Finally, my thanks to the teachers who first interested me in this and related topics. I think Michael Holt, emeritus Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia, will see here that my version of William Branch Giles has at last come to resemble his understanding of Thomas Hart Benton—which does not flatter either Giles or Benton. Professor J. C. A. Stagg, editor of The Papers of James Madison, will find that I have relied heavily upon his versions of events in the War of 1812 both major and minor. From Professor Ed Ayers, I learned not only a certain skepticism of John C. Calhoun but to consider the prose in which an argument is made an essential buttress of that argument. My fixation on this particular subfield of American history I blame on Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus Peter S. Onuf, whose “conflicted” appreciation of the Virginian cohort of “the Founding Guys” I seem to have come at last to share. This book is dedicated to my son, Cyril—at last.

  NOTES

  Chapter 1

  1.  Thomas Jefferson (hereafter TJ) to the House of Representatives, February 20, 1801, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950) (hereafter PTJ), 33:25.

  2.  Fisher Ames to John Rutledge Jr., January 26, 1801, Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), 2:1404–06, at 1405. Interestingly, Ames proposed that congressional Federalists make a condition of Federalist acquiescence in Jefferson’s election that Jefferson pledge “he wd. not countenance democratic amendmts.,” which perhaps explains the otherwise mysterious stillbirth of Edmund Pendleton, “The Danger Not Over” (1801), in which the prominent Virginia patriot proposed eight amendments to foreclose adoption of measures such as those to which Republicans objected in the 1790s.

  3.  Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Penguin, 2007), 220.

  4.  Rep. James A. Bayard is quoted to this effect in PTJ, 33, n. at 3–4. As we will see, the question of the political fate of Bayard’s correspondent, Collector of the Port of Wilmington Allen McLane, would be a major thorn in President Jefferson’s political side.

  5.  James Madison (hereafter JM) to TJ, January 10, 1801, PTJ, 32:436–39, at 437.

  6.  Michael A. Bellesiles, “‘The Soil Will Be Soaked With Blood’: Taking the Revolution of 1800 Seriously,” in James Horn, et al., eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 75.

  7.  Joseph E. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

  8.  TJ to JM, February 18, 1801, PTJ, 33:16.

  9.  In a letter to his son-in-law the next day, Jefferson said that House Federalists’ behavior had “done in one week what very probably could hardly have been effected by years of mild and impartial administration”: making most Federalists into Republicans. TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, February 19, 1801, PTJ, 33:20–21, at 21. He repeated this idea in TJ to Thomas Lomax, February 25, 1801, PTJ, 33:66–67.

  10.  JM to TJ, February 28, 1801, PTJ, 33:99–100, at 100. Also see JM to TJ, January 10, 1801, PTJ, 33:436–39, at 436–37.

  11.  TJ to Henry Dearborn, February 18, 1801, PTJ, 33:13.

  12.  TJ to Meriwether Lewis, February 23, 1801, PTJ, 33:51.

  13.  TJ to Robert Livingston, February 24, 1801, PTJ, 33:61 and note; George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1813 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), 309–94.

  14.  TJ to John Wayles Eppes, February 22, 1801, PTJ, 33:37–38, at 38.

  15.  TJ to the Senate, February 28, 1801, PTJ, 33:101.

  16.  TJ to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98–01–02–0734.

  17.  The most colorful account is Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York: Free Press, 1996). See also Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 561–65.

  18.  George Washington (hereafter, GW), First Inaugural Address, in James D. Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (Washington, 1896), 1:51–54. The “Virginian” elements included avowals of Washington’s want of preparation and lack of proper qualification. Compare, besides Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, Edmund Pendleton’s speeches on assuming the presidencies of the Virginia Convention of 1776 and Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788 and GW’s speech upon being selected by the Continental Congress to command its army.

  19.  GW, Second Inaugural Address, in Richardson, Messages and Papers, 1:138.

  20.  John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 334–35.

  21.  John Adams (hereafter JA), Inaugural Address, in Richardson, Messages and Papers,1:228–32.

  22.  JA to TJ, December 6, 1787, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99–02–02–0281.

  23.  A full-length account by a rhetoric scholar is Stephen Howard Browne, Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).

  24.  Ellis, American Sphinx, 170.

  25.  Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 264.

  26.  Margaret Bayard Smith to Her Sister, October 5, 1800, http://bobarnebeck.com/mbs.html (accessed October 22, 2018).

  27.  Margaret B. Smith to Susan B. Smith, in Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 2nd edition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), 25–7, at 25–6.

  28.  Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 208.

  29.  Alexander Hamilton (hereafter, AH) to Gouverneur Morris, December 26, 1800, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01–25–02–0145.

  30.  AH to Gouverneur Morris, December 24, 1800, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01–25–02–0141.

  31.  TJ, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, PTJ, 33:148–52. For the term “social intercourse,” see Caspar Wistar to TJ, February 18, 1801, PTJ, 33:19–20, at 19. For more along the same lines, see William Jackson to TJ, February 24, 1801, PTJ, 33:58–59, at 58.

  32.  Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Douglas L. Wilson, “Jefferson and the Republic of Letters,” in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 50–76.

  33.  For Morris’s unsentimental estimation of commoners generally, see Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution (New York: Free Press, 2004), 20.

  34.  For Republicans’ “Gallomania,” see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); for burning Bibles, Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign (New York: Free Press, 2007), 169.

  35.  Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 46.

