The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  158Allgor, op. cit., pp. 315–18; Wood, op. cit., p. 691.

  159Wood, op. cit., pp. 695, 689–90.

  160Hickey, op. cit., pp. 65–69; Ketcham, op. cit., pp. 594, 596.

  161Allgor, op. cit., p. 321; Ketcham, op. cit., pp. 596–97; Wood, op. cit., pp. 696–97.

  162Ketcham, op. cit., p. 606.

  163JM to Spencer Roane, 2 September 1819 (LoA, p. 736); Ketcham, op. cit., p. 403.

  164Ketcham, op. cit., p. 337.

  165Ralph Ketcham, The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), p. 1.

  166Ibid., p. 32.

  167Ibid., p. 84.

  168Ibid., p. 93.

  169Wood, op. cit., p. 734.

  170Ketcham, The Madisons at Montpelier, pp. 33, 36; Thomas Jefferson to JM, 17 February 1826 (Jefferson LoA, pp. 1514–15).

  171JM to Thomas Jefferson, 24 February 1829 (LoA, pp. 810–11).

  172Ketcham, The Madisons at Montpelier, p. 14.

  173Ibid., pp. 11–14.

  174Ibid., p. 37; Allgor, op. cit., p. 373.

  175Allgor, op. cit., pp. 380, 395–96, 398.

  176DPM, p. 325.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IT IS A PLEASURE to acknowledge with grateful thanks the many debts I have incurred for kindness and support during the writing of The Founders at Home. Above all, sincere thanks to the Manhattan Institute—to its president, Lawrence Mone; its staff; and its trustees, especially its succession of remarkable and strong-minded chairmen, Paul Singer, Roger Hertog, and my dear friend, Charles H. Brunie. Heartfelt thanks to my valued colleagues at the institute’s magazine, City Journal, where the first versions of these chapters appeared. All—writers and editors alike—have been intellectually stimulating friends for years. Brian Anderson, once my deputy and now my successor as editor, generously gave me space in the journal to develop my vision of the Founding, and managing editor Benjamin Plotinsky read through the manuscript of this book with his incomparably sharp eye and exacting standards, a kindness I’ll never forget.

  Starling Lawrence, W. W. Norton’s editor in chief for almost two decades and my valued, witty, and generous-hearted friend for more than five, saw very early that what I began writing as magazine stories would grow up to be a book. His encouragement, confidence, and counsel have been incalculably precious to me from the start, and his finely honed editorial skill and wise judgment have ensured that the final outcome is as in tune and harmonious as it can be. His capable assistant at Norton, Ryan Harrington, has kept an eye on detail with unfailingly cheerful and intelligent meticulousness.

  Those entrusted with the preservation and presentation of the houses I discuss were graciously hospitable in every way. Kind thanks for all their help to William Schroh, the operating chief of Kean University’s Liberty Hall Museum, who in colonial-era knee breeches also presides as one of the museum’s vibrant docents, and to accomplished author and historian Terry Golway, a member of the Kean faculty and curator of the John T. Kean Center for American History. The warm welcome of Stratford Hall’s genial executive director, Paul C. Reber, made my visit to that magical place especially enjoyable and informative, and director of research Judith S. Hynson cheerfully provided more and more pictures of the beautiful house for a picky author to chose among.

  My friend Lesley Herrmann, executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, an indispensable advocate and provider of resources for the teaching and learning of American history at every level, introduced me to the staff of Mount Vernon, who made sure that I missed not a corner of the amazing house, even to the extent of climbing what seemed an impossibly steep and flimsy ladder into the lantern on the roof to take in the breathtaking Potomac view, which the ever-resourceful Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has preserved as Washington knew it by buying up the river’s opposite bank as far as the eye can see. Hearty thanks to Stephen McLeod and Ellen Stanton for guiding my visit, and to Dawn Bonner and Melissa Wood for endlessly kind and patient help with pictures. I deeply appreciate it.

  Allan Weinreb showed me around the John Jay Homestead and gave me a look at some of its hidden treasures, including the museum’s newly acquired residence permit that New York’s royal governor, Thomas Dongan, issued to John Jay’s immigrant grandfather in the 1680s—a most evocative link with a long-vanished past. I’m additionally grateful to him, and to Ronna Dixon of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, for providing the illustrations of the Homestead and its contents reproduced here.

