Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams, on the Deaths of His Father and Thomas Jefferson)

“[Tavernkeeper John] Merrill told me that he had come this morning out from Baltimore, and was informed there that my father died on the fourth of this Month, about five o’clock in the afternoon. From the Letters which I had yesterday received this event was so much expected by me, that it had no sudden and violent effect on my feelings— My father had nearly closed the ninety-first year of his life: A life illustrious in the Annals of his Country, and of the World— He had served to great and useful purpose his Nation, his Age, and his God— He is gone, and may the blessing of Almighty Grace have attended him to his Account— I say not, may my last End be like his! it were presumptuous— The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of divine favour, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe— For myself all that I dare to ask is that I may live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came, and at the appointed hour of my maker die as my father has died; in peace with God and man, sped to the regions of futurity with the blessings of my fellow men.”—John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Sixth President of the United States, diary entry for July 9, 1826, in Diaries 1821-1848, edited by David Waldstreicher (2017)

Many Americans felt similarly to John Quincy Adams: that the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both on the 50^th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, were “visible and palpable marks of divine favour” on the United States.

Many of my readers will know that Jefferson had died at 12:50 pm, and that John Adams—who had reconciled with his longtime friend turned political rival the decade before—passed away later in the afternoon, unaware of what had happened in Virginia, with the words, “Jefferson still survives.”

Fewer people will know that, because of the still-slow state of overland communication in those days, John Quincy Adams, in Washington, was unaware of Jefferson’s death in Charlottesville 117 miles away. And it would not be for another three days when John Quincy learned of his father’s death at the family home in Massachusetts, 447 miles away.

When John Quincy Adams passed 22 years later, the news spread far more quickly, because the first links between major Eastern cities had been established for the telegraph, which Samuel Morse had publicly demonstrated in 1844. (See this 1999 C-Span clip for how the new invention was used so dramatically for what became a true “media event.”)

The younger Adams—who, like his father (and unlike Jefferson), was turned out of the White House after one miserable term—did indeed, as he hoped, “live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came.” As the last prominent living link to the American Revolution, he lent tremendous prestige to the antislavery cause.

He was, in fact, engaged in another front in his struggle against slavery—a House of Representatives vote related to the Mexican War—when he was felled by a fatal stroke. 

By this time, this former President, after a long public career marked by controversy, was hailed as “Old Man Eloquent” by admirers and even recognized by opponents as a debater and legislator of formidable passion and shrewdness.

In its way, his last words were as memorable as those of his revered father: “This is the last of earth, but I am composed."

(The image accompanying this post is a detail from John Trumbull's 1818 painting of the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. From left to right, the figures are: John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.)

Flashback, March 1806: Jefferson Approves Bill for First National Road

Within a week of it reaching his desk after passage by the House of Representatives, Thomas Jefferson signed in late March 1806 a bill authorizing the construction of the first federally funded road in the history of the American republic.

Approval came at the end of a long, bitter debate about the expenses and forces involved with what came to be known as the Cumberland Road, or National Road. In fact, that controversy over what were then called “internal improvements” and now “infrastructure” has continued, albeit in different forms, down to the present day.

Construction would also be buffeted by factors that few debate participants would have considered at the time. By necessity, the War of 1812 consumed much of the nation’s attention. Even though building had reached Wheeling, Va., in 1818 and continued to expand west, it halted at Vandalia, Ill., by 1841, victimized by funding issues occasioned by the Panic of 1837.

Advocates for state supremacy got more of what they wished for at this point, with maintenance of completed portions taken out of the hands of the federal government and monetized through toll systems.

Still, from its Cumberland, MD starting off point, the road—or what was completed to that point—covered 620 miles and five states, and had become a major transportation link between the East and Midwest.

In the first few decades of the United States, what many Founding Fathers had in mind with the term “internal improvements” were roads and canals. What divided the two political parties of the time, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, was who would pay for these: the federal government or individual states.

The Federalists believed that improved modes of transportation facilitated national unity, so they wanted construction to be federally funded. But the Democratic-Republicans saw this as interfering with the prerogative of states, as well as a source of pork-barrel politics—or, as Jefferson put it in a March 1796 letter to James Madison, “boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money.”

Once in power, however, Jefferson’s opinion on the federal prerogative was modified. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin—who, while previously serving as state assemblyman from Pennsylvania’s Fayette County, had supported the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike and "every other temporary improvement in our communications."

He persuaded Jefferson to sign the Ohio Enabling Act, which provided that five percent of the proceeds from public land sales in Ohio would be saved for the future construction of a National Road.

Obstacles to travel were formidable because the lack of hard surfaces could plunge riders and their vehicles into ruts, and mountainous terrain could prove treacherous to negotiate.

At the same time, engineering in the early republic was still in its infancy, largely linked to military fortifications. The major boost to civil engineering, the Erie Canal, was still a decade away when the Cumberland Road was planned.

Construction, then, was still a matter of brawn and beasts, as described by the history The Cumberland Road:

“Burly axmen began the construction process by felling all trees along a clearing sixty-feet wide through the forest. They were followed by choppers, grubbers, and burners, whose work might take weeks to complete in heavily timbered sections…After grubbing, the road had to be leveled by pick-and-shovel wielding laborers. This earth-moving army cut into hillsides, flung tracks of fill across hollows, and hauled away excess earth and rock. Finally, the graders, stone crushers, and pavers laid the roadbed.”

