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

Page 112

by Gordon S. Wood


  98. Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., “William Manning’s The Key of Libberty,” WMQ, 13 (1956), 202–54. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz have edited a modern edition of The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning: “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, MA, 1993), but unfortunately they have corrected all his phonetic spelling.

  99. Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington (1809), ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, MA, 1962), 203–14.

  100. A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680–1810 (Chapel Hill, 1981), 247, 251; Bogin, Abraham Clark, 32; Austin, Matthew Lyon, 64.

  101. Dowling, Literary Federalism, 15; George W. Corner, ed., Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton, 1948), 338.

  102. Leary, “Dennie on Franklin,” in J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (New York, 1986), 244.

  103. Charles Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (New York, 1981), 168.

  104. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 3: 372.

  105. [James Sullivan], The Path to Riches: An Inquiry into the Origin and Use of Money; and into the Principles of Stocks and Banks (Boston, 1792), 6. On this point of interests versus passions and the taming of ambition, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977); and J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, 2008).

  106. Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore, 1987), 186; Dowling, Literary Federalism, 15, 64.

  107. TJ to Joseph Priestley, 19 June 1802, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 10: 324–25.

  1. TJ to J.P.G. Muhlenberg, 31 Jan. 1781, Papers of Jefferson, 4: 487; Reginald Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire of Liberty’: Expansionism and Republicanism,” JER, 9 (1989), 6. On the Jeffersonian West, see François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” AHR, 113 (2008), 647–77.

  2. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York, 1970), 773.

  3. TJ to Archibald Stuart, 25 Jan. 1786, to George Rogers Clark, 25 Dec. 1780, Papers of Jefferson, 9: 218; 4: 237. On the different meanings of empire in the late eighteenth century, see Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, 1970), 189–95.

  4. TJ to Monroe, 24 Nov. 1801, Jefferson: Writings, 1097.

  5. Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy (New York, 2002), 76.

  6. Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH, 1986), 116; Henry Wansey, The Journal of an Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794 (New York, 1969), 183; J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, 2008), 45.

  7. Malcoln J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (New York, 1978), 89–156.

  8. Ames to Christopher Gore, 3 Oct. 1803, Works of Fisher Ames (1854), ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, 1983), 2: 1462.

  9. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “A Meaning for Turner’s Frontier: Part I: Democracy in the Old Northwest,” and “A Meaning for Turner’s Frontier: Part II: The Southwest Frontier and New England,” Political Science Quarterly, 69 (1954), 321–53, 565–602.

  10. Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, 2009).

  11. Steven F. Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 1815–1840,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993), 155–69; Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington, 1996), 183–87; Thomas P. Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (Chapel Hill, 1932), 146–51; Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland (Lexington, KY, 1960), 247–81; Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier; Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939), 333, 346–47.

  12. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee, 208; Robert E. Corlew, Tennessee: A Short History (Knoxville, 1969, 1981), 209, 210.

  13. Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” JER, 6 (1986), 343–70; and Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” JER, 9 (1989), 21–51.

  14. Freeman Cleaves, Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Time (New York, 1939), 9–32.

  15. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 188–92, 246–47.

  16. Cayton, Frontier Indiana, 247–52; Patrick J. Furlong, “Jonathan Jennings,” American National Biography (New York, 1999), 11: 951–52; Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783–1815 (New York, 1970), 92. Although Harrison himself ran a populist campaign for the presidency in 1840, using hard cider and a log cabin as his symbols to hide his aristocratic Virginia background, he had not forgotten what Jennings had done to him. In his inaugural address as president, Harrison called attention to this “old trick of those who would usurp the government of their country. In the name of democracy they speak, warning the people against the influence of wealth and the dangers of aristocracy. History, ancient and modern, is full of such examples.”

  17. Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793–1821 (Columbus, OH, 1998), 102.

  18. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 103.

  19. Jacob M. Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History, 8 (1974), 123–86; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, “Urban Development in the Eighteenth-Century South,” Perspectives in American History, 10 (1976), 7–78.

  20. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 140 .

  21. Elkins and Mckitrick, “A Meaning For Turner’s Frontier,” 572 .

  22. Stanley Elkins and Eric Mckitrick, Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), 335; Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic, 61, 74.

