Major Abraham Kirkpatrick was not one to mince words. “There is a few of them Damned Cherokees,” he reported in July 1784, “near 40 men, settled on Siota about the old Chillicoffee Towns . . . These is the Villains that killed the family at the blue licks,” he continued, “as is still doing mischeif […]
BOOK REVIEW: A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship by Louis P. Masur (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2025) $24.95 hardcover Have you ever wanted to road trip through rural America with future presidents Thomas Jefferson or James Madison? Louis P. Masur’s A Journey North is probably as close to […]
The American Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These words encouraged Americans to fight for freedom and have inspired disadvantaged groups though out the world. Historian Joseph Ellis called the phrase “the most potent and consequential words in American […]
One the United States’ Founders, writing under the pseudonym Brutus, argued that the new country, spanning too great a distance and too many distinctly interested peoples, was not viable.[1] His predictions were bleak: the government would lack the support of the people, who would feel both neglected and subsumed by its distant authority. To generate […]
During his time in England prior to the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin often wrote letters to The Public Advertiser, a London newspaper. In one of them, published on August 22, 1766, Franklin mentioned in passing that among his old friends he counts Lemuel Gulliver.[1] Gulliver was renowned for his voyages around the world, in which […]
Many Americans celebrated April 30, 1789, as a defining moment for the United States, a sort of political BC/AD demarcation point in the republic’s short history.[1] Once the initial jolt of national optimism and political unity induced by President George Washington’s first inauguration had worn off, however, the first administration took up the thankless business […]
One day in the late winter of 1788 in Paris, the Marquis de Lafayette and two other champions of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, held a little “convention of our own,” according to Lafayette. They were discussing the latest news from America about the debates taking place over ratifying the Constitution of 1787.[1] Jefferson […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Scientist Turned Spy: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Conspiracy of 1793 by Patrick Spero (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024) $34.95 Hardcover Dreary as they may have been, the COVID lockdowns had a few positive consequences; they did give some historians, among them Patrick Spero, the Chief Executive Officer of the […]
George Washington was famously taciturn, often a man of few words in public gatherings. And though his published works are sparse in comparison to many of his fellow founders, he nevertheless left a voluminous written record of correspondence and diary entries that is still being parsed today.[1] It was while commanding the Continental Army that […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Disease of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, History, & Liberty: A Philosophical Analysis by M. Andrew Holowchak (Vernon Press, 2024). In The Disease of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, History, & Liberty: A Philosophical Analysis, author M. Andrew Holowchak situates Thomas Jefferson’s political ideology within a philosophical framework and positions Jefferson as a great philosopher of […]
Quotes about indigenous Native Americans are brimming with paradoxes. Benjamin Franklin praised their martial skills and the political structure of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy yet labeled them “ignorant savages.” John Adams chastised the French utilization of native warriors in the French and Indian Wars while Philip Schuyler wooed Oneida warriors with false promises of equality and […]
BOOK REVIEW: Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway: A Gordian Love Affair by M. Andrew Holowchak (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2024. $39.00 Paperback) Maria Cosway, the quickly recognizable name of the woman to whom widower Jefferson became attached, has appeared in many Jefferson works over the years. While scholars have tried to decipher the nature of […]
By an accident of birth Thomas Jefferson (1742-1826) entered Virginia planter society and politics in 1769 when he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. By an application of his fortuitous talents, he became a political philosopher when America most needed one. Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America (July 1774, […]
It is in those first frenzied moments of war fever when declarations of patriotism are their most ardent. So it was for the “Young Men of the City of Philadelphia” in the spring of 1798, when the United States stood within a hair’s breadth of war with France. These young Americans, “anxious to preserve the […]
The idea that no one is above the law is a long-held and repeated precept of American constitutionalism. Its roots go back to the philosophical and historical foundations of western political thought. Holding a prominent place in this history is the thirteenth-century English Magna Carta. Although it does not explicitly use the phrase, the document—a […]
In George Washington’s Mount Vernon mansion many visitors take note of the key presented by Lafayette to the first American president, formerly used in the Bastille prison in Paris. Few visitors invest much time to look at a tea set on display in the exhibition and fewer still will wonder about who made Martha and […]
BOOK REVIEW: A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic by Francis D. Cogliano (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2024. $37.95 Cloth) Comparative founder profiles are a crowded book genre with numerous volumes depicting any combination of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin as rivals, friends, or brothers. Professor […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Raphael Corletta about his recent article on the contrast between Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” and Esther Reed’s use of the same phrase. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web […]
The description of the United States as an “Empire of Liberty” is one of the most often repeated phrases of the American founding. Long associated with Thomas Jefferson, the phrase has been used by statesmen and authors alike. But what does “Empire of Liberty” mean? What were Jefferson’s intentions with the phrase and what are […]
