Social Welfare as Common Sense

My cherie and I spent part of a recent drive in Florida reading and discussing Thomas Paine’s 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice,” a document both of its time and surprisingly prescient. AJ’s central premise and proposals grew from Paine’s reflections on natural rights throughout the course of his career. Briefly: private property was responsible for all that was best and worst in “civilized” countries. Property rights encouraged cultivation and increased productivity, such that agrarian countries could support ten times as many people as hunter-gatherer societies of equivalent territory. On the other hand, property produced a grotesque level of inequality, such that the most “degraded” people in the world lived cheek-by-jowl with the richest. Paine’s solution to the latter problem was not to eliminate property rights and agrarian civilization altogether, but to assert that all people had a property right that governments must secure to them: their collective ownership of land’s pre-improvement value, together with an equivalent fraction of the value of personal property. (He guesstimated that each fraction was about ten percent.) He grounded these rights in the assumption that land before improvement was the common property of all, and that part of the value of personalty came from “society,” which provided the labor markets, intellectual capital, and other structures that facilitated creation of that property. Governments - he addressed himself to his fellow revolutionaries in France and his former countrymen in England - should detach these fractions from property owners by way of a tax, and return it to all citizens by way of cash payments. Paine proposed an inheritance tax as least intrusive, since dead men needed little money and their children would eventually get part of the exaction transferred back to them. As for the payments themselves, AJ proposed giving every man and woman 15 pounds (the equivalent of about $3000 today) when they reached the age of 21, a “social dividend” that would help them set up an independent household and farm; in addition, every person over the age of 50, and every disabled person below that age, would receive L10 annually for their support. It is worth noting that Paine calculated the average adult life expectancy at 51 years, and the number of younger disabled people as fairly small. Nonetheless, his proposals are viewed today (by the American Social Security Administration, inter alia) as one of the intellectual foundations of social insurance, a feature of most modern nation-states.

Citizen Paine expected the rich and powerful to oppose his tax on legacies rather than his payouts to the young and old. Two centuries of subsequent experience with the kind of social insurance program proposed in “Agrarian Justice” suggests the elite would actually oppose pensions and social dividends more than the supporting taxes. Their sticking point was and is Paine’s characterization of these payments as rights. In the Anglo-American world, at least, the upper classes have long been nervous about rights language, which might give the lower orders ideas above their station, and preferred to think instead of charity. Charity affirms the status and power of the giver and the humility and dependence of the recipient. The highborn sometimes even think of employment as a charitable enterprise: in the eighteenth century English gentleman so characterized their hiring of craftsmen and servants, and in our own time the American Republican Party, appanage of the plutocratic order, has proposed replacing Labor Day with “Job Creators’ Day,” to celebrate the generosity of management toward the plebeians. In an aside, Paine noted that the personal wealth of employers often came from their underpaying of their workers. He was, perhaps, insufficiently cynical, insofar as he could not see that the owner class preferred not to pay their workers at all, unless they could see those workers grovel for their pittance. Nor do I think he could have predicted that such attitudes would persist for over 225 years, and likely for another 225 after that.

Quote of the Week

Students of the early American republic will probably remember the highly-conditional emancipationist sentiments Thomas Jefferson expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782). The state should abolish slavery, TJ wrote, but African-American freedmen should not be permitted to remain in the Commonwealth, lest they try to take vengeance on their former masters or - perhaps worse, in Jefferson's eyes - marry them.* This was a common enough sentiment among whites in the contemporary upper South, one which would help inspire the colonization movement of the early nineteenth century.

Lest we think that only Virginia slaveholders held such views, however, let us attend to the words of Governor James Sullivan (1744-1808) of Massachusetts, who expressed Jefferson's idea in more allegorical (and more memorable) language:

"We have in history but one picture of a similar enterprise [colonization], and there we see it was necessary not only to open the sea by a miracle for them** to pass, but more necessary to close it again to prevent their return." (Quoted in Eva Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation [LSU Press, 2006], 128.) 

Nothing like a little anti-semitism to help wash down the racism, I guess.




* TJ did not extend his opposition to interracial liaisons to himself and his own human property. Rules are for other people.

** For those unsure about the identity of "them," see Exodus 14: 21-29.

The Revolutionary Monarch

I think many Americans assume that autocratic states rest exclusively on fear, that subjects of a repressive dictator or oligarchy obey only because they and their families will otherwise suffer terrible punishment. Those familiar with the history of monarchies recognize, however, that dictatorships (hereditary or otherwise) also rest on a kind of popular magical thinking, a widespread belief that supreme rulers have powers superior to those of mere mortals. Only a few centuries have passed since Britons believed their sovereign's touch could cure scrofula; only a few decades since Japan was ruled by an actual deity; and only a few years since North Koreans paid their final tribute to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, whose sacred birth was attended by supernatural omens.

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1992), James Scott observes that this tendency to ascribe super-human traits or virtues to monarchs certainly applied to imperial Russia. He quotes Lenin's contempt for Russian peasants' superstitious monarchism, their tendency “naively and blindly to believe in the Tsar-batiushka [Deliverer]” and petition him for redress (p. 97). Accompanying their faith in the Tsar-Deliverer, however, was the peasantry's complementary belief that any evils done in the tsar's name were actually the work of corrupt officials. Peasants could resist those officials while retaining their loyalty to the tsar, confident that “if the tsar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents committed in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters.” The reactionary worship of a semi-divine monarch could lead to insurrectionary, even revolutionary action.

A similar dynamic drove the decade of colonial uprisings preceding the War for American Independence. Opponents of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the military occupation of Boston, the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts assumed (or persuaded themselves) that these impositions came not from the king but from a corrupt Parliament. His Majesty was good and patriotic, but in the colonies, away from his watchful eye, his evil ministers tried to plant their boots on freeborn English colonists' backs. Thus Patrick Henry, denouncing the Stamp Act, simultaneously pledged to defend George III to his dying breath. Sons of Liberty settling in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley gave their new townships such patriotic names as Hanover (after Britain's ruling dynasty) and Kingston. New Yorkers erected an equestrian statue of the king in 1771, well into the imperial crisis. As late as 1775, the American rebels referred to the British forces fighting them in Boston as “the ministerial army,” not the king's army.

Brendan McConville pointed out (The King's Three Faces, 2006) that American monarchism had not come over in the Mayflower, bur rather had been built by colonial and imperial elites. By putting royal images in their homes (on tea sets and objets d'art), celebrating royal birthdays, and burning the king's enemies in effigy on Pope's Day, the leaders of colonial society imbued their followers with affection for a distant and artificial* British monarchy. The colonists, however, viewed the king much as Russian peasants viewed the tsar: a benevolent father-figure who would right the wrongs perpetrated by aristocrats and officials. Rebellious slaves, for instance, invoked the king's aid against their masters, and rebellious white colonists considered their resistance to tax collectors and soldiers entirely consistent with loyalty to the king.

The big change, as Pauline Maier reported (American Scripture, 1997), came in early 1776, when colonial newspapers reported that George III had declared the colonies in rebellion and withdrawn his royal protection. The king had now publicly proclaimed himself the colonists' enemy. Common Sense, published at the same time, made it safe to discuss the superstitious absurdities that underlay devotion to a monarch, and the Declaration of Independence pointedly indicted the king (not the Parliament) for abuse of power. Later in the War of Independence, the new loyalty oaths that the rebels forced upon former royalists helped dissolve the bonds of duty that still bound many to the Hanoverians. Yet the desire to follow or at least show affection for a monarch persisted in the United States into at least the 1780s – for I agree with Forrest McDonald's argument (Novus Ordo Seclorum, 1985) that residual king-worship explains Americans' celebration of the French royal family and their naming of towns and counties for the Bourbons. Arguably, it took the “party war” of the 1790s, in which “monocrat” became a deadly epithet, and the rise of a post-Revolutionary generation to bury American monarchism for good. Until the early nineteenth century, monarchism was as American as corn cakes or witchcraft trials.

So, Happy Independence Day, and God Save the Queen.

* The Hanoverian dynasty was imposed on Britain by act of Parliament, and its first two rulers didn't speak English particularly well

Pride, Prejudice, and Presidents

Last month Your Humble Narrator's university had the privilege of hosting Sarah Vowell, NPR essayist and voice of Violet Incredible. Ms. Vowell gave a talk on her new book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which I am reading in an audiobooks edition because it's hard to beat Patton Oswald as the voice of Thomas Jefferson.* Before her public appearance, Vowell was kind enough to meet with a dozen history students and faculty and talk about her work, specifically her research techniques (site visits, lots of reading, lots of notecards) and the themes, like family and memory and democratic debate, with which she regularly engages. In response to a question from YHN, Vowell attributed the shortage of women in the history bestseller lists to publishers' marketing of histories to “Republican dads” and focus on “serious,” male topics. She found this amusing, because “there is nothing funnier than a self-important man.” Probably so.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of Vowell's visit (for me, anyway) came at the reception before her talk, when one of my colleagues' sons asked her advice for a school paper on James Buchanan. Vowell had nothing specific to offer about Buchanan, but did share a general suggestion: try to find something about your subject, even if s/he is an obscure politician or president, that makes him/her appealing to you. Recalling her research for Assassination Vacation, Vowell described plowing through James Garfield's dreary memoirs, choc-a-block with mundane details of a legislator's life, and seeing that he only “came alive” when he wrote about the novels he read for pleasure. Thinking of the future president sneaking off to the Library of Congress to read Jane Austen made him appealing to Ms. Vowell, and I daresay to all of us who heard her account. Since Garfield's presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullet, and he spent much of it dying on a sick bed while doctors futilely tried to save him, one can't know much about the twentieth president except by studying his pre-presidential life. It is affecting to think of him reading novels in secret, or “writ[ing] Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other,”** and to imagine Garfield doing so from the White House, if only he had avoided his encounter with Charles Guiteau.

* Although Fred Armison, as the voice of Lafayette's teen-aged wife, comes close.

** From Joe Queenan's Imperial Caddy (1992), 117.

Alexander McGillivray Strikes a Pose

Midway through my graduate studies, the editors of American National Biography commissioned me to write two entries on early American congressmen. Both of my subjects, William Loughton Smith and William Vans Murray, shared a common regional and party identity, apropos of which my adviser Lance Banning said I would soon become an expert on obscure Southern Federalists. Not a terribly marketable specialty, I had to admit. Fortunately, Lance's prediction did not come to pass, and the assignment instead brought me more tangible benefits: one of my first professional writing credits, a modest but welcome paycheck, and some useful bits of research.

Of the two congressmen Smith proved the less likable. He struck me as a typical spoiled conservative rich kid: born into money in South Carolina, educated abroad, lukewarm about the American Revolution but keen to draw a salary from the new government it created, and supportive of Alexander Hamilton's elitist national economic program. After his few minimally consequential terms in Congress, W.L.S. became the United States' minister to Portugal, a suitably obscure last chapter to an obscure public career. The men with whom Smith worked, however, were often quite famous, and one particularly intriguing acquaintance became directly relevant to my dissertation and first book.

In 1790 William Smith attended the formal signing of the United States' first treaty with the Creek Indian nation, the Treaty of New York. After the main event, Smith exchanged a few pleasantries with the most famous Creek man at the conference, Alexander McGillivray. Since the end of the Revolutionary War, the biracial warlord had harried Southern white frontiersmen and perturbed American officials. Now assuming a more pacific and magnanimous posture, McGillivray told the congressman that “his Nation [the Creeks] had been always much pleased with the conduct of South Carolina and had been well treated by us.” By contrast, he continued, the white inhabitants of neighboring Georgia “thought too highly of their own power and too meanly of that of his [McGillivray's] nation.” The new treaty gave Georgia “a line more favorable than they had any right to expect” - an allusion to the Creeks' recent raiding campaigns against that state's frontier, the military power they had displayed, and chiefs' subsequent willingness to give Georgians some of the Creek lands they demanded. Smith closed by noting that George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, had been competing with one another in demonstrations of courtesy and hospitality toward the Creeks. Their solicitousness may have contributed to McGillivray's good humor, but probably had no bearing on the outcome of the treaty itself. 

Indeed, McGillivray displayed rather more hauteur in his conversation with Smith than one would expect from a southeastern Indian leader, especially one on a diplomatic mission. His arrogant posture toward Georgia, I suspect, was just that, a pose. Native Americans always made their diplomatic conferences stagy and dramatic events, though they differed in one significant way from stage plays: the Indian "actors" usually got to write their own parts. McG had apparently, in this exchange at least, decided to adopt the role of a triumphant but magnanimous general. Perhaps he modeled his part on some of the reading he had done while he was a boy, attending school with white colonists' children in Smith's own hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. The cultural distance between nabob and warlord wasn't always as great as one might assume.

Sources: George Rogers Jr., ed., "Letters of William Loughton Smith to Edward Rutledge" (8 Aug. 1790), South Carolina Historical Magazine 69: 135; Michael D. Green, "Alexander McGillivray," in R. David Edmunds, ed., American Indian Leaders: Studies in Diversity (Lincoln, 1980), 41-63.

Campaign 1776: Hallowing the Small and the Great

I am of two minds regarding the recent launch, by the Civil War Preservation Trust, of Campaign 1776, the Trust's effort to preserve battlefield land from the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. On the one hand, I have a 21st-century bourgeois appreciation for conservation: preserves and parks and historic sites improve the quality of life in their region, and tend to increase property values as well, not a bad thing in a depressed national real-estate market. Also, as a student of mine observed just the other day, most Americans learn more history from battlefields and museums and non-written media than from books. Experiential learning is very powerful, and actually visiting a historic site and walking over the landscape (or treading the boards within a historic house) gives one a visceral appreciation for the events associated with that site. Visiting the U.S.S. Constitution or the Paul Revere House in Boston, for example, allows one to see how cramped were the private and maritime spaces in which eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans spent their time. And many people who have visited the Gettysburg battlefield, your humble narrator included, have come away convinced the place is haunted, even if the battle itself wasn't the turning-point that its boosters claim. So, two cheers for battlefield preservation!

But I'll reserve the third cheer for the time being, because public history is a difficult enterprise to conduct properly, and the leaders of Campaign 1776, while energetic and well intentioned, don't (yet) seem to have thought too deeply about the lessons they want to impart to the public.

Based on their website, it looks like Campaign 1776 wants to present a very conventional, top-down account of the Revolutionary War, one which focuses on the heroism of specific leaders, lumps common soldiers together into a largely nameless mass, downplays the motives of British and Loyalist and Native American combatants, and assumes that the Revolutionary War consisted of regular soldiers maneuvering and fighting one another. The Campaign’s discussion of the Battle of Princeton, for instance, focuses on Washington’s endurance, Mercer's heroism, and the historical intersection between the battlefield and Princeton College, rather than on the bush-whacking campaign that Patriot militia units in New Jersey conducted against the British army after the battle. As David Fischer points out (Washington's Crossing, OUP, 2004), this campaign drove Britain out of New Jersey for most of the rest of the war. A focus on the Continental Army disregards the central role that rebel militia played in winning the war: they attacked British outposts and foraging parties, terrorized Loyalists into flight or surrender, and made it impossible for Britain to control the countryside, except a few frontier zones dominated by royalists. Militiamen were, in John Shy’s words, the “sand in the gears of the [British] pacification machine” (A People Numerous and Armed, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990, p. 237).  It’s difficult, however, to memorialize the actions of a para-military organization that fought few set-piece battles. It’s harder still to build memorials to naval victories or to grants of foreign aid, which is why I also suspect Campaign 1776 will spend little time emphasizing the role that France played in winning the American victory, particularly during the Battle of Yorktown.

From a practical standpoint, though, one thing Campaign 1776 might consider doing is emphasizing the experiences of ordinary soldiers - regulars, volunteers, and militia - in the battles whose sites they are now helping to preserve. The War for American Independence left behind a massive and, for its time, unique body of records dealing with the experience of enlisted men: the pension applications that war veterans filed under the 1818 and 1832 federal pension acts, which fill nearly 900 reels of microfilm at the U.S. National Archives. These applications included veterans’ names, states of residence, and accounts of the battles and engagements in which they served. I don’t ask, of course, that Campaign 1776 plow through thirty or forty thousand records, but other scholars have already mined some of the pension files – John Dann, for example, read all (!) of the Revolutionary War pension applications and later reprinted several dozen of them in The Revolution Remembered (Chicago, 1980). Surely it would not be difficult, as these doughty preservationists raise funds to buy land they regard as “hallowed” – literally, made holy – by American soldiers, for them to remind the public that not everyone who fought at Monmouth or Yorktown was a Great White Man, and that we can recover and retell the life stories of many of the ordinary soldiers and militiamen who took part.

Also, I would like to see Campaign 1776 inform Glenn Beck fans that their movement simultaneously supports conservation, which Beck’s followers associate with the evil Agenda 21 conspiracy, and preserving the memory of the first generation of American heroes. Then we can watch the Beckians’ heads explode from the contradiction, just like in Star Trek.

**

And, yes, the image above is of British soldiers, or more precisely British-soldier re-enactors. Their story, and that of their Loyalist and Native American allies, also deserves telling to the public, but that's an issue for another day.

Better Know a President!

In honor of President's Day, here are links to several blog pieces I've written about each of the first five American presidents:

George Washington: His precedent of retiring after two terms, and creating thereby the "post-presidency," is discussed here; this entry mentions a microbrew created with Washington's own recipe. My favorite online link regarding Washington is here, but be warned: it is very Unsafe For Work or for children.

John Adams: This entry reviews the John Adams miniseries that played on HBO a few years ago. It's less inaccurate than other films about the Revolutionary era, but I probably won't be using it in class.

Thomas Jefferson: A regular on this site, he was the subject of a short piece on the Beringian hypothesis of Native American origins, another on the first American diplomatic contact with Vietnam, a short primary-source-based reply to the Tea Partiers, and an essay replying to a blog entry by the inimitable Paul Bibeau.


James Madison: One of the more obscure early American presidents, unless one is in advertising, lives in Wisconsin, is a fan of the movie Splash, or likes to read the Federalist Papers for fun. Here are my thoughts on Madison's true legacy.

James Monroe: Despite being named for a famous Doctrine, Monroe has not previously piqued my interest on this weblog. I did note in a Twitter post a couple of years ago one of the more interesting pieces of trivia I discovered while researching a book chapter on Monroe: in the mid-1790s, when Monroe served as U.S. minister to France, his daughter Eliza attended school with Hortense Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte's stepdaughter. This probably gave the two men some familiarity with one another when they met a decade later to discuss the Louisiana Purchase. Wikipedia, which knows more than me, points out that one of Hortense's portraits now hangs in James Monroe's plantation home in Virginia.

**

More to come on this subject, probably.

Blogroll update

I have finally retired the link to the Orwell Diaries from my blogroll, as the site editors have posted the last entry from G.O.'s wartime journal.  Orwell went to work for the B.B.C.* in late 1942, and did not resume keeping a diary until 1946 (and his postwar diary focused almost exclusively on trivia).  It's been fun following his account of World War Two.

Replacing Mssr. Blair is a link to a new weblog put together by a group of graduate students and recent Ph.Ds in early American history, The Junto.  The site launched a couple of weeks ago, and already the authors have published several excellent articles on Jay Gitlin's Bourgeois Empire, the communitarianism of the Founding Fathers, the best history books of 2012, and other subjects.  I look forward to following their exploits.

Your humble narrator has also been alerted to this list of the 50 best American history blogs, in which his humble site appears as number 45.  Huzzah!**

Updated Update, 4 January 2013: Allow me to introduce my readers to "Baby Got Bactria," Briana Kristler's research blog on commerce, law, and architecture in pre-modern Balkh (Bactria).  Really, how could one not support a weblog with that title?


* If memory serves, the B.B.C.'s headquarters was the architectural model for the Ministry of Truth in 1984, and one of the conference rooms where Orwell's section met was Room 101.


** Pronounced "hoozay."  Really!

Constitutional Idolatry

Since its inception in the spring of 2009, the conservative Tea Party movement has generated a torrent of online articles and blog entries - possibly a sentence of text for each of its actual members. Until quite recently, though, I've seen little (virtual) ink spilled on the Tea Partiers' interpretation of the historical era that inspired them, or on their somewhat idolatrous - not to say illiterate - attitude toward the culminating document of that era, the U.S. Constitution. Now, however, several authors and essayists have taken up those subjects. Award-winning historian Jill Lepore has a new book out on the Tea Party movement and the American Revolution, The Whites of Their Eyes, which wryly observes that in "the American political tradition, nothing trumps the Revolution" (p. 14), but notes that those who currently make use of it for political ends have no actual interest in history. History may be summarized as "change through time," and the Tea Partiers don't wish to acknowledge any lapse of time between the Revolutionary Golden Age and our descent into the Dark Age of Obaman Socialism.

