Dear Sir Correspondences. The Letters of Bernard and Hutchison, and Olivor and Parton &e were detected and exposed before The Prevolution. There are I doubt not, thousands of Litters now phone in to their Friends, which will one day See the light. I have wondered now in being but still concealed from their Party for more than thirty years that so few have appeared; and have constantly expected that a Jory History of the Rise and progress of the Prevolution would appear. And wished it I wouldy we more for it than for Marshall, Gordon Thamsay and at the rest. Private Leders of all Parties willbe found analogous to the Newspapers Pamphets and Historians. of the Tomes Gordons and Marshall's Histories were written"" to make money, and fashioned, and finished; to sell high in the dondon Market. I should expect to find more Truth in a History suritten by Hutchinson, Oliver or erick And I doubt way, Luck Historics will one day appoar. Marshall's. is a Mausoleum, 100 feet square at the base, and 200 feet. as the inonuments of the Washington க high. It will be a Character in History maur be easily foreseen: Your Administration, will be quoted by Philosophers, as a model of profound Wisdom, by Politicians, as weak, Superficial and Thart sighted. Mine, litre Popes Woman will have no Character at all. The impious Idolatry to Washington, destroyed all Character. His Legacy of Ministers, was not the worst part of the Tradredy, Though Writing to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, John Adams addressed the role each would play in American יידי things that they may be lost; and, indeed, they were all written in so much haste and so carelessly put upon paper that they are not fit for the public eye. Three years later, building upon his selfreproach as well as the cynicism Adams felt about the influence of powerful people and families upon the writing of authentic history, he warned Rush that "I doubt whether faithful history ever was or ever can be written." Two years later his cynicism had turned to despair, and he pleaded with Rush "to write a treatise or at least an essay on the causes of the corruption of tradition and consequently of the corruption of history. For myself I do believe that both tradition and history are already corrupted in America as much as they ever were in the four or five first centuries of Christianity, and as much as they ever were in any age or country in the whole history of mankind."3 When we turn to John Adams's remarkable correspondence with Thomas Jefferson-which Ezra Pound quite accurately called one of the greatest treasures of American national culture we find a startling contrast between the self-confidence expressed by Adams as a practicing historian in 1787 and his fearsome concerns as an old man in 1813. On the earlier occasion, when Adams (in London) mailed to Jefferson (in Paris) his discursive volumes on the new American state constitutions set in the context of ancient constitutionalism, Adams conceded that he would be "Suspected of writing Romances. . . . But I assure you, it is all genuine History. 114 The eve of July 4 in 1813, eighteen months after the two luminaries had resumed their correspondence following a long silence, Adams wrote candidly and speculatively about their respective niches in the pantheon of time. "Your character in History may be easily foreseen," he told his erstwhile friend (during the Revolution) and subsequent political foe (1796-1811). "Your Administration, will be quoted by Philosophers, as a model, of profound Wisdom; [but] by Politicians, as weak, superficial and short sighted. Mine, like Popes Woman will have no Character at all. [Alexander Pope had written that "Most Women have no Characters at all."] The impious Idolatry to Washington, destroyed all Character."5 Jefferson did not take offense at Adams's sharp barb, in part because Jefferson seems to have been more sanguine about his treatment at Clio's hands but also because Jefferson felt more disposed than Adams to live in the present and less willing to be tyrannized by the past. We are Jefferson distinguished between the burden of past history and the value of historical knowledge. all familiar with Jefferson's famous remark, written from Paris in 1789, that "the earth belongs always to the living generation." He also added, in the same letter, that few people had perceived, "by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another."6 All too often, however, we lose sight of the fact that Jefferson differentiated between the burden of the past-the need for those in the present to avoid being oppressed by it—and his profound respect for the value of historical knowledge. It taught practical lessons, he insisted, such as the nature and schemes of tyranny. Consequently history should be the centerpiece of any precollegiate curriculum, when most ordinary folk would receive their entire education. "History," Jefferson declared, "by apprizing them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and de- Jefferson and Adams shared in common a Theuferd Resolved by the Denate and Smat of the American Revolution and its aftermath, the creation of a new nation.8 For my second pair of Presidents, James K. Polk and Abraham Lincoln, historical distortions and skewed interpretations were mobilized during their administrations to rationalize controversial policies and what appeared to be unavoidable conflicts. For them the uses of mythic history were more expedient and more directly linked to political legitimation than would be true of other Presidents I shall discuss. Although Polk actually wrote less about the American past than any of my eight Presidents, he clearly possessed an intelligent and shrewd, almost driven self-awareness and desire for prompt vindication that easily match the more illustrious egotists who subsequently lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Polk, for example, was one of the few chief executives in our history to keep a detailed diary-and did so long before the publication of memoirs during retirement became a standard practice. Polk recorded, often after the fact, what he perceived to be the high points of his administration along with abundant particulars and entries concerning his aspirations and policy initiatives." As an expansionist and a continentalist, Polk campaigned in 1844 for "the reoccupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas," and he managed to defeat the far better known Henry Clay by 170 electoral votes to 105. In August 1846 Polk sent John Slidell to Mexico with the design of purchasing upper California and New Mexico as well as adjusting the Texas boundary along the Rio Grande. The Mexican government refused to negotiate with Slidell, however, and after a Mexican armed force crossed the Rio Grande and attacked American detachments, Congress declared a war that by 1848 had achieved all of Polk's objectives. Neither space nor your patience permits me to recite the complicated details, first, of Polk's deceitfulness in 1845 in gaining Senate acceptance of Texas into the Union in exchange for his House of Representations of the United States of Amurice in Conques asembled, That the state of Texas phall be ones, and is henty declared to be of the United States of America, and admited into the Union