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!!! The letters illuminate the differences in philosophy between Adams and Jefferson. In some ways, they illuminate the irreconcilable differences. However - overriding all of this is mutal respect and cordiality. They were both in process. Neither of them "gave up" on trying to figure all of this stuff out. When they used to be active politically, their different conclusions caused much strife. But once retired they were free to discuss all of these issues at length, with no object but to illuminate and explain their point of view to the other. (In 1813 John Adams wrote a letter to Jefferson which is still rightly famous - and in it he said: "You and I ought not to die before We have explained ourselves to each other." Gulp. So moving.)

And so that's what they did. Over the next 13 years, they wrote letter after letter, trying to "explain" themselves "to each other". The letters only stopped when they died (er - on the same feckin' day, mkay? Also - ehm ... it was July 4. Mmkay? Also, it was the 50th anniversary of 1776. Mmkay? I mean, you just could not make this shit up!! No one would believe it!)

These are two letters from 1815.

So: a couple things swirling around in the world at that time

-- The aftermath of the war of 1812.

-- Adams and Jefferson watched the meteoric rise of Napoleon with horror. (Jefferson had been a big fan of the French revolution, Adams had been horrified by it ... but they both were horrified by the tyranny of Napoleon. Jefferson called him 'the Attila of the age')

-- March to June 1815: The Hundred Days. (the end of the Napoleonic regime, the last chapter, as it were)

-- But, let us add this in to the mix: Jefferson and Adams, now old men, wondered to one another: who was the greater tyrant, John Bull or this new tyrannical France? They hashed it out. Their anti-British feelings were still strong ... and yet the two of them knew, somehow, that the fortunes of the United States would be forever tied with the fortunes of that original parent nation. (I think of Emily, Bill and myself toasting Tony Blair the first time we all met, clinking our beer glasses together. Ha!)

These events are, collectively, center stage for Adams and Jefferson at this time. They are their current-day concerns. On a more uber level, they wonder: have the advances from the 18th century in political/moral theory and man's enlightenment all been swept away? Is it so easy to regress, did all you and I worked for mean nothing?

Pertinent questions to them in their day, and, I believe, still pertinent to us in ours.

Note - at the end of the first letter: John Adams is making a joke here. A book had just come out which included some of Adams' private letters - used without his permission. And after one of the letters, which had to do with the convulsions going on in Europe at the time, the author of the book characterized Adams' thought process as "the effusions of a splenetic mind, rather than as the sober reflections of an unbiassed Understanding". Adams continuously made jokes from there on out about his "splenetic mind" and its "effusions".

And about Jefferson's reply: The letter is a masterpiece of Jeffersonian abstraction: good vs. evil, light vs. dark ... all that stuff he loved. Diametrical opposites balancing each other out, trembling across the abyss from one another... But anyway - I'll refrain from commenting too much. At least for now. I just love that letter.

From The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams .

JOHN ADAMS to THOMAS JEFFERSON

Quincy Nov. 13 1815

Dear Sir

The fund[a]mental Article of my political Creed is, that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or absolute Power is the same in a Majority of a popular Assembly, an Aristocratical Counsel, an Oligarchical Junto and a single Emperor. Equally arbitrary cruel bloody and in every respect diabolical.

Accordingly arbitrary Power, wherever it has resided, has never failed to destroy all the records Memorials and Histories of former times which it did not like and to corrupt and interpolate such as it was cunning enough to preserve or to tolerate. We cannot therefore say with much confidence, what Knowledge or what Virtues may have prevailed in some former Ages in some quarters of the World.

Nevertheless, according to the few lights that remain to Us, We may say that the Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its Errors and Vices has been, of all that are past, the most honourable to human Nature. Knowledge and Virtues were increased and diffused, Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal Period.

But, what are We to say now? Is the Nineteenth Century to be a contrast to the Eighteenth? Is it to extinguish all the Lights of its Predecessor? Are the Sorbonne, the Inquisition, the Index expurgatorius, and the Knights Errant of St Ignatius Loyola to be revived and restored to all their salutary Powers of supporting and propagating the mild Spirit of Christianity? The Proceedings of the Allies and their Congress at Vienna, the Accounts from Spain France etc the Chateaubriands and the Genlis, indicate which Way the Wind blows. The Priests are at their Old Work again. The Protestants are denounced and another St Bartholomew's day, threatened.

This however, will probably, 25 Years hence, be honoured with the Character of "the effusions of a splenetic mind, rather than as the sober reflections of an unbiassed Understanding."

THOMAS JEFFERSON to JOHN ADAMS

Monticello Jan. 11 1816

...

I agree with you in all it's eulogies on the 18th century. It certainly witnessed the sciences and arts, manners and morals, advanced to a higher degree than the world had ever before seen. And might we not go back to the aera of the Borgias, by which time the barbarous ages had reduced national morality to it's lowest point of depravity, and observe that the arts and sciences, rising from that point, advanced gradually thro' all the 16th. 17th. and 18th. centuries, softening and correcting the manners and moral of man? I think too we may add, to the great honor of science and the arts, that their natural effect is, by illuminating public opinion, to erect it into a Censor, before which the most exalted tremble for their future, as well as present fame.

With some exceptions only, through the 17th. and 18th. centuries morality occupied an honorable chapter in the political code of nations. You must have observed while in Europe, as I thought I did, that those who administered the governments of the greater powers at least, had a respect to faith, and considered the dignity of their government as involved in it's integrity. A wound indeed was inflicted on this character of honor in the 18th. century by the partition of Poland. But this was the atrocity of a barbarous government chiefly, in conjunction with a smaller one still scrambling to become great, while one only of these already great, and having character to lose, descended to the baseness of an accomplice in the crime.

France, England, Spain shared in it only inasmuch as they stood aloof and permitted it's perpetration. How then has it happened that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation to character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right? Can this sudden apostacy from national rectitude be accounted for?

The treaty of Pilnitz seems to have begun it, suggested perhaps by the baneful precedent of Poland. Was it from the terror of monarchs, alarmed at the light returning on them from the West, and kindling a Volcano under their thrones? Was it a combination to extinguish that light, and to bring back, as their best auxiliaries, those enumerated by you, the Sorbonne, the Inquisition, the Index expurgatorius, and the knights of Loyola?

Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300. years before. France, after crushing and punishing the conspiracy of Pilnitz, went herself deeper and deeper into the crimes she has been chastising. I say France, and not Bonaparte; for altho' he was the head and mouth, the nation furnished the hands which executed his enormities. England, altho' in opposition, kept full pace with France, not indeed by the manly force of her own arms, but by oppressing the weak, and bribing the strong. At length the whole choir joined and divided the weaker nations among them.

Your prophecies to Dr. Price proved truer than mine [This is a reference to Adams making dire predictions about which way the French revolution was going to go - not a popular view at the time. Adams sensed impending disaster and carnage, and Jefferson thought that "the blood of patriots and tyrants" were needed to water "the tree of liberty". Adams predicted to Dr. Price, in a letter, that a million people would eventually die.]; and yet fell short of the fact, for instead of a million, the destruction of 8 or 10 millions of human beings has probably been the effect of these convulsions. I did not, in 89. believe they would have lasted so long, nor have cost so much blood. But altho' your prophecy has proved true so far, I hope it does not preclude a better final result. That same light from our West seems to have spread and illuminated the very engines employed to extinguish it. It has given them a glimmering of their rights and their power. The idea of representative government has taken root and growth among them. Their masters feel it, and are saving themselves by timely offers of this modification of their own powers. Belgium, Prussia, Poland, Lombardy etc. are now offered a representative organization: illusive probably at first, but it will grow into power in the end. Opinion is power, and that opinion will come.

Even France will attain representative government. You observe it makes the basis of every constitution which has been demanded or offered: of that demanded by their Senate; of that offered by Bonaparte; and of that granted by Louis XVIII. The idea then is rooted, and will be established, altho' rivers of blood may yet flow between them and their object. The allied armies now couching upon them are first to be destroyed, and destroyed they will surely be. A nation united can never be conquered.

We have seen what the ignorant bigotted and unarmed Spaniards could do against the disciplined veterans of their invaders. What then may we not expect from the power and character of the French nation? The oppressors may cut off heads after heads, but like those of the Hydra, they multiply at every stroke. The recruits within a nation's own limits are prompt and without number; while those of their invaders from a distance are slow, limited, and must come to an end.

I think too we perceive that all these allies do not see the same interest in the annihilation of the power of France. There are certainly some symptoms of foresight in Alexander that France might produce a salutary diversion of force were Austria and Prussia to become her enemies. France too is the natural ally of the Turk, as having no interfering interests, and might be useful in neutralizing and perhaps turning that power on Austria. That a re-acting jealousy too exists with Austria and Prussia I think their late strict alliance indicates; and I should not wonder if Spain should discover a sympathy with them. Italy is so divided as to be nothing.

Here then we see new coalitions in embrio which after France shall in turn have suffered a just punishment for her crimes, will not only raise her from the earth on which she is prostrate, but give her an opportunity to establish a government of as much liberty as she can bear, enough to ensure her happiness and prosperity. When insurrection begins, be it where it will, all the partitioned countries will rush to arms, and Europe again become an Arena of gladiators. And what is the definite object they will propose? A restoration of the status quo prius, of the state of possession of 89.

I see no other principle on which Europe can ever again settle down in lasting peace. I hope your prophecies will go thus far, as my wishes do, and that they, like the former, will prove to have been the sober dictates of a superior understanding, and a sound calculation of effects from causes well understood.

The Books: "The True History of the United States of America" (Elbridge Streeter Brooks)

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

Next book in my American history section is a book I found in the second-hand bookstore near my parents house - and I just treasure it, in all its outdated glory. Even the title shows it is from a different age. It is called: The True History of the United States of America. And even the author's NAME shows it is from a different age. It is by Elbridge S. Brooks. Elbridge Brooks? Now that's a 19th century moniker! It's a book for kids - and it was first published in 1891 - but I guess it was a big hit at the time, so they kept re-releasing it over the years. But my copy is the 1891 copy. It has that almost glossy type of pages where if you run your hands over it, you can feel the imprint of the type. I love that. And it's filled with awesome illustrations - woodcuts, and cartoons from the newspapers, and drawings of this or that great event in the "true history" of America -- I love the drawings. I just love the whole she-bang. I even love the tone ... the tone boils everything down to its essentials, so that high school kids could get the jist of it.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter III - called "The Naming of America".

The whole John Cabot flag story reminds me of Eddie Izzard's hysterical bit about Empire: "England took over other countries and then maintained a vast empire - They did this with the cunning use of flags." He imagines the first confrontation with India. Snooty English voice: "You're OUR country now." Indian person: "What are you talking about? There are billions of us ... we LIVE here, ya bastards." Snooty English person: "Yes, but ... do you have a flag?"

From i>The True History of the United States of America, by Elbridge S. Brooks.

Columbus, as you have heard, did not know that he had discovered a new world. He thought he had merely touched some of the great islands off the eastern coast of Asia. Even when, in the month of August, 1498, he first saw the mainland of America, at the mouth of the river Orinoco, he did not imagine that he had found a new continent, but believed that he had discovered the fabled river of the East into which, so men said, flowed the four great rivers of the world -- the Ganges, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile.

But his success set other men to thinking, and after his wonderful voyage in 1492 many expeditions were sent westward for purpose of discovery and exploration. After he had found "Cathay" every man, he declared, wanted to become a discoverer. There is an old saying you may have heard that tells us "nothing succeeds like success." And the success of Columbus sent many adventurers sailing westward. They, too, wished to share in the great riches that were to be found in "the lands where the spices grow," and they believed they could do this quite as well as the great admiral. Once at a dinner given to Columbus a certain envious Spaniard declared that he was tired of hearing the admiral praised so highly for what any one else could have done. "Why," said he, "if the admiral had not discovered the Indies, do you think there are not other men in Spain who might have done this?" Columbus made no reply to the jealous Don, but took an egg from its dish. "Can any of you stand this egg on end?" he asked. One after another of the company tried it and failed, whereupon the admiral struck it smartly on the table and stood it upright on its broken part. "Any of you can do it now," he said, "and any of you can find the Indies, now that I have shown you the way."

So every great king in Europe desired to possess new principalities beyond the sea. Spain, Portugal, France, England alike sent out voyages of discovery westward -- "trying to set the egg on end."

Of all these discoverers two other Italians, following where Columbus had led, are worthy of special note -- John Cabot, sent out by King Henry the Seventh of England in 1497, and Amerigo or Alberigo Vespucci, who is said to have sailed westward with a Spanish expedition in the same year. Both of these men, it is asserted, saw the mainland of America before Columbus did, and England founded her claims to possession in South America and fought many bloody wars to maintain them because John Cabot in 1497 "first made the American continent" and set up the flag of England on a Canadian headland. In that same year of 1497 Cabot sailed along the North American coast from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson; and Vespucci, although this is doubted by many, sailed in the same year along the southern coast from Florida to North Carolina. In 1499 Vespucci really did touch the South American coast, and in 1503 he built the first fort on the mainland near the present city of Rio de Janiero.

Both these Italian navigators thought at first, as did Columbus, that they had found the direct way to the Indies, and each one earnestly declared himself to have been the first to discover the mainland. At any rate Vespucci could talk and write the best and he had many friends among the scholars of his day. When, therefore, it really dawned upon men that the land across the seas to which the genius of Columbus had led them was not India or "Cathay" but a new continent, then it was that the man who had the most to say about it obtained the greatest glory -- that of giving it a name.

Wise men who have studied the matter deeply are greatly puzzled just how to decide whether the continent of America took its name from Amerigo Vespucci or whether Vespucci took his name from America. Those who hold to the first quote from a very old book that says, "a fourth part of the world, since Amerigo found it, we may call Amerigo or America;" those who incline to the other opinion claim that America came from an old Indian word Maraca-pan or Amarca, a South American country and tribe; Vespucci, they say, used this native word to designate the new land, and upon its adoption by map-makers deliberately changed his former name of Alberigo or Albericus Vespucci to Amerigo or Americus.

But whichever of these two opinions is correct, the Italian astronomer and ship chandler Vespucci received the honor and glory that Columbus should have received or that Cabot might justly have claimed, and the great continent upon which we live has for nearly four hundred years borne the name that he or his admirers gave to it -- America.

The Books: "A History of the American People" (Paul Johnson)

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

Next book in my American history section is the massive A History of the American People , by Paul Johnson. Massive in scope and really well-written - I totally recommend this book. There are swaths of American history I'm not clear on ... and Paul Johnson attempts to cover it all: industries rising, the birth of American literature, the religious renaissance that swept the nation in the 1800s ... but then, of course, we go through each President ... and each administration, the events that shaped our nation, domestic and foreign. Johnson's English, an outsider, but I think that makes him even more qualified to write about some of this stuff, because he's not trying to stick it to a political party he despises, he's not trying to right a historical wrong, he doesn't write with a massive CHIP on his shoulder, which is unbelievably refreshing. He certainly has opinions - he's LOADED with opinions ... but it's still an outsider's analysis of how our nation morphed into what it is today. Johnson loves America. He is certainly not uncritical of a lot of it - but whatever, we're a huge nation - anyone who is completely uncritical of America in a kneejerk way is a moron.

Johnson writes at the end of his introduction: "I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the fly-blown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans, or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen. I love them and salute them, and this is their story."

He's a marvelous writer. This book is enormous and rather daunting - but I can't recommend it highly enough.

It was hard to figure out what to choose as an excerpt - there's so much awesome information here - but I decided to go with an excerpt from his section called "Monster Cities: Chicago and New York". I loved this section especially because Chicago and New York are both so dear to me ... I loved reading about their development.

From A History of the American People , by Paul Johnson.

New York, by contrast, was circumferenced by water and chose to have its park, on a giant scale, in the middle. New York was still second in size to Philadelphia at the time of the 1810 census, with 91,874 to 96,373 people, and the plan for its development laid down the following year provided only minimum public spaces (its original Parade Ground between 23rd and 34th Streets had been long since greedily built over). But when the fashions for laying out big public parks within cities was brought from London and Paris soon after, New York still had plenty of undeveloped land in central Manhattan, and the city fathers were able to set aside an enormous area. The landscape architect F.L. Olmsted (1822-1903), from Hartford, Connecticut, that nursery of genius, together with the Londoner Calvert Vaux (1824-95), designed Central Park as an extraordinary multi-class complex of carriage drives, walks, lakes for fishing, boating, and skating, and boulder-strewn wilderness woods.

By the time the Park was in working order the City was fast growing up around it. Population was then 813,000. Forty years later, thanks largely to immigration, it was nearly 3,500,000 and still growing at breakneck speed. The rise of high buildings meant that the immense flat space of Central Park was increasingly surrounded by a periphery of stone and masonry achieving spectacular effects of precisely the rus in urbe appeal which had been the aim of the earliest town planners, like John Nash of London. No other city in the world can produce these skylines. First came four or five-story structures, developed out of British precedent for shops, factories, and warehouses, the leading spirits being two brilliant iron-founders of the 1850s, Daniel Badger and James Bogardus. From this emerged cage-constructions, whose interiors were self-supporting metal frameworks reinforced by independent masonry walls. Next was skeleton-type construction, in which even the external walls hung off the metal frame. The Equitable Building of 1868-70 is often regarded as the first New York skyscraper: it had a frontage only five bays wide but it rose to 142 feet in eight stories and was serviced by two elevators. (Its replacement, the Equitable Building of 1913-15, was an entire block, reached forty stories and 542 feet, and had forty-eight elevators making 50,000 trips a day, giving some idea of the leap from large to gigantic in New York City in these four decades.

Evidently the New York skyline was beginning to assume its characteristic form, and to promote deep thoughts in visitors, as early as 1876, when T.H. Huxley, the leading promoter of scientific ideas in Europe, made his first visit. His verdict was: "Ah, that is interesting. In the Old World, the first things you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here you see, first, centers of intelligence." Huxley was in a sense right: the skyscraper represented the application of science at its frontiers and imaginative intelligence in the art of building in precisely the way a great Renaissance architect like Michelangelo would have instantly appreciated. But the men who devoted huge creative intelligence and engineering and mathematical skills to making New York a "scientific city" did not share Huxley's atheism. Rather the contrary. A characteristic American religiosity tended to enter even the field of the high-rise and the structurally gigantic. John Roebling (1806-99), the German-trained immigrant who designed the Brooklyn Bridge (it was completed by his son Washington in 1883), then the longest suspension bridge in the world, said it was "proof positive that our mind is one with the Great Universal Mind."

New York differed from Chicago in key respects. Though less innovative, it was richer in the sense that it was the source of the capital for Chicago as well as itself, and most major firms with immortal longings, who wished to commemorate themselves with the tallest, largest, most expensive skyscraper, had their headquarters in New York. So ultimately New York skyscrapers were not only taller but more decorative. The ten-story Western Union headquarters was put up in 1873-5, followed quickly by the eleven-story Tribune building, then the sixteen-story World Building in 1889-90 and the twenty-story Manhattan Life Insurance giant of 1893. New York soon surpassed Chicago in height, with ten stories or more added every decade, and it indulged in fantastic and often beautiful accretions of domes, columns, and spires. Most New York skyscrapers were permanent advertisements for their companies. Thus the Singer Building of 1902 paid for its construction by one year's extra sales in Asia alone. Equally, New York's vast insurance industry dictated the construction, regardless of cost, of headquarters buildings which vaunted strength, size, and durability (rather like banks). In the first decade of the 20th century, the Metropolitan Life had insurance in force totaling over $2.2 billion, so it built and occupied, 1909-10, an immense temple in the sky which was 700 feet high, the world's tallest for a time. Another example was the spectacular Woolworth Building of 1911, which for long represented the skyscraper. Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852-1919), who established his first five-and-ten-cent store in 1879 and by 1911 had over 1,000 worldwide, told the contractor who put up his building that though it could never make a proper return on capital it had an enormous hidden profit as a gigantic signboard.

By 1903 office rents were four times higher in Manhattan than in central Chicago and that was one reason buildings were taller. High rents also determined the cluster of skyscrapers within easy reach of the Stock Exchange: by 1910 they could be as high as $24,750 a square foot in Wall Street but only $800 in South Street a few blocks away. Then in 1916 came the New York Set-Back ordinance: so long as your architect worked out the set-backs correctly, you could go to any height you liked. Grandeur and display raised the height well above the economic optimum and by 1930 it was averaging sixty-three stories in the best area around Grand Central, with the Chrysler Building (1929-30) pushing up to seventy-seven stories, the extra being the advertising element. The sensation of the 1920s, indeed, was the development of the Grand Central area as an alternative to Wall Street, and New York skyscrapers are still to this day grouped around these two foci.

But we are getting ahead of our story, and above it too, for beneath the towering New York high-rises were the clustering tenements, themselves also multistory, of the burgeoning metropolis of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. New York had begun as a Dutch city, then had expanded as a mainly English city, then in the 19th century had broadened into a multiethnic city, much favored by Germans and, above all, by the Irish. Then came the turn of the Italians, the Greeks, and the Jews from Eastern Europe. The outbreak of savage state pogroms in Russia from 1881 had dramatic consequences for New York. In the following ten years Jews were arriving in the city at the rate of 9,000 a year. In the 1890s it jumped to an average of 37,000 a year and in the twelve years 1903-14 it averaged 76,000 a year. In 1886 the Grench people commemorated the centenary of American Independence by having their sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi fashion a gigantic copper statue of Liberty, which was placed on a 154-foot pedestal on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor, the whole rising to 305 feet, making it the highest statue in the world. A local Jewish relief worker, Emma Lazarus (1849-87), whose talent had been spotted by Emerson, grasped, perhaps better than anyone else in America at that time, the true significance of the open-door policy to the persecuted poor of Europe. So she wrote a noble sonnet, "The New Colossus," celebrating the erection of the statue, in which the Goddess of Liberty herself speaks to the Old World:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-toss'd to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The refugees and the huddled masses crowded not just into Manhattan as a whole but in particular into the Lower East Side, one and a half square miles bounded by the Bowery, Third Avenue, Catherine Street, 14th Street, and the East River. In 1894 the density of Manhattan reached 142.2 people an acre, as opposed to 126.9 in Paris and 100.8 in Berlin. They were much higher than the Chicago tenements, perhaps safer -- fire escapes had been made obligatory in 1867 -- and far more crowded. The most infested were the Dumbell Tenements, which get their name from a shape determined by the 1879 regulartion which imposed airshafts. They were five to eight stories high, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep, and with fourteen rooms, only one of which got natural light, on each floor. Over half a million Jews were crowded into the Lower Easy Side, and the heart of New York Jewry was the Tenth Ward, where, in 1893, 74,401 people lived in 1,196 tenements spread over six blocks. Five years later the population density in Tenth Ward was 747 persons per acre or 478,080 per square mile. By comparison, the modern density of Calcutta is only 101,010 per square mile (1961-3). The New York buildings had more stories of course; even so, the Tenth Ward was probably the most crowded habitation, in the 1890s, in the whole of human history. By 1900 there were 42,700 tenements in Manhattan, housing 1,585,000 people.

So here were luxury skyscrapers surrounded by slums, an image of rich-and-poor America. And the poor were, in a sense, sweated labor, most of them in the 'needle trades'. By 1888 no less than 234 out of 241 New York clothing firms were Jewish. By 1913 clothing was New York's biggest industry, with 16,552 factories, nearly all Jewish, employing 312,245 people. But the apparent rich-poor dichotomy concealed a huge engine of upward mobility. The whole engine of America was upwardly mobile, but New York, for the penniless immigrant, was the very cathedral of ascent.

The Books: "April 1865: The Month That Saved America" (Jay Winik)

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

Next book in my American history section is April 1865: The Month That Saved America , by Jay Winik

I loved this book. Fun. I couldn't put it down. What a freakin' month it was.

Here's an excerpt about the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination. Some incredible images here. The image of the farmers kneeling in their fields just ... gets me right in the throat.

From April 1865: The Month That Saved America , by Jay Winik

In New York, on 550 Broadway, precisely at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, the clock at Tiffany % Co., held aloft by a huge wooden Atlas, had come to a halt. This was no doubt fitting, for, as was well known, Charles Lewis Tiffany greatly esteemed Lincoln.

Across town, in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman was at home when he heard the news. His mother prepared their breakfast, as usual, but it was left untouched and unnoticed, as were the rest of the day's meals. He sipped a half cup of coffee, and after pushing his plate of food away, he scoured every newspaper, silently passing them back and forth with his mother. Then he crossed over to Manhattan and, to darkening skies and driving rain, trudged up Broadway, past shuttered stores hung with black. "Lincoln's death," he wrote in his notebook, " -- black, black, black -- as you look toward the sky -- long broad black, like great serpents."

Four days later, farther north, in Concord, Massachusetts, all business and labor was suspended between eleven and two o'clock, as the townspeople moodily gathered in the local Unitarian church. Music was played and selections from the Scriptures and prayers were read. Then Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a somber address: "Rarely was [a] man so fitted to events," he said of Lincoln, about whom he had often had severe reservations. "Only Washington can compare with him in the future."

To the south, it would take a full seven days for Mary Chestnut to receive the news of the assassination, which arrived for her husband on April 22 in a sealed envelope, by secret dispatch. She opened it. "It is simply maddening, all this," she wrote. A friend of hers saw it differently: "See if they don't take vengeance on us," she warned, "now that we are ruined and cannot repel them any longer." Another friend quipped defiantly: "I call that a warning to tyrants!"

By then, though, Lincoln had been eulogized, his funeral had been held, and his remains had begun the long j ourney home to Springfield. On Wednesday, April 19, Lincoln's casket spent its final hours lying in state in the East Room of the White House. Outside, the sun beamed, and a gentle breeze caressed the sky. Inside, black was everywhere: on the chandeliers, on the ornate gilt frames of the mirrors, in the adjoining rooms, even on the steps. The East Room itself was hushed, dim, somber. Lincoln's coffin rested on a flower-covered catafalque, a bed of roses at his feet. Even in death, his gangly frame filled the open casket: his head rested on a white pillow, a queer smile fixed on his lips. At eleven that morning, the services began.

Six hundred people crowded into the room. All of official Washington was here: President Johnson and his cabinet, Senator Sumner and his congressional colleagues. Justice Chase and the Supreme Court, generals and the diplomatic corps, Lincoln's personal cavalry and bodyguards, his personal aides and his sons, Robert and Tad, standing at the foot of the coffin, grief-stricken. At the other end, General Grant sat, alone, his numbed gaze fixed on a cross of lilies, a black mourning crepe wound around his arm. In full view, he wept, later maintaining that this was the saddest day of his life. For his part, President Johnson stood erect and qujet, facing the middle, his hands crossed on his breast. Four ministers spoke and delivered their prayers. Then the casket was closed.

With machinelike efficiency, twelve veteran corps sergeants lifted the coffin, carrying it out into the funeral car, into the sunlit day, into the dirge of bells tolling and bands playing for the dead. In slow time, the funeral procession started up Pennsylvania Avenue. With a detachment of black troops in the lead, it moved, in careful, measured, rhythmic steps. Lincoln's empty boots sat eerily in the stirrups of his riderless horse, which followed behind, as though ready to join his master in the afterlife, while columns of mourners trudged to the steady, muffled roll of drums. Arms reversed, battalions and regiments were next. Soon the lines curved and swelled, like the great blue sky, with wounded soldiers, torn and bandaged men, marching along. Behind them came a cortege of black citizens, stretching from curb to curb in neatly ordered lines of forty -- 4,000 of them all told, in dark coats and shiny white gloves, clasping hands and quiet, as they strode along. In their wake, heavy artillery rumbled.

When the procession reached the Capitol, the sergeants gently lifted Lincoln into the rotunda, where he lay in state on another catafalque. All the oil paintings and bright white statues were covered, except for the figure of George Washington, on which a simple black sash was tied. During that day, and the next, thousands of people filed through, to get one last glimpse and pay their last respects. Noah Brooks recorded: "Like black atoms moving over a sheet of gray, the slow moving mourners ... crept silently in two dark lines across the pavement of the rotunda ..."

The next day, April 21, a nine-car funeral train bore Lincoln from the capital. It would make a journey of fourteen days and 1,662 miles, back to Illinois, retracing the route that a freshly elected United States president had taken to Washington four years earlier.

The train crept forward, to ringing bells and through the soft, spring landscape. All along the route, people gathered, watching in stunned silence as the train rolled by under the velvety sky. In Philadelphia, Lincoln's coffin was placed in Independence Hall, where a double line of mourners stretched three miles deep. Among them was former President Buchanan, just one day shy of his seventieth birthday; ignoring his advancing age, he had driven his buggy all the way from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see the fallen president. In New York City, the procession continued for four hours. Eighty-five thousand mourners accompanied the funeral hearse through the streets beneath a thicket of signs. "Mankind has lost a friend and we a President," one sign said. Another read: "In sorrowing tears the nation's grief is spent." A tearful Walt Whitman would never forget this moment: from that time on, every spring, with its lilacs blooming and the season blossoming, would remind him of the coffin passing in the street. Six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was there, too, leaning out of the second-floor window, watching the spectacle from his grandfather's twon house on Broadway. In Albany, Lincoln rested in the statehouse, and people came all through the night to lay their eyes on his open coffin. Two presidents, one former and one future, would rush to Buffalo to join the long lines of mourners: Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. Then the train steamed west, past farmers kneeling in their planting fields, to Cleveland, where a special outdoor pavilion was set up -- for no outdoor public building was large enough to accommodate the expected crowds -- through which 10,000 mourners passed each hour, braving a cold, steady rain. In all, 150,000 came. Indianapolis followed, on the night run. It was lit up by bonfires, with attentive crowds standing in the rain, mute and still, as the train slowly glided by like a ghost. In Chicago, the hearse was shepherded by thirty-six young women, dressed in white, representing each state in the restored Union. There, too, were Lincoln's fellow Illinoisians, silent columns of heartbroken colleagues and friends marching lockstep by his side in one subdued, final tribute.

