“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 […]
In 1790, when Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, it triggered lots of backlash from people like Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson wrote a letter to Benjamin Vaughan in May 1791 severely criticizing Burke.[1] This letter has given many scholars an impression that after this point, […]
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the founders of the new American Republic were lurching forward from the shockingly successful outcome of their increasingly remote Revolution, and finding themselves immersed in the uncharted waters of nation-building. The political landscape was inflamed by passionate partisanship and varying, often vituperatively expressed visions of what course […]
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (1754–1836) was a famous French Enlightenment philosopher. Thomas Jefferson admired him, and was so impressed with his writings that he translated one of his works into English and published it. In 1811, Jefferson completed his translation of Destutt de Tracy’s Commentary on Montesquieu, writing in thepreface: Montesquieu’s immortal […]
Jefferson scholars all knew that Thomas Jefferson often disparaged the label “Tory” in his political writings. For Jefferson, being called a Whig would signify approval, while being called a Tory was quite derogatory and damaging. There were, however, one or two Tory thinkers that Jefferson truly admired, and Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke seems […]
Thomas Jefferson is well-known for his so-called “Frenchified” stance.[1] On the topic of the relationship between Jefferson and French Revolution, scholarly accounts often stop at depicting Jefferson’s “sympathy for the French Revolution and his aspirations for a democratic republicanism,”[2] merely focusing on Jefferson’s so-called “radicalism.”[3] Scholars tend to describe Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution […]
BOOK REVIEW: Patriotism & Profit: Washington, Hamilton, Schuyler & the Rivalry for America’s Capital City by Susan Nagel (Pegasus Books, 2021). In Patriotism & Profit: Washington, Hamilton, Schuyler & the Rivalry for American’s Capital City, Susan Nagel recounts the drama surrounding the Compromise of 1790 and the protracted struggle over the location of the nation’s capital. […]
Speaking on Independence Day, 1821, John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the Unites States and the son of John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stated that the Declaration was merely an occasional state-paper. It was a solemn exposition to the world, of the causes which have compelled the people of a small […]
Clemson University Professor C. Bradley Thompson is a nationally recognized historian and Revolutionary Era scholar whose most recent book, America’s Revolutionary Mind, has earned copious praise and widespread acclaim. It is well-deserved. Nevertheless, Professor Thompson’s work is not without flaws as it renews, unnecessarily, the erroneous and ahistorical argument that God, as referenced in the […]
If the gunfire at Lexington and Concord was the “shot heard round the world,” the phrases in the Declaration of Independence were the words read around the world. In the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson declared America an independent nation, rooting his ideas in political theory and justifying them with a list of grievances.[1] After the Declaration was […]
“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . .” Who were the first people to hear Thomas Jefferson’s memorable words spoken in public? And who was the first person to read them? According to our embraced heritage, the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence happened in Philadelphia on July 8, 1776. […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews educator and JAR contributor Geoff Smock on his research into the teenage years of Thomas Jefferson, including his education at William & Mary college. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and the JAR Dispatches web site. […]
Within the pantheon of Founding Fathers, only George Washington was more impenetrable than was Thomas Jefferson—then and now. The man who would come to be known as the “Sage of Monticello” was also the man who slouched in the back of every session of the Continental Congress; a spectator outwardly disinterested in opening his mind […]
Following the Constitutional Convention’s completion of the United States Constitution in the Fall of 1787, many of those involved in its creation embarked on a campaign to ensure its ratification among the several states. The most significant effort was the publication of the Federalist in New York, published anonymously in a long series of newspaper articles […]
In the weeks before it declared independence, the Continental Congress was already hard at work building the institutions it would need to maintain the new republic. In June 1776, a committee was appointed to explore articles that would link the thirteen provincial legislatures in a loose confederation. A second was tasked to consider how the […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews Pulitzer-prize winning historian Thomas E. Ricks on his new book, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, recently reviewed in JAR. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, […]
First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks (New York, NY: Harper Colins Publishers, 2020) Author Thomas E. Ricks (Churchill and Orwell, 2017; Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006) started his work on First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned From the […]
The Routledge Guide to Paine’s Rights of Man by Frances A. Chiu (London & New York: Routledge, 2020) The American Revolution, John Adams famously wrote in 1818, was begun in the “minds and hearts of the people” before the American Revolutionary War began.[1] It was a suggestion that the Revolution was unique and the result of […]