Even as Jefferson and Gallatin looked to internal improvements as a means of fostering national unity, they encountered opposition from within the President’s own state. In his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams assessed the ironic turn of events brought about by Jefferson’s second cousin, the choleric and contrarian Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, Va.:

“To some extent the President, his Cabinet, and the Senate had become converted to Federalist views; but the influence of Randolph and of popular prejudices peculiar to Southern society held the House stiffly to an impracticable creed. Whatever the North and East wanted the South and West refused. Jefferson's wishes fared no better than the requests of the State and city of New York; the House showed no alacrity in taking up the subject of roads, canals, or universities. The only innovation which made its way through Congress was the Act of Feb. 10, 1807, appropriating fifty thousand dollars for the establishment of a coast survey, for this was an object in which the Southern States were interested as deeply as the Northern. Even the Senate's appropriation for beginning the Cumberland Road was indefinitely postponed by the House.”

Upon completion in 1825, the Erie Canal started a mania for canal building, and following the Civil War a similar frenzied construction phase began for railroads. It was easy to forget amid this transportation revolution how much the Cumberland Road represented in the beginning.

Major Eastern Seaboard cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore could more easily transport goods to growing territories along the Midwestern frontier, which, in turn, now had more accessible outlets for their food. In between, a network of taverns to serve hungry and tired travelers sprang up.

Moreover, the Cumberland Road set a precedent for involvement of the federal government in transportation projects. A journey that could take anywhere from five to seven miles a day in the early 1800s increased to thirty miles a day by stagecoach four decades later.

In effect, the road also was the forerunner America’s interstate highway system. Initially the foundation for US Route 40 in the 1920s, it was absorbed and, at points, bypassed by Interstate 70 following the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Stone and masonry from the original was replaced by modern asphalt and concrete.

In a sense, one thing hasn’t changed about America’s relationship to infrastructure: it remains a political football. Maintaining roads, bridges and tunnel costs money, and, despite frequent boasts about “Infrastructure Week” from 2017 to 2021, Presidential commitment has turned into a matter of funding threats and ego stroking over time.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Moderates, Radicals Unite to Present Case for Fighting)

July 6, 1775—Nearly one year before the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, it took the first step at airing the grievances of the 13 colonies over British depredations.

Two delegates who locked horns in the debate leading to independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson, took turns in creating Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which sought to assure the public—and, in far-off Great Britain, King George III—that their problems were not with the monarch but with his ministers imposing coercive measures on the colonies.

Years later, John Adams recalled that during the American Revolution, one-third of the colonists supported the cause, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. If anything, non-supporters of independence were still in the ascendant one year earlier, but events were assuming a momentum that many feared could not be controlled.

This latter group is not as celebrated as the radicals, who won the vote for independence in the Second Continental Congress and, in the end, the war itself. They come off especially badly in the musical 1776.

But the moderates’ stance was not without merit, and they marshaled compelling arguments for the colonists’ rights before the Declaration of Independence and contributed to the republic afterward.

The most prominent moderate delegates from two large middle colonies, including New York’s John Jay, who became the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court; Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, among the keenest legal minds of the revolutionary and Federalist periods; and Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who earned the nickname “Financier of the Revolution” through his crucial infusion of money when the Continental Army was at its most desperate.

But the leader of the group in the debates already convulsing the Second Continental Congress was Dickinson, a wealthy lawyer who, by refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence—even though he promptly joined the Continental Army as a private—immediately forfeited much of the credit he deserved for mobilizing American opinion against British policies in his pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768).

In devastating critiques of the Stamp and Townshend Acts, Dickinson crafted one of the first known strategies for nonviolent protest in American history, preferring to call on economic pressure and appeals to the Mother Country’s longstanding care of its faraway offspring (“where is maternal affection”?: he wondered) to bring Britain’s ministers around.

Unlike fellow Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway, who wanted the colonists to be brought more tightly under the British umbrella, Dickinson preferred that the colonists be allowed to administer something more akin to home rule.

Yet his reluctance to accept the inevitability of independence might have resulted from internal divisions within his own extended clan. His in-laws included not just independence firebrands but also loyalists and others whose allegiance could be swayed to and fro—an example in microcosm of the split that Adams saw in the nation at large.

On a committee that the Continental Congress designated to respond to Britain, Dickinson found himself working with a Virginia delegate less inclined to speak up but every bit his equal as a penman: Thomas Jefferson, whose Summary View of the Rights of British America attracted wide notice within his colony and among the other politicians gathered that year in Philadelphia.

The case that the panel would present had assumed greater importance with the outbreak of hostilities at the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Dickinson read the first draft by Jefferson—and blanched over its fierce statements.

Jefferson read Dickinson’s revisions, nodded—and mostly accepted only his minor suggestions.

Dickinson reviewed Jefferson’s “fair copy,” made a few other suggestions—and, after some more changes, Congress had in its hands a document that slammed the “Legislature of Great-Britain” for being “stimulated by an inordinate Passion for a Power.” (To track the intense revision process behind Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, see this "Editorial Note" on the "Founders Online" Website.)

At the same time, it pledged to readers that, while committed to defending their lands and freedoms, “we mean not to dissolve that Union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.”

What a difference a year would make. King George III’s high-handed refusal even to consider the “Olive Branch Petition” adopted that same weekend in Philadelphia undermined the warnings of Dickinson, its primary proponent, that the colonies were incurring enormous risks by fighting Britain without a powerful ally or an effective central government.

In the end, the defiance of the Continental Congress brought on the violence and the assault on privilege that concerned Dickinson. But the cause won out and even a conservative reformer like Dickinson accommodated the new order by serving in the governments of Pennsylvania and Delaware. At his death in 1808, Jefferson hailed his onetime "moderate" opponent in the Continental Congress:

"Among the first advocates for the rights of his country when assailed by Great Britain, he continued to the last the orthodox advocate of the true principles of our new government, and his name will be consecrated in history as one of the great worthies of the revolution.”

