Notes

Preface

1.   See his 1958 address: Gilbert Chinard, “La Littérature comparée et l’histoire des idées dans l’étude des relations franco-américaines,” in Comparative Literature: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, 2 vols. (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), 2:349–69. For a checklist of his writings see Princeton University Library Chronicle 26 (1965): 150–96. For a biographical memoir consult Antonio Pace, “Gilbert Chinard (1881–1972),” in Tear Book of the American Philosophical Society, 1972, 132–38.

2.   L’Esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: E. Champion, 1925), trans. Ramon Guthrie as The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America: A Study of Moral and Intellectual Relations Between France and the United States at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). Reviews: Carl Becker, American Historical Review 30 (1924–25): 810–12; Gilbert Chinard, Revue de littérature comparée 6 (1926): 371–76; G. L. Van Roosbroeck, Romanic Review 18 (1927): 158–60; Henry Commager, New Republic 54 (1928): 355–56.

3.   America and French Culture, 1750–1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927; rpt. ed., Durham, N. C: Seeman Press, 1965). Reviews: Carl Becker, American Historical Review 33 (1927–28): 883–85; Henry Commager, New Republic 54 (1928): 355–56; Robert E. Spiller, Saturday Review of Literature, July 28, 1928, 8; Bernard Faÿ, Revue de littérature comparée 10 (1930): 353–60.

Introduction

1.   Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 1:124.

2.   See my Rousseau in America 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 18–21.

3.   James Truslow Adams, Revolutionary New England, 1691–1776 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1923), 288.

4.   L’Idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle, 4th ed. (Paris: A. Colin, 1969).

5.   Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978).

6.   James Breck Perkins, France in the American Revolution (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 418–19.

7.   For annual annotated bibliographies of books, articles, and reviews, French > American and American > French, see Romanic Review 29 (1938)–39 (1948); French American Review 2 (1949), 3 (1950); and Bulletin de l’Institut Français de Washington, nouvelle série, 1951–54. See too the various publications of the Institut Français de Washington itself. A number of these were crowned by L’Académie Française. Consult also the Franco-American Review 1–2 (1936–38) and the American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 1 (1930–). The latter magazine is an especially good source of articles pertaining to almost every aspect of French and American culture. A new periodical, the French American Review, began publication in 1976. This is a scholarly journal of comparative literature, concerned with the history of French and American literary relations.

8.   Louis B. Wright, The Atlantic Frontier: Colonial American Civilization, 1607–1763 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959), 335.

9.   But see also Adrienne Koch, The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 19–20, and her article “Aftermath of the American Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 56 (1967): 735–63.

10.   Saul K. Padover, The World of the Founding Fathers: Their Basic Ideas on Freedom and Self-Government (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 27.

11.   See Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly 76 (1961). Padover, in The World of the Founding Fathers, writes that “most of the delegates [to the Constitutional Convention of 1787] were in their early middle age, averaging slightly under 45” (p. 29).

One. The Enlightenment

1.   From a wealth of writings on the Enlightenment generally, I select for mention here only two books: Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951; Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966, 1969).

2.   Herbert Dieckmann, Essays in Comparative Literature (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1961), 43–44. See also the section “Theories on the Origins of the Enlightenment,” in Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 28–57.

3.   See J. H. Brumfitt, The French Enlightenment (London: Macmillan, 1972).

4.   Ethics 53 (1943): 257.

5.   See Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), and Charles F. Mullett, “Classical Influences on the American Revolution,” Classical Journal 35 (1939): 92–104.

6.   Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 63–78.

7.   Henry Steele Commager, “America and the Enlightenment,” in The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1972), 7.

8.   Henry Steele Commager, “Leadership in Eighteenth-Century America and Today,” Daedalus 90 (1961): 657. Much earlier Commager had written, “The sources of American revolutionary philosophy are English, not French, and the development of American institutions has been a realistic phenomenon, dominated by geographic conditions and by economic considerations” (New Republic 54 [1928]: 356).

9.   In Intellectual History in America: Contemporary Essays on Puritanism, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism, ed. Cushing Strout, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 1:, 64–93. With regard to this introductory phase, see also Theodore Hornberger, “Benjamin Col-man and the Enlightenment,” New England Quarterly 12(1939): 227–40; David Levin, ed., The Puritan in the Enlightenment: Franklin and Edwards (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963); Stow Persons, “The Cyclical Theory of History in Eighteenth Century America,” American Quarterly 6 (1954): 147–63; and Harold B. Wohl, “Charles Chauncy and the Age of Enlightenment in New England” (Ph.D. diss., Iowa State University, 1957).

10.   Rüssel B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 5.

11.   Bernard Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 67 (1961–62): 339.

12.   For further information consult Peter Gay, “The Enlightenment,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 34–46; Henry F. May, “The Problem of the American Enlightenment,” New Literary History 1 (1970): 201–14, and The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Donald H. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976); and American Quarterly (special issue, “An American Enlightenment,” ed. Joseph Ellis), vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 1976). See, among other articles in this issue, David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America.” Their article gives statistical information on the reception in America, from 1700 to 1813, of certain major authors of the European Enlightenment.

Two. The World of the Founding Fathers and France

1.   Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, new impression, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 2: 213–14.

2.   Gilbert Chinard, La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen et ses antécédents américains (Washington, D.C.: Institut Français de Washington, 1945); “Notes on the American Origins of the ‘Déclaration des Droits de l’homme et du Citoyen,’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98 (1954): 383–96.

3.   R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), vol. 1.

4.   Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 181s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

5.   See also, among others, Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, extra vol. 14 (1897) of Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science; and Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

6.   For this figure and the following population statistics I am indebted to the Encyclopedia of American History … Updated and Revised, ed. Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).

7.   Frank J. Klingberg, The Morning of America (New York: D. Appleton—Century, 1941), 294. For maps showing the space of the country, colonies, and cities see Lester J. Cappon, editor-in-chief, Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 1760–1790 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).

8.   Merle E. Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Harper, 1951), 39.

9.   Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).

10.   Michael Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1949), 30, 31.

11.   For example, Klingberg, The Morning of America, and Evarts B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (New York: Macmillan, 1943).

12.   Howard Mumford Jones reckoned the total number of Huguenot immigrants here at about fifteen thousand (America and French Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927], 102).

13.   Gilbert Chinard, “The American Philosophical Society and the World of Science (1768–1800),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87 (1943): 1–11. Chinard’s article supersedes J. G. Rosengarten, “The Early French Members of the American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 46 (1907): 87–93.

14.   Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, Performed in 1788 (Dublin: W. Corbet, 1792), 107.

15.   The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 1:27.

16.   V. L. Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1925), 2:207.

17.   See Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Treaties of 1778 and Allied Documents, introduction by James Brown Scott (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928); and William C. Stinchcombe, The American Revolution and the French Alliance (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969).

18.   Les Combattants français de la guerre américaine, 1778–1783 (Washington, D.C.: Imprimerie Nationale, 1905; rpt. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1969). See also Thomas Balch, The French in America During the War of Independence of the United States, 1777–1783, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1891–95), vol. 2.

19.   The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 31 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 26:7.

20.   French American Review 1 (1948): 123–25.

21.   Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration During the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 92. See also Frances S. Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790–1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940) ; and Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey [1793–98], trans, and ed. Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947).

22.   See Louis Réau, L’Art français aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1926), for the source of these remarks on Houdon and Saint-Mémin. On L’Enfant and Houdon, consult particularly Elizabeth S. Kite, comp., L’Enfant and Washington, 1791–1792 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), and Gilbert Chinard, ed., Houdon in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930).

23.   Consult John G. Roberts, “The American Career of Quesnay de Beaurepaire,” French Review 20 (1947): 463–70.

24.   See Frank Monaghan, French Travellers in the United States, 1765–1932 (New York: New York Public Library, 1933); Lee W. Ryan, French Travelers in the Southeastern United States, 1775–1800 (Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1939); and Genevieve G. Hubbard, “French Travellers in America, 1775–1840: A Study of their Observations” (Ph.D. diss.; American University, 1936). I have not seen the latter. According to Ryan, Hubbard is concerned with impressions of the entire country.

25.   See “French Newspapers in the United States Before 1800,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 14, pt.2 (1920): 45–126; Samuel J. Marino, “The French-Refugee Newspapers and Periodicals in the United States 1789–1825” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1962); and Allen J. Barthold, “French Journalists in the United States, 1780–1800,” Franco-American Review 1 (1936): 215–30.

26.   Consult F. C. Green, Eighteenth-Century France: Six Essays (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1929), 48, 69.

27.   See Alfred O. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), and his article “Benjamin Franklin and the Philosophes,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963): 43–65.

28.   Aldridge, “Franklin and the Philosophes,” 46–48.

29.   Kenneth N. McKee, “The Popularity of the ‘American’ on the French Stage During the Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 83 (1940): 480.