Meanwhile, Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman and Economist columnist "Lexington" (alias Peter David) have commented on the Tea Partiers' ahistorical worship of the U.S. Constitution, which the TPers alternately deploy as a political talisman and as an imaginary key to the secrets of the Founding Fathers (and thus to the legitimate origins of the republic). Klarman calls this sort of attitude "Constitutional idolatry," and observes that the original U.S. Constitution contains several provisions that made sense to the Framers, but which modern Americans find repugnant (e.g. its support for slavery and the slave trade) or indefensible (e.g. parity in the Senate, the provision that the president must be a "natural-born citizen"). We might also note, as Woody Holton discovered while polling his students at the University of Richmond, that most modern Americans, when they think of the U.S. Constitution, prefer to associate that document more with the protection of legal, civil and voting rights than with the structure of the federal government. In other words, Americans put more emphasis on the amendments than on the main body of the Constitution. (See Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution [New York, 2007], ix-x.)

Finally, journalist and prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow noted, in a somewhat less acidic op-ed piece for the New York Times, that the Founding Fathers were themselves a pretty disputatious lot, and that several of the first leaders of the federal republic, notably Washington and Hamilton, took an "expansive view of the Constitution" at odds with the modern Tea Partiers' strict-constructionism. Just what you'd expect a font of liberal socialist treason like the Times to print, of course.

Founderbrau

While Scottish and German brewers fight to see who can produce the most potent beer in the world, a microbrewery in Philadelphia is reviving some of the gentler, but still distinctive, potables of the American past. Yards Brewing Company has launched its series of "Ales of the Revolution" with George Washington's Tavern Porter, a 14-proof brew inspired by one of Washington's own recipes. The Washington Post described the beverage as a mixture of "sharper, coffeelike flavors" and "residual sweetness," the latter flavor resulting from the molasses infused into each barrel.

Beer, of course, has been an important drink since the development of agriculture 11,000 years ago, but in late-colonial British North America it usually took a back seat to harder alcoholic beverages. The Anglophone elite preferred imported heavy wines, like port and Madeira, while farmers and laborers enjoyed hard cider and spiritous liquors, particularly rum distilled from West Indies molasses. David McCullough noted in 1776 that the early Continental Army consumed a prodigious amount of ordinary rum, plus cherry rum and flip (a "mixture of liquor, beer, and sugar" [29-30]), while their commander purchased "cider, brandy, and rum by the gallon" (42). I suspect, though, that if they'd had access to 110-proof beer they would have consumed it by preference, whether or not the bottles were stuffed into the carcasses of squirrels and stoats.

Noble Ideas and Petty Grievances

For those of us who think the Declaration of Independence is just a tad too long (that includes nearly anyone who's read more than a few of Jefferson's obscure, nit-picky indictments of George III), Slate Magazine is pleased to offer several translations of the founding American document into Twitter form. The winning entry in their contest was "Bye, George, we've got it" (just 25 characters, you'll note), but I will confess I preferred their third runner-up:

We seek independence based on noble and universal ideas combined with petty and one-sided grievances

and their first runner-up:

Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al.

Reflections on the Fourth of July

For those of you who missed it last year, here is a thought-provoking Independence-Day editorial, "Life, Liberty, and Benign Monarchy" (New York Times, 2 July 2009), by Professor Kathleen DuVal of the University of North Carolina, reflecting on Native American political authority and the attractiveness of Spanish paternalism to American settlers and slaves.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Founders Round-Up

It seems that Thomas Jefferson has catalogued his personal library on LibraryThing, complete with 'reviews' extracted from his correspondence.

There's a hip-hop video on YouTube (actually from WhiteHouse.gov, but YouTube is trendier) on the early life of Alexander Hamilton - about a year old now, but still worth watching.

John Quincy Adams has a Twitter feed, derived from his diary entries for 1810.

And there's a new strategy game in the works, Founding Fathers, about the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Once known primarily as political wonks, the Founders are fast becoming Web 2.0 and boardgame geeks.