This Day in Legal History (Marshall Makes Case for Supreme Court in ‘Marbury v. Madison’)

Feb. 24, 1803—In his first, stealth move to simultaneously uphold federal power and to assert the Supreme Court as a partner equal to the President and Congress, Chief Justice John Marshall set down for the first time the concept of judicial review— the ability of the Court to declare a Legislative or Executive act in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

That power, unmentioned in the text of that foundational national document, has been essential in establishing the Court as the ultimate authority of the validity of a law. It has also helped make the Court an eternal bone of contention for political parties.

Marbury v. Madison was the most unorthodox case on which to build a judicial revolution. I can’t think of another important case, for instance, where:

* a justice’s own brother was called on as a witness to verify a fact;

* the justice arguably had his own conflict of interest in this case;

* the Presidential administration being sued was not represented in the courtroom because it wished to confer no legitimacy on the plaintiffs;

* the Attorney General, called as a witness by the plaintiffs, declined to answer because of executive privilege and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination; and

* more importantly, as historian Henry Adams aptly put it in his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, “Where a judgment was to turn on a question of jurisdiction, the Court commonly considered that point as first and final.”

In other words, if the Court lacked jurisdiction, the case should proceed no further.

In contrast, Marshall first argued at length that the principal plaintiff, William Marbury, had been damaged when Jefferson’s Secretary of State, James Madison, failed to deliver Marbury's commission as Justice of the Peace in the District of Columbia —but only then stated that the Supreme Court lacked authority in this instance.

Legally, all of the foregoing was highly unusual, even problematic. But, in a case with overwhelming political importance, Marshall’s resolution was shrewd and startlingly successful.

In a sense, the title of the case was a misnomer. The real adversaries were not William Marbury and James Madison but Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall.

Though alike in certain ways—second cousins, slaveholders from the Virginia interior, careless of dress, with a fondness for fine liquor and good company—the two men could not have been more opposed.

Exactly when and how their mutual enmity developed is still disputed by historians. But by the late 1790s, that dislike had hardened into something toxic: differences founded as much on personality as on early American party politics.

In March 1801, when Marshall—appointed Chief Justice just before John Adams turned the Presidency over to friend-turned-rival Jefferson—administered the oath of office to his fellow Virginian, the two men were taking the measure of each other, not realizing that their quarrel over the nature of government would dominate the rest of their lives, and beyond.

Jefferson was the head of the Democratic-Republican Party, which now not only held the Presidency but, for the first time, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Marshall was the most significant surviving officeholder in a Federalist Party that, nobody knew at the time, would never dominate the executive or legislative branches of the United States again.

There were few if any Jeffersonian positions that Marshall agreed with, whether it was friendly relations with revolutionary France, rising democratic sentiments across the nation, or states’ rights. More viscerally, the Chief Justice loathed the new President as a faithless friend of Marshall’s commanding officer in the American Revolution and postwar political mentor, George Washington.

Perhaps above all, Jefferson feared Marshall’s formidable intellect and persuasive powers. “When conversing with Marshall,” he observed, “I never admit anything. So sure as you admit any position to be good—no matter how remote the conclusion he seeks to establish—you are gone. So great is his sophistry, you must never give him an affirmative answer, or you will be forced to grant his conclusion. Why, if he were to ask me whether it was daylight or not, I’d reply, ‘Sir, I don’t know. I can’t tell.’”

The outgoing Federalist majority in Congress furnished Jefferson with a pretext to strike back by passing, in the last days of their session, the Judiciary Act of 1801, which created new courts, added judges, and gave the president more control over appointing judges—and, by increasing offices for Federalist party members (including Marshall’s brother James), resulted in what the Chief’s biographer Richard Brookhiser termed a “lame-duck potlatch.”

Jefferson’s Congress retaliated not only by undoing these expanded judicial appointments in the Judiciary Act of 1802, but also by eliminating summer sessions of the Supreme Court. The next chance for Marshall and his like-minded justices to counterattack came when Marbury and several other “midnight judges” appointed in the last hours of the Adams Administration asked the Court for a “writ of mandamus” ordering Madison to deliver their commissions.

Marbury wouldn't have had to do if Marshall hadn't been struggling to deal with the first transition between opposing political parties in Presidential history. 

Serving as Secretary of State before Adams finally prevailed upon him to take over as Chief Justice, Marshall had been so busy affixing his seal to all these commissions that he didn’t ultimately make sure they were delivered. He asked his brother James to do the job. They were still on the secretary’s desk would Madison took over. Jefferson ordered that the commissions stay right there. 

Nowadays, judicial-ethics mavens would have had a fit over Marshall ruling on a case in which he figured, even if peripherally. But this was a new republic, with the rules being made up as people went along--and Marshall would be there at the foundation.

With Jefferson not wanting the administration represented in the court, Marshall had to resort occasionally to extraordinary means just to determine facts. Such was the case when James Marshall was called to testify about the non-delivery of the commissions.

Finally, on February 24, Marshall read aloud the ruling. This, in itself, was a break with prior practice, in which the justices handed down their own separate decisions.

Marshall, in writing and delivering the opinion himself, was having the Court speak as one voice. Moreover, because the ruling was a unanimous 6-0, he had succeeded in “massing the court,” or presenting a united front—an effective device for gaining legitimacy in controversial cases.

Marshall answered “yes” to the first two questions before the justices: Did Marbury and the other plaintiffs have a right to receive their commissions, and could they sue for their commissions in court?

Two statements in particular, both of which continue to reverberate with clarity and authority to the present day, seemed guaranteed to provoke Jefferson into another act of retaliation against the judiciary: "A Law repugnant to the Constitution is void" and "It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is."

Then Marshall pulled his masterstroke. Even though Marbury was entitled to the commission, he could not rely on the Judiciary Act of 1789, since Constitution did not permit the Court to have original jurisdiction in this matter. Therefore, the Court would not order the White House to give Marbury his office.