On April 7, 1776 American ships began dropping anchors off New London, Connecticut. Esek Hopkins, commander in chief of the new Continental navy, was returning from a successful raid on the town of New Providence on Nassau island in the Bahamas. While there, the Americans had seized eighty-eight desperately needed cannon and fifteen mortars, thousands […]
John Marshall’s life (1755-1835) has been the subject of many authors over the nearly 190 years since his death. Albert Beveridge, Charles Hobson, and Leonard Baker immediately come to mind. There are others, of course; and there are those works which look at the life of Marshall’s wife, Mary (Polly). Their home of nearly fifty […]
The “whole of [President John] Adams’s single term was absorbed, to a degree unequaled in any other American presidency, with a single problem”: a diplomatic crisis with France.[1] Some Federalists must have been surprised that France, the United States’s greatest ally during the Revolution, became its greatest enemy within a generation. Not Adams: As a […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author, historian, and JAR Editorial Board member Ray Raphael on the memories of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas McKean about the Declaration of Independence and when it was actually signed. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon […]
BOOK REVIEW: His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer by Fred Kaplan (New York City, NY: HarperCollins, 2022) Thomas Jefferson was many things. Some of his best known roles were as Founding Father, president, governor, secretary of state, the only vice president who was of a different political persuasion than the sitting president, foreign […]
Thomas Jefferson has a Thucydidean, or fact-based, approach to the praxis of history. Evidence of that approach appeared early in his life, in his Literary Commonplace Book. There, Jefferson, quoted Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), who wrote of history, rightly practiced. For history to be authentic, Jefferson, continuing to copy Bolingbroke, added that “these […]
BOOK REVIEW: Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh by Thomas S. Kidd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022) There seems to be a reliable annual tradition of biographies about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson being published. What else can we learn about these American icons? Baylor University professor Thomas S. Kidd is […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor David Otersen on the influence of political philosopher Alergnon Sidney on Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can now be […]
Algernon Sidney was a seventeenth-century British political theorist, Member of Parliament, and Whig politician who was executed for treason on December 7, 1683, during the reign of Charles II. At his trial, the most incriminating evidence presented by the prosecution was a series of anti-monarchical passages from a seized manuscript of Sidney’s reformist treatise, Discourses […]
Scholars typically cast the outcome of the second presidential election as either a forgone conclusion or a non-event.[1] After all, George Washington ran unchallenged and once again received unanimous support from the Electoral College.[2] Shifting academic focus from the first magistrate to the second, however, reframes the 1792 contest as a struggle for the soul […]
In Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson wrote of King George III’s unwillingness to use his “negative” to veto unjust proposals. Two years later, Jefferson echoed this sentiment in his first draft of Declaration of Independence. Here, Jefferson listed a “long train of abuses & usurpations,” at the hand of King George […]
After seven years of fighting in the Revolutionary War, Otho Holland Williams returned home. It was the Spring of 1782. When he left Frederick, Maryland, in 1775 he was the first lieutenant in a company of riflemen; now he was back from a long campaign in the Carolinas and was receiving a commission as a […]
There was much discussion over the impeachment process during the Constitution’s ratifying debates. Federalists argued that the ability to impeach an individual gave disproportionate power to the House of Representatives, while Antifederalists favored more provisions to prevent tyranny from taking root. Some individuals liked the idea of having a body other than the Senate try […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian M. Andrew Holowchak on interpreting the distinctions Thomas Jefferson made between rebellion, revolution, and treason. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can now be easily accessed on […]
Jefferson’s views on rebellion and revolution, when they are addressed, are often largely misapprehended in the secondary literature. One reason for the confusion is that rebellion and revolution are sometimes judged to be equivalent, or nearly so, and thus are often uncritically lumped together, or are viewed merely as symptoms of liberalism, taken too far. […]
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”[1] As with the 25th grievance in the Declaration of Independence, in the 27th grievance Thomas Jefferson carefully constructed […]
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the twenty-seven grievances against the King listed in the Declaration of Independence, he did so with the intention of encapsulating the sentiment and objections that colonists felt about their current situation. It was a collective account of their grievances and their interpretation of the unfairness of how they were being treated […]
In the second half of the 1700s, French natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, formulated what would be dubbed the “New World degeneracy” or the “American degeneracy” theory. His work, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, included a vast array of facts about natural history from around the world as well as the Count’s many […]
Since James Thomas Flexner’s 1974 Pulitzer recognition for his biography of George Washington, one of the axioms of the American founding is that the general, George Washington, was the “indispensable man.”[1] The selection, therefore, of Washington as the commander of the Continental Army was undoubtedly among the most critical decisions in the history of the […]
BOOK REVIEW: Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence by Robert G. Parkinson (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021) The final grievance that Thomas Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence used blatantly racist language, making it […]