These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  68.Lund Washington to George Washington, December 3, 1775, in The Papers of George Washington, 2:477–82; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 11.

  69.Pybus, Epic Journeys, 212.

  70.Edward Rutledge to Ralph Izard, December 8, 1775, in Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard (New York, 1884), 165.

  71.Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), 8.

  72.Paine, Common Sense, ii, 17, 12.

  73.Thomas Paine, “The Forester’s Letters, III: ‘To Cato’” in The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 1:151; Paine, Common Sense, 31–32.

  74.Paine, Common Sense, 2–3.

  75.Feldman, Three Lives of James Madison, 26–7.

  76.The first draft: The Papers of George Mason, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 1:277. The final draft: Papers of George Mason, 1:287; “Have the effect of abolishing”: quoted in Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 11.

  77.Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776, and John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776, AFP.

  78.John Dickinson, Draft of the Articles of Confederation, June 1776, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

  79.Jeremy Bentham, “Short Review of the Declaration,” in David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 173. And see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 10.

  80.On the Declaration, see Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York, 1922); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997); Armitage, The Declaration of Independence.

  81.Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 28.

  82.Quoted in David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 87.

  83.Pybus, Epic Journeys, 8.

  84.O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 197–98.

  85.Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017), 111.

  86.Quoted in Kamensky, Revolution in Color, 323.

  87.Christopher Gadsden to Samuel Adams, July 6, 1779, in The Writings of Christopher Gadsden, 1746–1805, ed. Richard Walsh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966), 166.

  88.Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 5–6, 8, 91–93.

  89.“Inspection Roll of Negroes Book No. 2,” The Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, National Archives, Washington, DC.

  90.Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: The Narrative of Joseph Plumb Martin (New York: Dover Publications, [1830] 2006), 136; Comte Jean-François-Louis de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, “Journal of the War in America,” in American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army 1780, 1781, 1782, 1783, trans. and ed. Howard C. Rice Jr. and Anne S. K. Brown, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 1:64; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: Ecco, 2006), 155; Nash, Forgotten Fifth, 39–43.

  91.Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 259; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 88; Nash, Forgotten Fifth, 45–47.

  92.Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington, February 5, 1783; and Washington to Lafayette, April 5, 1783, in Writings of George Washington, 26:300.

  93.Quoted in Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 56.

  94.Quoted in Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 54.

  95.James Madison to James Madison Sr., March 30, 1782, in The Papers of James Madison, 4:127. And see Edwin Wolf, “The Dispersal of the Library of William Byrd of Westover,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 68 (1958): 19–106, and Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 48, fig. 6.

  96.Feldman, Three Lives of James Madison, 50–52. On Henrietta Gardener, see James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, Volume 2: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 808.

  97.“Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” Methodist Magazine, May 1798, 209; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 172–75.

  98.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, April 29, 1783, PBF.

  99.See Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  100.Independent New-York Gazette, November 29, 1783.

  Four: THE CONSTITUTION OF A NATION

  1.David O. Stewart, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), ch. 4.

  2.James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 15, 1787, Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, ed. James Morton Smith, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1995), 1:477.

  3.James Madison, “Origin of the Constitutional Convention,” in The Writings of James Madison, ed Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), 2:410–11.

  4.Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact; or The Principles of Politic Law (London, 1764), 151.

  5.The Craftsmen 395 (January 26, 1733): 100.

  6.“Letter CCXXI,” March 29, 1750, in The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, ed. Charles Strachey (London, 1901), 42.

  7.Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Part the First, Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (London, 1791), 27.

  8.Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice (London, 1792), 28.

  9.“Constitution of New Hampshire,” January 5, 1776, in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the United States, 4:2452.

  10.Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Nelson, May 16, 1776, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., 60 vols. projected (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:292–93. And see Francis Cogliano, “‘The Whole Object of the Present Controversy’: The Early Constitutionalism of Paine and Jefferson,” in Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 26–48.

  11.John Adams diary entry, June 2, 1775, in The Diary of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 3:352; John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” April 1776, in The Papers of John Adams, 4:92. See also Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–88 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Linda Colley, “Empires of Writing: Britain, America and Constitutions, 1776–1848,” Law and History Review 32 (2014): 237–66.

  12.The Constitution of Pennsylvania—1776, in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 5:3082; “Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—1780,” in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 3:1888–89.

  13.Fisher Ames quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921), 254.

  14.John Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776, in The Papers of John Adams, 4:210.

  15.“Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—1780,” in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 3:1893–1906; The Constitution of Pennsylvania—1776, in The Federal and State Constitutions, Co
lonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 5:3084–90.

  16.Emilie Piper and David Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Struggle for Freedom (Salisbury, CT: Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area, 2010).

  17.Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 282.

  18.Samuel Chase in “Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress,” July 12, 1776, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:320–21; Thomas Lynch in “Notes of Debates on the Articles of Confederation, Continued,” July 30, 1776, in The Diary of John Adams, 2:246; Benjamin Franklin in The Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford et al., 34 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1906), July 30, 1776, 6:1080.

  19.Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1:86; The Journals of the Continental Congress, June 28, 1787, 25:948–49; The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:444.

  20.For the prehistory of the convention and origins of the Constitution, see Sean Condon, Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

  21.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, October 12, 1786, PBF.

  22.Quoted in Feldman, Three Lives of James Madison, 82–83, 94.

  23.James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, March 18, 1786, in Republic of Letters, 1:413. Madison, “Ancient & Modern Confederacies [April–May 1786],” in The Writings of James Madison, 2:369–90.

  24.James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, August 12, 1786, in Republic of Letters, 1:432.