What to make of this maneuver? Jefferson had been left, it seems, with a victory: this and other judicial appointments that could obstruct his power had been vacated.

It was, in fact, nothing of the sort, but rather, as noted in Michael Glennon's excellent overview of the case in the Summer 2003 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, "a masterwork of calculated restraint, feint, and cunning, an opinion that laid claim for the courts to the greatest of government powers—the final say as to what the law is—even as it left Marshall's opponents no effective response."

In later years, the President realized that Marshall had a loaded pistol at his disposal in the doctrine of judicial review. Jefferson would decry Marbury v. Madison and subsequent decisions of the Marshall Court.

At the same time, Marshall solidified a judicial institution that had appeared increasingly irrelevant. Turnover on the Supreme Court had been rapid, in no small part due to the belief that it was the weakest of the three branches of government, with its power continuing to ebb. When he had taken over, R. Kent Newmyer told Brian Lamb in a C-Span "Book Notes" interview in 2002, "the institution was pretty much on the ropes.

Marshall changed all that, through his intellect, his charm, and his 35 years as Chief (still a record in that post), as I discussed in a later precedent-setting ruling of his, Gibbons v. Ogden. Perhaps most of all, he retained his influence through his shrewd political insight that he should not invite a reaction by overstepping his authority. 

So, though he claimed the right of judicial review, that authority would not be exercised again until 1857, two decades after his death, in the enormously controversial Dred Scott decision--a ruling that also confirmed that Marshall was the first Court practitioner of what Felix Frankfurter would call "judicial restraint."

(There are many fine discussions of Marbury vs. Madison, but one I would recommend is Nicholas Mosvick's blog post this time last year on the Website for the National Constitution Center.)

This Day in Presidential History (Jefferson Calms Tensions After Disputed Election)

Mar. 4, 1801—In the newly constructed capital of the nation he had helped bring into being, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as the third President of the United States—and, after a bitterly disputed election, the first to take office in a peaceful transfer of power between rival political parties.

In his own assumption of the Presidency in 1981, Ronald Reagan pointed out the remarkable nature of such an event: “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”  

That “miracle” has continued without disruption except twice since Jefferson took the oath of office:  In 1861, when Southern states seceded rather than accept their recent electoral loss to a Republican Party committed to containing slavery, and this past January 6, at the Capitol riot that interrupted the formal acknowledgement of Electoral College results, leading to five deaths.

The author of the Declaration of Independence took the oath of office after an election that threatened to tear the United States asunder before it had barely begun. With a Constitution that did not envision party tickets or even political parties, the two Democratic-Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, ended up with the same number of electoral votes.

In spite of the fact that it was clearly understood that Jefferson headed the ticket, the election ended up, for the first of only two times in U.S. history, in the House of Representatives, where the rival Federalist Party seriously considered electing Burr rather than the candidate they abominated, according to historian Richard Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System, as “an atheist, a French fanatic, a libertine, a visionary, and a political incompetent.”

Tensions were at the breaking point, with some Federalists scheming to avoid ceding the election to the Republicans at all, while the Republican governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared to mobilize the state militia in case of Federalist usurpation. In the end, with the Federalists accepting the conclusion of the informal party leader, Alexander Hamilton, that even the hated Jefferson was preferable to the unprincipled and dangerous Burr, the House voted to accept the Virginian as the winner.

In his landmark History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams depicts, with wonderful irony, the men around whom controversy swirled that March 4:

*a “retiring President” (his great-grandfather, John Adams) too angry to show up at the inauguration of the former friend who had defeated him in this last general election (John’s son, son John Quincy Adams, reacted similarly in 1829 when an opponent he despised, Andrew Jackson, assumed office);

*a Chief Justice (John Marshall) only appointed six weeks before but already on record as despising Jefferson;

*a Vice-President (Burr) now regarded by Jefferson and his associates as “the certain centre of corruption” for his ambiguous responses to Federalist attempts to sound him out before the recent vote in the House; and

*Jefferson himself, who, unlike later occupants of the White House, arrived with minimal ceremony: on foot, in ordinary dress, accompanied only by militia from a neighboring state and a few close political associates.

In private correspondence, among trusted confidants, Jefferson fulminated against the recent “reign of witches,” or period of political intolerance among the Federalists, and nearly two decades later he remembered the “revolution of 1800.” But publicly, in 1801, he began what has been a tradition of newly inaugurated Presidents since then: a reminder of the unity that exists among Americans despite strongly held political opinions.

Jefferson’s first inaugural address is among the most famous of all his public documents. Indeed, in a 2017 blog post, James M. Lindsay of the Council of Foreign Relations included it on a list of the seven best inaugural addresses.

Similarly to England’s theorist of conservatism, Edmund Burke, Jefferson delivered the most memorable public utterances in a voice devoid of volume or even noticeable expression. So it was with this address. Though many in his small audience that day could barely make out what he had to say, it has reverberated in all the years since, including in this appeal to bipartisan harmony:

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

As with all later occupants of the White House, Jefferson would encounter storms of contention. But on this occasion, he succeeded in calming an anxious nation, including through his assurance—which has gained even greater relevance in light of recent events—to preserve “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.”

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Arnold Raid on Richmond Rattles Jefferson)

Jan. 5, 1781—Facing only token opposition, Royal troops in Virginia under their notorious new commander, Benedict Arnold, plundered and destroyed at will public buildings and private residences in Richmond, the recently designated capital of the commonwealth.

The attack was so unexpected that few troops were available to stand in the way of the traitor who, for all his double-dealing, continued to display the energy and skill that had once made him so valuable to the Continental Army.

Having no clue until too late as to Arnold’s ultimate destination, Governor Thomas Jefferson (pictured) tried in vain to instigate a military counter-offensive and maintain civil authority in the small community he had done so much to bring into being as the new seat of government in Virginia, leading to charges of incompetence and even cowardice that dogged him for the rest of his life.

