History, VI (1972), 167–306. See also Winthrop D. Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History, LX (1973), 294–308.

4 Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), and American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); John J. Waters, “James Otis, Jr.: An Ambivalent Revolutionary,” History of Childhood Quarterly, I (1973), 142–150; Bruce Mazlish, “Leadership in the American Revolution: The Psychological Dimension,” in Leadership in the American Revolution, Library of Congress Symposia on the American Revolution (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1974), 113–133.

5 Jack P. Greene, “An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution,” in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 60; Greven, Protestant Temperament, 351.

6 Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity,” Journal of Social History, III (1970), 219; James H. Hutson, “The American Revolution: The Triumph of a Delusion?” in Erich Angermann et al., eds., New Wine in Old Skins: A Comparative View of Socio-Political Structures and Values Affecting the American Revolution (Stuttgart, Germany: Klett, 1976), 179–194.

7 Bailyn’s introduction was entitled “The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution,” in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, I (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 3–202; Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1965).

8 Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968), 13, and The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 94–95.

9 For a typical example of the sociological studies of the early 1950s, see Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955).

10 Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 7.

11 Ibid., ix, 4, 6.

12 Ibid., ix.

13 Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, eds., Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), ix, x; David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), xiv.

14 David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1909), 29; Davis, ed., Fear of Conspiracy, 23.

15 James Kirby Martin, Men in Rebellion: Higher Governmental Leaders and the Coming of the American Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 34; Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York: Knopf, 1974), 130, 131, 132; Hutson, “American Revolution,” in Angermann et al., eds., New Wine in Old Skins, 179, 180.

16 Lance Banning, “Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789 to 1793,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXI (1974), 171.

17 Greven, Protestant Temperament, 349, 352.

18 Hutson, “American Revolution,” in Angermann et al., eds., New Wine in Old Skins, 177, 180, 181, 182. In a more recent unpublished essay, “The Origins of ‘the Paranoid Style in American Politics’: Public Jealousy from the Age of Walpole to the Age of Jackson,” Hutson has virtually repudiated his earlier psychological interpretation. He now suggests that “the special position the Revolution occupies in our national life” has inhibited historians from following him in making the Revolution “the first link on Hofstadter’s paranoid chain.” Perhaps other historians were quietly filling in behind him more than he realized. At any rate, he has retreated from his exposed position and returned to one not very different from Bailyn’s. In this paper he describes the Americans’ “paranoid style” as a product of their long tradition of jealousy and suspicion of governmental power. Such fears of abused political power, Hutson now concedes, made American conspiratorial views “altogether credible,” at least up to 1830 or so. Only after that date, when American suspicions and jealousy were transferred from the government to nongovernmental agencies and groups, such as the Masons and the Roman Catholic Church, for which there was no tradition of past abuse, is it “possible,” says Hutson, “to speak of these fears veering off towards pathology.”

19 “The British ministers of the Revolutionary Era,” writes Hutson, “were shifting coalitions whose principal discernible goal was the preservation of power. How could reasonable people believe them capable of fiendish malevolence, cunningly concerted and sustained, year in, year out?” (“American Revolution,” in Angermann et al., eds., New Wine in Old Skins, 177.) Although not as boldly as Hutson, other historians trying to explain the Revolutionaries’ conspiratorial beliefs in effect seem to be asking the same question.

20 Daniel Defoe, quoted in Maximillian E. Novak, ed., English Literature in the Age of Disguise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 2; George Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, Charles N. Fifer, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), act 4, sc. 1; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, pt. III, chap. 6, in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman Piper, eds. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 162–163.

21 Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 144–159, quotation on p. 153; Ira D. Gruber, “The American Revolution as a Conspiracy: The British View,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXVI (1969), 360–372; David T. Morgan, “ ‘The Dupes of Designing Men’: John Wesley and the American Revolution,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, XLIV (1975), 121–131; J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 24; Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, Joan White, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 60–62, 210; Jack Richard Censer, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789–1791 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 99.

22 Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language . . . , 12th ed. (Edinburgh: A. M. Knapton, 1802); Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 36, 32, 27.

23 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard Trask, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 463.

24 Niccolo Machiavelli, “Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Book 3,” in The Chief Works and Others, Allan Gilbert, trans., 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), I, 428. See also letter CII in Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters, George R. Healy, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 170.

25 American Museum, or, Universal Magazine, XII (1792), 172; Samuel Kinser, ed., The Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, Isabelle Cazeaux, trans., I (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 361.

26 Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 35. See also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 173.

27 Myron P. Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 59–60.

28 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 78–112.

29 Increase Mather, The Doctrine of Divine Providence Opened and Applyed (Boston: Richard Pierce, 1684), quoted in Lester H. Cohen, The Revolutionary Histories: Contemporary Narratives of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 27–29. Cohen’s book is richly imaginative and by far the best work we have on early American historical thinking.

30 Halifax, quoted in Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 109. On the scientific revolution, see Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London, 1949), and J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1953).

31 Bronowski, Common Sense of Science, 40; Smith, The Lectures . . . on the Subjects of Moral and Political Philosophy (Trenton, NJ: Daniel Fenton, 1812), I, 9, 122.

32 Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis, LXXII (1981), 192; M. B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” in Daniel O’Connor and Francis Oakley, eds., Creation: The Impact of an Idea (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 29–53; Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” ibid., 54–83; P. M. Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXIX (1978), 271–292; Roy N. Lokken, “Cadwallader Colden’s Attempt to Advance Natural Philosophy Beyond the Eighteenth-Century Mechanistic Paradigm,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings, CXXII (1978), 365–376; Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976).

33 The best brief discussion of the search for a science of human behavior in the eighteenth century is Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945).

34 Smith, Lectures, II, 22; Warburton and Volney are quoted in R. N. Stromberg, “History in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XII (1951), 300; Richard H. Popkin, “Hume: Philosophical Versus Prophetic Historian,” in Kenneth R. Merrill and Robert W. Shahan, eds., David Hume: Many-Sided Genius (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 83–95.

35 On the effects of the new causal thinking on the development of the novel see Edward M. Jennings, “The Consequences of Prediction,” in Theodore Besterman, ed., Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), CLIII, 1148–1149, and Martin C. Battestin, “ ‘Tom Jones’: The Argument of Design,” in Henry Knight Miller et al., eds., The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 289–319.

36 Bolingbroke, Historical Writings, Isaac Kramnick, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 18, 21, 22; Gibbon, “Essai sur L’Etude de la Litterature,” in Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon . . ., John, Lord Sheffield, ed. (London, 1796), II, 477. These enlightened assumptions about man’s responsibility for what happened led naturally to historical explanations that R. G. Collingwood thought were “superficial to absurdity.” It was the Enlightenment historians, wrote Collingwood, “who invented the grotesque idea that the Renaissance in Europe was due to the fall of Constantinople and the consequent expulsion of scholars in search of new homes.” For Collingwood, who usually had so much sympathy for the peculiar beliefs of the past, such personal sorts of causal attribution were “typical . . . of a bankruptcy of historical method which in despair of genuine explanation acquiesces in the most trivial causes for the vastest effects” (The Idea of History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946], 80–81). Elsewhere, Collingwood of course recognized the historical differentness of the eighteenth century (ibid., 224).

37 David Kubrin, “Newton and the Cyclical Cosmos: Providence and the Mechanical Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVIII (1967), 325–346; P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, III (1971), 233–306.

38 Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), 153; [ John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon], Cato’s Letters: Or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, 5th ed. (London, 1748), IV, 86; Hans Kelsen, Society and Nature: A Sociological Inquiry (London: Kegan Paul, 1946), 42. On the ways in which Arminian-minded Protestants reconciled individual responsibility with God’s sovereignty, see Greven, Protestant Temperament, 217–243.

39 Lokken, “Cadwallader Colden,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings, CXXII (1978), 370; Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXIX (1978), 273, 378–379.

40 David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” sec. VIII, pt. I, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), II, 72, 77; Reid, quoted in S. A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 216.

41 [ James Dana], An Examination of the Late Reverend President Edwards’s “Enquiry on Freedom of Will,” . . . (Boston: Daniel Kneeland, 1770), 81, 89; Stephen West, An Essay on Moral Agency . . ., 2nd ed. (Salem, MA: Thomas C. Cushing, 1794), 73–74.

42 George L. Dillon, “Complexity and Change of Character in Neo-Classical Criticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXV (1974), 51–61; Warren, quoted in Cohen, Revolutionary Histories, 193–194; Bryson, Man and Society, 109.

43 [Dana], Examination, xi, 50, 62, 66. See Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, Paul Ramsey, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 156–162.