Historical Humor: A Small Example

For a change of pace I decided to wear my Declaration of Independence tie - a red silk tie bearing the facsimile signatures of the members of the Continental Congress - to school today. In my upper-level Colonial History class, one of my students, after asking me what was on my tie, said - completely deadpan - "It must have taken you a while to collect all those signatures." I'm not used to my students making good jokes, but it's a pleasant surprise when they do.

The Prince and the Plenipotentiary

Anna Berkes, at "A Summary View," writes about the first high-level contact between the American and Vietnamese governments: a 1787 meeting in France between U.S. minister plenipotentiary Thomas Jefferson and Nguyen Phuc Canh, the 7-year-old heir to the royal throne of Vietnam. Prince Canh was in France to help secure a treaty of alliance, which the French Crown approved later that year (and under which France supplied Canh's father with arms, warships, and military advisors). Jefferson's goal in meeting the prince was more pacific: he sought samples of Cochin-Chinese upland rice, which he had read were the best in the world. Prince Canh said he would send the American minister these samples, but Jefferson apparently never got them.

Read the Founders!

Apropos of President Obama's forthcoming speech to America's schoolchildren, Tim Rutten writes in the Los Angeles Times that one conservative group "is urging parents to demand that their children be excused from watching the president and be sent instead to the library to read the Founding Fathers." I think this is a fine idea, and as a historian of early national America, I would like to offer the following reading suggestions:

* Benjamin Franklin, "Advice to a Young Friend on Finding a Mistress," a 1745 letter observing that the proper remedy for "the violent natural inclinations" of youth is marriage, but that taking a mistress is an acceptable substitute, as long as she is an older woman.

* Thomas Paine (or, as we call him here in the early 21st century, "Glenn Beck"), "Agrarian Justice." Argues in favor of the creation of a guaranteed income for all, funded by a tax on estates. "It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for."

* Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia," Chapter 17. The future third president's reflections on the separation of church and state: "It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

No offense to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue intended, but any of these essays would be more edifying and stimulating than an address on the importance of doing well in school.

A Federalist-Themed Windfall

This afternoon, Heritage Auction Galleries will auction in Dallas, for a current minimum bid of $30,000, a 1788 first edition of Volume One of The Federalist Papers. The book is the property of Nathan Harlan, a National Guard captain from Granger, Indiana, who purchased it in 1990 (while he was in high school) for seven dollars. In recognition of Capt. Harlan's forthcoming deployment to Iraq, the auction house has waived its usual commission, so Harlan will make a significant profit on the sale: about $770 for each of the 39 essays in that volume.

Update, 10 PM EDT: The final selling price was $80,000 - so make that $2,051 per essay.

Seven Annoying Things about the John Adams Miniseries

Last Sunday I watched all seven episodes of HBO's John Adams series, and was pleasantly surprised by the show's quality. I found the program well-produced, attentive to historical detail, and graced by some very fine performances (notably Paul Giamatti's and Tom Wilkinson's). In all, it was a good evening's entertainment. However, as a historian of early America, I am honor-bound to point out some the series' factual and interpretive flaws, not so much to warn viewers away from it as to explain why I probably won't use John Adams much in my classes, and as part of a cautionary tale warning my readers not to undertake graduate education, lest they lose their ability to enjoy well-made television programs.

Herewith, then, are the things I most disliked about the miniseries:

1) In Episodes 1 and 2, colonial resistance leaders repeatedly say that they object to the policies of "the Crown." Actually, until 1776 the American rebels considered themselves loyal subjects of the King, and insisted that they merely opposed the wicked policies of the British Parliament – forgetting that, by the 18th century, the King was subordinate to the Parliament.

2) At the beginning of Episode 2, a rider tells Adams that "the British" have attacked Concord. Since most white American colonists still considered themselves British in 1775, this would have confused Adams. Paul Revere and other rebel messengers instead called their military adversaries "regulars," "redcoats," and related epithets (e.g. "bloody backs") – that is, they referred to them by their profession, not their nationality.

3) The series portrays George Washington as a genial, even-tempered man, concerned about the well-being of his soldiers during the war, and unable to resist Alexander Hamilton's personality during his presidency. In reality, Washington was cold and aloof in social settings, famous for his volcanic temper, and reckless in battle. Moreover, while Washington frequently took Hamilton's advice during his two terms as president, his final policy decisions were usually his own.