  36.  For Jefferson and freedom of conscience, see Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), chapter 2.

  37.  The best account is Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993).

  38.  Browne, Jefferson’s Call for Nationhood.

  39.  Forced to choose, Jefferson would opt for Virginia’s rights over the Union. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018). Also see Gutzman, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary, chapter 1.

  40.  Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776–1840 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), chapter 4.

  41.  Compare TJ, Revised Draft, PTJ, 33:146, and 148, n. 20. Madison had counseled Jefferson against “the steps toward [Adams] which you seem to be meditating,” and perhaps his advice played a role here as well. JM to TJ, January 10, 1801, PTJ, 32:436–39, at 436. For what Jefferson had been “meditating” regarding Adams, TJ to JM, December 19, 1800, PTJ, 32:321–23, 323.

  42.  John Strode to TJ, February 26, 1801, PTJ, 33:83.

  43.  At the news of it bells rang from around 11:00 AM until sundown in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Thomas McKean to TJ, February 20, 1801, PTJ, 33:28–29, at 28. Bells and cannon heralded the news in Philadelphia. Stephen Sayre to TJ, February 20, 1801, PTJ, 30–31, at 30. The young men of William & Mary paraded gleefully down the old Virginia capital Williamsburg’s main street. Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution, 137.

  44.  The contemporary publication of Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address is a subject of Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Inaugural Addresses of President Thomas Jefferson, 1801 and 1805 (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 17–38.

  Chapter 2

  1.  Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, with Selected Speeches and Letters, 4th edition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1997), 31.

  2.  Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 127–28.

  3.  “Jay and Slavery,” The Papers of John Jay, Columbia University Libraries, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/dev/jay/JaySlavery.html.

  4.  For Jefferson and slavery’s future, see Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), chapter 3; and Cara J. Rogers, “Jefferson’s Sons: “Notes on the State of Virginia and Virginian Antislavery, 1760–1832” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2018).

  5.  TJ to JM, December 19, 1800, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 32:321–23, at 322.

  6.  JM to TJ, January 10, 1801, PTJ, 32:436–39, at 438–39.

  7.  JM to TJ, February 28, 1801, PTJ, 33:99–100, at 99.

  Chapter 3

  1.  Robert M. S. McDonald, Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 13–14.

  2.  For the party’s story, Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980).

  3.  Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 444–46 (quotation at 446).

  4.  Though there really is no substitute for reading Taylor’s own writings, including for this period his pamphlets and letters, besides the record of debates on the Virginia Resolutions in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1798, the best introduction to Taylor in this period remains Robert E. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline: Pastoral Republican (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980), 70–107.

  5.  TJ to JM, September 21, 1795, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01–28–02–0375.

  6.  For the Pacificus-Helvidius debate, see Kevin R. C. Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 266.

  7.  For the coalescence of a proto-party around Madison in the House of Representatives by 1792, see Mary P. Ryan, “Party Formation in the United States Congress, 1790–1796: A Quantitative Analysis,” William and Mary Quarterly 28 (1971): 523–42.

  8.  For Madison, see Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America, chapters 1–6.

  9.  JM to TJ, January 22, 1786, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01–08–02–0249.

  10.  William Lee Miller, The Business of May Next: James Madison and the Founding (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

  11.  JM, “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies,” (April–June) 1786, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01–09–02–0001; JM, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” 1787, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01–09–02–0187.

  12.  For Madison, Washington, and the creation of the Constitution, see Stuart Leibiger, Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), chapter 3.

  13.  The following account of Madison’s role in the Philadelphia Convention relies on Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America, 49–131.

  14.  Charles F. Hobson, “The Negative on State Laws: James Madison, the Constitution, and the Crisis of Republican Government,” The William and Mary Quarterly 36 (1979): 215–35.

  15.  For Madison and the ratification campaign up to the Richmond Convention, Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America, 133–86. For Madison in the Richmond Convention, Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America, 187–237.

  16.  Fisher Ames to George Richards Minot, May 3, 1789, Works of Fisher Ames, as Published by Seth Ames, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1:567–69, at 569. For Madison during the Washington and Adams administrations, Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America, 239–77.

  17.  Charles Rappleye, Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

  18.  See especially Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion; Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York: NYU Press, 1984); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Richard Buel, Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972); and James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

  19.  Ryan, “Party Formation in the United States Congress,” 523–42, says that by 1792, a couple of dozen House members voted consistently with Rep. Madison across the gamut of issues. This, she says, was the proto-Republican Party.

  20.  In a crowded field the best account of Hamilton’s tenure at Treasury is Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 117–306. It makes the financial program clear.

  21.  Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012), 109.

  22.  Ibid., chapter 3 and passim; Herbert Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  23.  TJ to JM, September 6, 1789, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 15:392–97, at 392–93.

  24.  For analysis of the entire exchange, see Lance Banning, Jefferson & Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding (Madison, WI: Madison House Publishers, 1995), 27–55.

  25.  Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution, 116–17.

  26.  Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt, 142–44.

  27.  Peterson, Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation, 442.

  28.  Ibid., 485.

  29.  TJ to JM, June 23, 1793, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01–26–02–0318.

  30.  Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America, 266.

  31.  TJ to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01–14–02–0402.

  32.  For popular politics in the 1790s, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

  33.  McDonald, Confounding Father, 13–14.

  Chapter 4

  1.  For Madison in the General Assembly, Kevin R. C. Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 276–80; for the Sedition Act Crisis generally, Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), chapter 4; and Wendell Bird, Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020).