The Sheila Variations

The Books: "His Excellency: George Washington" (Joseph Ellis)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

Hard to believe but this is the last book on this particular bookshelf (at least the last one I've READ. I hav a biography of Lincoln I haven't read yet, Henry Adams' book, as well as McCullough's Trumna bio - but I haven't read those). So this will be the last excerpt from the particular bookshelf. The "play" bookshelf felt like it went on forever - I guess because play scripts are so small, you can fit more of them on the shelves.

Anyhoo - this is Ellis' latest book, a superb biography of George Washington. But it's a biography in the Ellis style - it's more of a character analysis, an assessment of who this man was in Ellis' eyes. Ellis is open about the fact that this is his own personal interpretation (based on research, of course). He's not like many other biographers who basically say: "This is the way this person was, and I am right about it." Ellis can back up his interpretation with facts - but that's one of the reasons why I love Ellis' books sooo much and I am DYING for him to write another one.

I thought I'd post an excerpt from the end of the book, where Ellis takes the long view. To me, the way he writes about those guys (in his Adams biography, in Founding Brothers, in his Jefferson bio) - it just makes them come alive, fully human, flawed, mysterious, interesting.

His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

In effect, there were two distinct creative moments in the American founding, the winning of independence and the invention of nationhood, and Washington was the central figure in both creations. No one else in the founding generation could match these revolutionary credentials, so no one else could plausibly challenge his place atop the American version of Mount Olympus. Whatever minor missteps he made along the way, his judgment on all the major political and military questions had invariably proved prescient, as if he had known where history was headed; or, perhaps, as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices. He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet whose final position on slavery served as the capstone to a career devoted to getting the big things right. His genius was his judgment.

But where did that come from? Clearly, it did not emanate from books or formal education, places where it is customary and often correct to look for the wellspring that filled the minds of such eminent colleagues as Adams, Jefferson, and Madison with their guiding ideas. Though it might seem sacrilegious to suggest Washington's powers of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions. As much a self-made man as Franklin, the self he made was less protean and more primal because his education was more elemental. From his youthful experience on the Virginia frontier as an adventurer and soldier he had internalized a visceral understanding of the arbitrary and capricious ways of the world. Without ever reading Thucydides, Hobbes, or Calvin, he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and that surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fatal.

Armed with these basic convictions, he was capable of remarkably unblinkered and unburdened response to the increasingly consequential decisions that history placed before him. He no more expected George III and his ministers to respond to conciliatory pleas from the American colonists than he expected Indians to surrender their tribal lands without a fight. He took it for granted that the slaves at Mount Vernon would not work unless closely supervised. He presumed that the Articles of Confederation would collapse in failure or be replaced by a more energetic and empowered federal government, for the same reasons that militia volunteers could never defeat the British army. It also was quite predictable that the purportedly self-enacting ideals of the French Revolution would lead to tragedy and tyranny. With the exception of his Potomac dream, a huge geographic miscalculation, he was incapable of illusion, fully attuned to the specter of evil in the world. All of which inoculated him against the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot's phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. For Washington, the American Revolution was not about destroying political power, as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely. Ultimately, his life was all about power: facing it, taming it, channeling it, projecting it. His remarkably reliable judgment derived from his elemental understanding of how power worked in the world.

The Books: "George Washington : A Life" (Willard Sterne Randall)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is George Washington : A Life by Willard Sterne Randall

A huge book - this was the first biography I've ever read of Washington, actually. My main interests had been John Adams and Thomas Jefferson for years ... and somehow I took Washington for granted. So it was quite a revelation to read about the tremendous scope of his whole life, how he became a soldier, how he began to become irritated by Britain - and for him it was primarily economic. That was where it began for him. They were keeping him from making choices, in who to trade to, buy from ... they were taxing the shit out of him ... He became obsessed with getting around all of this, and so he made changes in his crops - he was determined to become self-sufficient. Eventually, this translated into: we need to be independent. But I was really interested in his journey - so different from the other men I've been studying.

So many good Washington stories. It's real goosebump territory, if you know what I mean.

Here's an excerpt about the winter of 1775-76. One of my favorite stories of the Revolutionary War is the hijacking of the cannons and the moving of the cannons over a damn mountain range. It's just ... you know. Goosebumps.

From George Washington : A Life by Willard Sterne Randall

Increasingly as the winter went by the talk in Washington's camp reflected the mood in Congress. The nonimportation agreement was expanded as the British tightened the coastal naval blockade. With spring the Americans expected an onslaught of fresh British armies. Many Americans began to believe it was high time to give up on reconciliation with England and declare American independence. This growing movement received a considerable boost when Washington's army suddenly acquired a large supply of modern artillery. In November 1775 Washington had dispatched his massive young artillerist, a tall, deep-voiced, 280-pound former bookseller named Henry Knox, to fetch the cannon Benedict Arnold had seized at Crown Point and Ticonderoga. Knox waited until the Hudson River froze over and then, with requisitional teams of oxen scarcely bigger than himself, towed a long column of sledges bristling with fifty-nine French- and British-forged cannon over the Berkshire Mountains along the route of the present-day Massachusetts Turnpike. His arrival in Framingham heralded the birth of a state-of-the-art American army.

By February, Washington was ready to use his new weaponry, and when on March 8 he learned from a spy inside Boston that the British command had received orders to evacuate, he decided to make political capital out of their departure by seizing the high ground of Dorchester Heights and fortifying it overnight. Anything less than a careful and quick movement would court disaster and the loss not only of his new artillery but of his army. Colonel Rufus Putnam submitted a plan to Washington on which he decided to gamble everything. Thousands of men were put to work making large frames of timber in which gabions, fascines, and bales of hay could be hauled quickly up on Dorchester Heights. The woven gabions were to be filled with earth; the hay was to be covered with as much dirt as the men could dig. Large branches, cut from nearby orchards, were sharpened to act as protective abatis to slow and ensnare infantry. Barrels of earth were readied to roll down on attackers.

By the night of March first, everything was ready. Washington put "Old Put," Israel Putnam, the hero of Bunker Hill, in command and designated John Sullivan of New Hampshire and Nathaniel Greene of Rhode Island in charge of the divisions. To cover the noise of thousands of men and their carts and draft animals Washington began an artillery barrage that night and resumed it the next night. On the night of March 4 the exchange of cannon fire was heavy. Around 7 p.m., 2000 men headed for Dorchester Heights, 800 infantry screening 1,200 workmenn who threw up breastworks and laid out the redoubts for the cannon as 300 oxcarts brought up the tools, the gabions, the fascines. A fresh work party relieved them toward dawn; by this time there were two redoubts lined with cannon infantry.

The British were stunned when dawn revealed the night's work. Washington's artillery could fire easily into Boston and sink any Royal Navy ship. Howe's first reaction was to attack. He assembled troops and barges, but a storm scattered his landing craft, giving him time to ponder the possibility of another Bunker Hill. He had already decided to abandon Boston. He decided another attack was impossible and ordered the evacuation to begin. On St. Patrick's Day, March 17, three weeks after Washington's cannon appeared on Dorchester Heights the last British transport crowded with the loyal English subjects of Massachusetts and everything Howe's army could carry off sailed from Boston harbor. Washington had his first great victory.

The British retreat made Washington a popular hero. Harvard College granted him an honorary degree, Doctor of Laws for honoria causa, and Congress struck him a gold medal. But the real effect of his success at holding an army of farm boys and fishermen together under the glower of the British army for nearly a year was to convince Americans that men like John Adams - considered radicals a year before - were behaving rationally when they said America was ready to become a self-supporting nation. Only six weeks after Howe's withdrawal to Nova Scotia, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a motion in Congress that "these states are and have right to be free and independent states." As members of Congress hurried home to obtain authorization to vote for - or against - independence, Washington prepared to ward off the powerful counterattack he expected any day from the British. On July 4, when Congress voted narrowly to declare American independence, John Adams could have been speaking for his friend Washington when he wrote to Abigail Adams, "The revolution is now complete: all that remains is a war."

The Books: "Thomas Jefferson : A Life" (Willard Sterne Randall)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is Thomas Jefferson : A Life by Willard Sterne Randall

Now I like Willard Sterne Randall's books - I read his one on Hamilton, his one on Washington, and this enormous one on Jefferson. It truly is enormous - and my particular copy has really small print, which is a bit of a challenge. This is the problem when you have bad eyes. Anyhoo ... It was published in 1994, I believe - and sadly he seems hell-bent on making the claim that Jefferson was NOT sexually involved with Sally Hemings. He seems strangely invested in the fact that Jefferson did NOT screw around with her. I just don't have that anxiety - and therefore, he seems a little bit untrustworthy as a biographer. The whole DNA study published its results in 1998 and obviously nobody can ever say, without a shadow of a doubt, "He slept with her and fathered children" ... but it also seems to me that you cannot say the OPPOSITE, without a shadow of a doubt either. Ya know why? Cause we weren't there. Mkay? Hitchens, in his book on Jefferson, gets very frustrated in his unbelievably articulate way with biographers like Randall - saying that make no mistake, there is racism in such defensiveness. Randall's just one in a long long long line of biographers who pooh-pooh the rumors - he's not the only one. Jefferson has had overly protective biographers for YEARS. And this isn't about yanking him off his mountaintop, and sullying his reputation. This is about what might or might not have happened. In my mind, it is completely not inconceivable that Jefferson would have messed around with a slave - not at all - he was ambivalent enough about his own slaveowner status, and in denial enough about the fact that he even HAD slaves (the entire design of Monticello reinforces this - He put effort into HIDING the slaves) ... Again, none of this, to me, makes Jefferson a limb of Satan. He was a man of his time, and I just find it all INTERESTING. I would rather look at the rumors with open eyes, rather than say "No. That could not have happened" right up front. What are you so afraid of, Randall? What are you protecting??

BUT his over-protectiveness of Jefferson is not enough for me to NOT recommend this book. I really like Randall's writing, I like his incorporation of primary documents (I think his books are filled with more of his subjects' words than his own words - and I really like that) - and it's very in-depth. It's a good old-fashioned massive biography, and if you want to get a good linear look at Jefferson's life, I can recommend this book.

I'm going to post an excerpt about Jefferson's intellectual influences. I always love it when biographers include that kind of stuff in their books ... what books did this person read? What books did he own? What were his main influences?