44 Merle Curti and William Tillman, eds., “Philosophical Lectures by Samuel Williams, LL. D., on the Constitution, Duty, and Religion of Man,” American Philosophical Society, Transactions, N.S., LX, pt. 3 (1970), 114. Since the moral effects of human behavior were determined by the causes or motives of the actors, James Wilson devoted a large section of his “Lectures on Law” to an attempt to demonstrate that “the common law measures crimes chiefly by the intention.” Such intention, he said, presupposed the operation of both understanding and will. “If the operation of either is wanting,” as in the case of lunatics, children, and other dependents, “no crime can exist” (“Of the Persons Capable of Committing Crimes; and of the Different Degrees of Guilt Incurred in the Commission of the Same Crime,” in Robert Green McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson, II [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], 677). “In every moral action,” wrote Samuel Stanhope Smith, “the principal ground on which we form a judgment of its rectitude or pravity is the disposition or intention with which it is performed” (Lectures, I, 313).

45 [Dana], Examination, 50, 66, 96; Hume, “Concerning Human Understanding,” sec. VIII, pt. I, in Essays, Green and Gross, eds., 74.

46 Bernard Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and Natural Happiness (1720), quoted in H. T. Dickinson, “Bernard Mandeville: An Independent Whig,” in Besterman, ed., Studies on Voltaire, CLII, 562–563.

47 Curti and Tillman, eds., “Lectures by Williams,” American Philosophical Society, Transactions, N.S., LX, pt. 3 (1970), 121.

48 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, F. B. Kaye, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 239; J. A. W. Gunn, “Mandeville and Wither: Individualism and the Workings of Providence,” in Irwin Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies; New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 101.

49 John Adams to Ebenezer Thayer, September 24, 1765, in Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), I, 135.

50 Jonathan Edwards, The Mind: A Reconstructed Text, Leon Howard, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 76–78. The mind is “informed by means of observed motion, of design,” wrote the British scientist James Hutton in 1792, “for when a regular order is observed in those changing things, whereby a certain end is always attained, there is necessarily inferred an operation somewhere, an operation similar to that of our mind, which often premeditates the exertion of a power and is conscious of design” (quoted in Heimann and McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers,” Historical Studies in Physical Sciences, III [1971], 283).

51 Samuel Sherwood, The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness: An Address on the Times . . . (New York: S. Loudon, 1776), 9, 13, 26, 29, 30, 38, 40, and A Sermon, Containing Scriptural Instructions to Civil Rulers and All Free-born Subjects . . . (New Haven, CT: T. and S. Green, 1774), vi; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 56; James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).

52 [Moses Mather], America’s Appeal to the Impartial World . . . (Hartford, CT, 1775), 59; Izrahiah Wetmore, A Sermon, Preached Before the Honorable General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut . . . (Norwich, CT: Judah P. Spooner, 1775), 4, 11; Henry C. Van Schaack, The Life of Peter Van Schaack . . . (New York: D. Appleton, 1842), 56; Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America . . . ( Williamsburg, VA: Clementine Rind, 1774), in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 125.

53 [Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania . . . (Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford, 1768), in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Memoirs, XIV [Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895]), 349, hereafter cited as Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson; Griffith J. McRee, ed., Life and Correspondence of James Iredell . . ., I (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 312. “If the American public had not penetrated the intentions of the English government,” noted Jefferson’s Italian friend Philip Mazzei in 1788, “there would have been no revolution, or it would have been stillborn” (Researches on the United States, Constance D. Sherman, trans. and ed. [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976], 125).

54 Adams, “Misanthrop, No. 2” ( January 1767), in Taylor et al., eds., Adams Papers, I, 187. “There is not an emotion or thought which passes through the mind,” wrote Smith, “that does not paint some image of itself on the fine and delicate lines of the countenance” (Lectures, I, 30). Beliefs such as this led to the faddish science of physiognomy promoted by the Swiss J. K. Lavater. See Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century . . . , I (New York: T. and J. Swords 1803), 433–434.

55 Richardson, The History of Clarissa Harlowe, William Lyon Phelps, ed., IV (New York: Croscup & Sterling, 1902), 112 (Letter XXVIII); Defoe, quoted in Novak, ed., Age of Disguise, 2; Dillon, “Complexity and Change,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXV (1974), 51–61.

56 Lord Chesterfield to his son, August 21, 1749, in Bonamy Dobrée, ed., The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, IV (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932), 1382–1383. On the issue of sincerity see the engaging and learned article by Judith Shklar, “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical,” Daedalus (Summer 1979), 1–25.

57 John Adams, August 20, 1770, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, I (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 363; Am. Museum, XII (1792), 172; Warren, quoted in Cohen, Revolutionary Histories, 207, 208.

58 Henry Fielding, “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” in The Works of Henry Fielding, XI (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1899), 190; William Henry Drayton, The Letters of Freeman, Etc.: Essays on the Nonimportation Movement in South Carolina, Robert M. Weir, ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 34; David Hume, The History of England . . . , VI (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879 [originally published Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1754–1762]), chap. 65, 16; Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 308; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Penguin, 1970), 283–287; Smith, Lectures, I, 10, 314. “In Truth,” wrote Trenchard and Gordon, “every private Subject has a Right to watch the Steps of those who would betray their Country; nor is he to take their Word about the Motives of their Designs, but to judge of their Designs by the Event” (Cato’s Letters, I, 86).

59 Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law” (1765), in Taylor et al., eds., Adams Papers, I, 127; Cooke, A Sermon Preached at Cambridge . . . May 30th, 1770 (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), in John Wingate Thornton, ed., The Pulpit of the American Revolution. Or, the Political Sermons of the Period of 1776 (Boston: Gould and Lincoln; Sheldon, 1860), 167; [Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer, in Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson, 348. The eighteenth-century fascination with power, both in physics and in politics, was enhanced by this need to infer causes from their effects. Power or causation, “which,” said Joseph Priestley, “is only the same idea differently modified,” was not found in our sensory experience. “We all see events one succeeding another,” wrote Thomas Reid, “but we see not the power by which they are produced.” Locke had called power a “mysterious quality,” and it remained such for Americans well into the nineteenth century. Power was something observable only from its effects. Whether from a magnet attracting iron, from a charged electrical jar giving a shock, or from a series of tax levies, men got the idea that some sort of cause or agent was at work. Power, said James Hutton, was “a term implying an unknown thing in action” (Heimann and McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers,” Historical Studies in Physical Sciences, III [1971], 266, 280, 286; Thomas Brown, “Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect,” North American Review, XII [1821], 401).

60 Hume, “Concerning Human Understanding,” sec. VIII, pt. I, in Essays, Green and Grose, eds., 71. See also ibid., sec. VI, 48–49.

61 Smith, Lectures, I, 254. The colonists, writes Bailyn, had “a general sense that they lived in a conspiratorial world in which what the highest officials professed was not what they in fact intended, and that their words masked a malevolent design” (Ideological Origins, 98).

62 Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 1; [Trenchard and Gordon], Cato’s Letters, III, 330, 334; Priestley, quoted in Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 16.

63 William Livingston, The Independent Reflector: Or Weekly Essays on . . . the Province of New-York, Milton M. Klein, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 218; Courtlandt Canby, ed., “Robert Munford’s The Patriots,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., VI (1949), 492; Tillotson, quoted in Leon Guilhamet, The Sincere Ideal: Studies on Sincerity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 16. American Protestantism was always preoccupied with the problem of deception and hypocrisy. While seventeenth-century New England Puritans had recognized man’s ultimate inability to discover who was saved or not and had accepted the possibility of some hypocrites being within the visible church, early nineteenth-century Christian perfectionists were sure they could tell who the deceivers were, for those “who bear a bold and living testimony against all sin, and confirm the same by their works” could not feign; their behavior thus “puts a period eventually, to all the contentions and debates, about Who is a christian and who is not” (Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953], 68–81; John Dunlavy, The Manifesto, or a Declaration of the Doctrines and Practice of the Church of Christ [Pleasant Hill, KY: P. Bertrand, 1818], 268, 283, 284–285).

64 Henrick Hartog, “The Public Law of a County Court: Judicial Government in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” American Journal of Legal History, XX (1976), 321–322. For some even the administration of all criminal justice could be reduced to the unmasking of deception. James Wilson thought that the word “felony”—“the generical term employed by the common law to denote a crime”—was derived from both Latin and Greek meaning “to deceive.” It was not an injurious action alone that causes a crime, said Wilson; instead, the action revealed that the actor had a dispostion unworthy of the confidence of the community, “that he is false, deceitful, and treacherous: the crime is now completed” (“Law Lectures,” in McClosky, ed., Works of Wilson, II, 622).