  25.“Proceedings of Commissioners to Remedy Defects of the Federal Government,” September 11, 1786, in Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States, ed. Charles C. Tansill (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1927), 43.

  26.See Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Knopf, 1979).

  27.James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” April 1787, in The Papers of James Madison, 9:355.

  28.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, May 22, 1787, PBF.

  29.Benjamin Franklin to Jane Franklin, May 30, 1787, PBF.

  30.Ibid.

  31.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, May 22 1787, PBF; Lepore, Book of Ages, 221, 246.

  32.Wiencak, Imperfect God, 112–13.

  33.On Washington’s apotheosis, see Paul K. Longman, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), and François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).

  34.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:18, 19, 30.

  35.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:26; The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 5:138; The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:48.

  36.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:133.

  37.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:201; James Madison, Federalist No. 57 (1788).

  38.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:177, 182, 199.

  39.Ibid., 1:486.

  40.Ibid., 1:134–35.

  41.Ibid., 1:183.

  42.Benjamin Franklin to Granville Sharp, and to Richard Price, June 9, 1787, PBF.

  43.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:596, 587. And see Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

  44.Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 89–98.

  45.Feldman, Three Lives of James Madison, 156–57.

  46.Henry Adams, The History of the United States of America during the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1891), 2:231–32, and Carl Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal (New York: Viking, 1948), 88.

  47.Nash, Forgotten Fifth, 76–77.

  48.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:364, 371, 415, 222–23.

  49.John Dickinson, “Notes for a Speech by John Dickinson (II),” in Supplement to Max Farrand’s The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. James H. Hutson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 158–59. And see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); John P. Kaminski, ed., A Necessary Evil?: Slavery and the Debate over the Constitution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1995); and François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History [hereafter JAH] 89 (2003): 295–1330.

  50.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:641–43.

  51.Ibid., 2:648.

  52.James Madison, Federalist No. 40 (1788).

  53.The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 2:200.

  54.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:588; Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in The Papers of James Madison, 10:337.

  55.The Papers of John Adams, 4:87; “Address by Denatus,” in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5:262. Patrick Henry is in Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 54. See also Christopher M. Duncan, The Anti-Federalists and Early American Political Thought (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); Albert Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius: A Reading of the Federalist Papers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  56.Luther Martin, Genuine Information, delivered to the Maryland legislature on November 29, 1787, printed in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3:197. And see Nash, Forgotten Fifth, 77.

  57.James Madison, Federalist No. 54 (1788).

  58.Jane Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, November 9, 1787, PBF.

  59.“A Plebeian: An Address to the People of the State of New York,” April 17, 1788, in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Commentaries on the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski, Gaspare J. Saladino, et al., 29 vols. (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1995), 17:149; The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 3:44.

  60.James Wilson in Pennsylvania Gazette, July 9, 1788. North Carolina rejected the Constitution in 1788 but ratified it at a second convention in November 1789, and Rhode Island eventually gave its consent to the nation’s new frame of government in May of 1790, by which time the government was already in place.

  61.Independent Gazetteer [Philadelphia], August 7, 1788; New-Jersey Journal, August 13, 1788; Essex Journal [Newburyport, Massachusetts], August 6, 1788.

  62.Louis Torres, “Federal Hall Revisited,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29 (1970): 327–38.

  63.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:653; The Constitution of Pennsylvania, September 28, 1776, in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 5:3085. And see Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5. By the mid-1790s, the doors of the Senate were open, too.

  64.U.S. Senate Journal, 1st Cong., 1st Session, April 30, 1789, 18–19.

  65.Robert Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth (New York: Norton, 2003), ch. 1; and Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes,’” 421–22.

  66.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:659; Amendments to the Constitution, in The Papers of James Madison, 12:209. And, broadly, see Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

  67.Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78 (1788).

  68.I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909
, 6 vols. (New York, 1915), 1:368, 377, 380.

  69.U.S. Senate Journal, 1st Cong., 1st Session, February 12, 1790, 157; U.S. House Journal, 1st Cong., 1st Session, March 23, 1790, 180.

  70.Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 231; Schama, Rough Crossings, 322.

  71.Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 150, 182; Schama, Rough Crossings, 310–11, 328, 390, 394–95; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 300–3.

  72.U.S. House Journal, 1st Cong., 1st Session, March 23, 1790, 180.

  73.Benjamin Franklin to Jane Franklin, July 1, 1789, PBF.

  74.Benjamin Franklin, “To the Editor of the Federal Gazette,” March 23, 1790, in Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin (London, 1818), 406.

  75.Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:545–46; James Madison, “A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religions Assessments,” ca. June 20, 1785, in The Papers of James Madison, 8:299.

  76.“The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 1638–39,” in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, 1:519. And, broadly, see Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  77.Bauer, “The Movement Against Imprisonment for Debt,” 90–91.

  78.Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, November 13, 1790, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 7:149.

  79.Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, April 15, 1811, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney, 14 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3:560.

  80.James Grant Wilson, John Pintard, Founder of the New York Historical Society (New York: Printed for the Society, 1902), 17; David L. Sterling, “William Duer, John Pintard, and the Panic of 1792,” in Joseph R. Frese and Jacob Judd, eds., Business Enterprise in Early New York (Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1979), 99–132; Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A Classic History of America’s Financial Disasters with a New Exploration of the Crash of 1987 (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1988), 17–19, 28; James Ciment, “In the Light of Failure: Bankruptcy, Insolvency and Financial Failure in New York City, 1790–1860,” PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1992, 42, 160.