30.   Consult Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).

31.   The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7), 9:77. When news of Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790, reached Paris, the National Assembly decreed a three-day period of mourning. For details, see Gilbert Chinard, L’Apothéose de Benjamin Franklin (Paris: Librairie Orientale et Américaine, 1955).

32.   Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784 to 1789 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1950); Edward Dumbauld, Thomas Jefferson, American Tourist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946); Howard C. Rice, Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.)

33.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 10:600.

34.   Gilbert Chinard, “Jefferson Among the Philosophers,” Ethics 53 (1943): 160. See also Chinard’s book Trois Amitiés françaises de Jefferson d’après sa correspondance inédite avec Madame de Bréhan, Madame de Tessé, et Madame de Corny (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1927).

35.   A Diary of the French Revolution, by Gouverneur Morris, 1752–1816, Minister to France During the Terror, ed. Beatrix C. Davenport, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939). See also the chapter on Morris in Charles C. Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers (New York: Devin-Adair, 1964).

36.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961); see vols. 2 and 3. Consult also the chapter “John Adams and the ‘Philosophes,’” in Alfred Iacuzzi’s John Adams Scholar (New York: S. F. Vanni (Ragusa), 1952), 174–212, and Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).

37.   Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1840), 2:55–56.

38.   Thomas O’Brien Hanley, Charles Carroll of Carrollton: The Making of a Revolutionary Gentleman (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1970).

39.   The source of my remarks pertaining to the medical careers of Bond, and of Jones and Morgan farther on, are the articles on these men in the Dictionary of American Biography.

40.   Frederick B. Tolles, George Logan of Philadelphia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 39.

41.   The Journal of Dr. John Morgan of Philadelphia, from the City of Rome to the City of London, 1764 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1907), 216–29.

42.   The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 67–73.

43.   The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 393–94.

44.   Ibid., 373–95.

45.   M. L. Welch, “The American Colony in Pre-Revolutionary Paris,” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 23 (1952): 47.

46.   Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, ed. Winslow C. Watson (New York: Dana, 1856), 88.

47.   Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of European Travel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).

48.   Yvon Bizardel, Les Américains á Paris pendant la Révolution (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1972).

49.   Discours à l’Assemblée Nationale, prononcé par M. William Henry Vernon, au nom des citoyens unis de l’Amérique (Paris: Baudouin, 1790).

50.   “The Grand Tour Diary of Robert C. Johnson, 1792–1793,” ed. Vernon F. Snow, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102 (1958): 84.

51.   For the source of these remarks, see Yvon Bizardel’s article “French Estates, American Landlords,” trans. Francine Yorke, Apollo 101 (February 1975): 108–15.

52.   See Yvon Bizardel, American Painters in Paris, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Macmillan, 1960).

53.   Irving Brant, The Fourth President: A Life of James Madison (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 266, 396.

54.   Consult Robert F. Durden, “Joel Barlow in the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 8 (1951): 327–54.

55.   The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2:467.

56.   The Revolution in France, Considered in Respect to Its Progress and Effects (New York: George Bunce, 1794), 3d page unnumbered.

57.   Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams … and the Late Wm. Cunningham, Esq. (Boston: True and Greene, 1823), 35.

58.   Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 42.

59.   R. R. Palmer, in his book The World of the French Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), has a chapter entitled “The English-Speaking Countries: The Revolution Acclaimed and Detested”; see pp. 219–32. See also Esther E. Brown, The French Revolution and the American Man of Letters, University of Missouri Studies 24 (1951), a study of the reactions of Jefferson, John Adams, Joel Barlow, Noah Webster, Timothy Dwight, and Philip Freneau—three Republicans and three Federalists—to the Revolution.

60.   Nathan Schachner, The Founding Fathers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954), 132.

61.   Consult Alexander De Conde, The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France 1797–1801 (New York: Scribner, 1966). On the XYZ Affair, see pp. 36–73.

62.   Herbert M. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 148. See also Gilbert Chinard, “Jefferson Among the Philosophers,” Ethics 53 (1943): 255.

63.   John Fiske, Essays Historical and Literary, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 1:175.

Three. The Fathers’ Knowledge of French

1.   Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3 vols. (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1858), 2:19n.

2.   The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 1:216.

3.   Moses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 16.

4.   Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail, During the Revolution, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875), 136.

5.   Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 27.

6.   See Howard Mumford Jones’s chapter on “The French Language in America” in his America and French Culture, 1750–1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927). This book was reprinted by the North Carolina State University Print Shop, Raleigh, 1965.

7.   Maurice Le Breton, The French in Boston in the Eighteenth Century (Bordeaux: Y. Cadoret, 1929), 19.

8.   F. O. Vaille and H. A. Clark, The Harvard Book, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Welch, Bigelow, 1875), 1:115.

9.   The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. F. B. Dexter, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 2:296–97.

10.   Howard C. Rice, “Cotton Mather Speaks to France: American Propaganda in the Age of Louix XIV,” New England Quarterly 16 (1943): 208.

11.   V. L. Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1925), 2:206.

12.   L. G. Tyler, “Education in Colonial Virginia,” William and Mary College Quarterly 6 (1897): 81.

13.   The Tapers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 15:204.

14.   A. I. Katsch, “The Teaching of Hebrew in American Universities,” Modern Language Journal 30 (1946): 576.

15.   Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, 1860), 2:281.

16.   Le Breton, The French in Boston, 21.

17.   Ibid., 47.

18.   Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, March 14, 1786.

19.   Massachusetts Centinel, September 5, 1787.

20.   John Clarke, Letters to a Student in the University of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1796), 76f.

21.   Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard 1636–1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), 82. See also Bernard Faÿ, “La Langue française à Harvard, 1636–1936,” in Harvard et la France (Paris: La Revue d’Histoire Moderne, 1936), 177.

22.   See C. F. Castaneda, “Modern Language Instruction in American Colleges, 1779–1800,” Catholic Educational Review 23 (1925) :92. For a comprehensive survey of instruction in French, consult especially George B. Watts, “The Teaching of French in the United States: A History,” French Review 37, pt. 2 (1963): 11–165. Watts also refers to important bibliography on the subject.

23.   R. A. Guild, Early History of Brown University (Providence: Snow and Farnham, 1897), 350–51.

24.   Collins, President Witherspoon, 2:206.

25.   Watts, “Teaching of French,” 66.

26.   See H. M. Jones, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology 28 (October 1931): 250, and “The Importation of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750–1800,” Modern Philology 32 (1934) : 157.

27.   See, for example, Robert F. Seybolt, “The Teaching of French in Colonial New York City,” Romanic Review 10 (1919).

28.   See Mary S. Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935).

29.   Robert Withington, “The Marquis of Chastellux on Language and Peace,” New England Quarterly 16 (1943): 317.

30.   Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:459.

31.   Gilbert Chinard, Trois amitiés françaises de Jefferson (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1927), 118.

32.   Collins, President Witherspoon, 1:196, 2:109, 206–7.

33.   “Narrative of the Prince de Broglie,” Magazine of American History 1 (1877): 378.

34.   Samuel Eliot Morison, John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (Boston : Little, Brown, 1959), 320. For a specimen of Jones’s written French, see p. 373.

35.   Kate Mason Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1725–1792, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 1:368.

36.   The Private Journal of Aaron Burr, comp, and ed. W. H. Samson, 2 vols. (Rochester, N.Y.: Genesee Press, 1903), 2:483.

37.   Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 1:20.

38.   Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Unity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 158.

39.   E. C. Shoemaker, Noah Webster, Pioneer of Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 41.

40.   Bernard Faÿ, “Benjamin Franklin Bache, A Democratic Leader in the Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s., 40 (1930):291.

41.   See David L. Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, Pioneer Voice of America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952), 68–69.

42.   See Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839), ed. Dorothy C. Barck, 3 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1930), 1:63, 226, 334.

43.   For information regarding advertisements of grammars, dictionaries, and other teaching aids, see Jones, “Importation of French Books,” 158n; and Seybolt, “Teaching of French,” 371.

44.   Faÿ, “La Langue française à Harvard,” 178. For information concerning Nancrède, see the Dictionary of American Biography.

45.   Le Breton, The French in Boston, 75. For information on Le Courier and other French language papers, and related bibliography, consult Samuel J. Marino, “The French-Refugee Newspapers and Periodicals in the United States 1789–1825” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1962).

46.   George G. Raddin, Jr., An Early New York Library of Fiction (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 22.

47.   Years ago I published an article on “The Founding Fathers’ Knowledge of French,” French Review 20 (1946). I desire to express my thanks to the editor of the French Review, Stirling Haig, for his kind permission to revise and use this article, or any portion of it, in whatever way I wish. I have utilized the article in writing this essay.

48.   Jules Jusserand, With Americans of Past and Present Days (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 199.

49.   See A Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenaeum (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1897).

50.   The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 31 vols. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 16:372. For the other references see 3:36, 27:338, 28:522, and 35:511.

51.   Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 5:254.

52.   The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Jared Sparks, 10 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1840), 10:414–15.

