Perspective on the Founders

Sixteen volumes of the Princeton University Press’s fifty-odd-volume collection, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, have now appeared. The Howard University Press’s great edition of The Adams Papers, which will include not only John Adams’ papers but those of John Quincy and Charles Francis as well, and total perhaps ninety volumes, has begun publication with the four volumes of John’s Diary and Autobiography. Hamilton’s papers have never had anything like an adequate edition, and this is being rectified by the Columbia University Press, whose altogether fine edition now reaches Volume Six, bringing the story to 1790. Meanwhile, Dumas Malone’s monumental Jefferson and His Time has reached Volume Three. This carries Jefferson through the decade before his election as President and indicates, more than any previous volume, along what lines our view of Jefferson, and so of ourselves, is suffering change. Professor Page Smith’s two-volume biography of John Adams, just out from Doubleday, continues the radical revaluation of Adams’ place in American history begun no recent volume on Hamilton has appeared, our view of him has, of course, already undergone a major overhauling.

If it is too early to say what form this mid-twentieth-century revaluation will finally take, some observations can be made. The childishly oversimplified view of Hamilton as the exponent of privilege is at an end; and the Jefferson-Hamilton conflict (variously billed in our history as the struggle of the people against the rich, of states’ rights against centralization, of the individual against the state, of agrarianism against industrialism) is no longer seen as a battle whose lines establish, once and for all, the adequate propaganda cliches in terms of which we can wisely order our political emotions.

VM

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Vincent Miller

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Sixteen volumes of the Princeton University Press’s fifty-odd-volume collection, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, have now appeared. The Howard University Press’s great edition of The Adams Papers, which will include not only John Adams’ papers but those of John Quincy and Charles Francis as well, and total perhaps ninety volumes, has begun publication with the four volumes of John’s Diary and Autobiography. Hamilton’s papers have never had anything like an adequate edition, and this is being rectified by the Columbia University Press, whose altogether fine edition now reaches Volume Six, bringing the story to 1790. Meanwhile, Dumas Malone’s monumental Jefferson and His Time has reached Volume Three. This carries Jefferson through the decade before his election as President and indicates, more than any previous volume, along what lines our view of Jefferson, and so of ourselves, is suffering change. Professor Page Smith’s two-volume biography of John Adams, just out from Doubleday, continues the radical revaluation of Adams’ place in American history begun no recent volume on Hamilton has appeared, our view of him has, of course, already undergone a major overhauling.

If it is too early to say what form this mid-twentieth-century revaluation will finally take, some observations can be made. The childishly oversimplified view of Hamilton as the exponent of privilege is at an end; and the Jefferson-Hamilton conflict (variously billed in our history as the struggle of the people against the rich, of states’ rights against centralization, of the individual against the state, of agrarianism against industrialism) is no longer seen as a battle whose lines establish, once and for all, the adequate propaganda cliches in terms of which we can wisely order our political emotions.