Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

69. TJ to David Humphreys, 18 March 1789, Papers of Jefferson, 14: 679; James Wilson, “Lectures on Law” (1790–1791), in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 1: 288.

  70. Anderson, Creating the Constitution, 130–31.

  71. Louise Burnham Dunbar, A Study of “Monarchical” Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801 (1922; New York, 1970), 127.

  72. William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795, ed. Rev. J. E. Strickland (New York, 1971), 53.

  73. Dunbar, Study of “Monarchical” Tendencies in the United States, 99–100.

  74. Anderson, Creating the Constitution, 132.

  75. James McHenry to GW, 29 March 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 1: 461; Winifred E. A. Bernard, Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1758–1808 (Chapel Hill, 1965), 92.

  76. David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1758–1800 (Westport, CT, 1985), 149; Smith, City of New York in the Year of Washington’s Inauguration, 217–19.

  77. GW, Draft of First Inaugural Address, c. Jan. 1789, Washington: Writings, 702–16.

  78. Congress decided that whether or not Washington wanted a salary he had to accept one—$25,000, out of which he was to pay all his expenses. David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period, 1789–1801 (Chicago, 1997), 33.

  79. AH to GW, 5 May 1789, Papers of Hamilton, 5: 335–37.

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

  81. Diary of Maclay, 182, 212.

  82. Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, 2001), 45–46; David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 120–22; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York, 1987), 53–54; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 301.

  83. GW to JM, 30 March 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 1: 464–65; JA to Rush, 21 June 1811, Spur of Fame, 181.

  84. GW to Philip Schuyler, 24 Dec. 1775, W.W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 2: 599–600 (Charlottesville, 1985–); GW to JM, 3 Dec. 1784, Papers of Madison, 12: 478; GW to John Hancock, 24 Sept. 1776, Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, 6: 107–8.

  85. Don Higginbotham, George Washington: Uniting a Nation (Latham, MD, 2001), 62, drawing on the work of David Shields and Fredrika Teute.

  86. Lisle A. Rose, Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South, 1789–1800 (Lexington, KY, 1968), 27–28.

  87. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency, George Washington (New York, 2004), 195–96; Editorial Note, Papers of Washington: Presidential. Ser., 8: 73–74.

  88. C. M. Harris, “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream: Politics, Design, and the Founding of the National Capital,” WMQ, 56 (1999), 527–64.

  89. Kenneth R. Bowling, “A Capital Before a Capitol: Republican Visions,” in Donald R. Kennon, ed., A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic (Charlottesville, 1999), 45, 46.

  90. Pierre L’Enfant to GW, 11 Sept. 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 4: 15–17.

  91. GW to the Commissioners for the Federal District, 7 May 1791, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 8: 159.

  92. Harris, “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream,” 542–43, 557; Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966), 16–17, 42.

  93. Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax, VA, 1991); Bowling, “A Capital Before a Capitol,” in Kennon, ed., Republic for the Ages, 54; Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Boston, 1951), 372.

  94. Diary of Maclay, 21; Schwartz, Washington: The Making of an American Symbol, 62.

  95. Diary of Maclay, 21.

  96. GW to David Stuart, 26 July 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 3: 322.

  97. Diary of Maclay, 70.

  98. Schwartz, Washington: The Making of an American Symbol, 62–63.

  99. Abraham Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 1783–1793 (Boston, 1970), 3: 201.

  100. White, Federalists, 108 n; JA to GW, 17 May 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 2: 314.

  101. John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York, 1992), 304.

  102. Page Smith, John Adams (Garden City, NY, 1962), 2: 755.

  103. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 586.

  104. Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (New York, 1971), 285; Smith, John Adams, 2: 755.

  105. We know what went on in the Senate only because of the remarkable journal that Adams’s nemesis, the straitlaced agrarian republican from western Pennsylvania, Senator William Maclay, kept of the Senate’s debates during the first two years of the Congress. For the modern edition, see The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit (Baltimore, 1988).

  106. Diary of Maclay, 16–17.

  107. Smith, John Adams, 2: 755.

  108. Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven, 1913), 163.

  109. Diary of Maclay, 29.

  110. TJ to JM, 29 July 1789, Papers of Jefferson, 15: 316.

  111. JM to TJ, 23 May 1789, Republic of Letters, 612.

  112. David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period, 1789–1801 (Chicago, 1997), 35.

  113. JM to TJ, 9 May 1789, Republic of Letters, 607.

  114. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st session, 1: 363.