53.   Ibid., 1:126.

54.   As clear examples see three letters to Madame Brillon in Letters from Dr. Franklin, vol. 46 (1), nos. 42, 43 and 50. The American Philosophical Society.

55.   See the delightful book by Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). For specimens of Franklin’s written French consult also Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 1:189–90, 192–93, and 9:364–65; Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, p. 76; and Dorothy Medlin, “Benjamin Franklin and the French Language: A Letter to Madame Brillon,” French-American Review 1 (1977): 232–39.

56.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 4:59–60.

57.   Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 9:338.

58.   See, for all these questions, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, respectively, 2:352; 4:78; 2:354, 361, 370, 384; and 4:79. For further information concerning Adams’s French, consult Alfred Iacuzzi, John Adams Scholar (New York: S. F. Vanni [Ragusa], 1952), 3–12.

59.   See J. M. Carrière, “Mr. Jefferson Sponsors a New French Method,” French Review 19 (1945–46): 394–405.

60.   The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, definitive ed., ed. Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 1:3.

61.   Ibid., 7:ii.

62.   See Gilbert Chinard, Volney et l’Amérique (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1923), and also his Jefferson et les Idéologues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925).

63.   Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:622.

64.   Kenneth Umbreit, Founding Fathers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 67.

65.   Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10:127.

66.   For specimens see Carrière, “Mr. Jefferson,” 400–401.

67.   Consult George R. Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 604–15.

68.   Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941–61), 1:63.

69.   Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 6:236.

70.   Old Family Letters, Copied from the Originals for Alexander Biddle, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), 1:16.

71.   The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 42–43.

72.   Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:531.

73.   Ibid., 1:493.

74.   John C. Hamilton, The Life of Alexander Hamilton, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1840–41), 1:3.

75.   Daniel Walther, Gouverneur Morris: Witness of Two Revolutions (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1934), 9–10.

76.   Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 94.

77.   A Diary of the French Revolution by Gouverneur Morris, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), i:xv, xli.

78.   See, for instance, Faÿ, “La Langue française à Harvard,” 180–81.

79.   Consult, for a case in point, Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 186.

Four. French Literature

1.   George G. Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction, with a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940).

2.   Harvey Gates Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States (New York: American Book Co., 1934), 18.

3.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:76–81.

4.   The Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston (1917) lists some four hundred or more titles of books in French, not to speak of translations from the French. Concerning this library, see Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 14–25. See also Alfred Iacuzzi, John Adams Scholar (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1952).

5.   George R. Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 615.

6.   Memoirs and Letters of James Kent, ed. William Kent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), 27.

7.   Diary of William Dunlap, ed. Dorothy C. Barck, 3 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1930) 1:168–69.

8.   Paul M. Spurlin, “Readership in the American Enlightenment,” in Literature and History in the Age of Ideas: Essays on the French Enlightenment Presented to George R. Havens, ed. Charles G. S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975), 359–74.

9.   Rüssel B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 250.

10.   H. Lehmann-Haupt, The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2d ed. (New York: Bowker, 1952), 132–33.

11.   Albert Schinz, “La Librairie française en Amérique au temps de Washington,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 24 (1917):568–84.

12.   Michael Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1949), 81.

13.   Evarts B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 136.

14.   For an analysis, See Albert Schinz, “Un ‘Rousseauiste’ en Amérique (L’Abeille française, de Joseph Nancrède),” Modern Language Notes 35 (1920): 10–18.

15.   Forrest Bowe, French Literature in Early American Translation: A Bibliographical Survey of Books and Pamphlets Printed in the United States from 1668 Through 1820, ed. Mary Daniels (New York: Garland, 1977).

16.   Howard Mumford Jones, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology 28 (October 1931), and “The Importation of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750–1800,” Modern Philology 32 (1934).

17.   Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 113n.

18.   David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28 (Summer, 1976). My own findings and remarks are independent of those of these two investigators.

19.   E.g., Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine 6 (March 1791); American Monthly Review 3 (1795); 367–73; and American Universal Magazine 4 (1797–98): 422.

20.   Consult the Evans, Bristol, Shipton, and Mooney indexes of American imprints through 1800.

21.   See, for instance, the Boston Gazette, November 30, 1761, and the Maryland Gazette, August 26, 1762. It was advertised in the South Carolina Gazette as early as 1753. I am indebted to my friend Edward D. Seeber for certain facts he gleaned from a study of South Carolina newspapers.

22.   Joseph T. Wheeler, “Books Owned by Marylanders, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 35 (1940): 351.

23.   George K. Smart, “Private Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” American Literature 10 (1938): 35. Smart cannot say whether in French or in English.

24.   William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 3 (1895): 251.

25.   Herbert W. Schneider, Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 2:317. Johnson himself read the work in French in 1728–29 (1:507).

26.   Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard 1636–1936 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 81.

27.   John Clarke, Letters to a Student in the University of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1796).

28.   Rufus W. Griswold, The Female Poets of America (Philadelphia: Moss, 1863), 24–27.

29.   Emily E. F. Skeel, ed., Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways, 3 vols. (New York: n.p., 1929), 2:82–83.

30.   Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenaeum (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1897).

31.   James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 33.

32.   [Lucinda Orr], Journal of a Toung Lady of Virginia, 1782 (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1871), 44–45.

33.   Mary S. Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 20.

34.   V. L. Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1925), 2:207. Fénelon’s treatise had some effect on Brockden Brown’s Alcuin; or, The Rights of Women. See David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952).

35.   Skeel, Mason Locke Weems, 2:167, 186.

36.   Consult Madeleine B. Stern, “Saint-Pierre in America: Joseph Nancrède and Isaiah Thomas,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 68 (1974): 312–25. This article also contains information concerning Nancrède’s publications of Paul and Virginia.

37.   The American Universal Magazine, for example, began serial publication of Arcadia, from the third volume of the book, on February 6, 1797.

38.   Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1803; reprint ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1:4m.

39.   Ibid., 2:170.

40.   Smart, “Private Libraries,” 35. Smart cannot say whether in French or in English.

41.   Wheeler, “Books Owned by Marylanders,” 350.

42.   J. H. Shera, Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England, 1629–1855 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 136–37.

43.   Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 316.

44.   Ruth Halsey, Forgotten Books of the American Nursery: A History of the Development of the American Story-Book (Boston: C. E. Good-speed, 1911; reprint ed., Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1969), 132. In 1796 Aaron Burr purchased one of her books, Annales de la vertu, for his precocious and beloved daughter, Theodosia, then nine. He regretted his purchase, and wrote to his wife urging “the necessity of reading books before we put them in the hands of children” (134).

45.   Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America, 79.

46.   See Lewis P. Waldo, The French Drama in America in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942), 233–34.

47.   For an analysis of Harris’s Catalogue, see Earl L. Bradsher, “A Model American Library of 1793,” Sewanee Review 24 (1916): 458–75.

48.   Halsey, Forgotten Books, 134f.

49.   David E. Cloyd, Benjamin Franklin and Education (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1902), 91. In his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), Franklin also cites Rollin’s The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres a number of times. This work was in many libraries.

50.   Stephen B. Weeks, “Libraries and Literature in North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Tear 1895 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896).

51.   Clarke, Letters, 64–65.

52.   The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review 3 (1806):628.

53.   See Mary-Margaret H. Barr, Voltaire in America, 1744–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941) and my essay on Voltaire later on.

54.   Miller, Brief Retrospect, 2:137–38.

55.   Evarts B. Greene, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 139.

56.   See Rebecca P. Hein, “Montaigne in America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1966), 12–26.

57.   Consult Theophilus Wreg, The Virginia Almanack for the Tear of Our Lord God 176s (Williamsburg: Joseph Royle, 1765).

58.   J. T. Wheeler, “Reading Interests of the Professional Classes in Colonial Maryland, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 36 (1941): 201, and “Reading Interests of Maryland Planters and Merchants, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 37 (1942): 41.

59.   William Reitzel, “The Purchasing of English Books in Philadelphia, 1790–1800,” Modern Philology 35 (1937): 162.

60.   Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 51 (1917–18): 368.

61.   American Universal Magazine 4 (1798): 147–55, 229–37.

62.   See Lewis P. Waldo, The French Drama in America in the Eighteenth Century and Its Influence on the American Drama of That Period, 1701–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942), appendix D, 220–40. Otis Fellows suggests a few additions to Waldo’s excellent book in the Romanic Review 34 (1943): 268. Consult also Edward D. Seeber, “The French Theatre in Charleston in the Eighteenth Century,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 42 (1941): 1–7.

63.   L. Clark Keating, “Moliere in New York,” in Moliere and the Commonwealth of Letters: Patrimony and Posterity, ed. R. Johnson, Jr., E. S. Neumann, and G. T. Trail (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975), 400. Consult Waldo, French Drama in America, 109–15.