65 P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” in Richard C. Boys, ed., Studies in the Literature of the Augustan Age: Essays Collected in Honor of Arthur Ellicott Case (New York: Gordian Press, 1966); Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 100, 106.

66 [Adams], “U” to the Boston Gazette, August 29, 1763, in Taylor et al., eds., Adams Papers, I, 78, 79.

67 So Eustache LeNoble wrote in the preface to his novel Abra-Mule (1696): “The actions of sovereigns always have two parts, one is the public element which everyone knows and which forms the material of gazettes and the greater part of histories; the other, which these sovereigns hide behind the veil of their policy, are the secret motives of intrigue which cause those events, and which are known or revealed only to those who have had some part in these intrigues, or who by the penetration of their genius know how the one part becomes the other” (quoted in Rene Godenne, Historie de la Nouvelle Française aux XVII^e et XVIII^e Siècles [Geneva: Droz, 1970], 96).

68 Hume, History of England, VI, 64–65. In the years between the Restoration and the era of George III, the modern English notion of the criminal law of conspiracy was essentially formed. Basic to this notion was the belief that the criminality of conspiracy lay in the intent, which was revealed by the acts done. A justice in Rex v. Sterling (1664) had suggested that “the particular facts” were “but evidence of the design charged.” A century later Lord Mansfield in Rex v. Parsons et al. elaborated the point by instructing the jury “that there was no occasion to prove the actual fact of conspiring, but that it might be collected from collateral circumstances” ( James Wallace Bryan, The Development of the English Law of Conspiracy, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, XXVII [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1909], 77, 78–79, 81. I owe this reference to Stanley N. Katz).

69 Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770), in The Works and Correspondence of. . . Edmund Burke, Charles William and Richard Bourke, eds. (London: Francis and John Rivington, 1852), III, esp. 112–114, 130–131. For the prevalence of the belief in a “double cabinet” operating “behind the curtain” in the era of George III, see Ian R. Christie, Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1970), 27–54.

70 Henry Laurens to John Brown, October 28, 1765, in George C. Rogers Jr., et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, V (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 30; Staughton Lynd, ed., “Abraham Yates’s History of the Movement for the United States Constitution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XX (1963), 231, 232.

71 Richard Henry Lee to———, May 31, 1764, in James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, I (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 7; James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, Modern Library ed. (New York, 1945), 532. Even someone as enlightened and prone to conspiratorial thinking as John Adams repeatedly fell back on the “inscrutable” designs of “providence” in order to account for strange turns of events. This providential tradition, associated especially with Protestantism, was the only means in the eighteenth century, other than conspiracies, to account for events that seemed inconsistent with their causes (Taylor et al., eds., Adams Papers, II, 84, 236).

72 Nathanael Emmons, A Discourse, Delivered on the National Fast, April 25, 1799 (Wrentham, MA: Nathaniel and Benjamin Heaton, 1799), 23.

73 Boston Evening-Post, December 29, 1766. See Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 129–215, and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

74 Duncan Forbes, “ ‘Scientific’ Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal, VII (1954), 651, 653–654; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Duncan Forbes, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 122, 123.

75 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 328; William Wordsworth, “The Borderers,” in William Knight, ed., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, I (Edinburgh: William Patterson, 1882), 109. François Furet notes the differing views of the two French Revolutionary leaders, Brissot de Warville and Robespierre, over what was happening. Brissot, writes Furet, argued publicly in 1792 that “it was impossible to foresee the turn of events and that human intentions and the course of history were two separate matters.” This “kind of historical objectivity, which made it possible to disregard the possibility—indeed, in this case, the probability—that evil intentions were at work, was by definition totally alien to Robespierre’s political universe, in which it was implicitly assumed that intentions are perfectly coherent with the actions they prompt and the effects they aim at. . . . In such a universe, action never had unforeseeable consequences, nor was power ever innocent.” The difference that Furet finds between the thinking of Brissot and Robespierre is precisely the difference between our modern conception of reality and that of the American Revolutionaries (Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 67–68).

76 See esp. Roberts, Secret Societies, 160–167. On April 17, 1798, the recent immigrant to America Benjamin Henry Latrobe wrote to his Italian friend Giambattista Scandalla of the unprecedented turmoil of the French Revolution. “At the present moment the great convulsions of empires and nations, are so violent, that they lay hold of, and move individuals with an effect unknown in the former wars of kings. The surface—the great men of every nation—were once the only part of the mass really interested. The present storm is so violent, that the ocean is moved to the very depth, and you and I who inhabit it, feel the commotion” (John C. Van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt, eds., The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, I [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988]).

77 Gouverneur Morris, “Political Enquiries,” in Willi Paul Adams, ed., “ ‘The Spirit of Commerce Requires that Property Be Sacred’: Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, XXI (1976), 328. Adams dates Morris’s unpublished essay at 1776, but the content suggests that it was more likely written a decade or so later.

78 The fullest account of the Illuminati scare is Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1967 [originally published 1918]). On conspiratorial thinking in the early Republic, see J. Wendell Knox, Conspiracy in American Politics, 1787–1815 (New York: Arno Press, 1972).

79 David Tappan, A Discourse Delivered in the Chapel of Harvard College, June 19, 1798 (Boston: Manning & Loring, 1798), 13, 19–21.

80 Ibid., 6; Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis, Illustrated in a Discourse Preached, on the Fourth of July . . . (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1798), 16. It was this traditional assumption about the cause-effect relationship between beliefs and behavior that lay behind the Federalists’ enactment of the Sedition Act of 1798. They could scarcely appreciate the emerging notion set forth by some Republicans that Americans should be free to believe and express whatever opinions they pleased.

81 Abraham Bishop, Connecticut Republicanism. An Oration on the Extent and Power of Political Delusion . . . (Albany, NY: John Barber, 1801), 8, and Oration Delivered in Wallingford on the 11th of March 1801 . . . (New Haven, CT: William W. Morse, 1801), 24. I owe some of these citations relating to the Illuminati conspiracy to David C. Miller, “The Ideology of Conspiracy: An Examination of the Illuminati Incident in New England” (seminar paper, Brown University, 1977).

82 Bishop, Proofs of a Conspiracy, Against Christianity, and the Government of the United States . . . (Hartford, CT: John Babcock, 1802), 10–12, and Oration Delivered in Wallingford, 25, 26. (Hartford, CT: John Babcock, 1802), 10—12, and Oration Delivered in Wallingford, 25), 26.

83 By avowing that “ ‘holiness’ is no ‘guarantee for political rectitude,’ ” Bishop, wrote a stunned Federalist David Daggett, was undermining the moral order of society. “What security then,” asked Daggett, “have we for ‘political rectitude’?” (Three Letters to Abraham Bishop . . . [Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin, 1800], 27).

84 Monthly Magazine and American Review, I (1799), 289; Charles Brockden Brown, “Walstein’s School of History,” in The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings, Harry R. Warfel, ed. (New York: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), 147. In discussing the conspiratorial interpretation that saw the Order of the Bavarian Illuminati bringing about the French Revolution, Hofstadter wrote that “what is missing [in it] is not veracious information about the organization, but sensible judgment about what can cause a revolution” (Paranoid Style, 37). The basic question is why we think one judgment “sensible” and another not.

85 Robert K. Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review, I (1936), 894–904. Fisher Ames, the most pessimistic of Federalists, was one of the few Americans of these years who came to think like a European about revolutions and the “stream” of history. “Events,” he wrote, “proceed, not as they were expected or intended, but as they are impelled by the irresistible laws of our political existence. Things inevitable happen, and we are astonished, as if they were miracles, and the course of nature had been overpowered or suspended to produce them” (“The Dangers of American Liberty” [1805], in Seth Ames, ed., Works of Fisher Ames . . . , II [Boston: Little, Brown, 1854], 345).

86 See W. B. Berthoff, “ ‘A Lesson on Concealment’: Brockden Brown’s Method in Fiction,” Philological Quarterly, XXXVII (1958), 45–57; Michael Davitt Bell, “ ‘The Double-Tongued Deceiver’: Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature, IX (1974), 143–163; John Clemen, “Ambiguous Evil: A Study of Villains and Heroes in Charles Brockden Brown’s Major Novels,” ibid., X (1975), 190–219; Mark Seltzer, “Saying Makes It So: Language and Event in Brown’s Wieland,” ibid., XIII (1978), 81–91; and David H. Hirsch, Reality and Idea in the Early American Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 74–100.

87 Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, the Transformation (Philadelphia: McKay, 1889 [originally published 1798]), 234, Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker (Philadelphia: McKay, 1887 [originally published 1799]), 267, and “Walstein’s School of History,” in Rhapsodist, Warfel, ed. 152, 154.