The Books: "1812 : The War That Forged a Nation" (Walter R. Borneman)

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

Next book in my American history section is 1812 : The War That Forged a Nation , by Walter R. Borneman.

It's just not a well-written book. Sorry, Borneman. It's just not. The author actually uses the word "Hey" a lot in the text. Like: "Hey, the British were impressing American soldiers ... what choice did the Americans have?" Hey? HEY???? But I have some bad books on my shelves - and this book excerpt thing isn't about me editorially choosing my "favorites" ... So here it is. 1812.

Here's an excerpt detailing the battle between the USS Constitution and the HMS Guerriere on August 19, 1812. Yawn.

From 1812 : The War That Forged a Nation , by Walter R. Borneman.

Leaving Boston harbor, Hull steered the Constitution northeast along the coasts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and took up station off Cape Race in the Gulf of St. Lawrence -- the route of Canada's lifeline to Great Britian. Constitution captured and sank two British merchantmen there and then turned south toward Bermuda. She soon chased down a brig that turned out to be the American privateer Decatur, of fourteen guns. Her captain reported to Hull that he had outrun a British frigate the day before. This was good news to Hull. Now he knew that there was a British warship in the vicinity and that he had just run down a vessel that had proven faster the day before.

About two o'clock on the afternoon of August 19, 1812, the Constitution's lookouts raised cries of "Sail ho" and pointed to a sail bearing east-southeast. Pulses quickened. Having the wind, the Constitution gave chase and quickly closed to within three miles. Both ships beat to general quarters, but Hull was still uncertain about the identity of his quarry. It soon proved to be the frigate Guerriere, and her captain was about to get his wish for a chance at revenge. Supposedly Captain Dacres was quoted as boasting, "There is the Yankee frigate: in forty-five minutes she is certainly ours: take her in fifteen and I promise you four months' pay!"

As Constitution closed with GFuerriere from its windward side, an overeager Dacres ordered his crew to fire broadside after broadside at the approaching vessel. By and large, Hull held his fire, much to the consternation of Lieutenant Morris, who asked three times for permission to do so. British cannonballs struck the Constitution, but did little damage. After one particularly well-aimed British broadside bounced harmlessly off Constitution's hull, a crew member is reported to have exclaimed, "Hurrah, her sides are made of iron," or words to that effect. No matter. A legend was born, and "Old Ironsides" she became.

Finally, with the two ships but twenty-five yards apart, Hull ordered his first broadside of double-shot -- both a canonball and a canister of grape -- from his starboard guns. The effect on the Guerriere at such close range was dreadful, and the cheers of the British seamen quickly quieted into moans of pain. Constitution fired again and again, and then crossed Guerriere's bow and brought her port guns to bear in equally devastating fashion. Hull, who was rather short and stocky, became so animated that he split the seat clean out of his breeches, an event that did as much for the morale of his crew as the obvious damage being inflicted on Guerriere. When another broadside raked Guerriere and toppled her mizzenmast, Hull ignored his breeches and shouted above the roar, "Huzza, my boys! We've made a brig of her."

The fallen mizzenmast acted as a huge rudder and had the effect of slowing Guerriere and swinging her to starboard despite the efforts of her helmsman. Constitution surged ahead and attempted to cross her bow again, but this time Hull cut the maneuver too close and the Guerriere's bowsprit became entangled in the rigging of the Constitution's mizzenmast. The Constitution poured yet another broadside into the starboard bow of the Guerriere while the Guerriere's own bow guns landed shots that set fire to Captain Hull's cabin. Trumpets sounded on both ships to summon boarding parties, while marine marksmen in the rigging of both ships added deadly small-arms fire to the melee. Aboard Constitution, Lieutenant Morris fell critically wounded as he prepared to lead a boarding party.

Then Guerriere's foremast fell with a splintering crash that took most of her mainmast with it. The ship shuddered and lost most of its forward momentum. Constitution continued under sail and broke loose from the grip of Guerriere's bowsprit. With Guerriere almost dead in the water, Constitution drew apart and prepared to rake her fore and aft with still more broadsides. Suddenly the British frigate fired a shot to leeward -- in the opposite direction of the Constitution. With no flags left to strike, Captain Dacres, who himself had been wounded, was signaling his surrender.

Captain Hull sent Lieutenant George C. Read aboard Guerriere to ascertain the situation. Stepping across decks slippery with blood, young Read confronted Dacres amid the carnage of his quarterdeck and inquired, "Captain Hull presents his compliments, sir, and wishes to know if you have struck your flag?" To this, Dacres is said to have replied, "Well, I don't know. Our mizzen mast is gone, our fore and main masts are gone -- I think on the whole you might say we have struck our flag."

Dacres was escorted aboard Constitution to confront Hull, who refused Dacres's tender of his sword, supposedly saying that he could not take the sword of one who had defended his ship so gallantly. Then Hull asked if there was anything on the Guerriere that Dacres wished to have brought aboard. "Yes," Dacres replied, "my mother's Bible." Hull ordered it retrieved.

Constitution had sustained losses of seven killed and seven wounded to British losses of fifteen killed and seventy-eight wounded -- the latter number due in no small measure to Captain Hull's use of grapeshot at close range. Hull hoped to tow the Guerriere into port as a prize, but by dawn the next morning there was four feet of water in her hold. By midafternoon Hull recalled his prize crew and ordered her blown up. In transferring the crew of Guerriere to the Constitution, Hull found that there were ten impressed Americans aboard -- a graphic example of one of the war's causes. Dacres clearly knew of it because he had graciously permitted the Americans to go belowdecks rather than fight against their countrymen.

The Books: "Founding Brothers" (Joseph Ellis)

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

Next book in my American history section is the marvelous Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation , by Joseph Ellis.

7 guys: Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Madison, Franklin
6 episodes:

-- The duel between Hamilton and Burr
-- George Washington's Farewell Address
-- The Adams administration
-- The heated debate about where to place the capital
-- Benjamin Franklin trying to force Congress to deal with the issue of slavery and James Madison's resistance to that
-- The correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Ellis is one of my favorite popular historians out there. I've read all of his stuff by now. Wonderful writer, but why I really like him is that I like how he THINKS. I like to hear what he thinks about things. He comes at things from a different angle. Unlike so many other historians or biographers, he seems quite comfortable with contradiction, mystery, and with saying, as an author: "We can't really know what Jefferson was thinking here ..." He tries to guess, but we KNOW he's guessing, and it's a pleasure to listen to his speculations.

His biography of Jefferson is not-to-be-missed as well, although I like all of his stuff.

With this book, Founding Brothers he hit the big leagues. As in NY Times bestseller list, etc. Small wonder.

I love it!! I've already read it twice. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on Washington's farewell address (props to Alexander Hamilton) - and why it continuees to be studied, picked apart, interpreted and re-interpreted.

From Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation , by Joseph Ellis.

The disarming simplicity of the statement, combined with its quasi-Delphic character, has made the Farewell Address a perennial candidate for historical commentary. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, the bulk of attention focused on the foreign policy section, advocates of American isolationism citing it as the classic statement of their cause, others arguing that strict isolation was never Washington's intention, or that America's emergence as a world power has rendered Washington's wisdom irrelevant. More recently, the early section of the Farewell Address has been rediscovered, its plea for a politics of consensus serving as a warning against single-issue political movements, or against the separation of American into racial, ethnic, of gender-based constituencies. Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light.

