94. Liam Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2007).
95. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York, 1981), Letter III, 69.
96. Fisher Ames, “Falkland III,” 10 Feb. 1801, Works of Fisher Ames (1854), ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, 1983), 1: 216.
97. Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts (New York, 1794), 168.
98. Paul A. Varg, “The Advent of Nationalism, 1758–1776,” American Quarterly, 16 (1964), 169–81.
99. Dickinson, “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” Ford, ed., Writings of Dickinson, 326.
100. Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, NH, 1992), 41–51.
101. Alan David Aberbach, In Search of an American Identity: Samuel Latham Mitchill, Jeffersonian Nationalist (New York, 1988), 154–56; Joseph Jones, “Hail, Fredonia!” American Speech (1934), 12–17; Richard L. Merritt, Symbols of American Community, 1735–1775 (New Haven, 1966); T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” JAH, 84 (1997), 13–39.
102. Address to the President, Dec. 1796, Annals of Congress, 4th Congress, 2nd session, 1612, 1638, 1641–42.
103. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford, 1976) (Bk. V, ch. 1) 2: 689. The fullest account of the four-stage theory is Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, UK, 1976). For the eighteenth-century Americans’ application of the four-stage theory to their society, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 13–47.
104. Eric Slauter, “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley,” Early American Studies, 2 (2004), 99–100; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK, 1960) (II, sect. 49), 301.
105. Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798–1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 58.
106. Nathanael Emmons, The Dignity of Man. A Discourse Addressed to the Congregation in Franklin . . . (Providence, 1787), 33.
107. JA, Translation of Thomas Pownall’s Memorial (1780), Papers of Adams, 9: 199.
108. Macaulay to GW, June 1790, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 5: 573–75.
109. BF, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784), Franklin: Writings, 975.
110. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III, 67.
111. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston, 1789), 288.
112. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson: Writings, 290.
113. Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 155; Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York, 1979), 14.
114. TJ to Martha Jefferson, 28 March 1787, Papers of Jefferson, 11: 251.
115. TJ to Lafayette, 11 April 1787, Papers of Jefferson, 11: 285.
116. Richard Price to BF, 17 Sept. 1787, Papers of Franklin, unpublished.
117. Larry E. Tise, The American Counterrevolution: A Retreat from Liberty, 1783–1800 (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1998), 35, 37.
118. David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution (1789), ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis, 1990), 2: 630.
119. Edward T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York, 1952), 54.
120. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 127, 613; Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 166.
121. Evarts B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (New York, 1943), 80.
122. Richard L. Bushman, “American High Style and Vernacular Cultures,” Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore, 1984), 371–72.
123. Witherspoon, “The Druid, No. V,” Works of John Witherspoon, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, 1802), 4: 417.
124. JA, 1780, in Adams, ed., Works, 8: 249–51, quoted in Dennis E. Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New Haven, 1982), 17. See Paul K. Longmore, “‘They . . . Speak Better English than the English Do’: Colonialism and the Origins of Linguistic Standardization in America,” Early American Literature 40 (2005), 279–314.
125. Webster, Dissertations on the English Language, 21, 36, 288. See Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1992).
126. Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 152.
127. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 418; Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 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 (Oxford, UK, 1965), 197.
128. David Ramsay to John Eliot, 11 Aug. 1792, in Robert L. Brunhouse, ed., David Ramsay, 1749–1815: Selections from His Writings, American Philosophical Society, Trans., n.s. 55, pt. 4 (1965), 133.
129. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III, 80.
130. Donald J. D’Elia, “Dr. Benjamin Rush and the American Medical Revolution,” American Philosophical Society, Proc., 110 (1966), 100.
131. Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1976), 129–30; J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (St. Albans, UK, 1974), 37; Conrad E. Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New England (Boston, 1992); Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, 1996).
132. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 139.
133. Charles Brockwell, Brotherly Love Recommended in a Sermon Preached Before the Ancient and Honourable Society of Free and Accepted Masons in Christ-Church, Boston (Boston, 1750), 14.
134. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 148.
135. Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789–1832 (Princeton, 1977), 40; Josiah Bartlett, A Discourse on the Origin, Progress and Design of Free Masonry (Boston, 1793), 15; DeWitt Clinton, quoted in Steven C. Bullock, “A Pure and Sublime System: The Appeal of Post-Revolutionary Freemasonry,” JER, 9 (1989), 371.
136. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 109–33.
137. John Andrews, A Sermon on the Importance of Mutual Kindness (Philadelphia, 1790), 20.
1. Charlene Bangs Bickford and Kenneth R. Bowling, Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789–1791 (New York, 1989), 6.