  115. Glenn A. Phelps, George Washington and American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, KS, 1993), 128.

  116. GW to Lafayette, 29 Jan. 1789, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 1: 263.

  117. Forrest McDonald, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History (Lawrence, KS, 1994), 226.

  118. Robert P. Williams, ed., The First Congress, March 4, 1789–March 3, 1791: A Compilation of Significant Debates (New York, 1970), 193.

  119. James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789: A Study in Constitutional History (New York, 1948), 178–84.

  120. White, Federalists, 20–25; Diary of Maclay, 111, 113–14.

  121. Williams, ed., First Congress, 216–17.

  122. On the history and significance of the president’s removal power, see Steven G. Calabresi and Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (New Haven, 2008).

  123. GW to JM, 5 May 1789, GW to JA, 10 May 1789, Papers of Washington, 2: 216–17, 246–47.

  124. Phelps, Washington and American Constitutionalism, 122, 169.

  125. Diary of Maclay, 130; Phelps, Washington and American Constitutionalism, 170; Editorial Note, Papers of Washington: Presidential Ser., 3: 526–27.

  126. Hamilton was born in 1755, but he apparently believed that he was born in 1757, which would have made him think he was even more precocious than he was.

  127. Hugh Knox to AH, 28 July 1784, Papers of Hamilton, 3: 573.

  128. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 1982; rev. ed., New York, 2005), 587.

  129. AH, Speech in New York Ratifying Convention, 28 June 1788, Papers of Hamilton, 5: 118.

  130. White, Federalists, 117; Jacob E. Cooke, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1982), 73; AH to Edward Carrington, 26 May 1792, Papers of Hamilton, 11: 442.

  131. Freeman W. Meyer, “A Note on the Origins of the ‘Hamiltonian’ System,” WMQ, 21 (1964), 579–88.

  132. Diary of Maclay, 377.

  133. Rose, Prologue to Democracy, 29; White, Federalists, 123.

  134. Roberts and Roberts, eds., Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey, 135–36.

  135. Notes from Gouverneur Morris’s Diary, 11 July 1804, Papers of Hamilton, 26: 324 n.

  136. Farrand, ed., Rec
ords of the Federal Convention, 1: 288.

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

  138. The fullest description of these “Country-opposition” ideas can be found in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967).

  139. Debate in the New York Ratifying Convention, 17 June–26 July 1788, in Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution (New York, 1993), 2: 768.

  140. On Hamilton’s “financial revolution,” see Richard Sylla, “The Transition to a Monetary Union in the United States, 1787–1795,” Financial History Review, 13 (2006), 73–95.

  1. Jacob E. Cooke, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1982), 75.

  2. Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700–1815 (Columbus, OH, 1994), 221.

  3. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago, 1981), 5: 84–85.

  4. Max M. Edling and Mark D. Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform: Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the Early Republic,” WMQ, 61 (2004), 712–44.

  5. Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York, 1948), 404n; GW, Plan of American Finance, c. Oct 1789, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, 30: 454.

  6. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957), 69.

  7. Hammond, Banks and Politics, 66.

  8. Hammond, Banks and Politics, 126–27; Fisher Ames to AH, 31 July 1791, AH to William Seton, 25 Nov. 1791, Papers of Hamilton, 8: 590–91; 9: 538–39.

  9. Hammond, Banks and Politics, 126.

  10. Hammond, Banks and Politics, 188, 196, 189. On Hamilton’s vision, see Robert E. Wright, The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance (Chicago, 2005), 66–85.

  11. Cooke, Hamilton, 98.

  12. “A Citizen of the United States,” Observations on the Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce of the United States (New York, 1789), 18–19. Although this pamphlet had long been attributed to Tench Coxe, his authoritative biographer, Jacob E. Cooke, says this is erroneous; he believes the author was a New Englander. Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 1978), 150n.

  13. GW, First Annual Message to Congress, 8 Jan. 1790, Washington: Writings, 750, 749.

  14. AH, Report on the Subject of Manufactures, 5 Dec. 1791, Papers of Hamilton, 10: 298.

  15. Edling and Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform,” 740.

  16. John R. Nelson Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789–1812 (Baltimore, 1987), 37–48; John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore, 1993), 146–55.