4) Two minor quibbles about the 1790s: Hamilton didn't propose that the federal government create a national debt in 1790, because that debt (to the tune of $54 million) already existed. He instead proposed that the government make the national debt permanent and interest-bearing. Also, Adams didn't cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of Jay's Treaty. No vice president can, or ever will, do this, because treaties require approval of two-thirds of the Senate.

5) The series ascribed President Adams's electoral loss in 1800 to his unpopular decision to negotiate a new peace treaty with France, which supposedly split the Federalist Party. Actually, Adams lost because the Republicans made political hay out of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the new taxes the Federalists levied to finance their projected war with France. President Adams approved of and signed all of these measures.

6) Episode 7 implies that the post-retirement correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson didn't begin until after Abigail's death in 1818. Actually, Abigail Adams was the person who arranged for the two men to resume their correspondence, which would have been difficult if she were dead. Adams and Jefferson subsequently exchanged dozens of detailed, erudite letters over a fourteen-year period.

7) Finally, everyone's accent is crap. Paul Giamatti manages a good eastern New England accent, but practically every other actor or actress either pretends he/she is on Masterpiece Theater, or doesn't bother. It's a jarring omission in an otherwise well-directed and detail-oriented series.

Madisonian Legacies

Several weeks ago there was a scholarly exchange on H-NET (the Humanities Network at Michigan State University) regarding the current obscurity of James Madison. One professor referred to Madison as one of the most "under-appreciated" members of the American Founding generation. Another observed that Madison, who was not only president but also the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, has no monument in Washington, D.C., appears on no coins or currency (except the long-retired $10,000 bill), and graces no best-selling biographies. Little remains of the fourth president, he remarked, except a small Midwestern state capital, a street in New York City, and a mermaid in an obscure comedy film.

Perhaps Americans have forgotten Madison's political accomplishments, and his presidency too (just as well, since it was a disaster), but we should note that his name has not been forgotten. On May 12th the Social Security Administration released its annual list of popular baby names for 2005, and I was pleased to note that Madison remains one of the most popular names for newborn girls in the United States -- No. 3 on the list, in fact. It has held that position since 2003, and was the second most popular name for baby girls in 2001-02. Why parents would name their female children for a short, neurasthenic male slave-owner from Virginia is something of a mystery, though I suspect it has something to do with the mermaid named Madison (played by Daryl Hannah) from the aforementioned 1984 film Splash. I do know, however, that if Thomas Jefferson were to come back to America twenty years from now, and see how many hundreds of thousands of young women were named for his friend and contemporary, he would be jealous.

Jefferson and the Beringian Migration

In commemoration of Thomas Jefferson's 266th birthday, and as a follow-up to my post of March 15th, let me note that the Sage of Monticello was one of the earliest English-speaking Americans to speculate that American Indians originated in Siberia and migrated to North America via the Bering Strait. "From whence came those aboriginal inhabitants of America?" Jefferson asked in Query XI of Notes on the State of Virginia, his only book. "The late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamschatka to California, have proved that, if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow strait...The resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former." (Merrill Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson [New York: Penguin, 1977], 142.)

Jefferson was not, however, the first European to hypothesize a Siberian origin for Native Americans. The concepts of a Bering land bridge and a Siberian migration to the Americas had been germinating for two centuries before Jefferson published them in his book. In Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1589), the Jesuit Jose de Acosta argued that since European animals were present in the Americas, they must have crossed over using a land bridge (which human beings could also have used). In the early 1600s the Spanish engineer Enrico Martin concluded that if such a land bridge existed, it must be in far northeastern Asia and the emigrants who used it must be Siberian. Around 1650, Bernabe Cobo asserted that the physical similarities between the various Indian peoples in North America pointed to a common origin, while in 1674 Daniel Gookin of Massachusetts noted that the most believable theory about the origins of Native Americans was that they were descended from the "Scythian" peoples of northeastern Asia and crossed into America via a land bridge. (Thanks to Charles Martijn, Daniel Mandell and John Faragher for the above information.)

Thomas Jefferson was a man of many talents: writer, inventor, lawyer, diplomat, scientist, naturalist, university founder, and, of course, president of the United States. Originality, however, wasn't necessarily his strongest suit.