64.   Reitzel, “Purchasing of English Books,” 161f.

65.   Collins, President Witherspoon, 2:207–8.

66.   William and Mary College Quarterly 15, (1907): 105.

67.   Catalogue of the Library of Chancellor James Kent (1940), mimeographed copy in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

68.   John Barker, Strange Contrarieties: Pascal in England During the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 242.

69.   Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:78f.

70.   See Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, 2d ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1956).

71.   Guy R. Lyle, “Imagination in Colonial Literary Taste,” Library Review 4 (Summer, 1933): 58.

72.   Consult Howard C. Rice, “Cotton Mather Speaks to France: American Propaganda in the Age of Louis XIV,” New England Quarterly 16 (1943): 198–233.

73.   Bowe, French Literature in Early American Translation, xvii.

74.   See Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 51 (1917–18) : 363–68.

75.   Consult Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française.”

76.   Catalogue of the Library of the Late Colonel William Duane (Philadelphia Auctioneer’s Catalog, 1836).

77.   Catalogue of the Library of Kent.

78.   Shera, Foundations of the Public Library, 154.

79.   Hart, The Popular Book, 53.

80.   See Miller, Brief Retrospect, 2:171ff.

81.   Collins, President Witherspoon, 2:206.

82.   Clarke, Letters to a Student, 76–79.

83.   Miller, Brief Retrospect, 2:161–63, 193, 195–96, 200.

84.   The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, library ed., ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–4), 15:166.

85.   Mott, Golden Multitudes, 7–8, 315, 317.

Five. Buffon

1.   Gilbert Chinard, review of L’Esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, by Bernard Faÿ, Revue de littérature comparée 6 (1926): 375–76.

2.   John C. Greene, “Science and the Public in the Age of Jefferson,” in Early American Science, ed. Brooke Hindle (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), 205.

3.   See especially Otis E. Fellows and Stephen F. Milliken, Buffon (New York: Twayne, 1972). George R. Havens, reviewing this book in Diderot Studies 18 (1975), refers to it as “the first book-length biography of Buffon in English, the special difficulties of the subject having evidently deterred previous writers.” Consult also Otis Fellows, “Buffon’s Place in the Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 25 (1963), 603–29. This article is reprinted in Fellows’s From Voltaire to La Nouvelle Critique: Problems and Personalities (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1970), 54–71.

4.   See, for example, Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 152–53.

5.   Margaret B. Korty, “Benjamin Franklin and Eighteenth-Century American Libraries,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s., 55, pt. 9 (1965): 54.

6.   See William F. Falls, “Buffon, Franklin, et deux académies américaines,” Romanic Review 29 (1938): 37–47.

7.   Ibid., 39.

8.   Fellows and Milliken, Buffon, 146.

9.   The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, ed. Fletcher Webster, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1857), 1:371–72.

10.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 3:191.

11.   Michael Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1949), 160.

12.   Albert Schinz, “La Librairie française en Amérique au temps de Washington,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 24 (1917): 579.

13.   Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1790).

14.   Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara M. Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), 1:385.

15.   Korty, “Benjamin Franklin and Libraries,” 35.

16.   William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, 2d ser., 5 (1925): 81.

17.   Frederick P. Bowes, The Culture of Early Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 64.

18.   Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Jefferson (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1943), 1044. Years later, Jefferson abridged Buffon’s system of astronomy for Francis Hopkinson, “signer” and satirist. Hopkinson in a letter of thanks whimsically points out the parallels between Buffon’s solar system and the American Revolution. See The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 6:443–44.

19.   George R. Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 614.

20.   Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941–46), 1:278–79; 2:308.

21.   See The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–), 9:29–47.

22.   Korty, “Benjamin Franklin and Libraries,” 27.

23.   James D. Hart, The Popular Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 33.

24.   Diary of William Dunlap, ed. Dorothy C. Barck, 3 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1930), 1:168–69.

25.   St. John de Crèvecoeur, Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York, trans. Clarissa S. Bostelmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 84.

26.   MS in the Library Company of Philadelphia.

27.   “Book of Minutes of the Trustees of Union College, Number 1,” meeting of December 8–9, 1795.

28.   Joseph Nancrède, L’Abeille françoise; ou, Nouveau recueil de morceaux brillans, des auteurs françois les plus célèbres (Boston: Belknap and Young, 1792), 252–54.

29.   Joseph Perkins, A.M., An Oration upon Genius, Pronounced at the Anniversary Commencement of Harvard University, in Cambridge, July 19, 1797 (Boston: Manning and Loring for Joseph Nancrède, 1797), 19.

30.   “Method of Preserving Birds, and Other Subjects of Natural History,” Columbian Magazine 1 (1787): 326–27.

31.   Columbian Magazine 1 (1787): 645.

32.   Columbian Magazine 2 (December 1788): 749–50. See same in the Massachusetts Centinel, August 13, 1788.

33.   Buffon, “Description of the Sensations and Ideas of the first Man,” New York Magazine 1 (1790): 521–23. See also Mary Ellen Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, 1686–1800 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944), 83, for a similar quotation in a newspaper the same year.

34.   New York Magazine 5 (1794): 39–41.

35.   Philadelphia Monthly Magazine 1 (1798): 38–42.

36.   I. Woodbridge Riley, American Thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism and Beyond (New York: Peter Smith, 1941), 28.

37.   Ernest Earnest, John and William Bartram: Botanists and Explorers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 32, 41.

38.   Ibid., 142, 149.

39.   Brooke Hindle, David Rittenhouse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 285.

40.   Charles C. Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 257.

41.   James T. Flexner, America’s Old Masters: First Artists of the New World (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 216.

42.   Sellers, Charles Willson Peale, 290.

43.   Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947): 28–57. This article, entitled “La Jeunesse du Nouveau-Monde,” appears as one of two essays in Chinard’s book L’Homme contre la Nature (Paris, Hermann, 1949); Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955); Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1968); Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth-Century Controversy (New York: Harper and Row, 1967; Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1968); and Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, rev. ed., trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).

44.   Cornelius de Pauw was the author of Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains. He wrote also an article denigratory of America which appeared in Supplément à l’Encyclopédie 1 (1776). See Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 11.

45.   Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, 47.

46.   Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:184–85.

47.   See Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, 43–72. Extracts from the Notes appeared in the Columbian Magazine 1 (1787): 366–69, 407–16.

48.   Harlow Shapley, “Notes on Thomas Jefferson as a Natural Philosopher,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87 (1943): 235.

49.   See, for example, the mock epic The Anarchiad, book 17; the Columbian Magazine 2 (1788): 135–37; The Federalist, no. 11; the Massachusetts Centinel, October 3, December 8, 1787; February 4, 1789; Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland: J. Lyon, 1793), 60–61; and Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, first published in 1821–22.

50.   Gilbert Chinard, “The American Dream,” in Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., rev. ed. in 1 vol. (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 205.

51.   Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 16, 26.

52.   Charles Willson Peale, Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Science of Nature (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, Jr., 1800), 25.

53.   Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas and John Swords, 1803; reprint ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1:115–16. In connection with this quotation, see also 1:496–97. For other references to Buffon in this volume, see pp. 117, 119, 121, 127, 165ft. (disagrees with the naturalist’s theory of the origin of the earth because it cannot be reconciled with the biblical account), 174, 187n, and 246.

54.   Ibid., 2:413.

Six. The Philosophes

1.   Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 390.

2.   John Lough, “Who Were the Philosophes?” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Literature Presented to Robert Niklaus, ed. J. H. Fox, M. H. Waddicor, and D. A. Watts (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1975), 139–49.

3.   See Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 181s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957). Echeverria treats at length of America’s role in the French Enlightenment.

4.   For a concise account of the philosophes, their task and their mission, see the essay of Peter Gay, “The Unity of the French Enlightenment,” in his book The Party of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 114–32.

5.   Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 51 (1917–18): 363.

6.   Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae (Boston: Fleet, 1790).

7.   Gazette of the United States, February 1, 1797.

8.   Margaret B. Korty, “Benjamin Franklin and Eighteenth-Century American Libraries,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 55, pt. 9 (1965): 8.

9.   Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d ser., 15 (1901), 15.

10.   See Mary Ellen Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, 1686–1800 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944).

11.   Joseph T. Wheeler, “Reading Interests of the Professional Classes in Colonial Maryland, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 36 (1941): 190.

12.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1:80.

13.   Southern Literary Messenger 20 (1854): 78.

14.   Benjamin Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Bradford, 1798), 256.

15.   Theophilus Wreg, The Virginia Almanack for the Tear of Our Lord God 1765 (Williamsburg: Joseph Royle, 1765).

16.   William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 15 (1906): 103.

17.   Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, no.

18.   William Reitzel, “The Purchasing of English Books in Philadelphia, 1790–1800,” Modern Philology 35 (1937): 161.

19.   Leonard M. Marsak, “Bernard de Fontenelle: The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 49, pt. 7 (1959): 12. See also Robert Shackleton’s edition of Les Entretiens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

20.   Herbert W. Schneider, ed., Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 508.

21.   Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 33 (1925): 195.

22.   Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, no, 105.

23.   Macklin Thomas thought that this passage was a possible source of Philip Freneau’s idea of beings with multiple senses (“The Idea of Progress in the Writings of Franklin, Freneau, Barlow, and Rush” [Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1938], 124n).

24.   American Universal Magazine 4 (1798): 275–76.

25.   Sec American Universal Magazine, August 21, 1797.

26.   Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 24 (1917): 579.

27.   Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, 107.

28.   Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas and John Swords, 1803; reprint ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 2:109.

29.   John Lough, “Helvétius and Holbach,” Modern Language Review 33 (1938): 360–84.

30.   Columbian Centinel, February 27, March 5 and 16, 1796.

31.   George C. Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 21.

32.   H. M. Jones, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology 28 (October 1931): 242.

33.   Catalogue of Books, Given and Devised by John Mackenzie Esquire, to the Charlestown Library Society, for the Use of the College When Erected (Charlestown: Robert Wells, 1772).

34.   See Catalogue of the Books, Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, Jr., 1789).

35.   Charter, Bye-Laws, and Names of the Members of the New York Society Library, with a Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Said Library (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1793).

36.   Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, 2 vols. (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton, 1907–12), 1:85. According to J. D. Hart, a student wrote home from Chapel Hill in 1795 that this book “circulated widely” (The Popular Book [New York: Oxford University Press, 1950], 35).

37.   Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, 113.

38.   Lower Norfolk County Virginia Antiquary 2 (1899); 31n. George K. Smart, in his study “Private Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” American Literature 10 (1938), found only a “slight” presence of Helvétius.

39.   Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, 101.

40.   Ibid., 84–86.

41.   John I. Johnson, Reflections on Political Society (New York: Freneau and Menut, 1797), 14–15.

42.   The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Jared Sparks, 10 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1840), 2:222.

43.   Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Benjamin Franklin and the Philosophes,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963): 58.

44.   On Franklin and Madame Helvétius, see Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).

45.   See The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–4), 14:141–42.

46.   The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926). See articles 849–51.

47.   The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2:355.

48.   Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865), 3:577.

49.   Allen O. Hansen, Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 254.

50.   Noah Webster, The Revolution in France (New York: George Bunce, 1794), 60.

51.   Noah Webster, Ten Letters to Dr. Joseph Priestly (New Haven, Conn.: Read and Morse, 1800), 21.

52.   Miller, Brief Retrospect, 2:295.

53.   Ibid., 2:453.

54.   Samuel Miller, Letters from a Father to His Sons in College (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1843), 208–9.

55.   W. H. Wickwar, Baron D’Holbach: A Prelude to the French Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935), 87.

56.   Holbach, Christianity Unveiled; Being an Examination of the Principles and Effects of the Christian Religion, trans. William M. Johnson (New York: printed at the Columbian Press by Robertson and Gowan, for the Editor, 1795).

57.   Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopoedia of American Literature, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Baxter, 1881), 1:607.

58.   Uzal Ogden, Antidote to Deism: The Deist Unmasked, 2 vols. (Newark: John Woods, 1795), i:ix–xiii.

59.   Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, August 6, 1796.

60.   Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), 4:269.

61.   Alan Charles Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 106.

62.   Diary of William Dunlap, ed. Dorothy C. Barck, 3 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1930), 1:168, 305. Dunlap also notes that in 1798 one of his visitors had received from New York both Christianity Unveiled and the System of Nature (see 1:344).

63.   Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 340.

64.   George C. Raddin, Jr., Hocquet Caritat and the Early New York Literary Scene (Dover, N.J.: Dover Advance Press, 1953), 112.

65.   I. Woodbridge Riley, American Philosophy: The Early Schools (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907; reprint ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 10–11, 17. Riley was also the author of an article, “La Philosophie française en Amérique,” published in the Revue philosophique 84 (1917): 393–428.

66.   Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1790).

67.   Bernard Faÿ, Notes on the American Press at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Grolier Club, 1927), 14.

68.   Paul Merrill Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969).

Seven. Montesquieu and the American Constitution

1.   See The Federalist, particularly nos. 9, 48, 51, and 66.

2.   Ibid., no. 51. “In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments.”

3.   Paul Merrill Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760–1801 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940; reprint ed., New York, Octagon Books, 1969). An article, “Montesquieu et l’opinion américaine au dix-huitième siècle,” which is a summary of the book, appeared in the French American Review 2 (1949): 12–21.

4.   For a statistical analysis of this research, see Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, “Montesquieu et la constitution des Etats-Unis,” Journal de la Société de Statistique de Paris 87 (March-April 1946): 87–91.

5.   Sergio Cotta, “Montesquieu, la séparation des pouvoirs, et la Constitution fédérale des Etats-Unis,” Revue internationale d’histoire politique et constitutionelle, n.s., 1 (1951): 225–47.

6.   My paper, “L’Influence de Montesquieu sur la constitution américaine,” in Actes du Congrès Montesquieu (Bordeaux: Delmas, 1956), 265–72, is an early version of the present essay.

7.   Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 316.

8.   The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repertory of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 35. On the Jefferson-Montesquieu relationship, see pp. 31–35. See also Chinard’s Pensées choisies de Montesquieu tirées du “Commonplace book” de Thomas Jefferson, Etudes françaises, quatrième cahier, 1925, pp. 15–19, 26–28.

9.   Consult Gilbert Chinard, Jefferson and the Idéologues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925), 45–55.

10.   With regard to this chapter, consult J. J. Granpré Molière, La Théorie de la constitution anglaise chez Montesquieu (Leyden: Presse Universitaire de Ley de, 1972); W. B. Gwyn, The Meaning of the Separation of Powers, Tulane Studies in Political Science 9 (1965); and M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

11.   Cotta, “Montesquieu, la séparation, et la Constitution,” 228 and note.

12.   See Robert Shackleton, “Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, and the Separation of Powers,” French Studies 3 (1949): 25–38. With reference to the deliberations in the Constitutional Convention on this type of separation, consult Gilbert Chinard, “Polybius and the American Constitution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 38–58.

13.   Holmes-Pollock Letters, 2d ed., ed. Mark De Wolfe Howe, 2 vols, in 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 2:265–66.

14.   Francis G. Wilson, The American Political Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), 69.

15.   Maryland Gazette, July 1, 1773.

16.   Black’s Law Dictionary, rev. and 4th ed. (St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1968), 386.

17.   See B. F. Wright, Jr., “The Origins of the Separation of Powers in America,” Economica 13 (1933): 169–85; and Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 119–75.

18.   The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 36.

19.   Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 453–63.

20.   See Charles F. Mullett, “Coke and the American Revolution,” Economica 12 (1932): 457–71.

21.   Raoul Berger, Congress v. the Supreme Court (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 23; see also pp. 27–28. Hamilton, in The Federalist, no. 78, quotes Montesquieu on the judiciary and takes judicial review for granted.

22.   Berger, Congress v. the Supreme Court, 45–46.

23.   Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 3 (1896): 47.

24.   The Federalist, no. 47. In this paper Madison explains Montesquieu’s meaning of the precept.

Eight. Voltaire in the South

1.   Charles Lee Smith, The History of Education in North Carolina (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888), 68.

2.   Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols, in 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 2:9–10.

3.   Henry Adams, John Randolph (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 13.

4.   Mary-Margaret H. Barr, Voltaire in America, 1744–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941).

5.   John F. McDermott, “Voltaire and the Freethinkers in Early Saint Louis,” Revue de littérature comparée 16 (1936): 720–31. See also his book Private Libraries in Creole Saint Louis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938).

6.   J. T. Wheeler, “Reading Interests of Maryland Planters and Merchants, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 37 (1942): 302.

7.   Ibid., 305.

8.   Ibid., 308.

9.   Ibid., 299.

10.   In 1762 Rind established, according to J. T. Wheeler, “the earliest known colonial circulating library.” This work was among the titles it included. See Wheeler’s article “Booksellers and Circulating Libraries in Colonial Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 34 (1939): 113.

11.   Baltimore Daily Intelligencer, October 27, 1794.

12.   Federal Intelligencer and Baltimore Daily Gazette, January 2, 1795.

13.   Maryland Journal, October 22 and November 26, 1795; March 27, 1781.

14.   Ibid., May 2, 1796.

15.   James David Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 33.

16.   J. T. Wheeler, “Books Owned by Marylanders, 1700–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 35 (1940): 347, 350.

17.   General Magazine and Impartial Review 1 (1798): 17–18. See also the Maryland Gazette, December 11, 1766, March 7, 1771; Maryland Journal, September 15, 1778, February 4, 1796; and Baltimore American and Daily Advertiser, December 4, 1800.

18.   Lewis P. Waldo, The French Drama in America in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942), 227–28.

19.   François Alexandre Frédéric, duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America … in the Tears 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1799), 2:117.

20.   Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Golden Age of Colonial Culture, 2d ed., rev. (New York: New York University Press, 1949), 109.