Thomas Jefferson : A Life by Willard Sterne Randall

Beginning in 1770, shortly after British troops shot down Boston protestors in the Boston Massacre, Jefferson had begun studying systems of government, following Diderot's injunction in that Bible of the Englightenment, the Encyclopedie: "Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection." He was not seeking a philosophical system to adopt whole. As Merrill Peterson has pointed out, Jefferson "was distrustful of philosophical systems generally," considering them "prisms of the mind." He regarded thought as a tool for reshaping life, not for absorbing some grand design. His thinking was pragmatic, always as unfinished as his house at Monticello would be. But that was the whole point with both his thinking and his constructions, the doing of them. The delight was to finish neither, but to revise, constantly. He borrowed fully to assemble an eclectic set of principles which, he believed, provided the greatest flexibility, dynamism, durability. To prepare for the future, he reached back. He brushed aside whole systems. Years later, asked to be a godfather, he refused: "I had never sense enough to comprehend the articles of faith of the Church," he replied. Already a confirmed deist who believed in natural religion and morality, he regarded the clergy of the established Church of England as part of the problems of the British Empire, not as a solution. In concluding his brief in the Lunan case in 1774, he had written, "In truth, the alliance between church and state in England has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the clergy, and even bolder than they are." It was at about this time, this fecund summer of 1774, that, questioning the legal foundations of the established church, he penned a little essay in his commonplace book under the title, "Whether Christianity is a Part of the Common Law."

For nearly fifteen years, Jefferson had followed the developments and writers of the Enlightenment, which had its roots in early eighteenth-century England. His three personal patron saints were Bacon, Newton, and Locke. While remaining a nominal Anglican and serving as a parish vestryman, Jefferson had drifted away from the Church of England as a student about the time he had begun to study "moral sense" Enlightenment philosophy under the tutelage of Dr. Small at William and Mary. As an old man, he wrote to John Adams in 1823:

I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was demonism. If ever man worshipped a false God, he did ... not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of the world, but a demon of malignant spirit.

His commonplace books contain numerous excerpts from the religious thoughts of Locke and Shaftesbury and his disciple Francis Hutcheson. A third-generation Presbyterian minister, Hutcheson gave enormously popular lectures at the University of Edinburgh, included James Boswell and David Hume among his students, had rejected Calvinist orthodoxy, and was once tried by the Presbytery of Glasgow for teaching "false and dangerous" doctrines. Hutcheson's "moral sense" philosophy asserted that moral goodness could be measured by the extent to which one's actions promoted the happiness of others. He also agreed that it was possible to experience a God-given knowledge of good and evil without resorting to the studying of God. Moral-sense philosophy weighed virtue in social terms: "That action is best which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers." One of Hutcheson's disciples, Thomas Reid, held that "moral truths" could be divided into truths "self-evident to every man whose understanding and moral faculty are ripe" and truths that had to be "deduced by reasoning from those that are self-evident." Another Scottish exponent of the moral-sense school was Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose thoughts Jefferson commonplaced copiously and who was listed under three headings in Jefferson's book-buying recommednation to Skipwith in 1771. Jefferson's study of Kames as early as 1767 led to his conviction that primogeniture in Virginia, the law requiring the leaving of all property to the firstborn son, had been unjustly transported from England and become early entrenched there. Jefferson had studied Kames's Essays on the Principles of Morals and Natural Religion during his student days, his boyish marginal notations surviving in one of the few books to escape the flames at Shadwell. From Kames, young Jefferson learned that "there is a principle of benevolence in man which prompts him to an equal pursuit of the happiness of all." There were echoes of Kames in contemporary Scot Adam Smith's philosophical writings. "All constitutions of government," Smith wrote, "are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them." And there were echoes of all these Scottish moral philosophers in Jefferson's political writings between 1774 and 1776.

If Jefferson had any religious credo, it was a utilitarian faith in progress. With Bacon, he believed that mysteries beyond human understanding should be set aside so that the mind was freed to attack real obstacles to happiness in life. Like the philosopher Baron de Holbach, who wrote that "man is unhappy only because he does not know nature," he believed that enlightenment provided a route to happiness. If man studied nature, he could bring himself into harmony with the natural order of his environment and use its laws to set himself free. He saw this as the pursuit of happiness that was his right as well as his deepest desire. Because there were individual definitions of happiness, societies needed the freedom that would allow pluralism and tolerance. Jefferson believed that limitless progress was possible, that man had all the "necessities" for progress, if not perfection:

Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible to much improvement and, most of all, in matters of government and religion, and that the diffusion of knowledge among people is to be the instrument by which it is effected.

It is not from the Scottish religious reformers but from English and European writers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Age of Reason that Jefferson drew his evolving notions of government. From Bacon, the grandfather of the English Enlightenment, Jefferson had learned to use his powers of observation and question any opinion, regardless of its source. He adhered to Bacon's admonition to apply reason and learning to the functions of government to improve society. Jefferson was influenced by Newton's Principia, which held that the universe was a great clock invented, made, and set in motion by a deity, but he had adapted Newton's view to his own quest for a world of order and harmony. Like Newton, Jefferson did not believe in miracles. Jefferson's third hero from the time of his boyhood studies was Locke, who had joined the empiricism of Bacon and Newton to the realm of politics. Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding for the first time fed his natural optimism and gave him hope that mankind could be improved by education. From Locke and his Scottish adherents, Jefferson had adopted the theory of the Second Treatise of Government that legitimate authority to govern was derived from the consent of the governed, which had first been granted while mankind had still been in a "state of nature" when all human beings were by right free and equal. Locke underpinned all of Jefferson's political thought.

The Books: "Thomas Jefferson : Author of America" (Christopher Hitchens)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is Thomas Jefferson : Author of America by Christopher Hitchens.

I admit it. I'm a Hitchens addict. I am also a US History addict - so this book was a particular delight. It's part of the REALLY cool "Eminent lives" series. They're little books - this is not a full-blown biography - it's more of a very pointed analysis of certain events. In that typical Hitchens voice which I find so addictive. How does he do it? How does he write so much and still manage to drink so much alcohol? The guy is everywhere. His book reviews, his columns for Vanity Fair, his columns for Atlantic, his books, his op-ed columns - I'm in awe. It was really fun to see his interpretation of Jefferson.

And because Hitchens is also such a wordsmith - I figured I'd excerpt the section where he analyzes the Declaration of Independence.

From Thomas Jefferson : Author of America by Christopher Hitchens.

It was partly as a result of a compromise that Jefferson was appointed to the committee charged with drawing up the Declaration. The author of the resolutions calling upon the thirteen colonies to announce independence, to form "a confederation and perpetual union," and to seek overseas recognition and military alliances was Richard Henry Lee, himself a Virginian. But he was needed at home, and Congress needed a Virginian just as it needed some New Englanders and some delegates from the middle colonies. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York comprised the rest of the drafting group.

There is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee. And, as with the extraordinary convocation of religious scholars that met at Hampton Court under the direction of Lancelot Andrewes in 1604, and with the later gathering of polymaths and revolutionaries at Philadelphia in 1776, the explanation lies partly in the simultaneous emergence, under the pressure of a commonly understood moment of crisis and transition, of like-minded philosophers and men of action. Modesty deserves its tribute here, too: a determination to do the best that could be commonly wrought was a great corrective to vanity. Thomas Jefferson's modesty was sometimes of the false kind. We have too many instances of him protesting, throughout his political ascent, that the honor is too great, the burden too heavy, the eminence too high. (Rather as the Speaker of the House of Commons is still ceremonially dragged to his chair on his inauguration, as if being compelled to assume his commanding role.) However, someone had to pull together a first draft, and we have it on the word of his longtime rival John Adams that Jefferson's reticence in the matter was on this occasion fairly swiftly overcome. He was generally thought to be the better writer and the finer advocate: one might wish to have seen a Franklin version -- which might at least have contained one joke -- but it was not to be.

Several years were to elapse before Jefferson was acknowledged as the author of the Declaration, or until the words themselves had so to speak "sunk in" and begun to resonate as they still do. So it is further evidence of his amour propre, as well as of his sense of history and rhetoric, that he always resented the changes that the Congress made to his original. These are reproduced, as parallel text, in his own Autobiography, and have been as exhaustively scrutinized as the intellectual sources on which Jefferson called when he repaired to a modest boarding house for seventeen days, with only a slave valet named Jupiter, brought from Monticello, at his disposal.

The most potent works, observes the oppressed and haunted Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he's read the supposedly "secret" book of the forbidden opposition, are the ones that tell you what you already know. (And, in the "Dictionary of Newspeak" that closes that novel, a certain paragraph of prose is given as an example of something that could not be translated into "Newspeak" terms. The paragraph begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident ...") Jefferson and Paine had this in common in that year of revolution; they had the gift of pithily summarizing what was already understood, and then of moving an already mobilized audience to follow an inexorable logic. But they also had to overcome an insecurity and indecision that is difficult for us, employing retrospect, to comprehend. Let not, in such circumstances, the trumpet give off an uncertain sound. So, after a deceptively modest and courteous paragraph that assumes the duty of making a full explanation and of manifesting "decent respect," the very first sentence of the actual declaration roundly states that certain truths are -- crucial words -- self-evident.

This style -- terse and pungent, yet fringed with elegance -- allied the plain language of Thomas Paine to the loftier expositions of John Locke, from whose 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government some of the argument derived. (It is of interest that Locke, who wrote of slavery that it was "so vile and miserable an Estate of Man ... that 'tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for it," was also the draftsman for an absolutist slaveholding "Fundamental Constitution" of the Carolinas in 1669.) Jefferson radicalized Locke by grounding human equality on the observable facts of nature and the common human condition. Having originally written that rights are derived 'from that equal creation," he amended the thought to say that men were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," thus perhaps attempting to forestall any conflict between Deists and Christians. And, where Locke had spoken of "life, liberty, and property" as being natural rights, Jefferson famously wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We differ still on whether this means seeking happiness of rather happiness itself as a pursuit, but given the advantageous social position occupied by most of the delegates at Philadelphia, it is very striking indeed that either notion should have taken precedence over property. The clear need of the hour was for inspiration (and property rights were to be restored to their customary throne when the Constitution came to be written), but "the pursuit of happiness" belongs to that limited group of lapidary phrases that has changed history, and it seems that the delegates realized this as soon as they heard it.