  23. AH to GW, 15 Sept. 1790, Papers of Hamilton, 7: 51–53.

  24. TJ to Archibald Stuart, 25 Jan. 1786, Papers of Jefferson, 9: 218.

  25. JM to TJ, 20 Aug. 1784, Republic of Letters, 339.

  26. TJ to Robert R. Livingston, 18 April 1802, Jefferson: Writings, 1104–7.

  27. Lawrence S. Kaplan, Jefferson and France: An Essay on Politics and Political Ideas (New Haven, 1967), 101.

  28. TJ to Robert R. Livingston, 18 April 1802, Jefferson: Writings, 1104–7.

  29. Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York, 2003), 287, 289.

  30. Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 292, 291.

  31. Higginson to Timothy Pickering, 22 Nov. 1803, “Letters of Stephen Higginson, 1783–1804,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896 (Washington, DC, 1897), 1: 837.

  32. AH to Theodore Sedgwick, 10 July 1804, Papers of Hamilton, 26: 309.

  33. TJ, Second Inaugural, 4 Mar. 1805, Jefferson: Writings, 519.

  34. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, 1992), 174–75.

  35. TJ to Joseph Priestley, 29 Jan. 1804, Jefferson: Writings, 1142.

  36. Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 311–13; Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York, 1976), 212.

  37. William E. Foley , A History of Missouri, VOL. 1, 1673–1820 (Columbia, MO, 1971), 63–119.

  38. Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense, 323.r />
  39. Fisher Ames to Thomas Dwight, 31 Oct. 1803, Works of Ames, ed. Allen, 2: 1468–69.

  40. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, 2004), 66; Rothman, Slave Country, 101–2.

  41. J.C.A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821 (New Haven, 2008), 39, 41.

  42. Livingston to JM, 20 May 1803, Papers of Madison: Secretary of State Ser., 5: 19.

  43. DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 215, 216.

  44. DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana, 218, 225, 214; TJ to JM, 18Sept. 1805, Republic of Letters, 1387.

  45. Randolph, Annals of Congress, 9th Congress, 1st session (April 1806), 947.

  46. Reginald Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire of Liberty’: Expansionism and Republicanism,” JER, 9 (1989), 11; Everett S. Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807 (New York, 1923), 401.

  47. TJ to JM, 27 April 1809, Republic of Letters, 1586; Andrew McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810 (Athens, GA, 2008).

  48. Edward G. Gray, The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (New Haven, 2007).

  49. TJ to Meriwether Lewis, 15 July 1803, in Ford, ed., Writings of Jefferson, 8: 199–200.

  50. Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York, 1996), 79; William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West in the Imagination (New York, 1986), 7.

  51. Landon Y. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West (New York, 2004).

  52. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, 156–57.

  53. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, 212 .

  54. James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (Lincoln, NE, 1984), 157.

  55. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, 305 .

  56. In 1893 Dr. Elliott Coues published a new annotated edition of Biddle’s History in which he identified many of the plants and animals mentioned in the text. But it was not until Reuben Gold Thwaites, director of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and an experienced documentary editor, published in 1904–1905 his multi-volume edition of the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that the world discovered what Lewis and Clark and their subordinates had actually written. These earlier editions have been superseded by the thirteen-volume edition edited by Gary Moulton, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lincoln, NE, 1987–2001).

  57. William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (New Haven, 1959).

  58. Editorial note, Mary-Jo Kline and Joanne Wood Ryan, eds., Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (Princeton, 1983), 2: 882.

  59. Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr (New York, 1979, 1982), 1: 347.

  60. Lomask, Aaron Burr, 1: 350.

  61. Lomask, Aaron Burr, 2: 45.

  62. Lomask, Aaron Burr, 2: 172.

  63. TJ, Message to Congress, 22 Jan. 1807, Jefferson: Writings, 532. John Adams made the obvious point. Even if Burr’s guilt was “as clear as the Noon day Sun,” he told Benjamin Rush in February 1807, “the first Magistrate ought not to have pronounced it so before a Jury had tried him.” Leonard W. Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 71.

  64. On the Trial From Burr’s Point of view, see Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 319–65.

  65. Unfortunately, most of Jefferson’s thirty years of work on Indian vocabularies was stolen during his move back to Monticello at the end of his presidency. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello (Boston, 1981), 4–5.

  66. For a Fuller Analysis of this issue of America’s climate, see Gordon S. Wood, “Environmental Hazards, Eighteenth-Century Style,” in Leonard J. Sadosky et al., eds., Old World, New World: America and Europe in the age of Jefferson (Charlottesville, forthcoming), from which this discussion is drawn.