21.   Emily E. F. Skeel, Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways, 3 vols. (New York: n.p., 1929), 2:36.

22.   George K. Smart, “Private Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” American Literature 10 (1938–39) :48.

23.   Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 3 (1921): 125.

24.   Smart, “Private Libraries,” 49.

25.   William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, Ist ser., 6 (1898): 161.

26.   Henry Cabot Lodge, George Washington, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 2:335–36.

27.   Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9 (1927): 102.

28.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1:80.

29.   William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773–1833, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 1:61.

30.   Letters of John Randolph to a Toung Relative (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1834), 43.

31.   William D. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress, 1800–1864 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 1:74.

32.   “La Henriade de Voltaire; Le Saul de Voltaire; Memoires de Voltaire; [Memoires de Voltaire écrits par lui meme, bound up in no. 130]; Vie de Voltaire; Voltaire’s history of Charles XII, of Sweden, 12 mo, in his works ch. 44; Soirees de Ferney; Tracts in foreign history, to wit, Voltaire … ; Voltaire sur Beccaria; Oeuvres de Voltaire, 58 V 8vo 1775 and 1785; Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary; Voltaire, Philosophie de l’histoire” (Catalogue of the Library of the United States [Washington: Jonathan Elliott, 1815]).

33.   “I will send you Voltaire’s legacy to the K. of Prussia, a libel which will do much more injury to Voltaire than to the King. Many of the traits in the character of the latter to which the former gives a turn satyrical & malicious, are real virtues” (The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 12 vols. [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5], 4:410).

34.   William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, 2d ser., 5 (1925): 5.

35.   The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repertory of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 48. For the Voltaire extracts in this book, see pp. 334–43 and the appendix.

36.   Ibid., 49. The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson: His Commonplace Book of Philosophers and Poets (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928), also edited by Gilbert Chinard, contains no quotation from Voltaire.

37.   George R. Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 612. Cf. Gaillard Hunt, “James Madison and Religious Liberty,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Tear 1901, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 1:170. “He believed … in the untrammeled existence of religious sects and was fond of quoting Voltaire’s aphorism: ‘If one religion only were allowed in England, the Government would possibly become arbitrary; if there were two, the people would cut each other’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.’ “

38.   Virginia Gazette, March 28, 1766; May 26, 1768; July 1, 1775.

39.   Ibid., July 22, 1773.

40.   Ibid., January 7, 1775.

41.   Barr, Voltaire in America, 12.

42.   Frederick P. Bowes, The Culture of Early Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 104.

43.   City Gazette, February 8, 1792; January 11, 1793.

44.   A Catalogue of Books, Belonging to the Lncorporated Charlestown Library Society, with the Dates of the Editions (Charlestown: Robert Wells, 1770). Transcribed here and without the dates are the titles listed: “Voltaire’s letters on the English nation, history of Europe, from Charlemagne to Charles V. 3 vols., the age of Lewis XIV, the war in ———, the empire from the reign of Charlemagne, 2 vols., Essai sur l’histoire general, 8 tom., Oeuvres diverses, 12 tom., Histoire de Russie, 2 torn.” In an appendix, dated 1772, is “Voltaire’s philosophy of history.”

45.   Bowes, Culture of Early Charleston, 63.

46.   A Catalogue of Books, Given and Devised by John Mackenzie Esquire, to the Charlestown Library Society, for the Use of the College When Erected (Charlestown: Robert Wells, 1772).

47.   Edward D. Seeber, “The French Theatre in Charleston in the Eighteenth Century,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 42 (1941): 6.

48.   David D. Wallace, The Life of Henry Laurens (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 440.

49.   Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), 413.

50.   Ibid., 180.

51.   Stephen B. Weeks, “Libraries and Literature in North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Tear 1895 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), 203.

52.   Hubbell, South in American Literature, 98.

53.   Barr, Voltaire in America, 100–116.

Nine. Diderot, D’Alembert, and the Encyclopedia

1.   Ira Wade, An Anthology of Eighteenth Century French Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1930), xliv.

2.   See Jacques Proust, Diderot et L’Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962). For short accounts consult Joseph Le Gras, Diderot et L’Encyclopédie, 5th ed. (Amiens: E. Malfère, 1928); Douglas H. Gordon and Norman L. Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Re-Established Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947); and George R. Havens, The Age of Ideas: From Reaction to Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Henry Holt, 1955), 292–309.

3.   See George B. Watts, “The Encyclopédie méthodique,” PMLA 73 (1958): 348–66; and especially Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1778–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1979).

4.   Howard Mumford Jones, “The Importation of French Literature in New York City, 1750–1800,” Studies in Philology 28 (October 1931) : 250.

5.   Howard Mumford Jones, “The Importation of French Books in Philadelphia, 1750–1800,” Modern Philology 32 (1934): 170.

6.   J. Robert Loy, “Diderot aux Etats-Unis,” Europe: Revue mensuelle 41 (January–February 1963): 263–73.

7.   The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, ed. G. W. Corner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 69.

8.   Independent Gazetteer, November 27, 1784.

9.   G. G. Raddin, Jr., An Early New York Library of Fiction, with a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 21, 51, 52.

10.   Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston (Boston: The Trustees, 1917). The first edition I have found was published in Amsterdam in 1772.

11.   Catalogue of the Library of the United States (Washington: Jonathan Elliott, 1815): “Oeuvres de Theatre de Diderot 12mo; Synonimes de Diderot, Dalembert et Jaucourt, 12mo; Memoires Mathématiques de Diderot, 12mo; Oeuvres Philosophiques de Diderot, 3 v 12mo; [Le Bons Sens, 12mo, Diderot] oeuvres.”

12.   Edward McNall Burns, James Madison, Philosopher of the Constitution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1938), 187.

13.   Catalogue of the Library of Chancellor James Kent (1940), mimeographed copy in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

14.   Howard C. Rice, Le Cultivateur américain: Etude sur l’Oeuvre de Saint John de Crèvecoeur, Bibliothèque de la Revue de littérature comparée, vol. 87 (1933), 54, 129.

15.   Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1790).

16.   Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Bartram and Reynolds, 1807). Listed were Le Père de famille, (Amsterdam, 1758); James the Fatalist and His Master, 3 vols. (London, 1797); and a book published in London in 1776 that contained “The Two Friends of Bourbon.”

17.   He was mentioned in anecdotal material reprinted from foreign sources in the Boston Magazine, April I, 1784, p. 221, and in the General Advertiser, November 17, 1792.

18.   General Advertiser, November 13, 1790.

19.   New York Magazine or Literary Repository, n.s., 2 (December 1797): 639, 656–57.

20.   Lewis P. Waldo, The French Drama in America in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942), 234–35.

21.   Ibid., 166.

22.   Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 18.

23.   Ibid., 81.

24.   Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), 4:259.

25.   William Cobbett, The Bloody Buoy, Thrown Out as a Warning to the Political Pilots of America, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Benjamin Davies, 1796), 276.

26.   Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas and John Swords, 1803; reprint ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 2:162.

27.   See J. G. Rosengarten, “The Early French Members of the American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 46 (1907): 87–93.

28.   The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 1:27.

29.   Albert Schinz,”Un ‘Rousseauiste’ en Amérique (L’Abeille française, de Joseph Nancrède),” Modern Language Notes 35 (1920): 12.

30.   Moreau de Saint-Méry, Idée générale ou abrégé des sciences et des arts à l’usage de la jeunesse (Philadelphia: M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, 1796), 209.

31.   Adrian H. Jaffe, Bibliography of French Literature in American Magazines in the Eighteenth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951).

32.   Independent Gazetteer, November 27, 1784.

33.   Massachusetts Centinel, August 2, 1786.

34.   Albert Schinz, “La Librairie française en Amérique au temps de Washington,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 24 (1917): 579.

35.   See The Virginia Almanack for the Tear of Our Lord God 1765, by Theophilus Wreg. “Gerard on Taste, with three Dissertations on the same Subject, by Voltaire, Alembert and Montesquieu.”

36.   J. T. Wheeler, “Reading Interests of Maryland Planters and Merchants, 1760–1776,” Maryland Historical Magazine 37 (1942): 299.

37.   Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1790).

38.   See Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Bartram and Reynolds, 1807) and Catalogue of Books Belonging to the South Carolina College Library (Columbia: Daniel and J. J. Faust, 1807).

39.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 2:307.

40.   Oeuvres de D’Alembert, 5 vols. (Paris: A. Belin, 1821–22), 5:386.

41.   The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. A. H. Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7), 1:198. “Tu vois le sage courageux / Dont l’heureux et mâle génie / Arracha le tonnerre aux dieux / Et le sceptre à la tyrannie.”

42.   Miller, Brief Retrospect, 1:36, 40, 44, 55, 61, 62, 203, 363, 422.

43.   Timothy Dwight, The Nature, and Danger, of Infidel Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: George Bunce, 1798), 47, 61, 83.

44.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4:67.

45.   Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, in.

46.   Ibid., 112.

47.   Uzal Ogden, Antidote to Deism: The Deist Unmasked, 2 vols. (Newark: John Woods, 1795), 2:311.

48.   James T. Callender, The American Annual Register; or, Historical Memoirs of the United States for the Tear 1796 (Philadelphia: Bioren and Madan, 1797), 220.

49.   Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, Performed in 1788 (Dublin: W. Corbet, 1792), 107.

50.   H. M. Jones, America and French Culture, 1750–1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927), 410.

51.   Gilbert Chinard, “L’Encyclopédie et le rayonnement de l’esprit encyclopédique en Amérique,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises, no. 2 (May 1952), 3–22.

52.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 5:15, 311–12.

53.   Schinz, “La Librairie française,” 579.

54.   Broadside in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress.

55.   Catalogue of the Books, Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, Jr., 1789).

56.   The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 9:664.

57.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:437.

58.   Catalogue of the Library of the United States.

59.   George R. Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923) : 610ff.

60.   Hugh A. Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), 2:9–10.

61.   Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, 308.

62.   The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. H. C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–), 4:403.

63.   Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 308.

64.   D. L. Clark, ed., Edgar Huntly (New York, Macmillan: 1928), viii.

65.   In 1790, Dr. George Gilmer of Virginia advised a son studying at Edinburgh that “you should by degrees procure the french encyclopedia” (R. B. Davis, Francis Walker Gilmer: Life and Learning in Jefferson’s Virginia [Richmond: Dietz Press, 1939], 7). Conceivably, Gilmer’s reference could have been to the Encyclopédie méthodique. This is, nevertheless, testimony to the prestige enjoyed by Diderot’s encyclopedic enterprise. In connection with Gilmer’s advice, it is of interest to note the finding of a study made by George K. Smart of libraries of the colonial period in Virginia: “No works of the French Encyclopedists turn up in the lists I have seen.” See “Private Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” American Literature 10 (1938): 43n.

66.   Frederick P. Bowes, The Culture of Early Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 63.

67.   Catalogus Bibliothecae Harvardianae.

68.   J. H. Shera, Foundations of the Public Library . . . (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 113. The Plan of the French Encyclopaedia (that is, the Discours préliminaire) had been published in London in 1752.

69.   A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the New York Society Library (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1813).

70.   Gabriel Richard Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

71.   Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis . . . (New Haven, Conn.: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1798), 10. This was a sermon. In a note to the passage above, Dwight said that the “articles of Theology were speciously and decently written, but, by references artfully made to other articles, all the truth of the former was entirely and insidiously overthrown to most readers, by the sophistry of the latter.” T. G. Fessenden, a believer in the conspiracy, cited a number of examples of the Encyclopedia’s cross-references to show “with what cunning its authors sought to spread the principles of Atheism, Materialism and Fatalism.” See his Democracy Unveiled (Boston: David Carlisle, 1805), 25–30nn. For information on the alleged conspiracy, consult Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918).

72.   Miller, Brief Retrospect, 2:266. In 1803 Joseph Dennie, journalist and Federalist, referring to a certain encyclopedia, said, “It displays the Genius, Learning and Taste of the French Encyclopedia, without being polluted by its Atheism or its Politics.” See Laura G. Pedder, The Letters of Joseph Dennie, 1768–1812, Maine Bulletin 38 (1936): 193.

73.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 6:258. For a more detailed account of Jefferson’s interest in and connection with this undertaking, see George B. Watts, “Thomas Jefferson, the ‘Encyclopédie’ and the ‘Encyclopédie méthodique,’” French Review 38 (1965): 318–25.

74.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 7:518. See also 8:342, 559–60.

75.   Ibid., 7:507, 511; 9:357, 439, 482.

76.   Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (New York: Knopf, 1950), 19. In a letter dated April 15, 1783, Madison Papers, Library of Congress.

77.   Allan McLane Hamilton, The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1911).

78.   The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. L. J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 1:152. See also the article by Watts in the French Review cited above.

79.   Miller, Brief Retrospect, 2:268.

Ten. A Citizen of New-Heaven: The Marquis de Condorcet

1.   Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1961), 4:66–67.

2.   Phillips Russell, in his book Jefferson: Champion of the Free Mind (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956) has a very short but interesting chapter entitled “Jefferson and Condorcet.”

3.   Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 2:143.

4.   Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Baker has also edited, and published with an introduction, Condorcet: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976).

5.   Consult Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 223–30. Gilbert Chinard has written in both English and French on the apotheosis of Franklin in France.

6.   For further information concerning this interest, see the chapter entitled “The Rediscovery of America” in J. Salwyn Shapiro, Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934).

7.   An image of the bust and details concerning its provenance are to be found in Gilbert Chinard, Houdon in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930).

8.   The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. F. B. Dexter, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 3:161.

9.   The Lettres, four, were inserted in Philip Mazzei’s Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale, 4 vols, in 2 (Paris: A. Colle, et se trouvent à Paris chez Froullé, 1788), 1:267–371.

10.   Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston (Boston: The Trustees, 1917), 58–59.

11.   See Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, compiled with annotations by E. Millicent Sowerby, 5 vols. (Washington: Library of Congress, 1952–59).

12.   The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 10:354.

13.   The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–), 11:212.

14.   Ibid., 320.

15.   Ibid., 215.

16.   Samuel E. Forman, “The Political Activities of Philip Freneau,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 20 (September-October 1902): 98.

17.   Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Bartram and Reynolds, 1807).

18.   Albert Schinz, “La Librairie française en Amérique au temps de Washington,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 24 (1917).

19.   G. G. Raddin, Jr., An Early New York Library of Fiction (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 17, 21.

20.   Mary-Margaret H. Barr, Voltaire in America, 1744–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941), 29.

21.   Mary Ellen Loughrey, France and Rhode Island, 1686–1800 (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944), 86–87.

22.   David Williams, “Condorcet, Feminism, and the Egalitarian Principle,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5 (1976): 153.

23.   Mary S. Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 249. I can point only to Elihu Palmer’s quotation of a paragraph from the Outlines on this subject. See his An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species (New York: John Crookes, 1797), 32.

24.   The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959–), 20:489–91.

25.   Bernard Faÿ, “L’Amérique et l’esprit scientifique en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 396–97. A translation of these queries is also spread on the minutes of the American Philosophical Society.

26.   The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 21:151. Franklin sent the queries to Benjamin Rush in July 1774, and requested him, as one “who understands French,” to translate them for the society’s use (p. 258). The society has other letters from Condorcet to Franklin and Jefferson on various subjects.

27.   See “Jefferson’s Notes from Condorcet on Slavery” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 14:494–98.

28.   The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 10 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–99), 5:379. See also Jefferson’s letter to Banneker of the same date, pp. 377–78. Henry William De Saussure, in an Address to the Citizens of South Carolina on the Approaching Election of President and Vice President of the U.S. (Charleston: W. P. Young, 1800), 16n., refers to Condorcet as a leading member of the society of Les Amis des Noirs and as being an “intimate” friend and correspondent of Jefferson. He mentions Banneker. De Saussure, in favor of slavery, feared that Jefferson would emancipate his slaves.

29.   A new translation appeared only in the mid–1950s: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough, with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955). A new French edition, with a text revised by O. H. Prior and presented by him and Yvon Belaval, was published in Paris in 1970.

30.   Catalogue of the Library of Chancellor James Kent (1940), mimeographed copy in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

31.   Catalogue of the Library of the Late Col. William Duane, auctioneer’s catalog, printed in Philadelphia and dated February 25, 1836.

32.   Diary of William Dunlap, ed. Dorothy C. Barck, 3 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1930), 1:110, 127.

33.   The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 9:481. For whatever reason he was moved to read it, a Mr. Dutton criticized the style and abstractness of the Outlines in a poem read at the the Yale College commencement in 1800. See A. O. Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Idéologues,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 151 (1976): 117.

34.   For analyses of and comments on this book, see the section “Marquis de Condorcet: The Taming of the Future,” in Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); and Keith Michael Baker’s Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, mentioned above.

35.   Consult Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), and John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth, 1970).

36.   Zoltán Haraszti, “John Adams Flays a Philosophe: Annotations on Condorcet’s Progress of the Human Mind,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 7 (1950):223–52. An appendix (pp. 252–54) contains Adams’s comments on the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New-Heaven. The essay, slightly revised, appeared without the appendix as “Condorcet and the Idea of Progress” in Haraszti’s book John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 235–58.

37.   See, for instance, the letters he wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1806. In Old Family Letters, copied from the originals for Alexander Biddle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), ser. A, pp. 111–26, passim.

38.   The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–56), 10:101.

39.   William and Mary College Quarterly, 2d ser., 5 (1925): 148.

40.   The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:25.

41.   Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas and John Swords, 1803; reprint ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 2:296–301. See Gilbert Chinard, “Progress and Perfectibility in Samuel Miller’s Intellectual History,” in Studies in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), 94–122.

42.   See Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).

43.   Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 2:123; Benjamin Silliman, An Oration, Delivered at Hartford on the 6th of July, A.D. 1802 (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1802), 28, 32.