Although Washington's own eyes never changed color and were set very much on the future, he had no way of knowing (much less influencing) the multiple meanings that future generations would discover in his words. The beginning of all true wisdom concerning the Farewell Address is that Washington's core insights were firmly grounded in the lessons he had learned as America's premier military and civilian leader during the revolutionary era. Unless one believes that ideas are like migratory birds that can fly unchanged from one century to the next, the only way to grasp the authentic meaning of his message is to recover the context out of which it emerged. Washington was not claiming to offer novel prescriptions based on his original reading of philosophical treatises or books; quite the opposite, he was reminding his countrymen of the venerable principles he had acquired from personal experience, principles so obvious and elemental that they were at risk of being overlooked by his contemporaries; and so thoroughly grounded in the American Revolution that they are virtually invisible to a more distant posterity.

First, it is crucial to recognize that Washington's extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits. Almost everyone regarded his retirement of 1796 as a repeat performance of his resignation as commander of the Continental Army in 1783. Back then, faced with a restive and unpaid remnant of the victorious army quartered in Newburgh, New York, he had suddenly appeared at a meeting of officers who were contemplating insurrection; the murky plot involved marching on the Congress and then seizing a tract of land for themselves in the West, all presumably with Washington as their leader.

He summarily rejected their offer to become the American Caesar and denounced the entire scheme as treason to the cause for which they had fought. Then, in a melodramatic gesture that immediately became famous, he pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles," he declared rhetorically, "for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: "Having now finished the work assigned me," he announced, "I now retire from the great theatre of action." In so doing, he became the supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so ready to give it up.

The Books: "Miracle At Philadelphia" (Catherine Drinker Bowen)

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

Next book in my American history section is the classic, and one of my all-time favorites: Miracle At Philadelphia : The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787 , by Catherine Drinker Bowen. She's such a good writer that you feel like you were there. She paints brief vivid portraits of all of the participants - many of them have famous names, of course - but there's something about her writing that makes the thing pop off the page. The image of Ben Franklin, with his gout, being carried in a chair by 4 servants to Independence Hall, etc. I mean, obviously, this is one of my favorite times in history - and this book really captures the spirit of why. These guys were BRAINIACS, first of all ... but what really blows me away is how they were just human beings, they couldn't see into the future, but they TRIED ... they tried to set up the constitution in a way to leave enough vagueness, enough ambiguity - that it would continue to be relevant as time went on. It's, frankly, amazing what they were able to accomplish.

This book is fantastic. If you're an American history buff, and you haven't read it -then go out right now and buy it. If you're gonna write about the Constitutional Convention, then this is the book to beat.

Here is an excerpt, describing the arrival of the delegates for the start of the convention.

From Miracle At Philadelphia : The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787 , by Catherine Drinker Bowen.

On the twenty-fifth of May, when a quorum was obtained, Washington was unanimously elected president of the Convention and escorted to the chair. From his desk on the raised dais he made a little speech of acceptance, depreciating his ability to give satisfaction in a scene so novel. "When seated," wrote a member, "he declared that as he never had been in such a situation he felt himself embarrassed, that he hoped his errors, as they would be unintended, would be excused. He lamented his want of qualifications."...
In the front row near the desk, James Madison sat bowed over his tablet, writing steadily. His eyes were blue, his face ruddy; he did not have the scholar's pallor. His figure was well-knit and muscular and he carried his clothes with style. Though he usually wore black, he has also been described as handsomely dressed in blue and buff, with ruffles at breast and wrist. Already he was growing bald and brushed his hair down to hide it; he wore a queue and powder. He walked with the quick bouncing step that sometimes characterizes men of remarkable energy.

As a reporter Madison was indefatigable, his notes comprehensive, set down without comment or aside. One marvels that he was able at the same time to take so large a part in the debates. It is true that in old age Madison made some emendations in the record to accord with various disparate notes which later came to light; he has been severely criticized for it. Other members took notes at the Convention: Hamilton, Yates and Lansing of New York, McHenry of Maryland, Paterson of New Jersey, Rufus King of Massachusetts, William Pierce of Georgia, George Mason of Virginia. But most of these memoranda were brief, incomplete; had it not been for Madison we should possess very scanty records of the Convention. His labors, he said later, nearly killed him. "I chose a seat," he afterward wrote, "in front of the presiding member, with the other members on my right and left hand. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted in terms legible and in abbreviations and marks intelligble to myself what was read from the Chair or spoken by the members; and losing not a moment unnecessarily between the adjournment and reassembling of the Convention I was enabled to write out my daily notes during the session or within a few finishing days after its close in the extent and form preserved in my own hand on my files ... I was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one."

It was, actually, a tour de force, not to be published -- and scarcely seen -- until thirty years after the Convention. "Do you know," wrote Jefferson to John Adams from Monticello in 1815, "that there exists in manuscript the ablest work of this kind ever yet executed, of the debates of the constitutional convention of Philadelphia ...? The whole of everything said and done there was taken down by Mr. Madison, with a labor and exactness beyond comprehension." ...

"The State of Georgia, by the grace of God, free, Sovereign and Independent" ... On Friday morning, May twenty-fifth, as soon as Washington had finished his little speech of acceptance from the chair, Major Jackson rose to read aloud the credentials -- so carefully worked over at home -- of the nine states present. It was noticeable that the smallest states spoke out with the loudest voice. Georgia, referred to as "small and trifling" because of her sparse population, announced herself to the Convention with a proud resounding orchestration which left little doubt of her position ... "Sovereign and Independent."

Certain members of the Convention were already heartily sick of the word sovereign. The monster, sovereignty, Washington had called it. The General knew well from what sanction Georgia derived the word. "Each state," the Articles of Confederation had said, "retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence." Without such a clause the Confederacy never would have been achieved ...

Before the Declaration of Independence, no colony had pretensions to independent sovereignty, nor were the states mentioned by name in the body of that document. Yet from the moment peace had been signed, states flaunted their sovereignty as an excuse to do as they pleased. "Thirteen sovereignties," Washington had written, "pulling against each other, and all tugging at the foederal head, will soon bring ruin on the whole."

A General of the Army is not expected to possess so direct and merciless a political eye. Already on May 25, 1787, it looked as if the Federal Convention were to have its fill of sovereignty. The reading aloud of these state credentials was a matter for strict attention; here were signs portent of which way the states were leaning. Madison and Hamilton thought they already knew. Madison had canvassed exhaustively; both men were personally acquainted with many delegates, some of whom had themselves drafted these documents and no doubt would stand by what they had written. Delaware, for instance, whose credentials forbade her deputies to change Article V of the Confederation, giving to each state one vote in Congress and one vote only. Proportional representation was no part of Delaware's scheme. Should the old rule be altered to voting by population, the small states would be blanketed out. Delaware had come prepared to oppose it.

Small states against large, the planting interests of the South against the mercantile money of the North, the regulation of the Western Territory -- these were immediate problems. Not every delegate brought to Philadelphia a comprehension of how thirteen independent states could share a government of tripartite powers: legislative, judicial, executive. James Wilson of Philadelphia understood it and so did Wythe of Virginia. Wilson and Wythe were scholars like Madison. Not only had they acted a part in government bu tthey had thought, red, pondered on the subject; they knew the theory behind the practice. "I am both a citizen of Pennsylvania and of the United States," Wilson told the Convention.

Time would pass before members realized how far the plans of such men as Madison and Hamilton reached, and what the Constitution promised to be. It would be misleading to name thus early the Constitution's "enemies", or to set down this name or that as "against" the Constitution. Five delegates in the end would refuse to sign -- Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, Yates and Lansing of New York, George Mason and Edmund Randolph of Virginia -- all men of decided views and each with a different reason for his action. More vociferous than any of these would be Luther Martin of Maryland, who, though out of town on private business at the moment of signing, later declared that had he been present he would have given the document his "solemn negative," even had he "stood single and alone".

