Does reading all those private emails from Hillary and her staff ever make you feel a little uneasy, perhaps a bit guilty about invading their privacy? Didn’t think so. And for what it’s worth, reading the other side’s mail goes way back in American history. As a promising young writer who has since faded into obscurity wrote a couple of decades ago, “the Founding Fathers showed no reluctance to violate privacy rights in the pursuit of liberty, especially the privacy rights of a Tory.” [The link hasn’t been working this morning, but here’s a cached version.]

In the early 1770s a spy stole some letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts.

With the aid of artful editing, the letters seemed to urge harsh measures to oppress the colonists. Benjamin Franklin, the Massachusetts legislature’s agent in London, had obtained them from unknown intermediaries on the understanding (as he later wrote) “that they should not be printed, that no copies should be taken of them, that they should be shown only to a few of the leading people of the government, and that they should be carefully returned.”

Of course they were immediately published. Other historical figures who were proto-doxed include Senator William Blount of Tennessee (who planned an insurrection in Spain’s Gulf Coast lands with the aim of helping Britain; in 1797 he was expelled from the Senate after a letter describing the scheme was made public), Aaron Burr (who, after he shot Alexander Hamilton, hatched a somewhat similar scheme to establish his own empire in the Southwest; he was acquitted of treason, but the written evidence of his duplicity barred him from any career except being a lawyer), and James Garfield (whose involvement in the Gilded Age’s Crédit Mobilier scandal did not stop him from being elected president a few years later). Secret letters that were eventually exposed also went a long way toward starting the War of 1812 (the John Henry letters) and the Spanish-American War (the de Lôme letter).

Perhaps Grover Cleveland had the right idea. His 1884 presidential contest against James Blaine was notoriously nasty on both sides, but when someone offered Cleveland a packet of incriminating documents about Blaine, he paid the asking price, took the documents, and tossed them into the fire. Cleveland’s reelection bid in 1888 failed, in a contest that actually was rigged against him with massive vote fraud in New York and Indiana, but he didn’t whine about it. Instead he came back and won in 1892.

Less nobly, perhaps, Republican campaign managers decided against publishing embarrassingly juvenile and worshipful letters from Henry Wallace, FDR’s running mate, to an eccentric Russian mystic named Nicholas Roerich:

After a good deal of controversy with his fellow bosses, the Republican national chairman, Joseph W. Martin, decided against publishing the letters. Privacy was the least of his considerations. Martin worried that it would come across as a smear, while others feared retaliatory leaks about Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate, and his barely concealed affair with a long-time mistress.

Those were the days, when politicians didn’t want to look like they were smearing their opponents . . .