  Being a front-row spectator to the moving of Hamilton Grange to its new site and its restoration to its original form was an exhilarating adventure that unfolded over several years, and I am eternally grateful to the National Park Service officials who invited me to take part. Thanks to Maria Burks, former commissioner of the National Parks of New York Harbor, to Darren Boch (now superintendent of Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park), Mindi Rambo, Kevin Daley, and Steve Laise. I am especially grateful to Stephen Spaulding, who oversaw the Grange’s restoration with infectious intensity and in the process gave me a riveting graduate seminar in historic preservation. It was a thrill, as layers of paint got scraped and dental-picked away, to see Hamilton’s moldings regain their original crispness and the sunshine yellow of his walls reemerge into the light. Thanks too to architect Nancy Rankin of John G. Waite Associates for providing the floor plan of the Grange reproduced in these pages.

  When I told New-York Historical Society chairman Roger Hertog, then a member of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s board, that I was planning a pilgrimage to Monticello, he told me that I should surely meet with the foundation’s then-president, Daniel P. Jordan. How right he was. At the end of a spirited and convivial visit, I asked Dan, a courtly, reflective student of history, what he thought was the best biography of Jefferson. Jefferson Himself, he replied, a narrative of the sage of Monticello’s life in his own words, selected and introduced by Dan’s old professor, Bernard Mayo. The book was a revelation, and it became an inspiration to me to try to tell the story of the Founding as much as possible in the Founders’ own voices. Who could better describe and explain their actions and the worldview out of which they sprang? I loved Monticello itself, arguably America’s greatest work of architecture, and warm thanks to Leah Stearns for helping me find just the right photographs to convey its uniqueness to readers.

  Montpelier turned out to be another graduate course in historic preservation, with restoration chief John K. Jeanes serving as the intense and charismatic professor. Visiting Madison’s house in the midst of an heroic restoration, I came upon John, hard-hatted and shirtless in the Virginia sun, as he was working beside his crew. A word of compliment on the progress so far produced first a stream of eloquence on the privilege of working on such a once-in-a-lifetime project and then a long guided tour through the half-dismantled structure, with fascinating demonstrations of the detective work involved in determining what Madison’s house looked like during his lifetime, and the methods the restoration sleuths used to figure out where the various fragments they found as they dismantled—a hearthstone, a door case—had originally stood. A later visit proved to be Historic Preservation 202: The Finer Points. What a lucky meeting that turned out to be.

  For hospitality at Montpelier, I also want to thank former Montpelier Foundation chief Michael C. Quinn, now head of the American Revolution Center, and Lynn Dakin Hastings. For help with pictures I am deeply grateful to C. Douglas Smith, executive director of the foundation’s Center for the Constitution, Tiffany Cole, Jeni Spencer, and Meg Kennedy.

  Much appreciated help with other illustrations came from Judith Thomas of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Andrea Ashby of Independence National Historical Park; Julie Cochrane of the Royal Museums, Greenwich, England; Jerry Bloomer of the R. W. Norton Art Foundation; and Thomas Haggerty and Camila Pawlowski of the Bridgeman Art Library. And hearty thanks for assistance to the Century Associ
ation’s curator, Jonathan P. Harding, and its librarian, W. Gregory Gallagher.

  Organizations such as the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which preserve Mount Vernon and Monticello and offer a wealth of further resources for students of the American Founding, are among the nation’s premier philanthropies. I can’t help singling out for praise and thanks one further nonprofit organization, the Library of America, which publishes beautifully crafted editions of the classics of American literature, including the writings of the nation’s major statesmen. I have found its immaculately edited and annotated editions of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, as well as its volumes of the debates over the Constitution, invaluable.

  Though I have tried as much as possible to depend on the words of the Founders and their contemporaries as my sources, anyone who writes on the Founding necessarily stands on the shoulders of such giants in the field as biographers Ron Chernow and Ralph Ketcham and historians Bernard Bailyn, David Hackett Fischer, and Gordon S. Wood. My debts to recent scholars are too numerous to mention here, but accompanying my acknowledgments to them in the endnotes is a bountiful measure of gratitude and respect. I do want to single out for thanks my good friend Richard Brookhiser, however. I had the pleasure of editing his “Alexander Hamilton, New Yorker” when it appeared in City Journal. An early version of his Alexander Hamilton, American, it first alerted me to the power of compact biographies such as the series he has so gracefully written to illuminate the entire era of the Founding.

