These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  81.Page Smith, James Wilson, Founding Father, 1742–1798 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), ch. 15.

  82.George W. Johnston, “John Pintard,” typescript biographical essay dated January 16, 1900, Pintard Papers, New-York Historical Society, Box 3, in a folder titled “Notes on John Pintard and Governor Clinton.”

  83.The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 1:286, 344, 404–5; Paine, Rights of Man: Part the First, 76; John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston: Little Brown, 1995), xiii.

  84.Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791–1806,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 361–79.

  85.Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789, Article 1.

  86.The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 1:464, 599.

  87.Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791–1806,” 361–79; Tim Matthewson, “Abraham Bishop, ‘the Rights of Black Men,’ and the American Reaction to the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 67 (1982): 148–54. And see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2006): 643–74; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  88.Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, February 12, 1799, in Republic of Letters, 2:1095.

  89.James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787).

  90.James Madison, “Public Opinion,” National Gazette, December 19, 1791.

  91.Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 33 and Appendix 2.

  92.Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.

  93.Connecticut Bee, October 1, 1800. And see Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 14.

  94.Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, February 5, 1799, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 31:10.

  95.Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796. And see Matthew Spalding, “George Washington’s Farewell Address,” Wilson Quarterly 20 (1996): 65–71.

  96.Nash, Forgotten Fifth, 62–65.

  97.Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes,’” 403–5; Nash, Forgotten Fifth, 66.

  98.Schama, Rough Crossings, 390–95; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 202; Cassandra Pybus, “Mary Perth, Harry Washington, and Moses Wilkinson: Black Methodists Who Escaped from Slavery and Founded a Nation,” in Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011), 168; Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 109; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 305.

  99.Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, 297–99.

  Five: A DEMOCRACY OF NUMBERS

  1.John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, December 6, 1787, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 1:213–14.

  2.Ibid., 213.

  3.Quotations from James E. Lewis Jr., “‘What Is to Become of Our Government?’: The Revolutionary Potential of the Election of 1800,” in James J. Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 10–11, 19, 13–14.

  4.John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3 vols. (London, 1787), 3:299.

  5.Thomas Jefferson, “II. The Response,” February 12, 1790, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 16:179.

  6.Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions, 1:iii.

  7.Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” 1748, PBF.

  8.Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions, 1:preface.

  9.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3:166.

  10.The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 2:57, 29.

  11.On numbers and the census, see Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History, 2nd ed. (1988; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Hyman Alterman, Counting People: The Census in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969); Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). On the rise of quantification more broadly, see Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); I. Bernard Cohen, The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (New York: Norton, 2005); and Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  12.Gazette of the United States, December 15, 1796.

  13.John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, December 6, 1777, in The Papers of John Adams, 5:346.

  14.“Resolutions Adopted by the Kentucky General Assembly,” November 10, 1798, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 30:554.

  15.Thomas Pickering to Rufus King, March 12, 1799, in The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, ed. Charles R. King, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), 2:557; Timothy Dwight, “Triumph of Democracy,” January 1, 1801, in James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 488.

  16.“Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, Esq., President of the United States,” October 24, 1800, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 25:186, 190.

  17.Carolina Gazette, August 14, 1800.

  18.Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Free Press, 2007), 185, 171–72; Federal Observer [Portsmouth, New Hampshire], May 1, 1800; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), 265. And see also Susan Dunn, Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  19.Aurora, October 14, 1800.

  20.Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe, 134–35.

  21.Spencer Albright, The American Ballot (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 16; Charles Gross, “The Early History of the Ballot in England,” American Historical Review 3 (April 1898): 456–63. And see Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977), ch. 6.

  22.Andrew Robertson and Phil Lampi, “The Election of 1800 Revisited,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, Illinois, January 9, 2000.

  23.Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 24 and Tables A.1 and A.2.

  24.Alexander Hamilton to James A. Bayard, January 16, 1801, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 25:319.

  25.Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 1:111.

  26.Schlesinger, History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, 129–30.

  27.Garry Wills, “‘Negro President’: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 1 (John Quincy Adams is quoted).

  28.John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 20, 1801, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 33:23.

  29.The Mercury and New-England Palladium [Boston, Massachusetts], January 20, 1801.

  30.Quoted in Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe, 274.

  31.“Causes of the American Discontents before 1768,” London Chronicle, January 5–
7, 1768, PBF.

  32.John Adams, Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies. In a Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend (Philadelphia, 1776), in The Papers of John Adams, 4:91.

  33.Jed Handelsman Shugerman, The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), chs. 1 and 2.

  34.“Brutus, Essay 11,” New York Journal, January 31, 1788. And see Shugerman, The People’s Court, 25–26.

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

  36.Quoted in Suzy Maroon and Fred J. Maroon, The Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Thomasson-Grant and Lickle, 1996), 110.

  37.Quoted in Clare Cushman, Courtwatchers: Eyewitness Accounts in Supreme Court History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 2, 5–6.

  38.Quoted in Cushman, Courtwatchers, 10.

  39.Maroon, Supreme Court, 173, 20; Cushman, Courtwatchers, 16.

  40.Quoted in Alexandra K. Wigdor, The Personal Papers of Supreme Court Justices (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 9.

  41.Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).

  42.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 274. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798), 346. On Jefferson and Jeffersonianism, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jacksonian America (New York: Norton, 1980); Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Liveright, 2016).

  43.Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), ch. 5.

  44.Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Cary Nicholas, September 7, 1803, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 41:347. And, broadly, see Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Viking, 2016).

  45.Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, February 24, 1804, and to Benjamin Chambers, December 28, 1805, quoted in Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 194, 203.