88 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: University of London, 1907 [originally published London, 1789]), 102. Utilitarianism has often been used rather loosely by historians and equated simply with utility or happiness. Although late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans were centrally interested in the usefulness of behavior, most did not mean by it what Bentham did: the abandonment of a concern with motives in favor of consequences. This sort of Benthamite utilitarianism had very little influence in America. See Paul A. Palmer, “Benthamism in England and America,” American Political Science Review, XXXV (1941), 855–871; Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 230–239; and Wilson Smith, “William Paley’s Theological Utilitarianism in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XI (1954), 402–424. Even in criminal legislation, where, through the influence of Beccaria, utilitarianism was rampant, an ultimate concern with motives insinuated itself. In designating punishments for various offenses, wrote New York penal reformer Thomas Eddy, modern legislators could scarcely take into account “the moral condition” of the criminals; they could “regard only the tendency of actions to injure society, and distribute those punishments according to the comparative degrees of harm such actions may produce.” Yet this stark utilitarianism in criminal legislation was justified in Eddy’s mind only because it gave the supervisors of the penitentiaries the opportunity of “distinguishing the shades of guilt in different offenders” and thus of effecting the moral reformation of the criminals (An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House, in the City of New York [New York: Isaac Collins and son, 1801], 51–52).

89 “Introduction,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, I (October 1837), in Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy: Representative Writings of the Period 1825–1850 (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1954 [originally published 1947]), 28.

90 George Washington (1788), quoted in Paul C. Nagel, One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 149.

91 Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1972), 111. “God governs the world by the laws of a general providence,” observed Peres Fobes in 1795. Things did not happen in violation of these laws, for “this would introduce such a train of miraculous events, as would subvert the whole constitution of nature, and destroy that established in connexion between cause and effect, which is now the principal source of human knowledge and foresight” (A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Samuel Adams . . . Being the Day of General Election [Boston: Young and Minns, 1795], 12).

92 Charles Stewart Davies, An Address Delivered on the Commemoration at Fryeburg, May 19, 1825 (Portland, ME: J. Adams Jr., 1825), in Blau, ed., Social Theories, 40.

93 On the romantic historians’view of the progressive patterning of events that sometimes transcended individual motives see David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 40–43.

94 Timothy Dwight, quoted in Marie Caskey, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 39; see also Lyman Beecher, Sermons, Delivered on Various Occasions, II (Boston: John P. Jewitt, 1852), 156–158. Although Beecher and the other New Haven theologians believed that people had free wills, they also believed that the law of cause and effect operated in the moral as in the natural world, “the laws of mind, and the operation of moral causes, being just as uniform as the laws of matter.” This made revivalism a science like engineering (Conrad Cherry, “Nature and the Republic: The New Haven Theology,” New England Quarterly, LI [1978], 518–520).

95 John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principle and Policy of the Government of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950 [originally published 1814]), 96; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Phillips Bradley, ed., II (New York: Knopf, 1945), 85. “It is evidently a general constitution of providence,” wrote Nathaniel Chipman as late as 1833, “that the general tendency of vice is to produce misery to the agent, of virtue, to produce happiness, connected in both by the relation of cause and effect” (Principle of Government; a Treatise on Free Institutions . . . [Burlington, VT: Edward Smith, 1833], 22).

96 Everett, An Oration Delivered at Concord, April the Nineteenth 1825 (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1825), 3–4; Cohen, Revolutionary Histories, 86–127.

97 Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 40.

CHAPTER 4, INTERESTS AND DISINTERESTEDNESS IN THE MAKING OF THE CONSTITUTION

1 Gladstone, quoted in Douglass Adair, “The Tenth Federalist Revisited,” in Trevor Colbourn., ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 81.

2 Henry Steele Commager, Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (New York: George Braziller, 1975), xix.

3 Charles Thomson to Thomas Jefferson, April 6, 1786, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), IX, 380. On the demographic explosion of the 1780s, see J. Potter, “The Growth of Population in America, 1700–1860,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), 640.

4 For examples of the various historians who have minimized the criticalness of the 1780s, see Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1913), 48; E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 337; Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781–1790 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 348–349; Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 21.

5 “Amicus Republicae,” Address to the Public . . . (Exeter, N.H., 1786), in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1760–1805 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1, 644; Rush to David Ramsay, [March or April 1788], in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), I, 454; Washington to John Jay, August 1, 1786, May 18, 1786, in John C. Fitzspatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington . . . (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–1944), XXVIII, 431–432, 503.

6 Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 177–178.

7 William Findley to Gov. William Plumer of New Hampshire, “William Findley of Westmoreland, Pa.,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, V (1881), 444; Jerry Grundfest, George Clymer: Philadelphia Revolutionary, 1739–1813 (New York: Arno Press, 1982), 293–294; John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, eds., Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1888), 115.

8 On this point, see Robert A. Feer, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Constitution: A Study in Causation,” New England Quarterly, XLII (1969), 388–410.

9 George Washington to John Jay, May 18, 1786, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, XVIII, 432; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 24, 1787, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XII, 276.

10 Robert A. Rutland, editorial note to “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison (Chicago, Charlottesville: University of Chicago Press, University Press of Virginia, 1962–), IX, 346.

11 Thomas Jefferson quoted in Ralph Ketcham, James Madison; A Biography (New York: Macmillan 1971), 162; Drew R. McCoy, “The Virginia Port Bill of 1784,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXIII (1975), 294; James Madison to Edmund Pendleton, January 9, 1787, to George Washington, December 24, 1786, in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 225, 244; A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680–1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 192–202.

12 McCoy, “Virginia Port Bill,” 292; James Madison to George Washington, December 7, 1786, to Edmund Pendleton, January 9, 1787, to George Washington, December 24, 1786, to Thomas Jefferson, December 4, 1786, in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 200, 244, 225, 191; Ketcham, Madison, 172.

13 “Vices,” in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 354, 355–356.

14 George Washington to Henry Lee, April 5, 1786, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, XXVIII, 402; Grundfest, Clymer, 164, 165; E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 209; Knox quoted in William Winslow Crosskey and William Jeffrey Jr., Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), III, 420, 421.

15 Benjamin Rush to Jeremy Belknap, May 6, 1788, in Butterfield, ed., Letters of Rush, I, 461; Elbridge Gerry, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911, rev. ed., 1937), I, 48.

16 The best study of wartime mobilization in a single state is Richard Buel Jr., Dear Liberty: Connecticut’s Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (Middletown, CT: Western University Press, 1980). For an insightful general assessment of the effects of mobilization, see Janet Ann Riesman, “The Origins of American Political Economy, 1690–1781” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1983), 302–338.

17 Laurens quoted in Albert S. Bolles, The Financial History of the United States from 1774 to 1789: Embracing the Period of the American Revolution, 4th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 61–62 (I owe this citation to Janet Riesman); Carp, To Starve the Army, 106.

18 Nathanael Greene to Jacob Greene, after May 24, 1778, in Richard K. Showman ed., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976–), II, 404; Richard Buel Jr., “Samson Shorn: The Impact of the Revolutionary War on Estimates of the Republic’s Strength,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 157–160. On the growth of commercial farming in the middle of the eighteenth century, see especially Joyce Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History, LXVIII (1982), 833–849. There is nothing on eighteenth-century America’s increased importation of “luxuries” and “comforts” resembling Neil McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). But see the articles of Carole Shammas, especially “The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America,” Journal of Social History, XIV (1980), 3–24; Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1658–1777,” Historical Methods, XIII (1980), 81–104; and Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

19 For examples of the new thinking about luxury as an inducement to industry, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 97.

20 [William Barton], The True Interest of the United States, and Particularly of Pennsylvania Considered . . . (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1786), 12.

21 Ibid., 4, 25–26.

22 [William Smith], The Independent Reflector. . . by William Livingston and Others, Milton M. Klein, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 106. See J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 38–39, 44, 49, 87, 97–99.

23 Remarks on a Pamphlet, Entitled, “Considerations on the Bank of North-America” (Philadelphia: John Steele, 1785), 14; James Madison to James Monroe, April 9, 1786, in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 26; [Barton], True Interest, 20; Pennsylvania Statute of 1785, cited in E. A. J. Johnson, The Foundations of American Economic Freedom: Government and Enterprise in the Age of Washington (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), 43n.

24 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, William Peden, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), Query XXII, 175; Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, October 13, 1785, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, VIII, 633.

25 Madison to Monroe, October 5, 1786, in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 141; Carlisle Gazette (Pa.), October 24, 1787, quoted in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), II, 208; George Washington to James Warren, October 7, 1785, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, XXVIII, 291; Hamilton, in Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, I, 378. On the nature and role of interests in eighteenth-century British politics, see Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970).