  67. Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, in Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth-Century Controversy (New York, 1967), 60; Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth-Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat,” American Philosophical Society, Proc., 91 (1947), 25–57; Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh, 1973); Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago, 2005), 1–29.

  68. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 4; Buffon, Natural History, in Commager and Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake?, 53, 60.

  69. Buffon, Natural History, in commager and Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake?, 60, 61.

  70. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” AHR, 87 (1982), 1262–89.

  71. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, 1957).

  72. Stanley Weintraub, Iron Tears: America’s Battle For Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire, 1775–1783 (New York, 2005), 65; Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York, 2005), 169. T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” JAH, 84 (1997), 29–32; Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783,” WMQ, 59 (2002), 65–100.

  73. TJ to C. F. de C. Volney, 8 Feb. 1805, Jefferson: Writings, 1155.

  74. TJ to BR, 12 Sept. 1799, Papers of Jefferson, 31: 183–84; Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York, 1952), 131–47.

  75. TJ to Governor William Henry Harrison, 27 Feb. 1803, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 10: 368; Governor William C. C. Claiborne, 7 July 1804, in Merrill Peterson, ed., The Portable Jefferson (New York, 1975), 499–500; TJ to Benjamin Rush, 12Sept. 1799, Papers of Jefferson, 31: 183–84.

  76. Charles Caldwell, Medical and Physical Memoirs: Containing, Among Other Subjects, a Particular Enquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Late Pestilential Epidemics of the United States (Philadelphia, 1801), 46, 51, 64, 117; Caldwell, An Oration on the Causes of the Difference, in Point of Frequency and Force, Between the Endemic Diseases of the United States of America, and Those of the Countries of Europe (Philadelphia, 1802), 5–9, 13, 16, 18, 32.

  77. Ramsey to TJ, 3 May 1786, Papers of Jefferson, 9: 441.

  78. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1955), 43–58, quotation at 55.

  79. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 264 .

  80. John Sullivan to TJ, 16 April 1787, Papers of Jefferson, 11: 296.

  81. TJ to Buffon, 1 Oct. 1787, Papers of Jefferson, 12: 194; Martin, Jefferson: Scientist, 187.

  82. TJ to Joseph Willard, 24 Mar. 1789, Papers of Jefferson, 14: 699; to Bishop James Madison, 1 Apr. 1798, Papers of Jefferson, 30: 236; to Palisot de Beauvois, 25 Apr. 1798, Papers of Jefferson, 30: 293–97; American Philosophical Society, Trans., 4 (1799), 246–60.

  83. Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York, 1980), 146–47; C. A. Browne, “Elder John Leland and the Mammoth Cheshire Cheese,” Agricultural History, 18 (1944); L. H. Butterfield, “Elder John Leland, Jeffersonian Itinerant,” American Antiquarian Society, Proc., 62 (1952).

  84. Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York, 1977), 190–91.

  85. Cecelia Tichi, “Charles Brockden Brown, Translator,” American Literature, 44 (1972), 1–12.

  86. TJ, Notes on Virginia, ed. Peden, 58–62; TJ to Chastellux, 7 June 1785, Papers of Jefferson, 8: 184–86.

  87. Rev. James Madison to TJ, 28 Dec. 1786, Papers of Jefferson, 10: 643.

  88. TJ, Notes on Virginia, ed. Peden, 162. In 1798 Jefferson’s protégé William Short offered Jefferson what he believed was the best solution to America’s racial predicament—racial mixing. Jefferson, who regarded miscegenation as
a degradation of the whites, ignored Short’s suggestion. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York, 2008), 536–39.

  89. Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (New York, 1974), 201–7.

  90. Panoplist and Missionary Herald, 14 (1818), 212–13.

  91. TJ to William Ludlow, 6 Sept. 1824, Jefferson: Writings, 1496–97.

  92. TJ, First Annual Message, 8 Dec. 1801, Jefferson: Writings, 501.

  93. TJ to the chiefs of the Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippewas, Powtewatamies, and Shawanese, 10 Jan. 1809, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 16: 464; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

  94. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction.

  1. William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 14–16; Hendrik Hartog,“The Public Law of a County Court: Judicial Government in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” American Journal of Legal History, 20 (1976), 321–23 .

 

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