Martin did not arrive at the Convention until nearly a month after it met; for the moment, members were spared his boisterous and interminable harangues. On this first Saturday of a quorum the Convention faced a twofold problem: the theoretic question of what kind of government best suited America -- a democracy, a limited monarchy, a republic? -- and the practical problem of creating such a government with all its untried component parts. It was good to review, by way of the state credentials, the aims of the Convention as declared by twelve legislatures. Major Jackson's voice droned on:

"To take into consideration the state of the union ... as to trade and other important objects ... to render the Foederal Government entirely adeuqate to the actual situation ..." When Jackson ceased there was time only to name a committee to prepare standing rules and orders, and to appoint a doorkeeper and messenger. The meeting adjourned for the weekend.

The Books: "Angel in the Whirlwind : The Triumph of the American Revolution" (Benson Bobrick)

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

Okay, now I'm all nervous and excited. I'm now ready to begin my American history section. I get nervous about this stuff because I am SO into it that I fear I won't be able to express myself properly. Or - I get so excited that all I want to do is scream. So I get nervous. I'm such a moron.

First book in this section is Angel in the Whirlwind : The Triumph of the American Revolution, by Benson Bobrick. I really like this book. You know why? He comes right out in his introduction saying: "A great many books have been written on the American Revolution and quite a few of them are good. I have not written mine to try to supersede them, or out of some general dissatisfaction with the canon, but -- hearkening to the voice of my own ancestral heritage -- to retell the story in my own way." He had ancestors who died on both sides of the war. So - it's a story he likes, and he decided to write a book about it. There is nothing new here - but what I really like about it is his enthusiasm for the subject. He's not a scholar. He just loves the story, and that comes through in his writing. Fans of this period in history would really enjoy this book. He's no Catherine Drinker-Bowen, but then again - who is?

I also like (as always) how many primary documents he includes. That's the stuff that I really like - because no matter how good a present-day narrator is - the men (and women) who were actually THERE told the story best - in their letters, and speeches, and pamphlets, etc. Bobrick peppers his entire narrative with first-person descriptions of this or that event. The book moves at a breakneck pace, and it's a blast. Again - nothing new, but really enjoyable.

I'm going to post an excerpt about one of my favorite "characters" in this story: Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. In 1778, Steuben - a Prussian, a veteran of many wars, a guy who served under Frederick the Great - arrived at Valley Forge - he was there to help whip the ragtag Continentals into an army that could win. Steuben just fascinates me. He passed himself off as a baron. He wasn't a baron. He passed himself off as a "lieutenant general" - but he had never gotten that high up in the ranks. But hey - he was a "baron" who was also a "lieutenant general", and that's final! Washington was impressed with his abilities, and brought him onto the team. Ben Franklin - who had met Steuben in Paris, and who agreed with the French attitude that the American army needed an overhaul - needed organization - was the one who sent him to America, writing a letter of introduction to Washington for Steuben

Here's an excerpt: (the whole anecdote about the petticoats is hysterical)

EXCERPT FROM Angel in the Whirlwind : The Triumph of the American Revolution, by Benson Bobrick.

On September 26, Steuben set sail for America in a warship that masqueraded as a commercial transport belonging to Beaumarchais's Rodrique Hortalez & Co. with the pretended destination of Martinique. The crossing took two months, which allowed Steuben plenthy of time to occupy himself with mathematical calculations (according to his predilection), take target practice, and acquaint himself with the words of the Abbe Raynal. When his ship finally docked at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on December 1, he was effusively welcomed by the local American commander, inspected the harbor fortifications, and dispatched a letter to Washington at Valley Forge. Briefed in advance about the political sensitivity of foreign appointments, he wrote, "My greatest ambition is to deserve the title of a citizen of America by fighting for the cause of liberty. But if the distinguished ranks in which I have served in Europe should be an obstacle, I had rather serve under your Excellecy as a volunteer than to be a student of discontent to such deserving officers as have already distinguished themselves amongst you."

From Portsmouth, he proceeded to Boston, where he was the guest of John Hancock, and then on to York, Pennsylvania, to see what Congress would do.

The journey was not without adventure. Near the Connecticut border, when his weary party sought refuge from a furious snowstorm, a Tory innkeeper refused to put him up. "I have no beds, bread, meat, drink, milk, nor eggs for you," he adamantly told them, which they could see was untrue. But repeated remonstrations did no good. "Bring me my pistols!" cried Steuben in German, and suddenly the innkeeper found a pistol at his chest. Accommodations were promptly furnished; their table lavishly spread. The following morning, after an abundant breakfast, the party resumed its journey, not forgetting to pay the innkeeper liberally with the Continental money he despised.

In Pennsylvania, where the Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) community was large, he was everywhere received with both hospitality and pride. Many members of the community had portraits of Frederick the Great on their walls, and in one establishment at Manheim he almost collapsed from laughter at an engraving showing a Prussian knocking down a Frenchman, with the caption, "Ein Franzmann zum Preuszen wie eine Mucke" ("To a Prussian a Frenchman is like a goat.")

Steuben made a favorable impression at York. Congress accepted his services, and he set out for Valley Forge. Washington met him on the outskirts of his encampment, and the very next day the troops were mustered for his review. "Never before or since, have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled God of War," wrote a young private long afterward, "as when I looked on the baron: he seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars. The trappings of his horse, the enormous holster of his pistols, his large size, and his strikingly martial aspect, all seemed to favor the idea."

Steuben soon discovered that in the Continental Army as it existed there was little internal administration in the conventional sense. Although the number of men in a regiment or a company, for example, had been fixed by Congress, each was made up of men who had enlisted for different terms. Thus, with the uncharted comings and goings of personnel, at any given moment, a company might have more men in it than a regiment and a regiment than a brigade. "The words company, regiment, brigade and division were so vague," he wrote, "that they did not convey any idea upon which to form a calculation, either of the particular corps or of the army in general ... I have seen a regiment consisting of thirty men, and a company of one corporal ... No captain kept a book." Leaves of absence and even dismissals were not always recorded, and many still on the regimental books had long since ceased to be part of the army. Army property -- muskets, bayonets, clothing, and so on -- was scattered everywhere, and at the end of each campaign, five thousand to eight thousand new muskets were carried off by men whose terms of enlistment had expired. There was no uniform code or system of regulations, and as for drill, "each colonel had a system of his own."

Under Steuben, all that changed. Records were scrupulously kept, and at rigorous monthly inspections, every man not present had to be accounted for, as well as every piece of equipment -- every musket, flint, and cartridge box. Steuben's own methods of discipline were unfamiliar and at first met resistance: "My good republicans wanted everything in the English style; our great and good allies everything according to the French mode. When I presented a plate of sauerkraut dressed in the Prussian style, they all wanted to throw it out of the window. Nevertheless, by the force of proving by Goddams that my cookery was the best, I overcame their prejudices."

Americans were not accustomed to blind obedience, and Steuben recognized and respected this. The genius of the nation, he wrote, "is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, 'Do this,' and he doeth it, but here I am obliged to say, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that': and then he does it."

Steuben's genius was his ability to unite Prussian virtues to those of the American mind. He brought uniformity and order to Continental training, drilled the troops repeatedly in different formations, and taught them how to deploy quickly from column into line, fire scything voleys, and deliver and receive bayonet attacks. He also insisted that all Continental officers drill their own soldiers instead of assigning the task to a soldier of lesser rank, both to encourage greater professionalism and to promote a closer bond between the officers and men. Until his advent, troops had drilled from at least three separate manuals, so that when they brigaded together, disarray ensued.