2. GW to Benjamin Lincoln, 28 Aug. 1788, George Washington: A Collection, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, 1988), 415.
3. Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, 1994), 5.
4. “Agrippa Letters,” in Paul L. Ford., ed., Essays on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, 1892), 64–65.
5. William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795, ed. Rev. J. E. Strickland (New York, 1971), 53. (I owe this citation to Brendan McConville.)
6. Benjamin Tappan to Henry Knox, April 1787, in Henry Knox Papers, Mass. Historical Society. (I owe this reference to Brendan McConville.) For the colonists’ strong attraction to monarchy, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, 2006).
7. Br, “To———: Information to Europeans Who Are Disposed to Migrate to the United States,” 16 April 1790, Letters of Rush, 2: 556.
8. Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, 1970), 1–22. Washington declared that “the Augustan age is proverbial for intellectual refinement and elegance,” but he never suggested that it had any anti-republican political significance. GW to Lafayette, 28 May 1788, Washington: Writings, 681.
9. Sam
uel Osgood to Elbridge Gerry, 19 Feb. 1789, in Merrill Jensen and Robert A. Becker, eds., The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections (Madison, WI, 1976–), 1: 657; JM to TJ, 30 June 1789, Republic of Letters, 618.
10. Thomas E. V. Smith, The City of New York in the Year of Washington’s Inauguration, 1789 (New York, 1889; Riverside, CT, 1972), 194, 102.
11. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (NEW YORK, 1999), 301.
12. Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts, eds., Moreau de St. MÉry’s American Journey (1793–1798) (Garden City, NY, 1947), 146; David T. Gilchrist et al., eds., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790–1825 (Charlottesville, 1967), 33.
13. By the early 1790s most of the original thirteen states had selected a method of election that they would continue to use until 1842, when Congress passed a law requiring district elections. In 1791 Pennsylvania joined the large district-electing states. See Rosemarie Zagarri, The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States, 1776–1850 (Ithaca, 1987), 105–24.
14. Baltimore Maryland Journal, 14 Nov. 1788, in Jensen and Becker, eds., Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 2: 125.
15. GW to Lafayette, 29 Jan. 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 1: 262.
16. Jack N. Rakove, “The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George Washington,” in Richard Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987), 286–87.
17. Raymond W. Smock, “The Institutional Development of the House of Representatives, 1789–1801,” in Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds., The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development (Athens, OH, 2002), 326.
18. Gordon S. Wood, “The Democratization of Mind in the American Revolution,” in Leadership in the American Revolution: Library of Congress Symposia on the American revolution (Washington, DC, 1974), 78.
19. Winifred E. A. Bernhard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesmen, 1758–1808 (Chapel Hill, 1965), 75, 104.
20. William C. Digiacomantonio, “Petitioners and their Grievances: A View from the First Congress”; Richard R. John and Christopher J. Young, “Rites of Passage: Postal Petitioning as a Tool of Governance in the Age of Federalism”; and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Private Access and Public Power: Gentility and Lobbying in the Early Congress,” all in Bowling and Kennon, eds., House and Senate in the 1790s, 31, 100–109, 62–63.
21. Rakove, “Structure of Politics,” in Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation, 291.
22. Ralph V. Harlow, The History of Legislative Methods in the Period Before 1825 (New Haven, 1917), 127.
23. Ames to Thomas Dwight, June 11, 1789, Works of Fisher Ames (1854), ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, 1983), 1: 642.
24. Ames to Minot, July 8, 1789, Works of Ames, ed. Allen, 1: 683.
25. JM to Edmund Randolph, 31 May 1789, Papers of Madison, 12: 190.
26. During a Single two-year Congress today, the House may hold as many as 4, 500 committee meetings.
27. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st session (13 May 1789), I, 352.
28. Ames to George Richards Minot, 3 May 1789, Works of Ames, ed. Allen, 1: 569.
29. Richard Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (New York, 2006), 145.
30. Editorial Note, Papers of Madison, 12: 54.
31. The Diary of William Maclay and other Notes on Senate Debates, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit (Baltimore, 1988), 253.
32. Diary of Maclay, 5–6, 27, 28, 37.
33. Diary of Maclay, 5–6.
34. Diary of Maclay, 11.
35. There is no contemporary evidence that he also said “so help me god” at the end of the oath; the matter is very controversial today. See Forrest Church, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State (New York, 2007), 445–49. Since the Judiciary Act of 1789 declared that the oath to be sworn by the justices of the Supreme Court and the other federal judges included the phrase “So help me God,” it is likely that Washington may have also used the phrase (1 Cong. Ch. 20, 1 Stat. 73, Sec. 8). I owe this information to Steven G. Calabresi.