  At a time when I felt I’d run aground, my wife, Barbara Crehan, floated me off the sandbar with insight, tact, and calm persistence in the face of irascible grumpiness. “How about a trip to Virginia to see Mount Vernon and Monticello?” she said. “Old houses; Founding Fathers—you’d like that.” I did; and I’m grateful, not just for the shove but for the intellectual companionship. These places were new and fascinating to both of us. “Everybody says Locke, Locke,” Barbara, a onetime renaissance literature professor, would observe as we drove, “but I keep hearing Coke, Coke”—and our discussions of the Jacobean chief justice and his penchant for inventing supposedly immemorial precedents, discussions that started forty years ago, set me off on an interesting train of thought about the intellectual background of the American Revolution, in which Lord Justice Coke indeed plays a key role. So: enduring thanks, for this as for much else. And heartfelt thanks too to my dear children, Julia and Alec, and my son-in-law, Trevor Brown, for their enthusiastic encouragement from the time I first haltingly outlined for them what I wanted to say about Monticello years ago in Maine right through to advice and criticism on matters large and small up to this present moment—and beyond.

  INDEX

  Active, 234, 249

  Adam, Robert, 177

  Adams, Abigail, 216, 236

  Adams, John, 4, 17, 27, 39, 46, 50, 69, 70, 78, 151, 199, 234, 248, 266, 272, 277, 294, 335, 342–43, 345, 391

  daughter of, 254

  death of, 401

  and France, 163, 330

  Hamilton and, 292–93, 362–63

  as president, 219, 261, 292–93, 362–63

  Adams, John Quincy, 356, 361, 396

  Adams, Samuel, 69, 70, 77–78

  Addison, Joseph, 21, 29–30, 96, 128, 133, 156, 349

  Address to the King, 222

  Address to the People of Great Britain (J. Jay), 226

  Address to the People of the State of New York (J. Jay), 254

  Advice to My Country (Madison), 366

  African Americans, 170, 377

  bias against, 314

  in military, 137

  voting rights for, 44

  Albany, N.Y., 18–20, 63

  Schuyler mansion at, 275

  Alexander, James, 22–27, 29

  Alexander, Mrs., 22–23

  Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), 362–65, 388

  Allen, Ethan, 131

  American Bible Society, 264

  American Continental Army, 51, 71, 77, 82, 86, 164

  colorful units of, 136–37

  foreign debt of, 329–30

  hardships and deprivations of, 129–30, 136, 141–42, 145, 150, 155–56, 161, 171–72, 228, 275, 318, 327–28

  lack of food and provisions of, 155–56, 327–28

  retreats and flight of, 137–38, 272

  shortage of arms and supplies of, 129, 227–28

  shortage of troops in, 129–30, 142–43, 144, 147

  Washington in command of, 109–10, 114, 119, 126, 128–75, 216, 227, 228, 229, 240, 272–74, 318, 327–28, 330–31

  American Crisis, The (Paine), 143–44

  American Prohibitory Act (1775), 72

  American Revolution, 135–75, 311, 315, 322, 327–28

  Americanness of, 3–14, 17

  British surrender to end, 170–71

  continued hostilities after surrender in, 171–73

  end of, 12, 46, 79, 95, 232, 240, 275, 331, 333

  foreign loans for, 51, 75–76

  George Washington in, 109–10, 114, 119, 126, 128–75, 216, 227, 228, 229, 240, 272–74, 318, 327–28, 330–31

  immediate causes of, 69–73, 122–23

  intellectual and philosophical basis of, 21–22, 39

  justification and rationale for, 17–49

  limited goals of, 4–5, 8–9

  military-supply problem in, 129, 155–56, 227–28, 327–28, 332

  morale in, 129, 133, 134, 138, 144, 145, 149, 151, 156

  onset of, 17–18, 71, 75, 125, 227

  paintings of, 262

  roots of, 8, 17–18, 27, 62–69, 222–23, 225–26, 241

  success of, 3–5, 10

  turning points in, 143–47, 150

  war debt of, 80, 192

  Americans with Disabilities Act, 298

  American Whig (W. Livingston), 44

  anarchy:

  government as antidote for, 233–36

  and human depravity, 228–30, 288

  threat of, 53, 276–78

  Washington’s aversion to, 198, 200–203, 209

  Anglican Church, 5, 36–37, 323, 324, 326

  and King’s College, 32–34, 44

  Annapolis Convention, 334, 337

  Anne, queen of England, 19

  Aranda, Count d’, 243, 244, 247

  Aranjuez, Treaty of (1779), 238

  architecture of democracy, 120

  aristocracy, resentment of, 310, 318–19, 357, 377–80

  Armstrong, John, 172–73, 394

  Army, British:

  in American Revolution, 135–75, 229

  Americans underestimated by, 128, 227

  change of strategy in, 157–58, 164–71

  as fallible, 107, 150

  quartered in colonies, 64, 68

  Southern campaign of, 164–71

  strategic errors of, 105–6

  in War of 1812, 391–92

  Army, U.S., 385, 389, 398

  standing, 162–63

  War of 1812 failures of, 391–92

  Arnold, Benedict, 131, 152, 171, 290

  Arnold, Peggy, 290

  Articles of Confederation, 78, 80, 108, 249, 315, 324, 332, 344, 345, 385

  Assunpink Creek, 148

  Bab (slave), 83

  Bach, Johann Christian, 74

  Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 363

  Bacon, Nathaniel, 53

  Bailyn, Bernard, 43

  balloon flight, 248

  Baltimore, Md., 86–87

  Baltimore Independent Cadets, 136

  Baltzell, Digby, 269

  Bancroft, Edward, 76–77

  Bank of New York, 276

  Bank of the United States, 48

  Baptists, 5

  Barbados, 111

  Barbé-Marbois, François, 330–32, 361

  Bastille:

  key to, 197

  storming of, 196, 316

  Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 75–76, 232–35

  Bedford, N.Y., 219–20, 261–
64

  Beekman and Cruger, 268

  Belvoir, 96–97, 101, 115

  Berkeley Plantation, 56–67

  bicameral legislature, 337, 339, 342–44

  see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.

  Bill of Rights, British, 33

  Bill of Rights, U.S., 81, 190, 352–53, 360, 364

  Bill of Rights Society, 74

  Birch, Harvey (char.), 230

  Black Sam Fraunces’s Tavern, 174, 189

  Bladensburg, Md., 394, 395

  Board of Indian Commissioners, 18

  Board of Regents, New York, 276

  Bob (dog), 253

  Bonaparte, Napoleon, 84, 361, 362, 386–87, 394, 399

  Boston, Mass., 18, 69–71, 122

  in American Revolution, 128–29, 131–33

  rioting in, 68

  Boston Massacre (1770), 17

  Boston Tea Party (1773), 17, 69–70, 123, 225, 323

  Boswell, James, 73

  Botetourt, Lord, 123

  Bourbon monarchy, 3

  Bowen, Catherine Drinker, 276

  boycotts, 124–25, 227

  Braddock, Edward, 104–7, 130, 133, 152

  Bradford, William, 322–23, 356

  Brandywine Creek, 151

  Brief Narrative (Alexander), 27

  Britain:

  American values based on, 4, 8, 51, 65, 162, 251, 276, 318, 343

  Arthur Lee in, 73–78

  ban on frontier land sales by, 116, 121

  as British Empire, 63

  colonial economy controlled by, 121–22

  disrespect for colonials by, 104–7, 110, 120, 128, 138, 141

  in French and Indian War, 63–64, 98–108, 120, 241

  French hostility toward, 198–99, 204– 5, 256, 378, 385–87

  frontier claims of, 204, 206, 255, 256, 258, 260

  Jay’s London peace mission to, 257–60

  military, see Army, British; Royal Navy

  subversion of colonies’ rights by, 4, 8, 46, 64–65, 69, 75, 124

  trade with, 58, 198, 246, 256, 268, 324, 386–89

  in Treaty of Paris negotiations, 241–49

  U.S. foreign policy toward, 248, 385

  British Architect, The, 113

  broadside ballads, 23

  Brock, Isaac, 392