44.   Allen Oscar Hansen, Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 20.

45.   John I. Johnson, Reflections on Political Society (New York: Freneau and Menut, 1797).

46.   Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. David Lee Clark (New York: Macmillan, 1928), viii.

47.   See Macklin Thomas, “The Idea of Progress in the Writings of Franklin, Freneau, Barlow, and Rush” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1938); Edwin Thomas Martin, “Thomas Jefferson and the Idea of Progress” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1941); and Rutherford E. Delmage, “The American Idea of Progress, 1750–1800,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947): 307–14.

48.   William Cobbett, The Bloody Buoy, Thrown Out as a Warning to the Political Pilots of America, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Benjamin Davies and William Cobbett, 1796), 228, 231.

49.   Robert Treat Paine, An Oration …in Commemoration of the Dissolution of the Treaties … Between France and the United States of America, 2d ed. (Boston: John Russell, 1799), 12.

50.   The Works of John Adams, 9:624.

51.   Ibid., 10:256. Samuel Miller noted that “the Life of M. Turgot, by M. Condorcet, and the Life of M. De Voltaire, by the same author, have also been much celebrated and admired, among a certain class of readers” (Brief Retrospect, 2:154).

52.   Noah Webster, Ten Letters to Dr. Joseph Priestly (New Haven, Conn.: Read and Morse, 1800), 21.

53.   Elihu Palmer, An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species (New York: John Crookes, 1797), 34. See also his Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species, 2d ed. (New York, 1802), 185.

54.   Gilbert Chinard, Honest John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), 239.

55.   The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett, 26 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 8:439.

56.   The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), 8:390–91.

57.   The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, library edition, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–4), 14:140. Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814.

58.   Ibid., 15:223. Letter to Short, October 31, 1819.

Eleven. French Deism, Empiricism, Ideology, and Physiocracy

1.   William D. Johnston, History of the Library of Congress (Washington : Government Printing Office, 1904), 1:86.

2.   Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), 4:259–60.

3.   Samuel Miller, Memoir of the Rev. Charles Nisbet, D.D. (New York: Robert Carter, 1840), 247. In his course on “Moral Philosophy” at Dickinson, Nisbet derided Voltaire, Raynal, and Rousseau. See pp. 3 and 86 of the MS of these lectures in the Library Company of Philadelphia.

4.   Noah Webster, Ten Letters to Dr. Joseph Priestly (New Haven, Conn.: Read and Morse, 1800), 8. See also Webster’s The Revolution in France (New York: George Bunce, 1794), preface, and 30.

5.   Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1897).

6.   The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repertory of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 63. See also Chinard’s article “Jefferson Among the Philosophers,” Ethics 53 (1943):260; and his biography of the third president, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism, 2d ed., rev. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 87.

7.   Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943; reprint ed. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1957), 19 and 113, for instance.

8.   Herbert M. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934; reprint ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1960) and G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York: Henry Holt, 1933).

9.   See, for example, Mary-Margaret H. Barr, Voltaire in America, 1744–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941), 107ff.

10.   Jean Gaulmier, Volney (Paris: Hachette, 1959), 117.

11.   Gilbert Chinard, Volney et l’Amérique d’après des documents inédits et sa correspondance avec Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1923), 113. For Volney’s impact on Barlow, see Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).

12.   Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 305. Gaulmier points out in his book, Volney, that Les Ruines was also “le plus grand succés de librairie” in France during the Revolution.

13.   Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species, 2d ed. (New York, 1802), 148–49.

14.   An Enquiry Relative to the Moral and Political Improvement of the Human Species (New York: John Crookes, 1797), 34. Palmer was also influenced by Rousseauan deism. See my Rousseau in America (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 79–80.

15.   Charles Lee Smith, The History of Education in North Carolina (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888), 68. For a broad and balanced presentation of clerical attitudes and fears see Gary B. Nash, “The American Clergy and the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 22 (1965): 392–412.

16.   Volney, A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America, trans. C. B. Brown (Philadelphia: J. Conrad, 1804), xvii. With regard to the influence of various philosophes on Brown, see Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Co., 1948), 70, 91–92.

17.   On Condillac and Locke, see R. J. White, The Anti-Philosophers: A Study of the Philosophes in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 38–45.

18.   Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (London: Favil Press, 1930). See translator’s introduction, xx–xxvii.

19.   Consult P. Emory Aldrich, “John Locke and the Influence of His Works in America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April 30, 1879, 22–39, and Merle Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philosopher, 1783–1861,” Huntington Library Bulletin 11 (April 1937): 107–51.

20.   Catalogus Librorum in Bibliotheca Cantabrigiensi Selectus, Frequentiorem in Usum Harvardinatum Qui Gradu Baccalaurei in Artibus Nondum Sunt Donati (Boston: Edes and Gil, 1773).

21.   Catalogue of the Books, Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, Jr., 1789).

22.   G. G. Raddin, Jr., An Early New York Library of Fiction, with a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 17.

23.   Catalogue of the Library of the Late Col. William Duane. This was an auctioneer’s catalog printed in Philadelphia and dated February 25, 1836. There is no way of knowing when Duane (1760–1835) acquired his books.

24.   Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas and John Swords, 1803; reprint ed., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 2:128–29. In a footnote Miller cites specifically the first volume of Condillac’s Cours d’études pour l’instruction du prince de Parme, and as a work in 16 volumes published in Paris in 1775, which was the case.

25.   The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2:438, 439. A Cours d’étude pour l’instruction des jeunes gens, by Condillac, was published in Paris in 1796.

26.   I. Woodbridge Riley, American Philosophy: The Early Schools (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 437.

27.   Palmer, Principles of Nature, 183.

28.   Charles Hunter Van Duzer, Contributions of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), 5.

29.   B. G. Garnham, “Who Were the Ideologues?” Studies in the French Eighteenth Century (Durham, Eng: University of Durham, 1978), 74.

30.   On Tracy, consult Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology” (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978). Extensive bibliography.

31.   See Sergio Moravia, “Les Idéologues et l’âge des Lumières,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 154 (1976), 1465–86.

32.   Garnham, “Who Were the Ideologues?” 79–80.

33.   Consult Emile Cailliet, La Tradition littéraire des Idéologues (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943).

34.   The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Cappon, 2:471, 500–501.

35.   A. Owen Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Idéologues,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 151 (1976): 109–17.

36.   See Gilbert Chinard, Jefferson et les Idéologues: D’après sa correspondance inédite avec Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, J.-B. Say, et Auguste Comte (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925). Reviewed by George Boas, Modern Language Notes 41 (1926): 205–8. The reader should also consult Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, along with Chinard’s book.

37.   The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:491. In a letter dated October 14, 1816.

38.   Ibid., 535. Letter dated March 2, 1819.

39.   Chinard, Jefferson et les Idéologues, 1.

40.   Gilbert Chinard, introduction to La Tradition littéraire des Idéologues by Emile Cailliet (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943), 23.

41.   Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Correspondence of Jefferson and Du Pont de Nemours with an Introduction on Jefferson and the Physiocrats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1931), xiv–cxxiii.

42.   Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 2:vi–vii.

43.   Ibid., 10. For a criticism of these views of Parrington, see Richard Hofstadter, “Parrington and the Jeffersonian Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941): 391–400.

44.   George K. Smart, “Private Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” American Literature 10 (1938): 47.

45.   See Malcolm R. Eiselen’s chapter on “Franklin and the Physiocrats” in his book Franklin’s Political Theories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 62–65; and Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 24–28.

46.   Frederick B. Tolles, George Logan of Philadelphia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 68.

47.   Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 139

48.   Adams, A Defence 1:372.

49.   Ibid., 1:384.

50.   See Pierre Teyssendier de la Serve, Mably et les Physiocrates (Poitiers: Société Française d’Imprimerie et de Librairie, 1911).

51.   Consult J. L. Lecercle, “Mably devant la révolution américaine,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 180 (1976): 1287–1306.

52.   Haraszti, “The Communism of the Abbé de Mably,” in John Adams and the Prophets of Progress, 116–38.

53.   William Vans Murray, Political Sketches (London: C. Dilly, 1787). This sketch was reprinted in the American Museum or Repository (Philadelphia) 2 (1787): 221–28.

54.   Philip Mazzei, Researches on the United States, ed. and trans. Constance D. Sherman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976).

55.   Memoirs and Letters of James Kent LL.D., ed. William Kent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), 238–39.

56.   George R. Havens, “James Madison et la pensée française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 611.

57.   Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Benjamin Franklin and the Philosophes,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963): 52.

58.   See Gilbert Chinard, “Jefferson Among the Philosophers,” Ethics 53, (1943): 265ff.

59.   Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, 190.

60.   See, for example, no. 14, by Madison, eager reader of French.

61.   Noah Webster, Ten Letters to Dr. Joseph Priestly (New Haven, Conn.: Read and Morse, 1800), 22.