Thomas Jefferson, indeed, is one of the small handful of people to have his very name associated with a form of democracy. The word was not in common use at the time, and was not always employed positively in any case. (John Adams tended to say "democratical" when he meant unsound or subversive.) But the idea that government arose from the people and was not a gift to them or an imposition upon them, was perhaps the most radical element in the Declaration. Jefferson was later to compare government with clothing as "the badge of lost innocence," drawing from the myth of original nakedness and guilt in the Garden of Eden. Paine in his Common Sense had said, "Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness." As a compromise between government as a necessary evil - or an inevitable one - and in the course of a bill of complaint against a hereditary monarch, the Declaration proposed the idea of "the consent of the governed" and thus launched the experiment we call American, or sometimes Jeffersonian, democracy.

The Books: "American Sphinx : The Character of Thomas Jefferson" (Joseph Ellis)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is American Sphinx : The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph ("Yeah. I was in 'Nam. DOH.") Ellis.

My favorite of all of his contemplative biographies - he really just hits his stride here. Jefferson, too, is more of an enigma than John Adams was - Adams was pretty much whatyou see is what you get - He also unburdened himself to his wife in letter after letter after letter - so he really had an intimate personal relationship with someone where he could really be himself, flaws and all. Jefferson didn't really have that. Perhaps the closest he came to it was with Adams himself at the ends of their lives when they renewed their friendship. But even then ... you can feel his formal manner protecting ... what? Protecting something.

Speaking personally - having read the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson - I can say that Jefferson's brief brief moments of deep feeling are so so moving, more so than Adams' more regular effusions - because you sense that these moments really COST Jefferson something. You feel for him. You get the sense that Jefferson might have had to lie down after writing the letter of condolence to John Adams on the death of Abigail. Open feeling did not come easily to him.

He's an enigma. A political animal. A lovelorn suitor (his letters to women are revealing as well - in their teasing almost coquettish tone - except with Abigail - he got the sense that that crap would not fly with HER). A farmer and inventor. Full of contradictions. Unreconcilable. He did not reconcile any of his contradictions by the time he died - they were all still there - but that's what makes him an interesting study. He tended to see the world in a polar-opposite kind of way. Most people who are political animals do. There's THIS way that will counteract THAT way. Jefferson seemed to believe that harmony could, actually be achieved on this earth. I disagree with him - uhm - look at all of human history - but that whole polar-opposite thing is one of the reasons why the Declaration of Independence is such a TIMELESS document. Perhaps its goals (at least its humanist goals) can never be fully achieved - but also perhaps they aren't meant to be. Perhaps their real role in human history (and that second paragraph is what people know by heart - and not just Americans - it's not a goal for ONE people, it's a goal for all humanity - it's universal, therein lies the appeal) but anyway - perhaps that second paragraph can never be actually achieved - but is a constant reminder of the GOOD that is in us, of man's inherent dignity. Never forget your rights as a human being. Never ever forget it. Those rights must ALWAYS be fought for. The rest of the document, with its King George did THIS to us, did THAT to us - is more easily achieved - it's a checklist. But that second paragraph? Is it a utopia? Have we ever achieved it? I don't think so (and I believe I've expressed here before my distrust of people who get all googly-eyed with excitement over utopias) - and perhaps Jefferson did believe that it was achievable, I don't know. Now let me go off in my own contemplation: I think ugliness truly HURT Thomas Jefferson. I think he preferred solitude, quiet, and purity. People who prefer those things can have a rough time when they come down off the mountaintop. HOWEVER, on the flip side of that - Jefferson was a master political manipulator. He SAID he wanted to retire, yet he had Madison reporting to him left and right about what was going on. I think both sides are true. I don't think one side is a lie, and the other side is the REAL Jefferson. I think he truly loved purity, solitude, and quiet intellectual contemplations. I think he truly did detest the ugliness that came out of people when they played politics hard. I think he wished the world was a nicer calmer place. But I also think he couldn't have backed out of politics if he tried. He needed to be in the game, as ugly as it could get. And he played it ugly himself. But then somehow - with Madison as his front-man, he could somehow claim that he had nothing to do with it ...

None of this is reconciled. So Ellis picked a good title for his book, I'm thinkin'.

Jefferson's discomfort with irreconcilable differences was really made clear (at least to us - years in the future) during the French Revolution. I often wonder what he REALLY thought about it. He was actually THERE during some of the main events of that bloody revolution - and his letters are well-known. Adams was horrified at the excesses of the revolution. Jefferson stood by it - in what seemed at the time like a breezy indifference to horror. He seemed to RELISH the blood running in the streets, etc. As long as the king was put down! Same thing with Shays Rebellion. Abigail wrote him a letter about the rebellion and how frightening she found it - how fragile was civil society ... and he wrote back his now-famous letter saying "I like a little revolution now and then ... it's like a storm that clears the atmosphere." Abigail was horrified. It seems that Jefferson was one of those men who wanted constant revolution. And there was a side of him that did.

Hoo hoo. I'll stop now.

Ellis' book is not set up like a typical biography. He chooses certain chunks of years - and analyses what was going on there, and how it created or revealed "the charater of Thomas Jefferson". It's fascinating - it's for true junkies like myself. If you want a more typical biography, or if you don't know that much about Jefferson - then this probably isn't the one to start with. But if you're already a bit down the Jeffersonian path, I HIGHLY recommend this one.

I'll post an excerpt about the French Revolution.

From American Sphinx : The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis.

So much history happened in prerevolutionary France during the last two years of Jefferson's ministry that it is not easy to summarize his shifting political positions, except perhaps to say that he presumed that France would emerge from the ferment as some kind of constitutional monarchy. Despite his earlier characterizations of the French king as a drunken sot, completely out of touch with the needs and frustrations of the French people, by the summer of 1788 he had come to regard Louis as an enlightened ruler who was anxious to play a crucial role in forging political alliances between the nobility and the members of the Third Estate. (In the end Louis XVI turned out to be like George III, fated to do precisely the wrong thing at just the right time, what Jefferson called "a machine for making revolutions.") But his fondest hopes for the recovery of political stability rested with the group of moderate and enlightened aristocrats, led by his good friend Lafayette, called the Patriots or the Patriot Party. Although he was prepared to acknowledge that the situations were fundamentally different, Jefferson seemed to regard the Patriots in France as counterparts to the Federalists in America; they were "sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, longed for occasions of reforming it" and were dedicated to "the establishment of a constitution which shall assure ... a good degree of liberty." Lafayette was cast in the role of a French Madison, orchestrating the essential compromises among the different factions and thereby consolidating the energies of the revolution within a political framework that institutionalized the maximum gains that historical circumstances would allow.

Jefferson was prepared to recognize that those circumstances were not ideal. The deeply rooted class divisions of French society were on display during the debates within the Estates-General that he attended in May and June 1789, as were the still-powerful legacies of feudalism, which had all but vanished in America but in Versailles took on the highly virulent and visible form of costumed lords and courtly processions. Given these entrenched impediments to a fully flowered revolution along American lines, Jefferson advised his friends in the Patriot Party to settle for the English consitutional model, supplemented by one important American addition - that is, he recommended the retention of the French monarchy, though with vastly reduced powers, the creation of a bicameral legislature with the upper chamber reserved for the clergy and nobility and -- the American contribution -- the insistence on a declaration of rights that protected basic liberties from violation by kings, lords or even elected legislators. Characteristically, he devoted most of his time and energy to drafting the Charter of Rights, which called for the abolition of all pecuniary privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the nobility, civilian rule over the military, equal treatment under the law and a modified version of freedom of the press. With France as with America, his fondest political topic was not the artful arrangement of government power but rather the cordoning off of a region where no government power could exist. He conveyed his draft to Lafayette in June 1789; it served as the basis for the Declaration of Rights that Lafayette presented to the National Assembly the following month.

By that time Jefferson was confident that the danger of disintegration and violent revolution had been averted. "The great crisis being now over," he wrote to Jay, "I shall not have a matter interesting enough to trouble you with as often as I have lately." The Estates-General had not taken his advice and established a separate chamber for the clergy and nobility, but enough of the privileged classes had gone over to the Third Estate to make the newly established National Assembly a representative, if somewhat unwieldy, body. Nevertheless, as he explained to Tom Paine on July 11, 1789, the French Revolution was effectively over. "The National assembly (for that is the name they take) ... are now in complete and undisputed possession of sovereignty. The executive and the aristocracy are now at their feet. The mass of the nation, the mass of the clergy, and the army are with them. They have prostrated the old government, and are now beginning to build one from the foundation."

The following day Paris exploded in a series of riots and mob actions that have been memorialized in countless histories, novels and films on the French Revolution: the assault on the Customs House, the stoning and eventual massacre of the royal cavalry; the storming of the Bastille and subsequent beheading and dismemberment of its garrison. After five days of random violence and massive demonstrations, Jefferson described to Jay the scene as Louis XVI returned to the capital, with Lafayette at his side, to be greeted by "about 60,000 citizens of all forms and conditions armed with the muskets of the Bastille and ... pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, sythes, etc." and all shouting "vive la nation."

If one were to conjure up a scene designed to weaken Jefferson's faith in the inherent benevolence of popular movements or to shake his apparent serenity toward popular rebellions, one could hardly do better. Therefore it is worth noting that, though shocked at first by the random and savage character of the mob violence, he never questioned his belief in the essential rightness of the cause or the ultimate triumph of its progressive principles. His letters to Jay and Madison described the carnage of July 1789 as an unfortunate but temporary aberration that in no way called into question the prospect for an enduring and peaceful political settlement. He seemed to regard the spasm of violence as the product of a misguided decision by the king or his ministers to increase the troop strength in the city rather than as ominous evidence of deep and irreconcilable class resentments. By early August, in fact, he was convinced that the storm (shades of Shays's Rebellion) had passed the future looked clear and bright: "Quiet is so well established here that I think there is nothing further to be appreheded. The harvest is so near that there is nothing to fear from the want of bread. The National assembly are wise, firm and moderate. They will establish the English constitution, purged or its numerous and capital defects."

It was in this brave and buoyant mood that Jefferson sat down on September 6, 1789, to write what has subsequently proved to be one of the most famous letters in his vast correspondence. "The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society," he explained to Madison, "has presented the question to my mind." The question itself was not entirely new. It was "Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another," which Jefferson claimed had implications that had not been sufficiently appreciated in either Europe or America. His answer to the question had the kind of unequivocal ring that he normally reserved for documents like the Declaration of Independence. "I set out on this ground," he announced, "which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living."

Exactly what Jefferson meant by this proposition has been the subject of endless debate among historians for some time. In the letter itself Jefferson seemed to be advocating some version of generational sovereignty. "We seem not to perceive," as he put it to Madison, "that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another." He produced elaborate calculations based on Buffon's demographic tables to show that, on average, a generation lasted about nineteen years. It therefore followed from the principle - "the earth belongs always to the living generations" - that all personal and national debst, all laws, even all constitutions, should expire after that time.

Madison, always the gentle critic of Jeffersonian ideas, complimented Jefferson on his "interesting reflections," then proceeded to demolish the idea of generational sovereignty, which was not really an idea at all, he suggested, but rather a dangerous fantasy. In the course of presenting his argument, Jefferson had asked Madison to imagine "a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day." Here, Madison observed not so diplomatically, was the chief clue that Jefferson was engaged in magic more than political philosophy. For there is not, and never can be, a generation in Jefferson's pure sense of the term. Generational cohorts simply do not come into the world as discrete units. There is instead a seamless web of arrivals and departures, along with an analogous web of obligatory connections between past and present generations. These connections are not only unavoidable but absolutely essential for the continuation of civilized society.

Madison did not say it, but the whole tenor of his response implied that Jefferson's letter was an inadvertent repudiation of all the painstaking work that he and his Federalist colleagues had been doing for the past two years. For Jefferson's idea (or, if you will, fantasy) struck at the very stability and long-term legality that the new Constitution was designed to assure. The notion that all laws, contractual obligations and hard-won constitutional precedents would lapse every nineteen or twenty years was a recipe for anarchy. Like Jefferson's earlier remark about wanting to see "a little rebellion now and then," which it seemed to echo, the generational argument struck Madison as an utterly irresponsible and positively dangerous example of indulged speculation and just the kind of abstract reasoning that gave French political thinkers a reputation for building castles in the air.

As usual, Jefferson listened to Madison's advice. He never put forward his generational argument as a serious legislative proposal, and he refrained from ever mentioning the matter to Madison again. But whatever practical problems the idea posed, whatever its inadequacies as a realistic rationale for legal reform, he clung to it tenaciously, introducing it in conversations and letters for the rest of his life. If, as Madison had suggested, the core of the idea was incompatible with the way the world actually worked, it was compatible with the way Jefferson's mind worked. Indeed, there is no single statement in the vast literature by and about Jefferson that provides as clear and deep a look into his thinking about the way the world ought to work. The notion that "the earth belongs to the living" is in fact a many-faceted product of his political imagination that brings together in one place his essential obsessions and core convictions.

The Books: "Alexander Hamilton : A Life" (Willard Sterne Randall)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is Alexander Hamilton : A Life by Willard Sterne Randall. Now that the Chernow biography of Hamilton has come out - there's probably no need to read this one (unless you're a junkie like me). Everything you could ever want to know about Hamilton is in the Chernow ... but I have a fondness for this book, as well as a fondness for Willard Sterne Randall's writing - I've read three of his biographies - one of Washington, one of Jefferson, and this one - and I really do like his style. Sadly, he seemed to have a vested interest in proving that Jefferson DIDN'T have an affair with Sally Hemings - and so he is definitely on the wrong side of history - It's kind of painful to read his Jefferson book for that reason. Like, I read it, thinking: What are you so afraid of, buddy? Why is it so horrifying to contemplate that he DID sleep with her? How you can be so SURE that he never did sleep with her? I mean - how can you stand here in the 1990s and be so CERTAIN of what happened in the private life of a man over 200 years ago - where do you get that arrogance? Why are you so intent on telling me there is "no evidence to support" blah blah blah. I know most writers of biographies have agendas - but I prefer them to be a little bit more artfully hidden.

So skip his book on Jefferson - but read his one on Hamilton. He doesn't have the same weird need to PROTECT Hamilton like he did with Jefferson - and the book is better for it.

One of the great things about Randall's writing (I've noticed it in all three of his books) is his reliance on primary documents - He quotes extensively from letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, speeches - His books are filled with block quotes - and I am ALL ABOUT the block quotes.

Now - nobody wrote more than Alexander Hamilton. I mean, from a very early age the boy was a wunderkind. I'll be studying Alexander Hamilton until I shuffle off this mortal coil. He, to me, is the dark horse of that group. Completely independent, out of nowhere, brilliant to the point of being intimidating (to his contemporaries and to me), prophetic, fearless, hated, complex ... I LOVE reading about this guy. He excites me.

During the Constitutional Congress in 1787 - he stood up at one point and talked for SIX HOURS STRAIGHT. Oh man, what I would not give to have been there that day. He had notes (as a matter of fact, I SAW those notes when I went to the Hamilton exhibit at the New York Historical Society - little scratchings on a page) - but he didn't look down at them. He knew what he had to say. And he said it - for six hours. It was a breathtaking accomplishment - even in that room filled with men who are still known for their own breathtaking accomplishments.

So here's an excerpt describing his six-hour marathon. And thank goodness that James Madison took extensive notes of the entire proceedings - recording every word everyone said, like an autistic lunatic. Thanks, Jimmy!

One of my favorite Hamiltonian quotes is below. It didn't come from his six-hour speech but a couple days later - during the arguments following his plan - It's the last blockquote in the excerpt. Words to live by, man, words to live by.

From Alexander Hamilton : A Life by Willard Sterne Randall.

Two days into an intense three-day debate on the New Jersey Plan, Hamilton asked President Washington if he could have the floor. It was early in the session of June 18 when the tall, thin, angular-faced New Yorker in elegant black and white stood and began a six-hour speech. Carefully prepared notes lay beside him, but he did not have to consult them. Madison, deeply impressed, recorded the scene:

Mr. Hamilton [said that he] had been hitherto silent on the business before the Convention, partly from respect to others whose superior abilities, age, and experience rendered him unwilling to bring forward ideas dissimilar to theirs and partly from his delicate situation with respect to his own state.

Madison was wrong about Hamilton's silence. He had already made two key motions. But, as it would later turn out, Madison was dead right about Hamilton's delicate situation in the New York delegation, where he was sure to be outvoted - and in bloc voting that meant nullified - by the pro-Clinton delegates. But that also meant he had nothing to lose. While Hamilton declared that he could not possibly accede to the views of his fellow New Yorkers, he said that the crisis "which now marked our affairs was too serious to permit any scruples whatever to prevail over the duty imposed on every man to contribute his efforts for the public safety and happiness."

Hamilton felt he was "obliged therefore to declare himself unfriendly" to both the Virginia and the New Jersey plans. He was "particularly opposed" to Paterson's small-state plan. No amendment of the Confederation that left the states sovereign "could possibly answer." Yet he was "much discouraged" by the "amazing" number of delegates who expected the "desired blessings" by merely substituting a federal national government for a loose-knit confederation of sovereign states. He agreed with Randolph of Virginia that "we owe it to our country to do in this emergency whatever we should deem essential to its happiness." To do anything less, jsut because it was "not clearly within our pwoers, would be to sacrifice the means to the end."

To Hamilton, all the defects lay with the states. Massachusetts was feeling the lack of a "certain portion of military force that is absolutely necessary":

All the passions we see, of avarice, ambition, interest, which govern most individuals and all public bodies, fall into the current of the states and do not flow into the stream of the general [national] government ... How then are all these evils to be avoided? Only by such a complete sovereignty in the general government as will turn all the strong principles and passions [to] its side.

Hamilton argued that Paterson's plan provided no remedy. Small states like New Jersey and North Carolina, "not being commercial states and [only] contributing to the wealth of the commercial ones," could never meet proportional tax quotas as Randolph of Virginia had proposed. "They will and must fail in their duty, their example will be followed, and the Union itself will be dissolved." What, then, was to be done? The expense of a national government over so great an extent of land would be "formidable" unless the cost of state government diminished. He did not mean to shock public opinion but he favored "extinguishing" the state governments: "they are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue or agriculture." What would work better would be "district tribunals: corporations for local purposes." The "only difficulty of a serious nature" which he foresaw was in drawing public officials from the edges to the center of the national community. "Moderate wages" would only "be a bait to little demagogues." Hamilton's views "almost led him to despair," Madison noted, "that a republican government could be established over so great an extent." In his private opinion, Madison wrote of Hamilton, "he had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was by so many of the wise and good, that the British government was the best in the world." He dared to say this because, he said, he had seen a profound shift in public opinion as the members of Congress who were the most tenacious republicans were as loud as anyone in declaiming against "the vices of democracy." He agreed with Necker, the French finance minister, who viewed the British Parliament as "the only government in the world 'which unites public strength with individual security.'"

Many in his audience reeling at such heresy in a Revolutionary council, Hamilton raced on:

In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many. Hence, separate interests will arise. There will be debtors and creditors. Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many. Both, therefore, ought to have power, that each may defend itself against the other.

Hamilton submitted "a sketch of his plan" to the Committee of the Whole, warning that "the people" outside the convention's walls would not adopt either the Virginia or the New Jersey plans. Hamilton said he saw the Union dissolving. "He seees evils in the states which must soon cure the people of their fondness for democracies," reported Madison.

Hamilton then read aloud his own plan of government. He proposed a two-house Supreme Legislative Power "in two distinct bodies of men": an elected assembly, elected by free men, serving three-year terms, and a lifetime senate, like the English House of Lords but not hereditary, serving "during good behavior." The senators would be chosen by electors chosen by the people, would form "a permanent barrier against every pernicious innovation." Judges also would be elected by the people and serve during good behavior. The supreme executive would be a governor chosen in the same fashion, for life, but only during good behavior: could there be "a good government without a good executive"? This "governor" -- Hamilton did not use the word "president" -- would be able to veto "all laws about to be passed" and would be in charge of executing the laws. He would be "the commander in chief of the land and naval forces and of the militia." He would have "with the advice and approbation of the Senate" the power of making all treaties. He would appoint the heads of the departments of finance, war, and foreign affairs. He would nominate all ambassadors subject to Senate approval, and he would "have the power of pardoning all offenses but treason," which would require the assent of Congress.

In one brilliant, six-hour, standup oration that left the convention stunned, Alexander Hamilton, with only the exception of term limits and the rules and qualifications of voters, laid out what would become the basic framework of the United States government. Off and on for the next few days, he rose to defend portions of his plan. Hamilton's plan coincided with the Virginia Plan on the major premise that there should be three branches of a national government, legislative, executive, and judiciary. On June 19, when the revised Virginia Plan came out of committee, he rose to elaborate on where his plan differed. His suggestion that the states should be abolished had drawn sharp criticism overnight. By "abolish", he meant their authority must be lessened. It should be "indefinite," but they should be left as "subordinate jurisdictions," as Persia within the Roman Empire. That same day, he rose again to contest a part of the Virginia Plan written by Luther Martin of Maryland that said the thirteen states were "in a state of nature," the old argument of philosopher John Locke. But Hamilton found James Wilson of Pennsylvania's resolution more palatable: the states had won their independence from Great Britain not individually but collectively. He did not fear combinations of states. The large states, Virginia and Massachusetts, were separated by too great distance.