  17. Edling and Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform,” 743–44.

  18. AH to GW, 15 Sept. 1790, Papers of Hamilton, 70: 50; GW to Henry Knox, 28 Feb. 1785, quoted in John Lauritz Larson, “‘Wisdom Enough to Improve Them’: Navigation Projects and the Rising American Empire,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Launching the ‘Extended Republic’: The Federalist Era (Charlottesville, 1996), 235.

  19. AH, Federalist No. 35.

  20. James M. Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York, 1970), 57.

  21. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984), 73; Perez Forbes, “An Election Sermon” (1795), in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing During the Founding Era (Indianapolis, 1983), 2: 993; Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence, KS, 2004), 76.

  22. AH, New York Ratifying Convention, 25 June 1788, Papers of Hamilton, 5: 85; AH, “The Defence of the Funding System” (July 1795), Papers of Hamilton, 13: 349.

  23. Roger V. Gould, “Patron-Client Ties, State Centralization, and the Whiskey Rebellion,” American Journal of Sociology, 102 (1996), 401.

  24. AH, “Continentalist,” VI, 4 July 1782, Papers of Hamilton, 3: 105–6.

  25. White, Federalists, 117; Cooke, Hamilton, 73.

  26. Carl E. Prince, The Federalists and the Origins of the U.S. Civil Service (New York, 1977), 271.

  27. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” JAH, 79 (1992–1993), 50–51; Prince, Origins of the Civil Service, 269–70.

  28. GW to John Sullivan, 1 Sept. 1788, in Fitzpatrick, ed. Writings of Washington, 30: 86.

  29. The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit (Baltimore, 1988), 316, 200.

  30. GW to Edward Rutledge, 5 May 1789, in Washington: Writings, 735–36.

  31. Gould, “Patron-Client Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, 102 (1996), 400–429.

  32. Lisle A. Rose, Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South, 1789–1800 (Lexington, KY, 1968), 27.

  33. This Federalist use of patronage resembles but was very different from the later Jacksonian “Spoils system” that came to dominate political officeholding in mid-nineteenth-century America. Most of the Jacksonian officeholders were not socially visible and respectable men; indeed, most were precisely those sorts of ordinary middling men whom the Federalists had ignored. For the Jacksonians the criterion of appointment was not family, not social standing, not ability, not character, and not reputation, but connection to the Jacksonian Democratic Party. Nothing else was required. “The duties of all public offices,” said President Andrew Jackson in his first annual message, “are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Political office was no longer to be a “species of property” belonging to prominent gentlemen simply because of their social rank or character. Jackson, First Annual Message, 8 Dec. 1829, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (Washington, DC, 1900), 2: 449; Lynn Marshall, “The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” AHR, 72 (1972), 452.

  34. GW to Henry Lee, 31 Oct. 1786, Washington: Writings, 609.

  35. James Hudson, ed., Supplement to the Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1987), 229; Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911, 1937), 1: 246.

  36. Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York, 1975), 76, 88.

  37. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 171.

  38. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865 (Boston, 1968), 183.

  39. Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 195.

  40. Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH, 1986), 23; TJ to JM, 20 June 1787, Papers of Jefferson, 11: 481.

  41. AH to Arthur St. Clair, 19 May 1790, Papers of Hamilton, 6: 421.

  42. GW to Duane, 7 Sept. 1783, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of Washington, 27: 140.

  43. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Construction Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 193, 194; National Gazette, I (November 1791), in Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South (Lexington, KY, 1973), 1: 58.

  44. Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783–1815 (Albuquerque, 1975), 5–6.

  45. John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, 1982), 102–3.

  46. GW to James Duane, 7 Sept. 1783, Washington: Writings, 536–38.

  47. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 23; Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax, VA, 1991), 11.

  48. Tamara Platkins Thornton, Cult
ivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life Among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven, 1989), 15–56.

  49. H. E. Scudder, ed., Recollections of Samuel Breck (Philadelphia, 1877), 203; Diary of Maclay, 48, 73–74, 134.

  50. Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995), 101.

  51. Alan Taylor, “Land and Liberty on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier,” in David Thomas Konig, ed., Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford, 1995), 89.

  52. Timothy J. Shannon, “‘This Unpleasant Business’: The Transformation of Land Speculation in the Ohio Country, 1787–1820,” in Jeffery P. Brown and Andrew R. L. Cayton, eds., The Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1787–1861 (Kent, OH, 1994), 23; Horsman, Frontier in the Formative Years, 42.

  53. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 419; Robert Kagen, Dangerous Nation (New York, 2006), 74.