ow an equal footing with the original states, in all respects whatever.. one, President Polk persuaded the Senate to accept Texas into the Union in 1845. The following year, claiming blood had been shed on Texan soil, he persuaded Congress to declare war on Mexico. commitment to negotiate with Mexico in order to ensure that the boundary issue would not result in war; and second, of his deviousness in 1846 when he sent Congress a message claiming that, "after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are at war." Not even Texas claimed the soil on which the blood was actually shed; but an extremely willful President then presented an inadequately informed Congress with a confusing account of what had created the impasse and offered vague options for avoiding war. On the one hand, Polk called on Congress to "recognize the existence of the war, and to place at the disposition of the Executive the means of prosecuting the war with vigor." Insisting upon his "anxious desire" to restore peace, however, the President promised to reopen negotiations whenever the Mexicans were willing. The best way to achieve such a result, Polk insisted, was "the immediate appearance in arms of a large and overpowering force." He got it. 10 So many "accidental" misunderstandings occurred between Polk, Congress, and others during his single term that he earned a reputation at the time for "a trait of sly cunning which he thought shrewdness, but which was really disingenuousness and duplicity." To compound matters, when charges of bad faith were leveled at Polk, he recorded in his diary a version that suited his desired outcome and kept his integrity untarnished. Consequently, one of the most extensive journals kept by a sitting President is highly unreliable, and historians are still trying to unscramble what actually happened. Abraham Lincoln, like Polk, was a nationalist; but after that the resemblance ceases to be meaningful. It is almost beside the point that, unlike Polk, Lincoln had been a Whig in the 1840s and had opposed the war with Mexico. In fact, as a first-term congressman, Lincoln had risen in the House on December 22, 1847, to expose Polk's "sheerest deception" and the President's efforts to conceal his political manipulations. Lincoln demanded that Polk reveal the exact "spot" where American blood had first been spilled. 12 Nor is the main point of contrast that Lincoln neglected to "improve" historical documents in Lincoln "invoked powerful national myths in order to legitimize his most essential policies." order to cover his tracks. Rather, what matters is that Lincoln also faced a major military conflict (though not one of his own making) and invoked powerful national myths in order to legitimize his most essential policies. Lincoln revered the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, he knew much better than most Americans the history and constitutional consequences of that pivotal and determinative period, 1775 to 1788. Or should I say, he knew that period in the historically utilitarian way that Daniel Webster and other great Unionist spokesmen had described it ever since the early Federalist era: namely, that a "perpetual union" had been created in 1787 and that its origins went back to the first Continental Congress in 1774. Therefore the nation preceded the states and thereby undercut the more extreme claims made in the name of state sovereignty. 13 Lincoln relied upon that time-honored formula during his famous pre-inaugural trip from Springfield to Washington, D.C., in February 1861, when he gave one conciliatory speech after another while insisting upon the sacredness of perpetual union. In the process, he offered an expedient or utilitarian version of American history at the moment of national creation. He did so spontaneously at Philadelphia's Independence Hall on February 22, 1861, the anniversary of George Washington's birth.14 (Keep in mind that as a youngster Lincoln had read and reread Parson Weems's literally fabulous Life of Washington.) 14 By the end of 1862, however, circumstances had changed. Not only had secession occurred, shattering the comity that had been validated by the state ratifying conventions in 1787-1788, but war had commenced and was not going at all well for the North. Those circumstances elicited from Lincoln, in his annual message to Congress, a fresh statement about the relation of past to present, of history to healing. Because the words are so familiar, I will quote selectively; but please note that Lincoln now sounded more like Jefferson than he did like Daniel Webster or John Adams. The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. . . . We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. 15 Saving the Union and freeing the slaves were explicitly presented as joint policy objectives in the memorable closing paragraph of this remarkable state paper. But we hear no more of perpetual Union. Instead the Congress received an appeal that they and those they represented must transcend historical myths in order to be remembered creditably by posterity. It was a unique and intriguing moment in American public discourse. It would be echoed on occasion, but never duplicated. It has quite recently been argued that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution in a fundamental way, by emphasizing equality via the document's direct linkage with the principles of 1776. After November 19, 1863, the Union ceased to be a mystical hope and became a permanent political reality. Before 1863 the United States was invariably articulated as a plural noun: "The United States are a free country." After that date, however, the usage became routinely singular: "The United States is a free country." Abraham Lincoln had basically altered the very nature of American constitutionalism. 16 My next pair of presidential historians contrasts sharply with the first two. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson actually produced more volumes of history than all the rest of our dramatis personae put together. They also did so years before assuming the presidency, and they both managed to be, simultaneously, modified Anglophiles and ardent American nationalists. Both had the great narrative historians, such as Parkman, Macaulay, Carlyle, and Gibbon, as models. Both of them wrote to validate the genesis of the American nation, and both hoped that their histories would achieve wide popularity. Wilson had informed his fiancée in 1884: "I want to write books which will be read by the great host who don't wear spectacles-whose eyes are young and unlearned!"'17 (That certainly excluded Teddy Roosevelt, known affectionately since 1884 as "old four eyes.") Wilson's career as a historian spanned a decade (1892-1902), when he taught politics at Princeton. (After he became president of the university in 1902, his career as a historian. ended abruptly.) He began with a history of the United States from 1829 until 1889, Division and Reunion, which appeared in 1893. Although it contained some fresh insights, the book rested upon thin research. His two-volume biography of George Washington (1896-1897) was not quite so adulatory as other recent efforts, but neither was it vitally needed at the time. Henry Cabot Lodge had published his pro-Federalist Wash |