Arnold's raid—as well as the larger five-month campaign he conducted in the interior—also had consequences for Jefferson’s personal life. To avoid capture by the English, he sent his wife Martha and young children packing for Tuckahoe, the plantation where he had spent much of his childhood. That journey through the wilderness in the deepest heart of the winter led to his five-week-old daughter Lucy catching a cold that worsened until she died in mid-April.

Forty years ago, in a college seminar on the American Presidency, our professor was fond of pointing out that for many Presidents, their prior experiences as governor foreshadowed how they would act in the White House. How, then, should we view Jefferson’s performance as an executive?

Unlike fellow Virginian George Washington, the “Sage of Monticello” had no experience of physical combat. Unlikely as it might seem, he had even less appetite for political combat. He left after two terms as both governor and President exhausted from the struggle, with the braying of his enemies ringing in his ears.

It is true that the powers of the Virginia governor were weak, requiring consensus by an eight-man Council of State. It is also true that any occupant of the office would be handicapped by the inability to raise funds at that time.

On the positive side, Jefferson had enough popularity to win a second term, and enough foresight to have drawn up, four years before, enabling legislation to move the commonwealth’s capital away from Williamsburg—easily accessible to invading troops attacking with a navy—to a more defensible interior location in Richmond. Moreover, he took care to move arms and necessary papers to safety.

But Jefferson lacked the personal charisma of predecessor Patrick Henry, Washington’s hard-won recognition of the many ways that things could go wrong in a military campaign—or the willingness to exercise the authority of his office up to its constitutional limits. Thus, he did not receive word until late that Arnold was pressing inland from the coast; did not notify Washington in time that Continental troops were needed to repel the invaders; did not guess correctly that Arnold would press towards Richmond rather than Petersburg; and did not call out the militia in time to defend the capital.

(In the case of the militia, Jefferson—suspicious of the threat posed by a standing army to republican government—remained, even three decades later, deeply naïve about the ability of poorly trained soldiers, signed up for limited service, to carry out significant military duties. His belief that Canada could be captured as a result of “a mere matter of marching” turned out to be spectacularly wrong, and the burning of Washington under his successor, James Madison, echoed his own experiences with Richmond.)

Unable to capture Jefferson himself, the redcoats took some of his slaves from the governor’s residence in Richmond. They then proceeded to Portsmouth, establishing there a base from which they could continue to launch raids in the countryside.

With Jefferson’s second term drawing to a close in early summer and no successor in sight, the English reached the Monticello, the mountain estate that he thought would be safe from English deprivation. Again he was wrong, forcing him to gallop away so hurriedly that some mistook it for cowardice.

Following an embarrassing inquiry into his conduct of the defense of Richmond, the legislature adopted a resolution praising his “ability, rectitude and integrity.” But critics began to complain about his lack of decisiveness in directing the campaign—notably Major General Baron von Steuben, who had won Washington’s gratitude and trust for intensively training Continental troops. Steuben was indignant that Jefferson had not used his office to order militiamen or even slaves to construct a fort at Hood’s Point.

Just a few weeks before his death in 1826, Jefferson had been willing to sit down with a son of onetime critic Henry Lee to provide documents justifying his role in the Richmond campaign. But the former President was too exhausted by what proved to be his death struggle to respond at the necessary length.

This Day in Medical History (Benjamin Rush, Reforming Doctor Who Signed Declaration of Independence, Born)

Dec. 24, 1745—Benjamin Rush, a doctor at the forefront of intellectual and reform movements in the first four decades of the American republic—including signing the Declaration of Independence—was born in Byberry Township, Penn. (The date used here was according to the Julian Calendar that prevailed in England and its colonies at the time.)

Last week, I wrote a post about another underrated Founding Father: John Jay. But, in its way, Rush’s career was more varied, more interesting—and more tragic. After all, how many other figures are considered so crucial to the origins of abolitionism, prison reform, psychiatry, eugenics, and substance abuse treatment—or been forced to put many of his concepts into practice by treating his own mentally ill son?

As a member of the Continental Congress whose activities ranged across multiple fields, Rush may have been surpassed only by two friends who also signed the Declaration, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He embodied the best notions of the American Enlightenment for his belief in republicanism, toleration, scientific progress, and the elevating impact of education.

Yet, though regarded as the most famous and brilliant American physician of his time, his renown faded somewhat in the two centuries after his death for three reasons: his relatively brief political career, a longtime lack of access to his copious writings, and out-of-context misunderstandings about some of the more controversial aspects of his medical career.

In recent years, Rush has become the focus of some long-overdue scholarly attention. First, Stephen Fried’s highly acclaimed biography of the doctor appeared two years ago. Second, the current COVID-19 pandemic has led scholars to re-examine Rush’s controversial role in a major epidemic of his career: a Yellow Fever outbreak in Philadelphia.

Though not the sole physician who signed the Declaration, Rush was the only one to receive a university education in medicine (the College of Philadelphia, then the University of Edinburgh).

From his late 20s on, he became active in politics: persuading the recent English immigrant Thomas Paine to call his incendiary pro-revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense; discussing how to advance the new movement while dining at Philadelphia’s City Tavern with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington; and, after signing the Declaration, leaving his pregnant wife behind to serve as physician in chief of the military hospital of the Middle Department of the Continental Army.

In the latter frenetic period, Rush was a trusted confidante and admirer of Washington: witnessing him clutching a page saying “Victory or death” (the watchword for the attack) before crossing the Delaware at the Battle of Trenton; treating the dying Gen. Hugh Mercer at the Battle of Princeton; slipping out of the clutches of the British after being briefly captured at the Battle of Brandywine; and writing an essay on  improving soldiers’ medical care that Washington pressed on his subordinates.

But before long, Rush would also display the habit of caustic, impolitic and sometimes indiscreet writing that attracted a host of enemies. He became appalled by medical treatment of soldiers at the hands of his superior, John Shippen, then at the Continental Congress for clearing him of wrongdoing.

Rush made an even more significant enemy when he penned an anonymous letter to Patrick Henry that was critical of Washington. Henry disregarded Rush’s plea to burn the letter immediately, instead passing it along to the general. Washington was so angry at Rush’s duplicity that the doctor felt compelled to resign his post.

In the 1780s, students rather than soldiers became the primary focus of Rush’s attention. At the University of Pennsylvania, he served in a number of capacities over the years, including professor of chemistry, professor of the theory and practice of medicine, and professor of the institutes of medicine and clinical practice. Unlike many of the other Founding Fathers, Rush was egalitarian in outlook, believing that a good education should be enough to qualify candidates for public office.

All the while he was lecturing to enthralled students (more than 3,000 in his 45-year career), Rush was maintaining a vigorous publication schedule (an estimated 85 significant publications, including the first American chemistry textbook) and becoming what would now be thought of as a public intellectual on health and educational matters:

* He founded Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (1783), Franklin College (now Franklin and Marshall) at Lancaster (1787), and the College of Physicians (also 1787);

* He sought, at Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital, to get better funding for the mentally ill, and to stop the shameful practice of warehousing them;

* He called for treating addiction as a medical problem years before this became standard practice;

* He sought to reconcile two modes of beliefs that he heartily embraced: rationalism and religion;

* He proposed a national system of public education with a federal university to train public servants; and

* He advocated for the education of women.

On top of all these efforts, Rush not only called for an end to slavery but, differing from the conventional wisdom of the time, declared that there was nothing physically different about African-Americans that would prevent them from achieving as much as whites.

Unfortunately, Rush endangered his reputation for being in the vanguard of progressive thought—not to mention his professional credibility—by his role in Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic of 1793. (A thorough but critical examination of his role is provided by Robert L. North's "Benjamin Rush, MD: Assassin or Beloved Healer?" in a 2000 article for the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings.)

At the start of the epidemic, Rush’s standing with the public actually rose, as he was one of the few physicians even to stay in the city to treat patients. But no approach he tried with patients seemed to work.

At this point, recalling a 1744 medical paper, Rush hit on the expedient of bloodletting and purging. Even when that didn’t work, he only resorted to it all the more often. (Ironically, Rush had stumbled onto they key to yellow fever outbreaks—his notes refer at one point to “Moschetoes” that were “uncommonly numerous”—but he never made the connection to the disease’s origin.)

William Safire’s novel Scandalmonger (2000) takes the viewpoint of Rush’s enemies by depicting him as a "murderous quack" and "Dr. Death," but it leaves out an important bit of context: Nobody else at the time had the least idea of what caused the disease. But the damage to the esteemed doctor’s credibility was done. He felt compelled to withdraw from some of his positions, and even his practice suffered for a time.

Adams’ appointment of his old friend as Treasurer of the U.S. Mint enabled Rush to rebuild his reputation even as he re-entered public service. He remained wed, fatally, to his old idea on fever—when stricken with typhus in 1813, he instructed that he be treated through bloodletting and purging—but at his death, a grateful populace turned out en masse to pay tribute to one of Philadelphia’s most honored citizens.

In his 2018 biography, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, Stephen Fried explained how the physician-patriot’s intimate connection to the leading lights of his time led to his relative undervaluation by decades of historians. At his death, descendants of several prominent families had reason not to have his correspondence or journal entries cited by biographers--materials that would have confirmed his central in the American Revolution:

*Jefferson’s family did not want airing of his skepticism about the divinity of Christ—opinions that could have been misconstrued to suggest he was an atheist—or his request to the doctor for the best way to treat his hemorrhoids;

*Adams’ descendants were sensitive about revealing the President's anguish over a son’s descent into and death from alcoholism—a pattern that repeated itself with one of the children of John Quincy Adams; and

*Rush’s family was not keen about divulging the reason behind his disrupted friendship with George Washington, now firmly established as the Father of His Country.

Even as he struggled with the personal tragedy of his son John--a physician who, after killing a friend in a duel, became so mentally unstable he needed to be placed under his father's care-- Rush, in his last decade, performed one of his greatest services to posterity by relentlessly urging old friends Adams and Jefferson to repair the breach that had developed because of their competition for the Presidency. 

That reconciliation not only helped heal old wounds between the proud old patriots but led to one of the most extraordinary bursts of correspondents among two ex-Presidents—creating a treasure trove that scholars have used since to better understand the extraordinary generation that produced such revolutionaries as Adams, Jefferson and mutual friend Rush.

This Day in Southern History (‘Gabriel’s Insurrection’ Foiled at Last Minute)

Aug. 30, 1800—At 2 in the afternoon, Virginia Gov. James Monroe (pictured)—just returned to Richmond because of a yellow fever quarantine emergency—received a visit from slaveowner Mosby Shepherd, confirming rumors circulating at least since spring: that a massive slave uprising was in the offing just outside Richmond in the town of Henrico.

This time, though, specific details provided by two of Shepherd’s slaves endowed the reports with a grim new certainty: that the rebellious slaves would kill their masters that night, move on to Richmond and set fire to the state capital, capitalizing on the ensuing confusion to seize ammunition from the penitentiary.

Immediately, Monroe—in his first executive position in the young United States, and two months from a tumultuous national election—moved to quash the insurrection, taking the unprecedented step of stationing militia in Henrico, Richmond and the penitentiary. A torrential downpour that night scotched the revolt before it could be launched.

Capitalizing on this respite, the militia broke into slave quarters in the area, producing a round of confessions or finger-pointing from the terrified inhabitants. Within two days, approximately 70 were arrested and charged.

The ringleader was quickly identified: a 24-year-old blacksmith named Gabriel, the property of plantation owner Thomas Henry Prosser. The incident has been sometimes been referred to as “Gabriel Prosser’s Revolt”—a misnomer, as Gabriel never took his master’s surname during his lifetime.

But, though the name was misleading, the fears that the uprising brought to the surface were real enough. The Virginia gentry did not have to look far for the possibility of violence at the hands of slaves: Ambrose Madison, the paternal grandfather of Congressman James Madison, was allegedly poisoned by two of his slaves and a neighboring one.

An insurrection—quicker than a slow-acting poison, perpetrated by slaves who often outnumbered whites on plantations—was even more terrifying. And it was more worrisome still when led by someone like Gabriel—a commanding physical presence (over six feet tall, well above the average size for that era) who, because of his literacy, also possessed a heightened ability to receive intelligence and communicate with followers.

The year 1800 was already shaping up to be one of unusual tension, with the United States and France trying to back away from a full-scale war; with the Democratic-Republican Party, headed by Monroe’s mentor Thomas Jefferson, attempting to win the Presidency that fall from the Federalists; and with the continuing repercussions of the successful Haitian revolt against their former French masters, led by Toussaint Louverture. But Gabriel’s Insurrection gave more tangible form to this unease.

The man at the center of it had been seething for over a year over the unequal treatment of slaves within the Virginia legal system, especially as it affected him. 

The charge facing Gabriel in 1799—“maiming” (an overseer, in a scuffle arising from another slave’s theft of a pig)—would not have been unusual in the society of his master. Indeed, “eye-gouging, ear-biting, and even more devastating forms of physical combat were common among equals in late eighteenth-century Virginia,” according to a 1982 article by historian Philip J. Schwarz. “It was the rare slave, however, who attacked whites openly and physically.”
 

Gabriel only escaped the death penalty through a quirk of the law called “benefit of clergy” (i.e., he would only be branded rather than executed if he could recite a Bible verse).

Whites had used that same legal system to bust his conspiracy, offering a full pardon to any slaves willing to testify against fellow conspirators.

Although a full pardon was one means of resolving the case, Gov. Monroe had to weigh to what extent any other form of mercy was possible among the multiple cases now filling the Virginia courts. He outlined the courses open to him in a letter to Jefferson:

“When to avert the hand of the Executioner, is a question of great importance. It is hardly to be presumed, [that] a rebel who avows it was his intention to assassinate his master etc. if pardoned will ever become a useful servant, and we have no power to transport him abroad—Nor is it less difficult to say whether mercy or severity is the better policy in this case, tho' where there is cause for doubt it is best to incline to the former council.”

Perhaps better than any whites, Monroe knew that extenuating circumstances existed for mercy. Though there was little doubt that Gabriel  led the conspiracy, the early investigation had already established that Presser had, even in a system favorable to a slaveholder, treated his slaves with “great barbarity.” Moreover, as a careful onetime lawyer, Monroe realized that confessions extracted under torture or its threat were not reliable guides to determining innocence.

In determining the varying fates of the accused, however, Monroe was not merely guided by public safety or questions of guilt and innocence, but also by his own self-interest. He would own as many as 250 slaves in his lifetime, making him one of the largest slaveowners in his county. He was a direct beneficiary of the system he was being tasked to protect.

In the end, with Monroe himself attempting to interrogate the captured leader, Gabriel refused to make a statement without a promise to mitigate his punishment. Gabriel would be one of 26 hanged for their complicity in the rebellion, with another dying in custody while awaiting execution. Among the remaining 38 originally arrested, some were transported out of state; some were found not guilty; and a few were pardoned.

As for Gabriel: 207 years after his hanging, then-Gov. Tim Kaine granted him a full pardon, commending his “courage and devotion to the fundamental Virginia values of freedom and equality.”

Those “values” perplexed Monroe, as it did fellow Virginia Presidents George Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, to his dying day. Although Washington arranged to manumit his slaves following the death of his wife Martha, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, fatally entrapped in the lavish, debt-inducing lifestyle of the plantation  aristocracy, freed no more than a handful of their own, despite their grave misgivings about “the peculiar institution.”

If anything, Gabriel’s Insurrection convinced Monroe that ultimately, slavery could not exist in the United States without raising tensions between North and South and posing a danger to the lives of slaveholders (a fear realized 31 years later in Nat Turner's Rebellion and in 1859 in another led by John Brown).

He came around to gradually moving slaves back to Africa as an ultimate solution to the practice, even endorsing the American Colonization Society. During his Presidency, Liberia was established on the African continent for this purpose, even naming its capital, Monrovia, after him.

This Day in Constitutional History (Alien and Sedition Acts Omen of Later Freedom Threats)

July 14, 1798—As tensions with France verged toward war, President John Adams (pictured) signed the last of four pieces of legislation passed over the past month by the Federalist Party in Congress to crack down on Gallic immigrants and their Irish Catholic and domestic allies. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the first major federal attempt to curtail immigration and press rights, sparked a furious reaction by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Vice-President Thomas Jefferson.

If you want to know about the evolution of such current controversies as immigration, states’ rights, voter suppression, the role of the press, and resistance to unpopular federal measures, this early wide-ranging attempt to interfere with the Bill of Rights is a good place to start. 

Actually, the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed attempt to label both Muslims and Mexicans as security threats has thrown an unexpected spotlight on a period of history that Americans have conveniently forgotten—or never really learned. 

For years, the passage of these bills and Adams’ signature “were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency," according to Adams’ keenly appreciative biographer, David McCullough. 

Yet it would appear that, two hundred and eighteen years later, the principles of the Alien and Sedition Acts “have sprung, with surprising vigor, from their resting place in history,” wrote Jelani Cobb in a “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker right after the last Presidential election. The last few weeks have only made that observation even more relevant.

The question of revolutionary France was the great fault line in the decade following adoption of the Constitution. The Democratic-Republicans regarded the new republic as a natural extension of the American Revolution by a nation that had served as our ally in the war, while the more Anglophile Federalists regarded it first with suspicion, then, as the Reign of Terror took hold, with horror.

The execution of Louis XVI plunged France into war with the Bourbon dynasty’s Continental allies, and, in the case of monarchical England, a newly sympathetic force. The possibility of involvement in that conflict compelled President George Washington to issue a Proclamation of Neutrality.

To be sure, there were plenty of domestic issues—notably, the place of the First National Bank in the new nation—to divide the Federalists from the Democratic-Republicans. 

Yet the quarrel with France ensured that the divisions would be relentlessly rancorous. For the argument about the French Revolution was, at bottom, an argument about ours—about what was the true legacy of that struggle, and about which side was the worthier custodian of its legacy.

Additional tensions arose in the Adams administration over France’s seizure of ships by neutral countries such as the United States. Adams’ attempt at negotiations collapsed when the French government demanded bribes. The resulting X, Y, and Z Affair (christened because of the initials standing for redacted names in the correspondence that Congress insisted the President release related to the incident) led to the abrogation of the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, and fiscal authorization of new frigates.

The Federalists also used the opportunity to smite their Democratic-Republican opponents. through four measures: 

*The Naturalization Act, the most dramatic of the measures, increased the period necessary for immigrants to become citizens from five to 14 years.

*The Alien Friends Act authorized the president to deport foreigners deemed "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime.

*The Alien Enemies Act allowed the president to arrest, imprison, and deport any foreigner subject to an enemy nation.

*The Sedition Act made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the Federal government, including the Congress and the preside

The four pieces of legislation collectively christened the Alien and Sedition Acts were the Federalists’ attempt to stem the dissent and anarchy they saw all around. In a time of unrelenting demographic and political change, it found favor among those who wanted to calcify current conditions before they changed again.

The immediate cause of the legislation was the Quasi-War that had erupted between the U.S. and France. The French and their Irish Catholic allies newly arrived on U.S. shores seemed to the Federalists like a fifth column, undermining the U.S. from within. 

But limiting immigration was, for the Federalists, not just a matter of national security; it was also an early—and unusual—attempt at voter suppression. 

Once settled, French immigrants had displayed, by Federalist lights, a dismaying tendency to vote Democratic-Republican. 

More alarmingly, the same phenomenon was occurring with Irish immigrants. What began, in the early 1790s, as a primarily Irish Protestant immigration to the U.S. had shifted, by the end of the decade, toward an Irish-Catholic flood that elected Democratic-Republicans in key urban districts of Philadelphia.

By 1798, “The Year of the French,” a French-aided rebellion by the United Irishmen had raised a threat close to England. Such Federalists as Harrison Gray Otis and Roger Griswold made no secret of their contempt for the new arrivals from this now-revolutionary homeland. 

Reflecting the partisan spirit in which the legislation was framed, the Sedition Act stipulated that "opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States" and publishing "any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the president or the Congress would resist in imprisonment or fines. 

Notice the one official left out among these maligned groups: the Vice-President. As the current occupant of that office was Jefferson, the Federalists had no objection to any criticism lobbed against him. 

Adams had no interest in using the authority handed to him by the Alien Acts to regulate immigration, so he kept Secretary of State Timothy Pickering on a short leash when it came to enforcing that.

But the choleric President was too thin-skinned to ignore insults, and before long journalists and politicians were being locked up or intimidated into silence for running afoul of the Sedition Acts. 

Among those who ran afoul of the new legislation was Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of Philadelphia's Democrat-Republican Aurora and the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who died of yellow fever before he could be brought to trial, and Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican representative from Vermont, who had said Adams’ foreign policy proved the President should be confined to a "mad house." 

By itself, a prison term would have been enough to make newspaper editors nervous about criticizing the administration. But the financial penalty of $2,000 may have been even more staggering. The sum would have been difficult-to-impossible to pay, forcing the editors into bankruptcy and debtor’s prison.

The Democratic-Republicans did more than register their disapproval at the polls; they also sought to defy federal power at the state level. Jefferson and protégé James Madison crafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, passed by those two legislatures not only declaring their opposition to the bills but explaining why they were null and void.

With Jefferson still a member of the federal government, he and Madison had to hide their authorship of the resolutions.(In fact, this would not become known until the 1820s, when both were old men no longer actively involved in electoral politics). 

But the resolutions, by insisting that a single state could nullify federal law, laid the groundwork for the Nullification Crisis 30 years later led by John C. Calhoun. By this time, Madison was insisting that his work and Jefferson’s could not be construed into an implied endorsement of Calhoun’s defiance of federal authority. But the genie had been let loose from the bottle, and Madison and Jefferson were, in effect, the intellectual grandfathers of secession.

Once Jefferson was inaugurated in 1801, the Alien and Sedition Acts became effectively inoperative. The legislation expired the day before he took office, and those jailed under its terms were released. The courts progressively viewed the legislation, as Associate Supreme Court Justice William Brennan noted in Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), and null and void. 

Although the legislation certainly excited and crystallized opposition to the Federalists, it did not by itself ensure their defeat at the polls. Instead, responsibility for their loss in 1800 lay in the feud between Alexander Hamilton, the party’s guiding light, and the Federalist who refused to act on the basis of political faction, Adams.

The President, contemplating the impact of another war on the young republic, authorized peace negotiations in 1799. Hamilton then launched an intemperate attack on Adams, dividing the Federalists and ensuring they would never win another Presidential election.