36. Diary of Maclay, 13; Editorial Note, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 2: 155; Smith, City of New York in the Year of Washington’s Inauguration, 230.
37. GW to Knox, 1 April 1789, Washington: Writings, 726.
38. GW, First Inaugural Address, 30 April 1789, Washington: Writings, 733.
39. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), 539.
40. John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, eds., Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788 (Philadelphia, 1888), 143–44, 313–16.
41. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 540–41.
42. TJ to John Jay, 23 May 1788, to JM, 20 Dec. 1787, Papers of Jefferson, 13: 190; 12: 440.
43. JM to TJ, 17 Oct. 1788, Papers of Jefferson, 14: 18.
44. TJ to Francis Hopkinson, 13 March 1789, Papers of Jefferson, 14: 650.
45. JM to TJ, 24 July 1788, Papers of Jefferson, 13: 412, 414.
46. Robert Allen Rutland, The Birth of the Bill of Rights, 1776–1791, rev. ed. (Boston, 1983), 159–89.
47. On the Origins of the Bill of Rights, See Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminiski, eds., The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties (Madison, WI, 1991); and Gordon S. Wood, “The Origins of the Bill of Rights,” American Antiquarian Society, Proc, 101 (1992), 255–74.
48. JM to TJ, 17 Oct. 1788, Papers of Jefferson, 14: 18.
49. JM, “To a Resident of Spotsylvania County,” 27 Jan. 1789, Papers of Madison, 11: 428–29.
50. JM to Richard Peters, 19 Aug. 1789, Papers of Madison, 12: 347.
51. JM to Edmund Randolph, 15 June 1789, Papers of Madison, 12: 219.
52. JM to Richard Peters, 19 Aug. 1789, Papers of Madison, 12: 347.
53. JM, June 1789, in Helen E. Veit et al., eds., Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress (Baltimore, 1991), 66–68, 77–86.
54. JM, June 1789, in Veit et al., eds., Creating the Bill of Rights, 188.
55. One of Madison’s proposed amendments—the one requiring a House election to take place before the Congress can raise its salaries—was finally ratified by the requisite number of states in 1992 and became Article XXVII of the Constitution that same year.
56. Up until the twentieth century, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government, a position endorsed by the Supreme Court in Barron v. City of Baltimore (1833). Only during the first half of the twentieth century did the Supreme Court contend that the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) incorporates or absorbs the First Amendment and other amendments of the Bill of Rights. On the doctrine of incorporation, see Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstitution (New Haven, 1998), 215–30.
57. “Symposium on the Second Amendment: Fresh Looks,” ed. Carl T. Bogus, Chicago-Kent Law Review, 76 (2000), 60–715; Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (New York, 2006); Mark V. Tushnet, Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can’t End the Battle over Guns (New York, 2007).
58. Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven, 1999), 157.
59. Mason, 16 June 1788, in John P. Kaminiski and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, WI, 1976–), 10: 1326, 1328.
60. John C. Miller, The Federalist Era, 1789–1801 (New York, 1960), 24.
61. William Grayson to Patrick Henry, 29 Sept. 1789, and Thomas Tudor Tucker to St. George Tucker, 2 Oct. 1789, in Veit et al., eds., Creating the Bill of Rights, 300.
62. Grayson to Henry, 12 June 1789, in William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches (New York, 1891), 3: 391.
63. Thomas Hartley to Jasper Yeates, 16 Aug. 1789, an
d John Brown to William Irvine, 17 Aug. 1789, in Veit et al., eds., Creating the Bill of Rights, 279.
64. This is the theme of Conley and Kaminiski, eds., Bill of Rights and the States.
65. Indeed, none of the States in 1787 possessed an executive with a four-year term; ten executives were elected annually, most of them by the legislature, and only the Massachusetts governor had a veto power similar to that given to the new federal president.
66. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911, 1937), 1: 65, 119; 2: 513. Article II is so vague that some Federalists seem to have assumed that the president had inherited all the prerogative powers wielded by the English crown except for those, such as the coining of money, the establishment of post offices, the constituting of courts, and the declaring of war, that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution specifically granted to the Congress.
67. Pierce Butler to Weedon Butler, 5 May 1788, in Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, 3: 302.
68. Thornton Anderson, Creating the Constitution: The Convention of 1787 and the First Congress (University Park, PA, 1993), 168.
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