Once again, on June 21, he rose to challenge Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, who wanted Congress to be elected by the state legislation. Without direct election by the people, Congress would be "engrafted" to state governments that could dwindle and die. The same day, he remained adamant on the term of representatives to the lower house. Three years in office was better than a shorter term because too frequent elections made the "people listless to them." He argued against letting state governments pay national salaries: "Those who pay are masters of those who are paid." And he argued vigorously against the holding of more than one public office:

Take mankind in general, they are vicious - their passions may be operated upon. Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives [but] one great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest. Wise government should avail itself of those passions, to make them subservient to the public good.

And then, sure that no one at the convention would follow his advice, he went home.

The Books: "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" (H.W. Brands)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands.

As you can probably tell I have arranged my American History biographies (we're in that section now, in case you didn't notice) by TOPIC, rather than by author. Believe me, I have agonized over whether or not this was the right choice. I am still not sure, and periodically I arrange all the biographies by author's name ... but there's something I really like about seeing all of the John Adams books next to each other, the Washington books, etc.

The First American is a big hefty fun book - I am sure there are better-written biographies of Franklin out there - this one was just the most recent. I enjoyed it, even though it's obviously a rather "typical" book. I like it for its breadth - but that's really just because of who Franklin was. Any biography of Franklin is necessarily going to be massive. He had such a deep life, such a long life - with so many different facets. It's really kind of astonishing. His commitment to civic duty - his practical bent - ("Let's set up a fire department like the one I saw in England ..." "Let's create a public lending library ...") - It's just awe-inspiring. There are still people like that today, of course - self-starters - people who don't WAIT for stuff to be given to them - and when you read any biography of Ben Franklin, you kind of start to think that you should never wait for anything, that you should go right ahead and do it yourself. Get people involved! Invest in the community! Figure out what needs to be done, and get the community to do it. Self-sufficiency. He was just a master at all of this. Or - yes. He was a master. But it's more that - it just seems that that's who he WAS. I don't know, I never met the guy - but he seems like a very positive can-do personality. He backed it up with intimidating brain power, obviously - but he just seems very very likable to me. And of course people would want to get on board with his schemes. And all of this is without even mentioning his role in the American Revolution!

I knew immediately the excerpt I wanted to post. This is one of the main reasons that I feel like I would have LIKED Ben Franklin. He was such a NUT. He was 16 years old and an apprentice in his brother's printing shop in Boston - they produced the paper The Courant. Only I can't remember what was going on with the father, exactly - but Ben's brother James was running the show. There was quite a bit of sturm and drang here - James Franklin despised Cotton Mather (which you just didn't do at that time) and put scathing attacks on Mather into his paper. Mather fought back - the establishment fought back - James reached out for allies in the community (many of whom were sick to death of Mather's pious bullshit.) Anyway - they got people in the community to write "op eds" in support of the paper (all under pseudonyms, of course).

And ... I am just so in love with what Ben Franklin - a kid of SIXTEEN - did.

So creative! So HUMOROUS! One of his main things was: never attack directly. You lose half your audience that way. Learn to make your points in a subtler way. Do it through humor. Or aphorisms. Make people LAUGH, soften them up - they'll be more inclined to agree with you.

Anyway, here's the excerpt. Ben Franklin creates a persona - and completely channels her personality. It's an act of transformation, of ... acting, if you will. I just LOVE it.

From The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands.

Consequently it was with pleasure that James awoke one morning to discover beneath the door of the print shop a contribution from a genuine outsider. Actually, this contributor was not an outsider at all; it was Ben Franklin, who had observed the genesis of the Courant and its challenge to Mather and the Massachusetts hierarchy but who conspicuously had not been invited to join the undertaking. Because he had not - and because he realized that James might be less than enthusiastic about his younger brother's participation in the new project - Ben carefully disguised his handwriting and signed the letter "Silence Dogood". James read the missive with growing delight - which increased the more from his appreciation that the author's very name tweaked Cotton Mather, whose recently published Silentarius followed his earlier Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good. James shared the Dogood letter with his colleagues; they registered equal approval. James ran it in the April 2, 1722, issue of the Courant.

Mrs. Dogood introduced herself to Courant patrons by chaffing them for the contemporary unwillingness "either to commend or dispraise what they read until they are in some measure informed who or what the author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a scholar or a leather apron man." She (Ben Franklin, rather) proceeded to mock this timidity by fabricating a fanciful background for herself. She had, she said, been born at sea en route from the old England to New England. But the joy surrounding her birth had turned to sorrow almost at once when a huge wave swept across the deck of the vessel and carried her celebrating father to his watery doom. It was a misfortune, Silence said, "which though I was not then capable of knowing, I shall never be able to forget."

The death of her father had made an indigent of her mother, with the result that the infant Silence was placed in foster care outside Boston, where she passed her childhood "in vanity and idleness" until being bound over to a country minister, "a pious good-natured young man and a bachelor." This godly fellow instructed the girl in all that was necessary for the female sex to learn - "needlework, writing, arithmetic, &c." (Had James known of Ben's earlier defense of education for girls, he might have guessed the identity of Silence Dogood at this point.) Because she displayed a head for books, the minister allowed her the run of his library, "which though it was but small, yet it was well chose to inform the understanding rightly and enable the mind to frame great and noble ideas." This bucolic idyll was interrupted briefly by the news that her poor mother had died - "leaving me as it were by my self, having no relations on earth within my knowledge" - but soon enough it resumed. "I passed away the time with a mixture of profit and pleasure, having no affliction but what was imaginary and created in my own fancy; as nothing is more common with us women than to be grieving for nothing when we have nothing else to grieve for."

Almost certainly none of the readers of the Courant guessed that this ironically knowing voice belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy; neither did James, who inserted after Silence Dogood's first epistle an invitation for more. Any such additional missives could be delivered to the printing house or to the candle shop of Josiah Franklin. "No questions shall be asked of the bearer."

Ben later said he felt "exquisite pleasure" at the approbation this first effort in journalism elicited; he took particular satisfaction from listening to james and the others guess who the anonymous author might be. "None were named but men of some character among us for learning ad ingenuity." During the next six months Ben continued his correspondence, delivering fifteen Dogood letters in all.

His topics ranged from love to learning to lamenting the death of dear ones. As in the first letter, insight and irony were evenly matched. Silence related how, to her astonishment, her ministerial benefactor presently essayed to woo her. "There is certainly scarce any part of a man's life in which he appears more silly and ridiculous than when he makes his first onset in courtship." (As Ben was of an age, if not an economic condition, to consider courtship, the reader who knows the identity of Silence Dogood discerns a certain dawning in him of the difficulties of the endeavor.) But gratitude inclined Silence to accept his suit, leading to wedlock and "the height of conjugal love and mutual endearments", not to mention "two likely girls and a boy." Tragically, her husband was carried off by illness almost as suddenly as her father had been swept away by the ocean, and Silence was left to look after herself and her offspring. Yet, as she assured readers, especially the men among them: "I could be easily persuaded to marry again ... I am courteous and affable, good humoured (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty."

Silence satirized the state of higher education in Boston, lampooning Harvard College - the alma mater of Cotton Mather, among other establishment influentials - as a snobbish ivory tower where students "learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteelly (which might as well be acquired at a dancing school) and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and charge, as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and conceited." She chided men for being as foolish as the women they criticized for idleness and folly: "Are not the men to blame for their folly in maintaining us in idleness?" She scoffed at women for silliness equal to men's - how else to explain hoop petticoats, those "monstrous topsy-turvy mortar pieces" that looked more like "engines of war" than ornaments of the fair sex. Having experienced multiple deaths in her family, she offered a formula for eulogizing departed loved ones, pointing out that tears were the easier to elicit the more unexpected and violent the demise. "It will be best if he went away suddenly, being killed, drowned, or froze to death." The address in such a case ought to include a litany of melancholic expressions such as "dreadful, deadly, cruel cold death, unhappy fate, weeping eyes." An experienced speaker would wring the maximal lachrymation from an audience, but in a pinch anyone could deliver the doleful sentiments. "Put them into the empty skull of some young Harvard (but in case you have ne'er a one at hand, you may use your own)." Rhymes were nice: "power, flower; quiver, shiver; grieve us, leave us." A concluding flourish was the mark of a really distinguished graveside encomium. "If you can procure a scrap of Latin to put at the end, it will garnish it mightily."

Had they come from the pen of a mature writer, the Dogood letters would deserve to be considered a delightful example of social satire. Coming as they did from the pen of a mere youth, they reveal emerging genius. Some of what Franklin wrote he might have experienced indirectly; some he extrapolated from his reading; much he must simply have imagined. But the tone is uniformly confident and true to the character he created. Silence is irreverent and full of herself, yet she brings most readers - the proud and pwerful excepted - into the realm of her sympathy. They laugh when she laughs, and laugh at whom she laughs at. She is one of the more memorable minor characters of American literature, and all the more memorable for being the creation of a sixteen-year-old boy.

The Books: "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" (Benjamin Franklin)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

A must-read. I struggled with which excerpt to choose. I love the part when he decides to be a vegetarian (which he pretty much was for his whole life). I love his determination to be perfect - and his whole journey with that - making charts with all of the virtues, checking them off. I love his discussions of the books that really helped him, the people who took a shine to him. But it's so unvarnished - that's why I love it. You get a sense of what an amazing character he was - going to England at so young an age, being swindled out of his money, having to make his own way ...

He also was such an earthy kind of person. Or - at least he admitted his earthiness. You totally get the sense of the frolics he's having left and right, with this or that girl ... His main revelation in life was that moderation was the key to all that was good. He liked to drink. In moderation. He was a vegetarian. But he didn't make it a religion. He was moderate about it. He liked the ladies. In moderation. He had massive appetites - and as long as he kept them a bit under control, they were fine. I don't know - I just really like that about him.