26 Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980), 3–50, quotation at 47.

27 George Washington, quoted in Lester H. Cohen, The Revolutionary Histories: Contemporary Narratives of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 273.

28 Joseph Lathrop (1786), in Hyneman and Lutz, eds., American Political Writing, I, 660; Wilson, in Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, I, 605; Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XI, 49. See also Ralph Ketcham, Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

29 Jefferson, “Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774), in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, I, 134.

30 Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language . . . (London: W. Strahan, 1755); Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 22–23.

31 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 97.

32 George Washington to John Hancock, September 24, 1776, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, VI, 107–108.

33 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) ( V.i.f. 50–51), II, 781–783; [ John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon], Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, 5th ed. (London: T. Woodward et al., 1748), III, 193; Phillips Payson, “A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council . . . at Boston, May 27, 1778,” in John Wingate Thornton, ed., The Pulpit of the American Revolution ... (Boston, New York: Gould and Lincoln, Sheldon and Co., 1860), 337; Jefferson, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Education” (1779), in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, II, 527. On the eighteenth-century British developments out of which “Cato,” Smith, and others wrote, see the illuminating discussion in John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 17–50.

34 The best discussion of the distinctiveness of the gentry in colonial America is Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University, of North Carolina Press, 1982), esp. 131–132.

35 Royster, Revolutionary People at War, 86–95; J ohn B. B. Trussell Jr., Birthplace of an Army: A Study of the Valley Forge Encampment (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1976), 86.

36 Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy in Three Books . . . (London: R. and A. Foulis 1755), II, 113. “Let not your Love of Philosophical Amusements have more than its due Weight with you,” Benjamin Franklin admonished Cadwallader Colden at midcentury. Public service was far more important. In fact, said Franklin, even “the finest” of Newton’s “Discoveries” could not have excused his neglect of serving the commonwealth if the public had needed him (Franklin to Colden, October 11, 1750, in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin[New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–], IV, 68).

37 Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretative. History of the Continental Congress (New York: Knopf, 1979), 216–239, quotation by William Fleming to Jefferson, May 10, 1779, at 237; George Athan Billias, Elbridge Gerry, Founding Father and Republican Statesman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 138–139.

38 See William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961).

39 Wilson, “On the History of Property,” in Robert Green McCloskey, ed., The Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), II, 716; Dickinson, “Letters of a Farmer in Pennsylvania” (1768), in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson, vol. I, Political Writings, 1764–1774 (Pennsylvania Historical Society, Memoirs, XIV [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1895]), 307 (hereafter cited as Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson).

40 “We have found by experience, that no dependence can be had upon merchants, either at home, or in America,” Charles Chauncy told Richard Price in 1774, “so many of them are so mercenary as to find within themselves a readiness to become slaves themselves, as well as to be accessory to the slavery of others, if they imagine they may, by this means, serve their own private separate interest” (D. C. Thomas and Bernard Peach, eds., The Correspondence of Richard Price [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983], I, 170). For Adam Smith’s view that the interest of merchants and indeed of all who lived by profit was “always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the publick,” see Smith, Wealth of Nations, Campbell and Skinner, ed. (I.xi.p.10), I, 267.

41 Richard Jackson to Benjamin Franklin, June 17, 1755, in Labaree et al., eds., Papers of Franklin, VI, 82. On the colonial merchants’ “detachment from political activity,” see Thomas M. Doerflinger, “Philadelphia Merchants and the Logic of Moderation, 1760–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XL (1983), 212–213; and Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 113.

42 William M. Fowler Jr., The Baron of Beacon Hill: A Biography of John Hancock (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); Charles W. Akers, The Divine Politician: Samuel Cooper and the American Revolution in Boston (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982), 121, 128, 130, 141, 176, 311; Henry Laurens to Richard Oswald, July 7, 1764, in Philip M. Hamer et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968–), IV, 338 (see also Rachel N. Klein, “Ordering the Backcountry: The South Carolina Regulation,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXVIII [1981], 667); David Duncan Wallace, The Life of Henry Laurens . . . (New York: Russell and Russell, 1915), 69–70, quotation at 335. In the 1780s Elbridge Gerry likewise retired from mercantile business and “set himself up as a country squire” (Billias, Gerry, 135–136).

43 Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 196; Christopher, Collier, Roger Sherman’s Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 14, 21–22.

44 Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist No. 35 (Middletown, CT, 1961) [Barton], True Interest, 27. For arguments in pre-Revolutionary Virginia whether lawyers were practicing “a grovelling, mercenary trade” or not, see Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers, 156–157. Some conceded that lawyers were members of one of the “three genteel Professions,” but that they were guilty of more “petit Larceny” than doctors and clergymen. Madison was not convinced of the disinterestedness of lawyers (ibid., 157, 147, Ketcham, Madison, 145). On the efforts of some nineteenth-century thinkers to make professional communities the repositories of disinterestedness against the selfishness and interestedness of businessmen, see Thomas L. Haskell, “Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities,” in Thomas L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 180–225.

45 Morris, “Political Enquiries,” in Willi Paul Adams, ed., “ ‘The Spirit of Commerce, Requires that Property Be Sacred’: Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, XXI (1976), 329; Alexander Hamilton to Robert Troup, April 13, 1795, in Harold C. Syrett, et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1979), XVII, 329.

46 George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, January 22, 1785, to George William Fairfax, February 27, 1785, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, XXVIII, 36, 85.

47 George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, January 22, 1785, to William Grayson, January 22, 1785, to Lafayette, February 15, 1785, to Thomas Jefferson, February 25, 1785, to George William Fairfax, February 27, 1785, to Governor Patrick Henry, February 27, 1785, to Henry Knox, February 28, 1785, June 18, 1785, to Nathanael Greene, May 20, 1785, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, XXVIII, 36, 37, 72, 80–81, 85, 89–91, 92–93, 146, 167. The only friend whose advice on the disposition of the canal shares Washington did not solicit was Robert Morris, perhaps because he feared that Morris might tell him to keep them. Instead he confined his letter to Morris to describing the commercial opportunities of the canals. To Morris, February 1, 1785, ibid., 48–55.

48 Cooke, ed., The Federalist No. 10; Gordon S. Wood, “Democracy and the Constitution,” in Robert A, Goldwin and William A. Schambra, eds., How Democratic Is the Constitution? (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), 11–12. On the tendency to misread Madison, see Robert J. Morgan, “Madison’s Theory of Representation in the Tenth Federalist,” Journal of Politics, XXXVI (1974), 852–885; and Paul F. Bourke, “The Pluralist Reading of James Madison’s Tenth Federalist,” Perspectives in American History, IX (1975), 271–295.

49 James Madison to George Washington April 16, 1787, to Edmund Randolph, April 8, 1787, in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 370, 384; John Zvesper, “The Madisonian Systems,” Western Political Quarterly, XXXVII (1984), 244–247.

50 Jerome J. Nadelhaft, “ ‘The Snarls of Invidious Animals’: The Democratization of Revolutionary South Carolina,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1981), 77.

51 On Findley, see his letter to Governor William Plumer of New Hampshire, February 27, 1812, “William Findley of Westmoreland, Pa.,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, V (1881), 440–50; and Russell J. Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania Politics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1938), 39–40.

52 Grundfest, Clymer, 141.

53 Claude Milton Newlin, The Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932), 71.

54 Ibid., 78, 80–81; Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania, 66–69.

55 Newlin, Brackenridge, 79–80, 83–84; Ferguson, Early Western Pennsylvania, 70–72.

56 Mathew Carey, ed., Debates and Proceedings of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania on the Memorials Praying a Repeal or Suspension of the Law Annulling the Charter of the Bank (Philadelphia: Carey and Co., Seddon and Pritchard, 1786), 19, 64, 10, 30.

57 Robert Morris to George Washington, May 29, 1781, E. James Ferguson et al., eds., The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973–), I, 96; Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Robert Morris, Patriot and Financier (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 52–56, 70–71.

58 Carey, ed., Debates, 33, 79–80, 98 (quotations on 80, 98).

59 Ibid., 81; Oberholtzer, Morris, 285–286, 297–299, 301–303; Eleanor Young, Forgotten Patriot: Robert Morris (New York: Macmillan, 1950–), 170; Barbara Ann Chernow, Robert Morris, Land Speculator, 1790–1801 (New York: Arno Press, 1978); H. E. Scudder, ed., Recollections of Samuel Breck . . . (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1877), 203: The Journal of William Maclay (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927 [orig. pub, 1890]), 132.

