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Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XXVI: May 1793 to August 1793 by John Catanzariti;Thomas JeffersonReview by: John P. KaminskiJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 130-132Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124299 .
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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
practitioners of American diplomacy seeking historical and cultural bearing after the Cold War. For them, the acts and writings of John Quincy Adams are surpassed by none as gyroscope for the nation's posture in the world, however circumstances may have changed since the nineteenth century.
Washington, D.C. James M. Banner, Jr.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XXVI: May 1793 to August 1793. Edited by John Catanzariti et al. (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1995. Pp. xviii, 875. Illustrations. $75.00.)
This is the tenth and next to last volume on Thomas Jefferson's four-
year tenure as U.S. secretary of state. In addition to 358 letters writ- ten to Jefferson and two dozen memoranda and reports by others, it contains 267 letters, 23 accounts of cabinet meetings, 22 notes on a
variety of topics, and five miscellaneous documents written by Jeffer- son.
This volume, for the first time, fully documents the Washington administration's frustrating experience with French minister Edmond Charles Genet. Jefferson struggles to combat Citizen Genet's chal-
lenge to America's neutrality while at the same time he tries to fore- stall Federalists from capitalizing-both in foreign affairs and in domestic matters-on the actions of the impetuous Frenchman. Jef- ferson told James Madison that he adhered to Genet "as long as I could have a hope of getting him right, because I know what weight we should derive to our scale by keeping in it the love of the [Ameri- can] people for the French cause and nation, and how important it was to ward off from that cause and nation any just grounds of aliena- tion. Finding at length that the man was absolutely incorrigible, I saw the necessity of quitting a wreck which could not but sink all who should cling to it" (652).
Other important documents in the volume include correspon- dence with U.S. ministers to Great Britain, France, Spain, and Por-
tugal, and with the British minister to the U.S., and documents
dealing with the establishment of the new federal capital and espe- cially architectural and structural concerns about William Thornton's
design for the Capitol. On a more personal level, Jefferson continues his correspondence with his daughter Martha (one letter mentions his love of mockingbirds) and with his son-in-law Thomas Mann Ran-
dolph, Jr. on agricultural matters.
practitioners of American diplomacy seeking historical and cultural bearing after the Cold War. For them, the acts and writings of John Quincy Adams are surpassed by none as gyroscope for the nation's posture in the world, however circumstances may have changed since the nineteenth century.
Washington, D.C. James M. Banner, Jr.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XXVI: May 1793 to August 1793. Edited by John Catanzariti et al. (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1995. Pp. xviii, 875. Illustrations. $75.00.)
This is the tenth and next to last volume on Thomas Jefferson's four-
year tenure as U.S. secretary of state. In addition to 358 letters writ- ten to Jefferson and two dozen memoranda and reports by others, it contains 267 letters, 23 accounts of cabinet meetings, 22 notes on a
variety of topics, and five miscellaneous documents written by Jeffer- son.
This volume, for the first time, fully documents the Washington administration's frustrating experience with French minister Edmond Charles Genet. Jefferson struggles to combat Citizen Genet's chal-
lenge to America's neutrality while at the same time he tries to fore- stall Federalists from capitalizing-both in foreign affairs and in domestic matters-on the actions of the impetuous Frenchman. Jef- ferson told James Madison that he adhered to Genet "as long as I could have a hope of getting him right, because I know what weight we should derive to our scale by keeping in it the love of the [Ameri- can] people for the French cause and nation, and how important it was to ward off from that cause and nation any just grounds of aliena- tion. Finding at length that the man was absolutely incorrigible, I saw the necessity of quitting a wreck which could not but sink all who should cling to it" (652).
Other important documents in the volume include correspon- dence with U.S. ministers to Great Britain, France, Spain, and Por-
tugal, and with the British minister to the U.S., and documents
dealing with the establishment of the new federal capital and espe- cially architectural and structural concerns about William Thornton's
design for the Capitol. On a more personal level, Jefferson continues his correspondence with his daughter Martha (one letter mentions his love of mockingbirds) and with his son-in-law Thomas Mann Ran-
dolph, Jr. on agricultural matters.
130 130
This content downloaded from 195.78.109.156 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 03:57:59 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The aura of politics hangs over the entire volume. Jefferson tells President Washington that Philip Freneau's newspaper "has saved our constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy" (102). Jef- ferson admonishes Madison to reply to Hamilton's "Pacificus" news- paper series: "For god's sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him" (444). Madison complied. Jefferson offers illuminating assess- ments of various political figures. Attorney General Edmund Ran- dolph is described as "the poorest Cameleon I ever saw having no colour of his own, and reflecting that nearest him. When he is with me he is a whig, when with H[amilton] he is a tory, when with the P[resident] he is what he thinks will please him. The last is his strong- est hue" (652-53).
Jefferson decries the slave uprisings in the Caribbean and predicts that "sooner or later all the whites will be expelled from all the West India islands" (504). Fearing racial violence in America, he hopes that "the timely wisdom and liberality" of the southern legislatures will provide for gradual emancipation and colonization to those nearby islands (504). He wants white America to be relieved of the "moral reproach" of slavery while "at the same time preventing the physical and political consequences of a mixture" of the races (788).