I love the excerpt I've chosen. It's advice about writing - advice that REALLY resonates with me. It's why I can't read the majority of political blogs. They're too certain they are RIGHT. And that kind of certainty, in my opinion, makes for terrible writing. Boring terrible harangues. Franklin's advice, while about writing, also ends up being a philosophy of life - it gets into deeper issues, not just writing issues - and it's stuff I don't care to discuss - but Franklin's writing advice goes a long way towards understanding who he was, why he was beloved the world round, why some people despised him, and why his career was so long and fruitful. Also - his scientific inquiries fall under this category as well ... His inquisitive mind, his curiosity, his ability to - even as a grown man - look at the natural world and say: "Why is it LIKE that?" His ability to take NOTHING for granted. All of this also seems to come under the philosophy he puts out in the second paragraph below. It's not about not having opinions or having ideas. Not at all! It's about how you express them - Is the point to just walk around feeling that you were right? Well, if it is - then good luck with persuading anyone to come to your side. People, in general, do not like to hang around self-righteous jagoffs. But what if the point is to persuade?? Are you able to ADJUST how you express yourself so that it is not so odious to others? The powers of persuasion ... Franklin was a master at it. Reading this book, you realize he was such a master at persuasion because he PRACTICED it.

Oh - it was great - last week I went to the Library Company of Philadelphia. Founded by Franklin (and his buddies) in 1731. That reading room!!!!! DROOLING OVER THE READING ROOM. (I wrote a bit about the Library Company here.)

Franklin is, of course, everywhere in Philadelphia - even more so than William Penn. Franklin has trickled down to the most trivial level of life. Franklin Liquors. Franklin Cafe. Franklin Bar & Grill. Franklin Mall. Franklin Lingerie. Just pop his name onto the beginning and you've got yourself a business!!

From The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

While I was intent on improving my language I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's) having at the end of it two little sketches on the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many examples of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradictions and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, made a doubter, as I already was in many points of our religious doctrines, I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took delight in it, practiced it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people even of superior knowledge into concessions the consequence of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved.

I continued this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence, never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; It appears to me, or I should not think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or, I imagine it to be so; or, It is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting. And as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive assuming manner that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat most of those purposes for which speech was given to us. In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion opposition and prevent a candid attention. If you desire instruction and improvement from others, you should not at the same time express yourself fixed in your present opinions. Modest and sensible men, who do not love disputation, will leave you undisturbed in the possession of your errors. In adopting such a manner, you can seldom expect to please your hearers or obtain the concurrence you desire. Pope judiciously observes --

"Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot."

He also commended it to us

"To speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence."

And he might have joined with this line that which he has coupled with another, I think, less properly --

"For want of modesty is want of sense."

If you ask, Why less propoerly? I must repeat the lines,

"Immodest words admit of no defense,
For want of modesty is want of sense."

Now, is not the want of sense, where a man is so unfortunate as to want it, some apology for his want of modesty? And would not the lines stand more justly thus?

"Immodest words admit but this defense,
That want of modesty is want of sense."

This, however, I should submit to better judgments.

The Books: "Samuel Adams : The Father of American Independence" (Dennis Brindell Fradin)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is Samuel Adams : The Father of American Independence by Dennis Brindell Fradin

This book was sent to me by ricki! It's an over-size hardcover - and it's filled with paintings, woodcuts, engravings, newspaper cartoons from the time ... It's a really rich book that way, in terms of images, and I love to flip through it. John Adams was a really successful lawyer before the Revolution came along. Washington was a rich dude who had distinguished himself as a soldier. Franklin - fuggedaboutit - what DIDN'T the guy succeed in? Sam Adams, though, really didn't have much going on for himself except his rage at the British - he wasn't Mr. Successful like all the rest of them - but when it came time to rebel? He was at the top of his game. It was his moment. Without the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin would still have made it into the history books. Even just as a philanthropist and general smarty-pants. But the American Revolution MADE Sam Adams - without it, he would have been completely forgotten. I find that one of the most interesting things about him. How certain people merge with certain moments in time ... It is as though they were MEANT to be born at that time. Sam Adams was a perfect example of right man- right time. He needed a CAUSE to bring out his particular brand of energy and genius. I mean, I guess they all did - but he REALLY did, because he didn't have too much else going for him. He was the kind of guy who get others fired up. He was inspirational, fierce, tireless ... When he spoke (or wrote) - people listened.

Here's an excerpt about the most famous protest he organized.

Samuel Adams : The Father of American Independence by Dennis Brindell Fradin

The first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston Harbor on November 28, followed soon after by the Eleanor and the Beaver. The Sons of Liberty posted armed guards at Griffin's Wharf to watch over the three ships and make sure that the agents did not try to sneak the tea ashore. Meanwhile, Samuel Adams was whipping the patriots into a frenzy, as demonstrated by a message that he sent to towns near Boston in late November:

Now brethren, we are reduced to this dilemma, either to sit down quiet under this and every other burden that our enemies shall see fit to lay upon us as good-natured slaves, or rise and resist this and every other plan laid for our destruction, as becomes wise freemen. In this extremity we earnestly request your advice, and that you would give us the earliest intelligence of the sense your several towns have of the present gloomy situation of our affairs.

By mid-December Adams had completed the details of his secret plan. On Thursday, December 16, the largest public gathering in Boston had ever held in its 143-year history took place at the Old South Meeting House. About five thousand Bostonians and two thousand people from outlying areas crowded into and around the church. Since Boston's population was about seventeen thousand, nearly every adult in the Massachusetts capital must have attended this gigantic town meeting.

The townspeople decided to send a final request asking that Hutchinson send away the tea ships. As they awaited the governor's answer, people in the meeting house stood up and made defiant speeches. One man hinted at what was coming by saying: "Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?" His comment drew loud applause. Finally, at about six at night, the messenger returned with the response that Samuel Adams and nearly everyone else had expected: Hutchinson absolutely refused to send the tea ships back to England.

Samuel Adams then arose and faced the multitude of angry Bostonians. "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!" he shouted. These words were a prearranged signal to forty or fifty men, disguised as Indians, who were posted at the church entrance.

"Boston Harbor a teapot tonight!" whooped the "Indians", waving their hatchets. The war party set off along Milk Street toward Griffin's Wharf. As the crowd emptied out of the Old South, John Hancock was heard to say, "Let every man do what is right in his own eyes!" Many in the crowd decided to help the "Indians" dispose of the tea, for by this time everyone knew the purpose of the hatchets.

Not counting spectators, the mob contained about a hundred and fifty people by the time it reached Griffin's Wharf. Most of their identities remain unknown, but we do know that Paul Revere was among them. By the light of torches and lanterns, the men boarded the three ships, smashed open the 342 chests (some sources say 340) with their hatchets, then dumped all the tea into Boston Harbor.

Their mission accomplished, the Bostonians marched home to the tooting of a fife. As the men joked about having turned Boston Harbor into a "teapot", Admiral John Montagu of the British Navy stuck his head out of a window and said, "Well, boys, you've had a fine, pleasant evening for your Indian caper. But mind, he who dances must pay the fiddler." A leader of the tea party shouted back, "Oh, never mind, Admiral. Just come out here, if you please, and we'll settle the bill in two minutes!"

Most Bostonians considered the destruction of the tea a brave and necessary act of defiance. Even John Adams, who loathed violence and destruction, said that the Boston Tea Pary was "the most magnificent act" the patriots had yet perpetrated. But no one was happier than Samuel Adams, who on New Year's Eve of 1773 wrote a letter to a friend about the events of December 16. "You cannot imagine the height of joy that sparkles in the eyes and animates the [faces] as well as the hearts of all [Bostonians," he wrote. Also on December 31, the Boston Gazette printed a New Year's message from Samuel Adams charged with the highly emotional style he was using to move his fellow Americans closer to war:

To all Nations under Heaven, know ye, that the PEOPLE of the AMERICAN WORLD are Millions strong - countless Legions compose their ARMY OF FREEMEN ... AMERICA now stands with the Scale of JUSTICE in one Hand, and the Sword of VENGEANCE in the other ... Let the Britons fear to do any more so wickedly as they have done, for the HERCULEAN ARM of this NEW WORLD is lifted up - and Woe be to them on whom it falls! -- At the Beat of the Drum, she can call five Hundred Thousand of her SONS to ARMS ... Therefore, ye that are wise, make Peace with her, take Shelter under her Wings, that ye may shine by the Reflection of her Glory.

May the NEW YEAR shine propitious on the NEW WORLD - and VIRTUE and LIBERTY reign here without a Foe, until rolling Years shall measure Time no more.

The Books: "Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams" (Joseph Ellis)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams by Joseph Ellis

In addition to Founding Brothers Ellis has these other books which don't qualify exactly as biographies - they are more like contemplations. I LOVE them. There's American Sphinx - about Thomas Jefferson, and His Excellency - about George Washington. Passionate Sage is Ellis' contemplation on the "character and legacy of John Adams". He's really good at this type of writing.

Here's an excerpt from Passionate Sage - where Ellis talks about Adams' autobiography. All of the founders were aware that future generations would be watching them - Adams more than most. Adams felt he got the short end of the stick, in terms of securing a legacy for himself. I love John Adams for a ton of reasons that have to do with what he actually DID - but I also love John Adams the most of all "those guys" because of how openly human he was. There he is - warts and all. His insecurities, his vanities, his never-ending yowl of "It's not FAIR ... why does HE get the credit for that??"

From Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams by Joseph Ellis

Adams' autobiography, on the other hand, was less like a well-crafted work of literature than an open wound, a text that requires no "deconstructing" because it was never "constructed" in the first place. Like Adams's life, it was impulsive, exuberant, and candid. And its theme, as well as its form, was the exact opposite of Franklin's. It was about self-doubt and failure rather than self-fulfillment and success, about the ironic ravages of history rather than the triumph of the individual. When Adams eventually read Franklin's autobiography in 1818, he admitted defeat: "My own appears, upon retrospection, a dull dreary unfruitful Waste." But then defeat and failure in the face of American popular opinion had always been his dominant message. In that sense, Adams's autobiography was a clumsy model for his great-grandson's masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, as well as an anguished exprssion of the dark and hidden underside of Franklin's beguilingly happy narrative.

Villains and intriuges had always played a crucial role in Adams's thinking about the American Revolution, although it was usually British leaders like Lord North or American Loyalists like Thomas Hutchinson who bore the brunt of Adams's accusations of conspiracy in the 1760s and 1770s. (As Adams once put it, "Mr. Hutchinson never drank a Cup of Tea in his life without Contemplating the Connectio between that Tea, and his Promotion.") Now, in the autobiography, after an opening section that described his early years as a student, grammar school teacher, and country lawyer, he got down to the serious business of eviscerating his enemies on the American side.