60 Carey, ed., Debates, 66, 87, 128, 21, 130, 38, 15, 72–73.

61 Cooke, ed., The Federalist No. 10; [William Findley], A Review of the Revenue System Adopted at the First Congress under the Federal Constitution . . . (Philadelphia: Bailey, 1794), 117.

62 Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution . . . (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896), II, 13, 260; [Findley], “Letter by an Officer of the Late Continental Army,” Independent Gazette (Philadelphia), November 6, 1787, in Storing, ed., Complete Anti-Federalist, III, 95; Ruth Bogin, Abraham Clark and the Quest for Equality in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1794 (East Brunswick, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 32.

63 Philip A. Crowl, “Anti-Federalism in Maryland, 1787–88,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., IV (1947), 464; Richard Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763–1789 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959), 132; [James Winthrop] “Letters of Agrippa,” Massachusetts Gazette, December 14, 1787, in Storing, ed., Complete Anti-Federalist, IV, 80; “Essentials of a Free Government,” in Walter Hartwell Bennett, ed., Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978), 10.

64 Benjamin Latrobe to Philip Mazzei, December 19, 1806, in Margherita Marchione et al., eds., Philip Mazzei: Selected Writings and Correspondence (Prato, Italy: Cassa di Risparmi e Depositi di Prato, 1983), III, 439 (I owe this reference to Stanley J. Idzerda).

65 Ibid.

66 James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 242, 243; Tocqueville to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831, in Roger Boesch, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 38; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), I, 243. It was not, of course, as simple as Tocqueville made it out to be. The ideal of disinterested politics did not disappear in the nineteenth century, and even today it lingers on here and there. It formed the basis for all the antiparty and mugwump reform movements and colored the thinking of many of the Progressives. For Theodore Roosevelt in 1894, “the first requisite in the citizen who wishes to share the work of our public life . . . is that he shall act disinterestedly and with a sincere purpose to serve the whole commonwealth” (Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays, Social and Political [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897], 34 [I owe this reference to John Patrick Diggins]). Of course, at almost the same time, John Dewey was telling Americans that it was psychologically impossible for anyone to act disinterestedly. See John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 341–343. See also Stephen Miller, Special Interest Groups in American Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983).

67 Wilson, in Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, I, 154; Cooke, ed., The Federalist No. 10. Vernon Parrington asked the same questions. If ordinary men were motivated by self-interest, as the Federalists believed, why would “this sovereign motive” abdicate “its rule among the rich and well born? . . . Do the wealthy betray no desire for greater power? Do the strong and powerful care more for good government than for class interests?” (Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927], I, 302).

68 John Witherspoon, “Speech in Congress on Finances,” The Works of John Witherspoon . . . (Edinburgh: John Turnbull, 1805), IX, 133–134.

69 Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1954), 20; Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 20–22; Dickinson, “Letters of a Farmer,” in Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson, 307; Fowler, Baron of Beacon Hill, 251; Margaret E. Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750–1820 (Smith College Studies in History, XXIV [Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1938–1939]), 159. See also Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 145–153.

70 Carey, ed., Debates, 96; Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Base and Social Structure: The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, XXV (1965), 650; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 133; East, Business Enterprise, 19; Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 116, 123.

71 John Adams to James Warren, February 12, 1777, in Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), V, 83; Riesman, “Origins of American Political Economy,” 135–136, 144; Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 124; George Washington to Governor George Clinton, April 20, 1785, to Battaile Muse, December 4, 1785, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, XXVIII, 134, 341; Carey, ed., Debates, 96.

72 Roy A. Foulke, The Sinews of American Commerce (New York: Dun & Bradstreet, 1941), 66–68, 74–75, 89; William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 44–45. For a sensitive analysis of the Virginia planters’ etiquette of debt, see T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 93–106.

73 Grundfest, Clymer, 177; Providence Gazette, August 5, 1786, quoted in David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 51; Madison, “Notes for Speech Opposing Paper Money” [November 1, 1786], in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 158–159; Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 166.

74 Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, II, 310, III, 350.

75 Ruth Bogin, “New Jersey’s True Policy: The Radical Republican Vision of Abraham Clark,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXXV (1978), 105.

76 David Ramsay, “An Address to the Freemen of South Carolina on the Subject of the Federal Constitution” (1787), in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, NY: Historical Printing Club, 1888), 379–380. Madison thought that the Anti-Federalist pamphlets omitted “many of the true grounds of opposition” to the Constitution. “The articles relating to Treaties, to paper money, and to contracts, created more enemies than all the errors in the System positive and negative put together” (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XIV, 18).

77 Benjamin Rush to Jeremy Belknap, February 28, 1788, quoted in John P. Kaminski, “Democracy Run Rampant: Rhode Island in the Confederation,” in James Kirby Martin, ed., The Human Dimensions of Nation Making: Essays on Colonial and Revolutionary History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), 267; Rush to Elias Boudinot, July 9, 1788, in Butterfield, ed., Letters of Rush, I, 471.

CHAPTER 6, THE MAKING OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

1 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1964).

2 Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 2.

3 James Otis, Right of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764), in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlet of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 427.

4 Philadelphia Pennsylvania Gazette, April 24, 1776.

5 Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 33.

6 Clifford K. Shipton, “Jonathan Trumbull,” in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates: Biographies of Those Who Attended Harvard College (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1951), 8: 269.

7 Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968).

8 On the politics of the imperial relationship, see the works by Alison Gilbert Olson, Anglo-American Politics, 1660–1775: The Relationship Between Parties in England and Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), and Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

9 On the increasing difficulties of colonial communication in the empire on the eve of the Revolution, see Michael Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968).

10 Gary B. Nash, “The Transformation of Urban Politics, 1700–1764,” Journal of American History, LX (1973), 605–632.

11 J. R. Pole, The Gift of Government: Political Responsibility from the English Restoration to American Independence (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983).

12 Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Secretary of the Commonwealth, 1878), III, 70.

13 South Carolina Gazette (Charleston), May 13, April 29, 1784.

14 Philadelphia Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 30, 1776, quoted in David Hawke, In the Midst of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), 187.

15 Alfred Young, “The Mechanics and the Jeffersonians: New York, 1789–1801,” Labor History, 5 (1964), 274; Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 389; Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 173.

16 Philip Lampi’s Collection of American Election Data, 1787–1825, for presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative elections shows how popular and competitive American politics became during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In other words, America did not have to wait for Andrew Jackson in order to become democratic. Lampi’s Collection is available online via the American Antiquarian Society’s Web page “A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787–1825.”

17 Harvey Strum, “Property Qualifications and the Voting Behavior in New York, 1807–1816,” Journal of the Early Republic, I (1981), 359.

18 Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Many states continued to maintain taxpaying requirements for voting.

19 James Madison to George Washington, April 16, 1787, in Jack N. Rakove, ed., James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999), 81.

20 Walter R. Fee, The Transition from Aristocracy to Democracy in New Jersey, 1789–1829 (Somerville, NJ: Somerset Press, 1933), 146; Joseph S. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations, IV, Eighteenth-Century Business Corporations in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 321; P. H. Woodward, One Hundred Years of the Hartford Bank . . . (Hartford: CT: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1892), 50.

21 Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Private Access and Public Power: Gentility and Lobbying in the Early Congress,” in Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds., The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and the Institutional Development (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 74–76; Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793–1821 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 79; Donald Hickey, The War of 1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 122.

22 Strum, “Property Qualifications and the Voting Behavior in New York, 1807–1816,” Journal of the Early Republic, I (1981), 350, 369.

23 Samuel Shapiro, “ ‘Aristocracy, Mud, and Vituperation’: The Butler-Dana Campaign,” New England Quarterly, XXXI (1958), 340–360.

24 Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 222.

25 Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 75.

26 James M. McPherson, “The Ballot and Land for the Freedman, 1861–1865,” in Kenneth M, Stampp and Leon F. Litwack, eds., Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist Writings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 138.

27 New York Times, September 8, 2010.

28 Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 279.

CHAPTER 7, THE RADICALISM OF THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THOMAS PAINE CONSIDERED

1 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Part the Second (1792), in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel, 1969), I, 405–406; Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, March 18, 1801, in Barbara Oberg et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 33, 359.

2 Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, Howard C. Rice, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 2, 391.

3 John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 211.

4 S. W. Jackman, “A Young Englishman Reports on the New Nation: Edward Thornton, to James Bland Burges, 1791–1893,” William and Mary Quarterly, XVIII (1961), 110.

5 Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British Colonists (1774),” in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), I, 134.

6 Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), in Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, I, 23.

7 Thomas Paine, “The Crisis Extraordinary,” October 4, 1780, in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 182.