  46.Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 4:428; Thomas Jefferson to James Jay, April 7, 1809, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 1:110–11.

  47.Thomas Jefferson to James Maury, June 16, 1815, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 8:544. On cotton, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).

  48.The Constitution of the United States together with An Account of Its Travels Since September 17, 1787, compiled by David C. Mearns and Verner W. Clapp (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1958), 1–17.

  49.[Sereno Edwards Dwight], Slave Representation by Boreas, Awake! O Spirit of the North (New Haven, CT: 1812), 1.

  50.Slave Representation, 1. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Knopf, 2010); Matthew Mason, “‘Nothing Is Better Calculated to Excite Divisions’: Federalist Agitation against Slave Representation during the War of 1812,” New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 531–61.

  51.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 270–71. And see Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello.

  52.Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:222.

  53.Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, March 29, 1801, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 33:491.

  54.James Thomas Callender, “The President, Again,” Richmond Recorder, September 1, 1802.

  55.Thomas Jefferson to Francis C. Gray, March 4, 1815, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 8:311. Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, 599–600.

  56.American Colonization Society, The Tenth Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States (Washington, DC, 1827), 79.

  57.Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams (Boston, 1859), 115.

  58.15 Annals of Cong. 1204 (February 16, 1819).

  59.James Madison to Robert Walsh, November 27, 1819, in The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series, 557.

  60.16 Annals of Cong. 228 (January 20, 1820).

  61.Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 246. See also Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, 557–60.

  62.Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy (Baltimore, 1820), 456. Daniel Raymond, The Missouri Question (Baltimore, 1819), 6–7.

  63.16 Annals of Cong. 428 (February 1, 1820); Raymond, The Missouri Question, 10.

  64.John Quincy Adams diary entry, January 10, 1810, in The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection, 51 vols., Massachusetts Historical Society, 31:245.

  65.John Adams to John Quincy Adams, April 23, 1794, in The Adams Family Correspondence, ed. Margaret A. Hogan et. al., 13 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10:151.

  66.The National Journal [Washington, DC], April 28, 1824.

  67.As the constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel once explained, “The populist idea, identified in the American political tradition with Andrew Jackson and in some measure with everyone else ever since, is that the ills of society and its government will be cured by giving a stronger and more certain direction of affairs to a popular majority” (Bickel, “Is Electoral Reform the Answer?,” Commentary, December 1968, 41). On populism, broadly, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  68.John Quincy Adams diary entry, June 18, 1833, in The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, 39:98.

  69.Thomas Jefferson as quoted by Daniel Webster, December 1824, in The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, ed. Fletcher Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1857), 371.

  70.Robert L. Brunhouse, ed., “David Ramsay, 1749–1815: Selections from His Writings,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55 (1965), 27; Frank L. Owsley Jr., “Editor’s Introduction” to John Reid and John Henry Eaton, The Life of Andrew Jackson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, [1974] 2007), v–vii; John Eaton, The Life of Andrew Jackson: Major General in the Service of the United States (Philadelphia: M. Carey and Son, 1817); Margaret Bayard Smith, 1828, as quoted in Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 200.

  71.John Eaton, The Life of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: S. F. Bradford, 1824); Owsley, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Life of Andrew Jackson, x (Owsley’s annotated edition marks out the changes between the 1817 and 1824 editions). On campaign buttons: M. J. Heale, The Presidential Quest: Candidates and Images in American Political Culture, 1787–1852 (London: Longman, 1982), 50. On campaigning, broadly: Robert J. Dinkin, Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 42. I also discuss Jackson’s campaign biography and its influence in The Story of America, ch. 10.

  72.Benjamin Austin, Constitutional Republicanism, in Opposition to Fallacious Federalism (Boston, 1803), 87.

  73.On the rise of the nominating convention: James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789–1832 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973); National Party Conventions, 1831–1984, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1987); Stan M. Haynes, The First American Political Conventions: Transforming Presidential Nominations, 1832–1872 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).

  74.James Kent quoted in Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, Assembled for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution of the State of New-York (Albany, 1821), 221.

  75.Quoted in David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 639–40.

  76.Quoted in The Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State C
onvention of 1829–30 (Richmond, 1830), 316. And see Daniel Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 80–111.

  77.George Bancroft, “The Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion,” An Oration Delivered before the Adelphi Society of Williamstown College in August 1835, in Thomas Breed et al., eds., Modern Eloquence, 15 vols. (Philadelphia: John D. Morris and Company, 1900), 7:79; George Bancroft, Oration Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1826, at Northampton, Massachusetts (Northampton, 1826), 20.

  78.Connecticut Herald, July 11, 1826.

  79.Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 655–56, 661–62.

  80.Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1997), 287–90; McCullough, John Adams, 644–47.

  81.John Randolph to John Brockenbrough, January 12, 1829, in The Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, ed. Kenneth Shorey (1988; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2015), 317.

  82.Alexandria Gazette, March 4, 1829.

  83.Margaret Bayard Smith to Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick, March 11, 1829, in The First Forty Years of Washington Society Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard), ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 290–94; Andrew Jackson, “First Annual Message,” December 8, 1829, The American Presidency Project (online), comp. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters; Joseph Story to Mrs. Joseph Story (Sarah Waldo Wetmore), March 7, 1829, in The Life and Letters of Joseph Story, ed. William M. Story, 2 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 1:563.

  84.Bayard Smith to Bayard Kirkpatrick, March 11, 1829.

  Six: THE SOUL AND THE MACHINE

  1.Maria W. Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” October 1831, in Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40.