Steuben's new military manual, or "The Blue Book", simplified and shrewdly adapted standard procedures to the particular requirements of training patriot troops. In European armies at the time, a man who had been drilled for three months was still considered a raw recruit; Steuben knew he could not always count on more than a couple of months in which to turn his American recruits into soldiers. He worked on the manual during the winter of 1779, and it was accepted by Congress on March 29, 1779, ad published as Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, Part I. It remained the official manual of the U.S. Army until the War of 1812.

Steuben's training brought together the best of traditional military thinking and American technique. He took into account the skirmishing style colonials had developed for themselves (in loose bodies rather than in close formations), organized sharpshooters into light infantry companies with their own special discipline and drill (an American innovation afterward adopted by all European armies), taught the Continentals how to use the bayonet, and had them aim their muskets like rifles, which improved their accuracy to a considerable degree. As occasion warranted, the light companies could also be detached from their "parent" regiments, brigaded together in a separate corps, and used as shock troops or advance guards for the main army.

As an example to the other officers, Steuben also created a model company which he drilled himself. "To see a gentleman dignified with a lieutenant general's commission from the great Prussian monarch," wrote one American colonel, "condescend with a grace peculiar to himself to take under his direction a squad of ten or twelve men in the capacity of a drill sergeant, commanded the admiration of both officers and men."

Steuben had begun his task with almost no knowledge of English, and his young secretary and translator, Pierre Duponceau, remembered that "when some movement or maneuver was not performed toi his mind he began to swear in German, then in French, and then in both languages together. When he had exhausted his artillery of foreign oaths, he would call to his aides, 'My dear [Captain Benjamin] Walker and my dear Duponceau, come and swear for me in English. These fellows won't do what I bid them.' A good-natured smile then went through the ranks and at last the maneuver or the movement was properly performed."

(Steuben's English steadily improved to the point where he was capable of a happy pun. Despite his parade-ground vituperations he had an elegant social manner, and on one occasion, on being presented to a beautiful Miss Sheaf, he said, "Ah, madam, I have always been cautioned to avoid mischief, but I never knew till today how dangerous she was.")

Not all his military exercises went as planned. One morning a mock battle was staged between two full divisions. Duponceau was sent to reconnoiter, with orders to return immediately when the enemy was in sight. About a quarter of a mile from camp, he saw a blur of red which he mistook for a body of British soldiers. He raced back with the news that the enemy really was marching on the camp. Steuben's division marched out smartly on the road Duponceau indicated and, drawing near to where the British had supposedly been seen, prepared to charge, when the red blur was discovered to be "some red petticoats hanging on a fence to dry." Duponceau's error naturally excited hilarity, to his own "utter confusion and dismay," and summoned into Washington's presence, he expected a reprimand. Instead, Washington passed aroud a bowl of punch to the officers present and invited Duponceau to share in the good cheer.

On March 24, Steuben put on a demonstration involving Washington's whole army. All the brigades turned out, "each regiment on its own parade," and after he took them through all the formations of their drill, he conducted maneuvers with ten and twelve battalions "with as much precision as the evolution of a single company." A new spirit had entered the army. Its encampment became more orderly, and parades, maneuvers, and reviews exhibited a harmony of movement that gave thousands of soldiers the appearance of acting as a single body under the control of a single will. On March 28, Washington officially appointed Steuben inspector general of the army "till the pleasure of Congress shall be known ... The Importance of establishing an uniform system of useful maneuvers, and regularity of discipline, must be obvious." On May 5, Congress ratified the appointment and gave Steuben the rank of major general in the American army.

The Books: "The Federalist Papers" (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my politics/philosophy section is:

The Federalist Papers (Penguin Classics), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

Written in a period of months from 1787 to 1788 - spearheaded by Alexander Hamilton (otherwise known as "Sheila's dead boyfriend") - the 85 essays that appeared in 4 of the 5 newspapers in New York were created in order to convince the people of the state of New York why they should agree to the ratification of the Constitution. The Constitutional Congress concluded in the early fall of 1787, with all of the delegates returning to their respective states to begin the ratification process. What ended up being known as "The Federalist Papers" were a blitzkrieg of pro-Constitution propaganda. We are so lucky to have them. If you want to understand the Constitution? Read the Federalist Papers. They set out to explain to the reluctant public (who were, in general, horrified at this idea of an "energetic" national government) why a Constitution was necessary, and the whys and wherefores of each part of it. It's an extraordinary work - hugely important - and really explains the inner workings of the grand experiment called the United States. Hamilton did the lion's share of the work (no surprise there - the man was unbelievable. Was he a mortal man or some freak of nature? His productivity was astonishing). Madison wrote, what is perhaps, the most well-known of the papers - Federalist # 10 (I babbled about it here, on the morning of election day), where he warns against faction and the creating of political parties (although he didn't use that word). Fascinating that Madison later, with the turbulent election of 1800, become a genius at party politics. No matter. His Federalist #10 should be required reading. I want to stand over certain politicians in Washington and feed it to them manually. (Now that's an image.)

Each essay appeared under the name "Publius". The depth and breadth of the essays are amazing, considering the speed in which they were written, and the frequency in which they appeared. Frankly, the entire series takes my breath away.

Hamilton is an interesting case. Born illegitimate (in the immortal words of one of his many enemies, John Adams: "the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler"), in the Caribbean - he came to the United States at the age of 15 to further his education. Because he was not affiliated with any one State, his concerns were different than the other delegates at the Constitution, his outlook completely original. He believed in AMERICA, not in a particular State. His loyalty was to the Union, from the beginning. I think his perspective allowed him to see farther ahead than anybody else. Truly. He predicted the industrial revolution, far before anyone else did, for example. It would no longer be land that would make someone wealthy, it would be money itself. You wonder how he did it - but I really think it had something to do with his foreign birth, his hard-scrabble beginnings, and the fact that he came to America as an outsider.

The excerpt for today is from Federalist # 15, one of a couple of essays in the series where Hamilton takes on the old Articles of Confederation that Congress, with its new Constitution, was looking to get rid of. He predicts that the Articles will not be strong enough to handle the problems of the nation in the future. The States must consolidate.

"they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names"

"If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at the fewness of them."

Incredible.

EXCERPT FROM The Federalist Papers (Penguin Classics), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

As almost every State will be one side or the other, be a frontier, and will thus find in a regard to its safety, an inducement to make some sacrifices for the sake of the general protection; so the States which lie at the greatest distance from the heart of the union, and which of course may partake least of the ordinary circulation of its benefits, will be at the same time immediately contiguous to foreign nations, and will consequently stand on particular occasions, in greatest need of its strength and resources. It may be inconvenient for Georgia or the States forming our western or north eastern borders to send their representatives to the seat of government, but they would find it more so to struggle alone against an invading enemy, or even to support alone the whole expence of those precautions, which may be dictated by the neighborhood of continual danger. If they should derive less benefit therefore from the union in some respects, than the less distant States, they will derive greater benefit from it in other respects, and thus the proper equilibrium will be maintained throughout.

I submit to you my fellow citizens, these considerations, in full confidence that the good sense which has so often marked your decisions, will allow them their due weight and effect; and that you will never suffer difficulties, however formidable in appearance or however fashionable the error on which they may be founded, to drive you into the gloomy and perilous scene into which the advocates for disunion would conduct you. Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many chords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great respectable and flourishing empire. Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended for your adoption is a novelty in the political world; that it has never yet had a place in the theories of the wildest projectors; that it rashly attempts what it is impossible to accomplish.

No my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defence of their sacred rights, consecrate the union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies. And if novelties are to be shunned, believe me the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rending us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties and promote our happiness. But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.

Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment, have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been labouring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind. Happily for America, happily we trust for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society: They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate. If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the union; this was the work most difficult to be executed; this is the work which has been new modelled by the act of your Convention, and it is that act on which you are now to deliberate and to decide.

PUBLIUS.