8 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Part the Second (1792), in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 363; Thomas Jefferson to T. Law, June 13, 1814, in A. A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), XIV, 141–142; Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 12, 1787, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XII, 15.

9 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 4.

10 Jonathan Mayhew, Seven Sermons upon the Following Subjects . . . (Boston: Alden Bradford, 1749), 126.

11 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Part the Second (1792), in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 357.

12 Ibid., 359.

13 Ibid., 355.

14 Ibid., 373; Thomas Jefferson to Governor John Langdon, March 5, 1810, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1221.

15 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Part the Second, in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 355–356.

16 [Benjamin Lincoln Jr.], “The Free Republican No. III,” Boston Independent Chronicle, December 8, 1785.

17 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Part the Second, in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 400.

18 Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Fey, March 18, 1793, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XXV, 402; Thomas Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson: Writings, 1004; Thomas Jefferson to Tench Coxe, May 1, 1794, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XXVIII, 67.

19 Alexander Hamilton to Rufus King, June 3, 1802, in Joanne B. Freeman, ed., Alexander Hamilton: Writings (New York: Library of America, 2001), 993; Alexander Hamilton, “Views on the French Revolution (1794),” Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962–), XXVI, 739–740.

20 Alexander Hamilton, “Views on the French Revolution (1794),” Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 739–740; Alexander Hamilton to Rufus King, June 3, 1802, in Freeman, ed., Hamilton: Writings, 993.

21 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Part the Second, in Foner, ed., Complete Writings, I, 408.

22 Thomas Jefferson to William Plumer, July 21, 1816, in Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings of Jefferson, XV, 46–47.

23 Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), in Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 825; Thomas Jefferson to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814, Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, December 8, 1822, in James H. Hutson, ed., The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 68, 218; Thomas Jefferson to Charles Clay, January 29, 1815, in Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings of Jefferson, XIV, 233.

24 Thomas Paine to Henry Laurens, September 14, 1779, in Foner, ed., Complete Writings of Paine, II, 1178.

25 Ibid.; Thomas Paine to Robert Livingston, May 19, 1783, quoted in Keane, Paine, 242.

26 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 18, 1785, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson: Writings, 841–842.

27 Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, March 18, 1801, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XXXIII, 359.

CHAPTER 8, MONARCHISM AND REPUBLICANISM IN EARLY AMERICA

1 Patrick Henry, in Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution (New York: Library of America, 1993), II, 629, 675.

2 Patrick Henry, in Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (Washington, 1854), III, 58, 491.

3 Benjamin Tappan to Henry Knox, April 1787, Henry Knox Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. (I owe this citation to Brendan McConville.)

4 James Madison, cited in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 410.

5 James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 24, 1787, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), XII, 276.

6 Benjamin Rush, “To———: Information to Europeans Who Are Disposed to Migrate to the United States,” April 16, 1790, L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), II, 556.

7 James Madison, “Vices of the System of the United States,” in Hutchinson et al., eds., Papers of Madison, IX, 352, 357.

8 Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), I, 65, 119; II, 513.

9 Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, March 18, 1789, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XIV, 679.

10 Louise B. Dunbar, A Study of “Monarchical” Tendencies in the United States, from 1776 to 1801 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1923), 99–100.

11 James McHenry to George Washington, March 29, 1789, in W. W. Abbot et al., eds., Papers of Washington: Presidential Series (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983–), I, 461.

12 Winifred E. A. Bernard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1758–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 92.

13 David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1758–1800 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 149; Thomas E. V. Smith, The City of New York in the Year of Washington’s Inauguration, 1789 (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1889, reprint ed., Riverside, CT, 1972), 217–219; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987).

14 William B. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), 446.

15 Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, May 5, 1789, in Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Alexander Hamilton, V, 335–337.

16 John Adams to George Washington, May 17, 1789, in Abbot et al., eds., Papers of Washington: Presidential Series, II, 312.

17 James Thomas Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation (1783–1793) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 195.

18 Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Greenwood, 1948), 108.

19 David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 120–122.

20 George Washington to James Madison, March 30, 1789, in John Rhodehamel, ed., George Washington: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 723; John Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 21, 1811, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1966), 181.

21 Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, eds., The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates: Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, 4 March 1789–3 March 1791 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), IX, 21; Schwartz, Washington, 62.

22 Bowling and Veit, eds., Diary of Maclay, 21.

23 Page Smith, John Adams (New York: Doubleday, 1962), II, 755.

24 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 29, 1789, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XV, 316.

25 White, Federalists, 108.

26 Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819, in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), X, 140.

27 Jefferson, First Annual Message, December 8, 1801, in Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 504.

CHAPTER 9, ILLUSIONS OF POWER IN THE AWKWARD ERA OF FEDERALISM

1 Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 1–22.

2 Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 241.

3 Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, February 29, 1802, Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1967), XXV, 544.

4 James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 41.

5 The talk of the United States becoming more monarchical in these years was much more prevalent than we have generally admitted. The only significant study we have is Louise Burnham Dunbar, A Study of “Monarchical” Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970, [originally published 1922]).

6 Hamilton, Speech at New York Ratifying Convention, June 28, 1788, Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Hamilton, V, 118.

7 Alexander Hamilton, quoted in Thomas K. McCraw, “The Strategic Vision of Alexander Hamilton,” American Scholar (Winter 1994), 40; George Washington to Henry Knox, February 28, 1785, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), XXVIII, 93.

8 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Routledge, 1989).

9 Hamilton, Speech at the New York Ratifying Convention, June 27, 1788, and in The Continentalist, no. V, April 18, 1782, in Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Hamilton, V, 96; III, 76.

10 Alexander Hamilton to Robert Troup, April 13, 1795, Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Hamilton, XVIII, 329; Sir James Steuart (1767), quoted in Stephen Copley, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London and Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1984), 120; Alexander Hamilton, “The Defence of the Funding System, July 1795,” Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Hamilton, XIII, 349.

11 Alexander Hamilton, “Conjectures about the New Constitution,” Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Hamilton, IV, 276.

12 George Washington, quoted in Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Greenwood, 1948), 404n; Alexander Hamilton, quoted in Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 171.

13 Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Pendleton, August 26, 1776, in Julian Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), I, 505.

14 For two revisionist interpretations of the origins of judicial review, see J. M. Sosin, The Aristocracy of the Long Robe: The Origins of Judicial Review in America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); and Robert L. Clinton, Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). For attempts to describe the judicial and legal climates out of which judicial review arose, see Gordon S. Wood, “The Origins of Judicial Review,” Suffolk Law Review, XXII (1988), 1293–1307; and Wood, “Judicial Review in the Era of the Founding,” in Robert Licht, ed., Is the Supreme Court the Guardian of the Constitution? (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1993), 153–166.

15 This is the gist of Lance Banning’s book The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

16 The Federalist No. 10.

17 White, The Federalists, 301.

18 George V. Taylor, “Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, LXII (1967), 469–496; William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 17–18.

19 George Washington to Thomas Johnson, July 20, 1770, Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, 3:18. On the efforts of some Boston gentry to set themselves up as country farmers, georgic style, see Tamara Platkins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life Among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

20 Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., “William Manning’s The Key of Liberty,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XIII (1956), 202–254.

21 Merrill Peterson, ed., Democracy, Liberty, and Property: The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820s (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 79–82. On the new democratic understanding of property as the product of labor, see Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 25, 28.

22 Although Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz have recently tried to portray Manning as someone opposed to capitalism, they admit that he was no “injured little yeoman” uninvolved in a commercial economy. He was more than a farmer in his little developing town of Billerica; he was as well an improver and a small-time entrepreneurial hustler. He ran a tavern off and on, erected a saltpeter works making gunpowder during the Revolutionary War, helped build a canal, bought and sold land, constantly borrowed money, and urged the printing of money by state-chartered banks, seeking (not very successfully, it seems) every which way to better his and his family’s condition. By themselves Manning’s commercial activities may not have been much, but multiply them many thousandfold throughout the society and we have the makings of an expanding capitalist economy. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, eds., The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 31–32.

23 Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, “Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly, XXXVII (1985), 496–531. Fanny Wright, in her Views of Society and Manners in America, Paul R. Baker, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 208, used the same phrase to describe American society a generation later. Although Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” suggests that he understood the importance of domestic trade, in fact, as John R. Nelson has argued, he never fully appreciated nor supported the interests of manufacturers and those involved in domestic commerce. Insofar as he supported manufacturing, it was the manufacturing of goods for export. John R. Nelson Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789–1812 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 37–51.

24 As John E. Crowley has shown, Americans were not very good students of Adam Smith: they tended to ignore his support for domestic trade over foreign trade and remained mercantilists a lot longer than the British; that is to say, they “slight[ed] or countermand[ed] the imperatives of market relations in the name of political imperatives.” John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xii–xiii, 133, 207.