Alexander Hamilton - no surprise here - was the chief villain. The fact that Hamilton had only recently died in a duel with Aaron Burr, Adams declared, was no cause for mercy. Adams claimed to feel no obligation "to suffer my Character to lie under infamous Calumnies, because the Author of them, with a Pistol Bullet through his Spinal Marrow, died a Penitent." During the final year of his presidency Adams had periodically terrified the High Federalists and startled the members of his cabinet with outbursts against Hamilton. But he had not seen fit to record his personal feelings toward the unofficial leader of the Federalist faithful. And he had adopted a stately pose in the wake of Hamilton's slanderous and scandalous Letter ... Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams... All the while, however, the suppressed anger had been throbbing away inside him. Now the invective poured out. Hamilton was a "Creole Bolingbroke ... Born on a Speck more obscure than Corsica ... as ambitious as Bonaparte, though less courageous, and, save for me, would have involved us in a foreign war with France & a civil war with ourselves." Writing to his good friend Judge Francis Vanderkemp at the same time, he amplified his accusation: Hamilton was "a bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," who lived constantly "in a delirium of Ambition" and who "had fixed his Eye on the highest Station in America and ... hated every man young or old who Stood in his Way." To Rush, he acknowledged that such diatribes against the man regarded as "the Sovereign Pontiff of Federalism" would probably cause "all his Cardinals ... to excite the whole Church to excommunicate and Anathematize me." But Adams claimed to be unfazed, adding: "It was time for a Protestant Separation." It was the closest he ever came to a direct assertion of what was his de facto desertion of the Federalist Party. If Hamilton was, as his worshippers claimed, the guiding light of Federalism, it was a light that deserved to go out.

Tom Paine ranked as second only to Hamilton in Adams's version of the American rogues gallery. Paine, wrote Adams, was "a Disastrous Meteor", "a disgrace to the moral Character and Understanding of the Age." Everyone knew that Benjamin Rush had given him the title for his wildly popular pamphlet, Common Sense, and that the arguments about the inevitability of American independence that Pain advanced had, in fact, been circulating throughout the colonies since 1760. In the midst of the accelerating events of early 1776, when Common Sense first appeared, Adams's initial reaction had been more generous, though even then he was somewhat wary. Paine's pamphlet, he oted then, contained "a great deal of good sense, delivered in a clear, simple, concise and nervous Style." In fact, it was the electricity and accessibility of the prose that caught his attention, causing Adams to recognize that Paine's message was identical to his won -- the American Revolution was both inevitable and natural -- but that he himself "could not have written anything in so manly and striking a style ..." What worried him then was Paine's endorsement of a single house legislature as the prescribed form of government for the new states, a prescription that revealed that "this Writer has a better Hand at pulling down than building." What worried him in his autobiography was the credit Paine had received for his elegant statement of the obvious. Paine was a mere cypher, a nonentity in the Continental Congress. Worse, Paine was "the Satyr of the Age ... a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Butch Wolf." Only if one wished to call the eighteenth century "the Age of Frivolity" could one call it "the Age of Paine".

The verdict on what he called "the American untouchables" -- Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington -- was decidedly less vitriolic, but sufficiently equivocal to sense Adams's ego throbbing just beneath the surface. All three American greats served as an illustration of the principle "that Eloquence in public Assemblies is not the surest road to Fame and Preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great Reserve." This was the lesson of "eternal taciturnity" that Adams preached to John Quincy and anyone else who would listen, and it derived from Adams's sure but somewhat neurotic sense that, as "the Atlas of Indepedence" who made the fierce and ferocious speeches that were needed to assure separation from England in the Continental Congress, he inevitably made lifelong enemies. The rule seemed to be that men who played leading roles in controversies became controversial. Jefferson, on the other hand, "had attended his duty in the House [the Second Continental Congress] but a very small part of the time and when there had never spoken in public." Adams recalled, with a mingled sense of admiration and accusation, that "during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together."

The Books: "John Adams" (David McCullough)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is John Adams by David McCullough

You know, I read a lot of biographies and most of them are kinda crappy. I read them for the TOPIC mainly. I have a crappy biography of Gary Cooper - which is written so salaciously and so badly (I mean, it's also so much fun) - but I have it because I love Gary Cooper, and there are some great anecdotes in there. But sometimes a biography comes along (and it's very rarely) that re-defines the entire genre, raises the bar, throws down a gauntlet to other writers - whatever you want to call it. And it's a short short list. When book reviewers talk about high-water-mark biographies there aren't many on their list. The same titles referenced over and over: Juliet Barker's book about the Brontes. It is generally agreed that Barker was one of those gauntlet-throwers. She makes all other biographies pale in comparison. The standard Bronte biography before Barker's had been written OVER A CENTURY BEFORE ... by someone who KNEW Charlotte Bronte. Woah. Barker went straight into the heart of the Bronte myth, and wrote a massive exhaustively researched book which actually made readers have to re-think the Brontes. The myth is so enduring of Haworth Parsonage, etc., and the wild Bronte girls, and their isolation ... but Barker researched EVERYTHING - the footnotes are almost as long as the book. We have financial statements, and leases, and grocery lists - all used as evidence - I mean, it's a stunning accomplishment. It came out in th 80s or 90s, I think, and you can STILL see it referenced on an almost weekly basis in various book reviews. Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce. Another gauntlet. Gerald Clarke's Capote. That book came out years ago and it is telling that nobody has even tried to compete with it. Nobody has said, "Let ME write a biography of Capote ... " Because ... why bother after that one? Scott Berg's biography of Lindbergh was also hailed as a high-water-mark of the genre - the access he had to Anne Lindbergh's private papers was unprecedented. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head - biographies that made a real STIR -not just because they were best-sellers but because they really made reviewers and readers look at the actual genre, and realize the possibilities of it. All of this is a lead-up to say that David McCullough's biography of John Adams is one of the best biographies I have ever read - it's on the short short list of greatest books I have EVER read, fiction or non-fiction. John Adams is having a bit of a resurgence right now - a couple of other people have come out with biographies of Adams since McCullough's book took the entire damn world by storm (there were a couple months there where you couldn't take a subway ride without seeing SOMEONE reading that book - it was so so cool) - but McCullough's book is so commanding, so readable, so ... GOOD ... that all biographies now have to compete with his. He is the guy to reach. Same with anyone who would want to write a biography of Joyce. Like it or not, you have to compete with Ellmann's book.

I LOVED McCullough's book. I love him, in general.

My whole family read this book (naturally - we're all such Adams freaks) ... and I remember Siobhan and I just LAUGHING about the anecdote in the following excerpt. It's my favorite anecdote in the whole book. I just love the image of it so much that it almost makes me nervous.

It's from 1776. The Declaration has been signed. There was the disastrous battle of Long Island (disastrous for the rebels, I mean) ... when Washington, in the dead of night, removed his troops across the Hudson. A retreat. Adams, when he heard the news, replied, "In general our generals were outgeneralled."

Lord Howe requests a conference with some of the delegates of the Continental Congress - who were all in Philadelphia. Adams was unanimously chosen as one of the delegates who should go (the conference was going to be on Staten Island). Benjamin Franklin was also chosen - and Edward Rutledge.

What happens on the journey just ... I picture it and I just LOVE IT. Thank God these guys kept diaries.

From John Adams by David McCullough

They were to meet His Lordship on Staten Island, and on the morning of September 9, in "fine sunshine", they set off, the whole city aware of what was happening. Franklin and Rutledge each rode in a high, two-wheeled chaise, accompanied by a servant. Adams went on horseback, accompanied by Joseph Bass. Congress, in the meanwhile, could only sit and wait, while in New York the admiral's brother, General Howe, temporarily suspended operations against the rebels.

Free of the city, out of doors and riding again, Adams felt a wave of relief from his cares and woes, even to the point of finding Edward Rutledge an acceptable companion. The road across New Jersey was filled with soldiers marching to join Washington, mainly Pensylvania men in long, brown coats. But for the "straggling and loitering" to be seen, it would have been an encouraging spectacle.

The journey consumed two days. With the road crowded, progress was slow and dusty. At New Brunswick, the inn was so full, Adams and Franklin had to share the same bed in a tiny room with only one small window. Before turning in, when Adams moved to close the window against the night air, Franklin objected, declaring they would suffocate. Contrary to convention, Franklin believed in the benefits of fresh air at night and had published his theories on the question. "People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in small close rooms," he had written, stressing "it is the frowzy corrupt air from animal substances, and the perspired matter from our bodies, which, being long confined in beds not lately used, and clothes not lately worn ... obtains that kind of putridity which infects us, and occasions the colds observed upon sleeping in, wearing, or turning over, such beds [and] clothes." He wished to have the window remain open, Franklin informed Adams.

"I answered that I was afraid of the evening air," Adams would write, recounting the memorable scene. "Dr. Franklin replied, 'The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without doors. Come, open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.' " Adams assured Franklin he had read his theories; they did not match his own experience, Adams said, but he would be glad to hear them again.

So the two eminent bedfellows lay side-by-side in the dark, the window open, Franklin expounding, as Adams remembered, "upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep."

The Books: "Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800" (John Ferling)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John Ferling

So whoo-hoo American Revolution, right? I'll be studying it forever - it's an endless topic, I love it all. But the election of 1800 ... John Adams the incumbent, with Thomas Jefferson "campaigning" (ahem - sitting on his hilltop in Virginia pretending he wasn't campaigning - oh no, politics are disgusting - who, me? I'm just a farmer ... Move along without me ...) is where things REALLY get interesting. I think it's so funny and kind of cute how some people think politcs are played so DIRTY now ... that in one glorious time in the past, campaigns weren't so ugly and so personal. I really wonder what glorious time in the past these people are referring to. They have no idea what they are talking about, frankly. The election of 1800 has to be one of the dirtiest elections (in terms of how both candidates played it) EVER in the history of our country. And it was the THIRD ELECTION. Mkay? Politcs have ALWAYS been personal. The media has ALWAYS been biased. Yay for you if you want to live in some fantasy utopia world where things USED to be great and NOW they suck - but it's not true.

I think the election of 1800 is one of the most pivotal moments in our nation's history - up there with the American Revolution and the Civil War. Well, and also - George Washington "stepping down" from the Presidency - with a peaceful handover of power to the next guy coming in. I think THAT is one of the most important moments in our collective history as well. John Adams became the second President. And nobody on the opposing side was lined up against the wall and shot. Nobody was run out of town on a rail. An unprecedented event in human history. But then we come to the election of 1800 - and the real birth of party politics in this country. I wrote a couple of posts about it, if you're interested. Here's one. Here's another one.