This month we asked our contributors: If George Washington had not run for President in 1789, who would you like to have had as a candidate (regardless of whether they were eligible based on the rules of time)? Michael J. F. Sheehan Dr. Benjamin Franklin, aside from Washington, was the only person in America […]
During September–October 1789, two heroes of the American War of Independence, both members of the Society of Cincinnati, were in the Polish capital of Warsaw. While they were aware of each other’s wartime exploits, they had never met. What brought these two Revolutionary War icons together in 1789? In November 1783, Congress gave naval hero […]
The Shores of Tripoli: A Strategy Game by Kevin Bertram (Fort Circle Games: Washington, DC) Recently I was fortunate to be asked to review a game about the Barbary Pirates who caused a considerable amount of trouble for Thomas Jefferson and the naval forces of the young United States. The game, The Shores of Tripoli, is […]
In October 1774, in a stunning and radical move, delegates of the First Continental Congress signed a pledge for the thirteen mainland colonies not to participate in the African slave trade. Perhaps equally astounding, Americans largely complied, turning the pledge into an outright ban. Congress’s ban and widespread compliance with it during the Revolutionary War […]
The American Revolution changed the way Americans viewed one of the world’s great tragedies: the African slave trade. The long march to end the slave trade and then slavery itself had to start somewhere, and a strong argument can be made that it started with the thirteen American colonies gaining independence from Great Britain, then […]
John L. Smith, Jr. introduced readers of the Journal of the American Revolution to Margaret Eustace in his article, “The Scandalous Divorce Case that Influenced the Declaration of Independence.” She had a second act in the American Revolution. In Georgia, late in the war, she made a name for herself. In November 1772, Thomas Jefferson represented Eustace’s […]
In July 1780, after three and half months at sea, nearly 6,000 thousand men[1] and supplies crammed on four frigates, seven ships of the line, and thirty-six transport vessels, sailed into Narragansett Bay. Ludwig von Closen of the Royal Deux-Ponts was dispatched to alert Gen. George Washington that the French allies had arrived. Washington quickly […]
Women in all states won the universal right to vote one hundred years ago through the ratification of the United States Constitution’s 19th Amendment in 1920. Though women in Seneca Falls, New York, launched the women’s rights movement in 1848 when they claimed that the Declaration of Independence applied to women in the Declaration of […]
The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University, edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, (University of Virginia Press, 2019). Revered by many for years, the University of Virginia boasts both of its academic reputation as well as its distinctive founder, Thomas Jefferson. As the collection of essays that comprise The Founding […]
Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in the first half of the eighteenth century, and John Taylor of Caroline in the 1790s, both feared that once power had been secured by an unpatriotic faction it might employ a standing army to effect the destruction of the republic. Additionally, Taylor was among those who felt that the […]
From 1792 to 1794, John Taylor of Caroline, a senator from Virginia, was engaged in a heated party struggle between Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists over the implementation of the latter’s new economic program. Taylor, despite being largely unknown by non-specialists today, has been called by Gordon S. Wood “the conscience of the Republican party” […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews political scientist, historian, and JAR contributor Jett Conner on his recent article about Thomas Paine’s and Thomas Jefferson’s interpretations of the role of presidential powers used by Jefferson to justify the Louisiana Purchase. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American […]
To Thomas Jefferson, great plagues were within the genus of republican antibodies. Like the occasional popular insurrection that warned rulers “the spirit of resistance” still existed, a few hundred deaths or so before the pathogenic scythe of a virus discouraged “the growth of great cities in our nation, & I view great cities as pestilential […]
Celebrated for his stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, and having profited upon the popularity since, Thomas Jefferson was now America’s chief magistrate—and its most self-satisfied citizen. To him, the Washington and Adams years had been a “reign of witches”—a sudden reversion from the ideals he had laid out in that document—a dark age […]
Those familiar with American history know that the Articles of Confederation served as the first constitution of the unified states during the American Revolution. A foundational document, it begins by establishing the name of the confederation of colonies as “The United States of America.” The creation of the Articles is intimately tied with the drafting […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews teacher and JAR contributor Geoff Smock on Thomas Jefferson’s enlightenment-influenced views on pandemics, the French Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, and other events of his time. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a free podcast that puts a […]
In 1813, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from Marguerite Brazier Bonneville, a French emigre and Thomas Paine’s former caretaker. Bonneville asked the former president if she could publish Paine and Jefferson’s correspondence. Paine had left most of his estate including all of his personal papers to her in his will when he died in 1809. […]