25 Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 126–127.

26 Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984).

27 John R. Nelson, “Alexander Hamilton and American Manufacturing: A Reexamination,” Journal of American History, LXV (1979), 971–995.

28 Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 189.

29 E. H. Smith, A Discourse Delivered April 11, 1798 . . . , quoted in Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 29.

30 On “garrison governments,” see the work of Stephen Saunders Webb (who coined the term) especially The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

31 Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 136–137. Jefferson had a very relaxed idea of the modern state and was never worried about Americans leaving the territorial boundaries of the United States. He always conceived of his “empire of liberty” as one of like principles, not like boundaries—similar to the way some eighteenth-century German and Italian intellectuals conceived of their nations. As long as Americans believed certain things, they remained Americans, regardless of the territorial boundaries of the government they happened to be in. At times he was remarkably indifferent to the possibility that a western confederacy might break away from the eastern United States. What did it matter? he asked in 1804. “Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children and descendents as those of the eastern.” Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestley, January 29, 1804, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Merrill Peterson, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1142.

32 For some of these illusions about the West, see Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986). “Neither the Federalist not the Republican vision of the future of the Ohio Valley was foolish or naive. The problem with both was that they were inappropriate for the kind of society emerging in Ohio.” Ibid., 153.

CHAPTER 10, THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

1 Benjamin Rush to Elias Boudinot?, “Observations on the Federal Procession in Philadelphia,” July 9, 1788, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: American Philosophical Society, 1951), I, 470–475.

2 John Adams, “Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law” (1765), in Gordon S. Wood, ed., The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820 (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 29.

3 Charles S. Hyneman and George W. Carey, eds., A Second Federalist: Congress Creates a Government (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), 24.

4 “Centinel” [Samuel Bryan], in Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution (New York: Library of America, 1993), I, 686.

5 Allen R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 26.

6 Evarts B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 418; Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 13–14; Alan D. McKillop, “Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism: The Eighteenth-Century Pattern,” in Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 197; David Ramsay to John Eliot, August 11, 1792, in Robert L. Brunhouse, ed., David Ramsay . . . Selections from His Writings (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1965), 133.

7 Richard Price to Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787, Papers of Benjamin Franklin (unpublished).

8 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 133.

9 Julie Richter, “The Impact of the Death of Governor France Fauquier on His Slaves and Their Families,” Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter, XVIII, no. 3 (Fall 1997), 2.

10 Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe (1792; repub. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 17; Harry C. Payne, The Philosophes and the People (New Haven, CT: Yale University, Press, 1976), 7–17.

11 Virginia Ratifying Convention, in John P. Kaminski and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999), IX, 1044–1045.

12 Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III (New York: Penguin, 1981), 67.

13 Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson, March 28, 1787, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), XI, 251.

14 Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, April 11, 1787, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, XI, 285.

15 David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, Lester H. Cohen, ed. (1789; repub. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1989), II, 630.

16 Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 54.

17 Benjamin Rush, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 88, 90.

18 Frank L. Mott, A History of American Journalism in the United States . . . 1690–1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 159, 167; Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 209; Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969), 15, 624.

19 Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, in Boyd et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson, X, 447–448.

20 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791), in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel, 1969), I, 265–266.

21 Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37.

22 Ibid., 77; American Museum (March 1970), 137.

23 Masur, Rites of Execution, 82.

24 Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 71; Masur, Rites of Execution, 65, 71, 80–82, 87, 88; Adam J. Hirsch, “From Pillory to Penitentiary: The Rise of the Criminal Incarceration in Early Massachusetts,” Michigan Law Review, LXXX (1982), 1179–1269; Linda Kealey, “Patterns of Punishment: Massachusetts in the Eighteenth Century,” American Journal of Legal History, XXX (1986), 163–176; Michael Meranze, “The Penitential Ideal in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 108 (1984), 419–450; Bradley Chapin, “Felony Law Reform in the Early Republic,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 113 (1989), 163–83.

25 Greene, Revolutionary Generation, 80.

26 Rush to Elisabeth Graeme Ferguson, July 16, 1782, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, L. H. Butterfield, ed., 280.

27 John Jay, The Federalist No. 2.

28 Richard L. Bushman, “American High Style,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 371–372.

29 John Witherspoon, “The Druid, No. V,” in The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1802), IV, 417.

30 Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), 36, 288. See Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

31 Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 152.

32 Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III, 80.

33 David Ramsay to Benjamin Rush, April 8, 1777, Brunhouse, ed., Ramsay . . . Selections from His Writings, 54; Arthur L. Ford, Joel Barlow (New York: Twaine, 1971), 31; Paine, Common Sense, in Foner, ed., Writings of Paine, I, 20.

CHAPTER 11, A HISTORY OF RIGHTS IN EARLY AMERICA

1 John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 3.

2 Lois G. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

3 Leonard Levy, Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960).

4 William Penn, England’s Present Interest Considered (1675), in Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), I, 429.

5 Lee, quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 189.

6 Reid, Constitutional History: Authority of Rights.

7 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 268–269.

8 James Wilson, Considerations on the Authority of Parliament (1774), in Robert G. McCloskey, ed., Works of James Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), II, 736–737.

9 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 81.

10 William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 37–38, 14.

11 William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America (Boston London: R. Baldwin, 1749), I, 507.

12 Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 62–68.

13 Ronald E. Seavoy, “The Public Service Origins of the American Business Corporation,” Business History Review, LII (1978), 30–36.

14 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

15 John Adams, quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 62–63.

16 Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 188.

17 Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 155; Harry N. Scheiber, “The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts,” Perspectives in American History, V (1971), 363; Horst Dippel, “Human Rights: From Societal Rights to Individual Rights,” Boletim Da Faculdade de Direito, LXXXI V (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 2008), 343–348.

18 J. A. C. Grant, “The ‘Higher Law’ Background of the Law of Eminent Domain,” Wisconsin Law Review, VI (1930–31), 70; William Michael Treanor, “The Origins and Original Significance of the Just Compensation Clause of the Fifth Amendment,” Yale Law Journal, XCIV (1985), 694–716.

19 Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 410.

20 James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” April 1787, in Jack N. Rakove, ed., James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999), 71; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788, in Rakove, ed., Madison: Writings, 421.

21 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, William Peden, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 120.

22 Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 115.

23 Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Peden, ed., 121.

24 The Federalist No. 71, No. 78, Jacob E. Cooke, ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

25 Lynn W. Turner, William Plumer of New Hampshire, 1759–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 34–35.

26 Alexander Hamilton, “Remarks in New York Assembly,” February 6, 1787, in Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1967), IV, 35.

27 Edward S. Corwin, “The Doctrine of Due Process of Law Before the Civil War,” Harvard Law Review, XXIV (1911), 371–372.

28 Edward S. Corwin, “The Basic Doctrine of American Constitutional Law,” Michigan Law Review, XII (1914), 254.

29 William E. Nelson, “Changing Conceptions of Judicial Review,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, CXX (1972), 1176.

30 Philadelphia Pennsylvania Packet, September 2, 1786.

31 On this point, see Barry Shain, Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Johann N. Neem, “Politics and the Origins of the Nonprofit Corporation in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, 1780–1820,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, XXXII (2003), 344–365.

32 Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 292.

33 Pauline Maier, “Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” William and Mary Quarterly, L (1993), 68–70.

34 Mathew Carey, ed., Debates and Proceedings of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania . . . (Philadelphia: Seddon and Pritchard, 1786), 11–12.

35 Hamilton, “The Examination,” February 23, 1802, in Syrett et al., eds., Papers of Hamilton, XXV, 533.

36 Corwin, “The Basic Doctrine of American Constitutional Law.”

37 Debates in the Senate of the United States on the Judiciary During the First Session of the Seventh Congress (Philadelphia: Thomas Smith, 1802), 39. (I owe this citation to Kurt Graham.)

38 R. Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 132; Harry N. Scheiber, “Public Rights and the Rule of Law in American Legal History,” California Law Review, LXXII (1984), 217–251.

39 Neem, “Politics and the Origins of the Nonprofit Corporation in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, 1780–1820,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, XXXII (2003), 358.

40 L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

41 William J. Novak, People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 15, 88.

42 David Lieberman, Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

43 Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law, 171–172.

44 Marbury v. Madison (1803), William Cranch, ed., U.S. Supreme Court Reports . . . (Washington, DC, 1804), 165, 177.

45 George L. Haskins, “Law Versus Politics in the Early Years of the Marshall Court,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, CXXX (1981), 19–20.

46 James Madison to George Washington, April 16, 1787, in Robert Rutland et al., eds., Papers of James Madison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), IX, 384.