It was exciting for me because last year a book came out which focused ONLY on the election of 1800 - which was very exciting, because normally that election is just folded into a larger story - part of John Adams' long life-story, or told as part of the life story of Thomas Jefferson - but Ferling's book honed in on that one event. (There was another book that came out at around the same time - by Susan Dunn - and I read that as well, but I don't think she's a good writer. Ferling is much better, although he does use the word "Indeed" too much. Just stop with the "Indeed". The same could be said of Glenn Reynolds. Enough. Find another word. Otherwise: YAWN.)

Here's an excerpt about the clash between Jefferson and Hamilton.

From Adams Vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John Ferling

Hamilton caused Jefferson the greatest concern. By late 1790 Jefferson suspected a concurrence of Hamiltonianism and royalism. Madison surely had filled him in on what he had gleaned of Hamilton's private thinking during the Nationalist battles in the 1780s, including a recapitulation of a remarkably unabashed pro-monarchist speech that the New Yorker had given at the Constitutional Convention. In addition, Jefferson leanred some things at first hand, ahving personally heard Hamilton extol the merits of the British system. Jefferson was coming to believe that the "ultimate object" of Hamilton and his followers was to "prepare the way for a change, from the present republican form of government, to that of a monarchy, of which the English constitution is to be the model." Indeed, he had grown certain that the Hamiltonians were "panting after ... [and] itching for crowns, coronets and mitres," and that the economic revolution that the Treasury Secretary envisioned was part and parcel of a transformation to the British way of things. Jefferson saw too that funding had unleashed a speculative craze in New York and other commercial hubs. A hot mass of feelings, Jefferson exclaimed that America was being transformed into a "gaming table". Already, he contended, the new national government was imperiled by the financial mania. A "corrupt squadron of paper dealers," whom he labeled as "stockjobbers" driven solely by pecuniary interests, had surfaced within Congress, and the day was coming when they and their kind would have the resources to sway a congressional majority. Furthermore, Jefferson cautioned, their gamester ethic would corrode the traditional frugality and industry that had defined the American character. Jefferson believed Hamilton and his compatriots were taking America for a ride along the same sordid path that adulterated Europe had traveled. During 1790 the notion took shape in Jefferson's mind that unless Hamilton was stopped, America would someday be dominated by huge financial institutions. Commercial avarice would dominate the national mores, and ever larger chunks of the American population would become the propertyless denizens of vast, squalid cities. This, Jefferson believed to the very marrow of his bones, was no way for free people to live. Indeed, those who lived in such a checkered society would not be free, and as they lost their independence, republicanism would be relegated to the scrap heap of the past.

Jefferson never wavered in his judgment of Hamiltonianism. The conclusions that he reached in 1790 presaged the decade of fiery partisanship that lay ahead, for Jefferson saw his disagreement with Hamilton not merely as a difference between men or a clash over policy but as a deep ideological rift. This was a view with which Hamilton concurred. Indeed, it was this sense of a titanic struggle between rival ideologies that in large measure brought to the politics of the 1790s a passion only occasionally equalled in America's political history. What loomed, virtually all activists understood, was a political war to shape the American future, possibly for all time, as it was widely presumed that what was put in place in the first days of the new Republica would not be easily changed by subsequent generations. Perhaps too, as the historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick theorized, the politics of the 1790s took on a supercharged quality because those who participated were revolutionaries. It was not just that Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and those in Congress and the state governments had played active roles in the American Revolution. They had a revolutionary mentality. Not only were they audacious, they were visionaries. They beheld an American vista for which they had been willing to die after 1775. For them, the politics of the 1790s was about the ultimate realization of their often grandiose dreams, and it meant that the politics battles of the decade were almost literally fought on a battlefield.

The Books: "The Book of Abigail and John"

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is the massive The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784 .

My grandmother (dad's mother) used to say that my grandfather was cheating on her. With Abigail Adams.

I grew up in that kind of environment as well. It was all about John Adams. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that my parents grew up around Boston ... so Adams was everywhere. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that my uncle lives in Quincy - so every time we went there for Thanksgiving we drove by the Adams family house. Or maybe it was because 1776 was a HUGE musical in our house. I don't know what it is - I just remember being aware of John and Abigail Adams from a very very young age. I feel like there was never not a time when I did not know about them. Same with George Washington, too. I don't remember the moment when I learned about Washington although there had to have been a first time I heard his name. He was just always there. The other founding fathers came later. I learned about them in the normal way, in classes at school, and during the Bicentennial Blitzkrieg which took over the entire nation during my childhood. It was all American History all the time.

My parents were both so into John and Abigail Adams that it rubbed off on me - and also - I saw a production of 1776 during (of course) that Bicentennial year which comPLETELY turned me on. I was the same girl then that I am now. Only I was 4 feet tall, with bug bites on my legs, and funny glasses that looked too big for my face. So I read the collected letters of John and Abigail - I think I took it out from the library.

Since that time - I've read this book countless times. I don't know - I probably read it once every other year, if I had to guess. It's also something I dip into, for inspiration, all the time. I should put together a daily calendar of quotes from those letters. They are just so so so extraordinary. I never quite get over the fact that we are so BLESSED to have such letters in our public record!!

So what to choose, what to choose.

I decided to go with one of Abigail's letters. And I decided to go with a really personal one. Because the volume is so rich - and because they were apart for the majority of their marriage - they discussed everything in their letters. Abigail ran the farm for the years he was gone. She was quite an astute manager and businesswoman - he might have been totally ruined when it came time for him to retire - if he hadn't had Abigail. So there are letters about seed and planting crops and animals and hired hands. There are AMAZING letters during 1775 - 1776 - I mean, you just read them in awe - the sense of urgency, and mission, and uplift, and fear ...

Then came the long long years when Adams was away in France and the Netherlands ... and it took weeks for letters to arrive - They continued to just write, regardless of lack of response ... Sometimes letters were lost at sea. Sometimes letters were intercepted.

The two of them never really got accustomed to the whole being-apart thing - although they were two strong people, and they managed. But their letters are filled with yearning. Or sometimes the whole letter will be businesslike, filled with surface updates about events ... and then the last paragraph will suddenly open wide, showing the loneliness, the aching for the other ...

They are so so romantic. "My dearest Friend ..."

So I decided to go with one of Abigail's sadder letters, when she let her loneliness be expressed. Both of them were strong people, they bore up well ... but they were intimate with one another. These were letters from one soul to another. You can sense that.

This letter always just tears at my heart. It's become quite famous now - one of her more well-known letters ... but in the moment she wrote it she could have no way of knowing that. She just was missing her "dearest friend".

It's from 1778. Oh, and "Portia" was what Adams called her - it dated from their courtship when they would write these steamy letters to each other, using the names Portia and Lysander. Taking on fake names from the "olden days" freed them up from their more restricted present ... those early letters are awesome.

But the nicknames stuck.

From The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784 .

ABIGAIL TO JOHN

Sunday Evening December 27 1778

How lonely are my days? How solitary are my Nights? Secluded from all Society but my two Little Boys, and my domesticks, by the Mountains of snow which surround me I could almost fancy myself in Greenland. We have had four of the coldest Days I ever knew, and they were followed by the severest snow storm I ever remember, the wind blowing like a Hurricane for 15 or 20 hours renderd it impossible for Man or Beast to live abroad, and has blocked up the roads so that they are impassible.

A week ago I parted with my Daughter at the request of our P[lymout]h Friends to spend a month with them, so that I am solitary indeed.

Can the best of Friends recollect that for 14 years past, I have not spent a whole winter alone. Some part of the Dismal Season has heretofore been Mitigated and Softned by the Social converse and participation of the Friend of my youth.

How insupportable the Idea that 3000 leigues, and the vast ocean now devide us -- but devide only our persons for the Heart of my Friend is in the Bosom of his partner. More than half a score years has so rivetted it there, that the Fabrick which contains it must crumble into Dust, e'er the particles can be seperated.

"For in one fate, our Hearts our fortunes
And our Beings blend."

I cannot discribe to you How much I was affected the other day with a Scotch song which was sung to me by a young Lady in order to divert a Melancholy hour, but it had quite a different Effect, and the Native Simplicity of it, had all the power of a well wrought Tragidy. When I could conquer my Sensibility I beg'd the song, and Master Charles has learnt it and consoles his Mamms by singing it to her. I will enclose it to you. It has Beauties in it to me, which an indifferent person would not feel perhaps --

His very foot has Musick in't,
As he comes up the stairs.

How oft has my Heart danced to the sound of that Musick?

And shall I see his face again?
And shall I hear him speak?

Gracious Heaven hear and answer my daily petition, "by banishing all my Grief."

I am sometimes quite discouraged from writing. So many vessels are taken, that there is Little chance of a Letters reaching your Hands. That I meet with so few returns is a circumstance that lies heavy on my Heart. If this finds its way to you, it will go by the Alliance. By her I have wrote before, she has not yet saild, and I love to amuse myself with my pen, and pour out some of the tender sentiments of a Heart over flowing with affection, not for the Eye of a cruel Enemy who no doubt would ridicule every Humane and Social Sentiment long ago grown Callous to the finer sensibilities -- but for the sympathetick Heart that beats in unison with

Portia

The Books: "The Adams-Jefferson Letters"

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

Next book in my American history section is the massive The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams .

The correspondence between those two has to be one of their greatest legacies they left behind for us. In the beginning - they were just sharing diplomatic information, they were colleagues, and - with Abigail - they were all friends. The rift finally came (it had been building for years) - but finally, they broke apart. And did not speak to one another for years. Benjamin Rush, a friend of both, was the one who "got them back together" - although Jefferson had reached out to Abigail in a letter - he truly missed her friendship. She wrote him back with the now-famous "faithfull are the wounds of a friend" letter which was her 18th century way of saying, "Talk to the hand!" It took Rush's pleading on both sides to open up the way to correspondence again - it's a great story - he told Adams that he had had a dream about it. That these two old gents were meant to correspond with one another ... it was in the stars! I think Rush knew what an amazing document the correspondence would be for future generations - but I don't think even he could anticipate how INCREDIBLE those letters really are.

They are a great great gift.

I love, too, that you can just hear their different personalities IN the letters. Adams is rambunctious, emotional, funny. Jefferson is more reserved - but that makes his little sparks of emotion even more moving. You really get the sense of how much intimacy cost this man. His feelings ran deep deep deep.

So - I picked out two letters to excerpt - which seems so unfair to all the rest of them, but oh well!

In these two letters, we can see the character of the entire correspondence. But you should read the whole thing, if you haven't already!!!