Continuing the practice set by Julian P. Boyd, documents written in French are not translated. (Spanish documents, however, are printed in both the original language and in a modern translation.) Some might question this policy, especially in a volume devoted so heavily to the Genet mission. Perhaps Boyd's decision a half century ago was valid for that time, but today many people use the Jefferson Papers who are not fluent in French, particularly the nuances of eighteenth-century diplomatic French. As a concession to the impor- tance of Genet's twenty-five letters to Jefferson, the editors of Volume 26 cite the sources where contemporary eighteenth-century transla- tions are published, a practice not done in previous volumes. It might be time, perhaps past time, to print translations of French docu- ments, especially if contemporary eighteenth-century translations are available.
Only three headnotes appear in this volume: two pages on the U.S. debt to France, three pages on the president's appeal to the Su- preme Court justices for legal advice on various aspects of neutrality, and an eight-page note on Genet's recall. The footnotes are extensive, learned, and germane; and the magnificent seventy-five page index is accurate and complete. The volume is a masterful job of editing and
BOOK REVIEWS 131
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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC
book-making that continues the long tradition of excellence associated with the Jefferson Papers.
University of Wisconsin, Madison John P. Kaminski
Retracing Major Stephen H. Long's 1820 Expedition: The Itinerary and Botany. By George J. Goodman and Cheryl A. Lawson. The American Exploration and Travel Series. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Pp. xviii, 366. Maps, illustrations. $38.50.)
Studies of the Lewis and Clark expedition will always dominate the literature of western American exploration. But the explorations of
Stephen H. Long have been getting their share of attention. The work of Goodman and Lawson is a fine addition to the considerable
body of studies on Long's best known achievement, the so-called Yel- lowstone expedition of 1820.
The authors, both botanists, personally followed the route of
Long and his men. Their goals, which they attain, were to locate the
itinerary with a precision not realized heretofore and to arrive at a full
understanding of the botanical results of the expedition. The book focuses on the expedition's naturalist, Edwin James, a civilian sur-
geon. Using the various editions of James's published narrative, his
unpublished diary, and the botanical publications of James and oth-
ers, the authors expand our knowledge of the plants, shrubs, grasses, and trees that were collected or observed, and the days and places that James found them. Goodman and Lawson traveled through Ne-
braska, Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma-often over terrain that is rugged and remote even now. In addition, they pored over the holdings of many libraries and herbaria.
John Torrey, the premier botanist of the early nineteenth cen-
tury, described many of James's specimens (several of them new to
science) in a number of publications. Both he and James could be
maddeningly vague in giving the locations where the specimens were taken. Sometimes they were downright wrong. The authors, with their knowledge of flowering times and distribution, identify plants and localities. Usually they do so with certainty. For example, they conclude that "James would have made his collection [of Verbesina vir-
ginica (Frostweed)] in late August or early September along the Cana- dian River in the eastern half of Oklahoma," not "on the Missouri"
(178), as Torrey had it. In a few cases the evidence permits only edu-
book-making that continues the long tradition of excellence associated with the Jefferson Papers.
University of Wisconsin, Madison John P. Kaminski
Retracing Major Stephen H. Long's 1820 Expedition: The Itinerary and Botany. By George J. Goodman and Cheryl A. Lawson. The American Exploration and Travel Series. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Pp. xviii, 366. Maps, illustrations. $38.50.)
Studies of the Lewis and Clark expedition will always dominate the literature of western American exploration. But the explorations of
Stephen H. Long have been getting their share of attention. The work of Goodman and Lawson is a fine addition to the considerable
body of studies on Long's best known achievement, the so-called Yel- lowstone expedition of 1820.
The authors, both botanists, personally followed the route of
Long and his men. Their goals, which they attain, were to locate the
itinerary with a precision not realized heretofore and to arrive at a full
understanding of the botanical results of the expedition. The book focuses on the expedition's naturalist, Edwin James, a civilian sur-
geon. Using the various editions of James's published narrative, his
unpublished diary, and the botanical publications of James and oth-
ers, the authors expand our knowledge of the plants, shrubs, grasses, and trees that were collected or observed, and the days and places that James found them. Goodman and Lawson traveled through Ne-
braska, Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma-often over terrain that is rugged and remote even now. In addition, they pored over the holdings of many libraries and herbaria.
John Torrey, the premier botanist of the early nineteenth cen-
tury, described many of James's specimens (several of them new to
science) in a number of publications. Both he and James could be
maddeningly vague in giving the locations where the specimens were taken. Sometimes they were downright wrong. The authors, with their knowledge of flowering times and distribution, identify plants and localities. Usually they do so with certainty. For example, they conclude that "James would have made his collection [of Verbesina vir-
ginica (Frostweed)] in late August or early September along the Cana- dian River in the eastern half of Oklahoma," not "on the Missouri"
(178), as Torrey had it. In a few cases the evidence permits only edu-
132 132
This content downloaded from 195.78.109.156 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 03:57:59 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions