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³ Jefferson's “original rough draught” of the Declaration, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–) (hereafter PTJ), Volume I, 427. In a later fragment, Jefferson changed the phrase “in a separate state” to “apart from them.” See “Fragment of the Composition Draft of the Declaration of Independence,” in ibid., 421. Congress adopted neither.

⁴ Jefferson, , Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, William (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 155Google Scholar.

⁵ Jefferson, , Notes on British and American Alienage (1783), in PTJ, Volume VI, 433Google Scholar.

⁶ Minutes of the Board of Visitors, University of Virginia, 1822–25, 4 March 1825, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984) (hereafter TJW), 479.

⁷ Smith, Rogers, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Also see Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35–46Google Scholar.

⁸ See Armitage, David, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” William and Mary Quarterly, 59 (Jan. 2002), 39–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wills, Inventing America.

⁹ Jefferson to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1903–4) (hereafter L&B), Volume XVI, 118.

¹⁰ Derrida, Jacques, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science, 15 (1986), 7–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Searle, John, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹² Quotations from Dunn, John, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke?”, in Dunn, , Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays, 1981–1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 15–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Jefferson's “original Rough draught” of the Declaration, in PTJ, Volume I, 423.

¹⁴ Ibid., 426–27. These ties, which rendered their separation “agonizing,” remained strong enough even after years of hostility to prompt an 1816 hope for reconciliation in Jefferson to John Adams, 25 Nov. 1816, in The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2nd edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) (hereafter AJL), 498.

¹⁵ Autobiography, in TJW, 18.

¹⁶ See Garry Wills's discussion of the Declaration as “a sentimental paper,” in Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 259–319, esp. 307–19.

¹⁷ The first grievance is in Jefferson's “original Rough draught,” in PTJ, Volume I, 424; the second is in the text as adopted by the Congress (ibid., 431), as well as in Jefferson's comparative text in his Autobiography, in TJW, 21.

¹⁸ Jefferson to Caesar Rodney, 10 Feb. 1810, in TJW, 1217; TJ to John Adams, Jan. 11, 1816, in AJL, 459.

¹⁹ Jefferson to John Langdon, 5 March 1810, in TJW, 1220.

²⁰ Jefferson to Henry Middleton, Jan. 1813, in L&B, Volume XIII, 203.

²¹ Jefferson to James Madison, 1 Sept. 1785, in James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1995) (hereafter ROL), Volume I, 381.

²² Outline of Policy on the Mississippi Question, 2 Aug. 1790, in PTJ, Volume XVII, 115; Jefferson to John Adams, 25 Nov. 1816, in AJL, 498. Also see Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Sept. 1787, in ibid., 200. Also see Jefferson to David Humphreys, 7 May 1786, in PTJ, Volume IX, 469; Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 13 May 1797, in TJW, 1042, and Jefferson to John Langdon, 5 March 1810, in ibid., 1219.

²³ Jefferson's “original Rough draught,” in PTJ, Volume I, 427.

²⁴ Jefferson to William Duane, 12 Aug. 1810, in TJW, 1228.

²⁵ Jefferson to Madame de Stael, 24 May 1813, in TJW, 1275.

²⁶ Jefferson to Fayetteville Republican Citizens, 17 March 1801, in PTJ, Volume XXXIII, 319.

²⁷ Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal Edition, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 12 vols. (New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904–1905) (hereafter FE), Volume IX, 195.

²⁸ Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in TJW, 1517.

²⁹ Jefferson to Fayetteville Republican Citizens, 17 March 1801, in PTJ, Volume XXXIII, 319, emphasis added.

³⁰ For a brief description of the typical distinction in the literature on nationalism between “civic” and “ethnic” varieties see Ignatieff, Michael, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 5–9Google Scholar. On the invention of this distinction in the work of Hans Kohn see Calhoun, Craig, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (New York: Routledge, 2007), 117–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a persuasive critique of the tradition of identifying American nationalism too exclusively with the civic variety see Smith, Rogers, “Beyond Toqueville, Mydral, and Hartz,” in American Political Science Review, 87 (Sept. 1993), 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Jefferson to Dr. James Mease, 26 Sept. 1825, in L&B, Volume XVI, 122–23; Jefferson to Mease, 30 Oct. 1825, in “Notes and Queries,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 41 (1917), 248.

³² Jefferson to James Madison, 30 Aug. 1823, in ROL, Volume III, 1876–77.

³³ Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, 18 July 1826, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress. Also see McDonald, Robert M. S., “Thomas Jefferson's Changing Reputation as Author of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years,” Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Summer 1999), 169–95, 190CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Which is why I largely leave battles over citizenship alone here, except in the sense that struggles over the criteria for naturalization speak to American arguments about what ought to be required of a citizen. A foreigner, after all, can become an American, though the mechanisms by which that will happen have always been in flux. One could even imagine a foreigner considering herself “American” in sentiment without actually going through the process of applying for formal citizenship. But a foreigner can never be an “un-American” precisely because there is no presumption that a foreigner will, of necessity, embrace American values; likewise, because her political obligations lie elsewhere, no foreigner can commit the crime of treason against the United States. See Kettner, James H., The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and David James Kiracofe, “Treason and the Development of National Identity in Revolutionary America, 1775–1815,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1995. In this context, it seems worth noting Alan McPherson's compelling argument that foreigners have long marshaled the concept “Americanism” to challenge US territorial expansion precisely by holding the United States “to its own [self-proclaimed] standards” of “equality before the law, self-determination, liberal democracy, universal human rights, and free markets.” This is a way of calling out American practice as inconsistent with American claims about its values: calling American practice un-American, in other words. See McPherson, “Americanism against American Empire,” in Kazin, Michael and McCartin, Joseph A., eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 169–91, 172Google Scholar.

³⁵ See Bradburn, Douglas, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Taylor, Alan, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2010)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Jefferson to James Madison, 30 Aug. 1823, in ROL, Volume III, 1877.

³⁷ “Reply to the Representations of Affairs in America by British Newspapers,” before 20 Nov. 1784, in TJW, 573. Also see Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, 13 Oct. 1785, in ibid., 835–36.

³⁸ Jefferson to Horatio Gates, 30 May 1797, FE, Volume VIII, 294. Also see Adams, Henry, The Life of Albert Gallatin (New York: Peter Smith, 1943), 197–98Google Scholar.

³⁹ Jefferson to Philip Mazzei, 24 April 1796, in TJW, 1036.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 1037; Jefferson to John Langdon, 5 March 1810, in ibid., 1218.

⁴¹ Porcupine's Gazette quoted in Smith, James Morton, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 14Google Scholar. Also see Malone, Dumas, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), 367–68, 438Google Scholar.

⁴² Jefferson to William Duane, 25 July 1811, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume IV, 56.

⁴³ Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 17 March 1814, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume VII, 249. Jefferson had long worried about the transformation of Americans – through too early contact with European aristocracies and ideas – into “foreigners” with preference for monarchy, hierarchy, and established churches. See Steele, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood, chapter 2.

⁴⁴ Jefferson to William Duane, 20 April 1812, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume IV, 632–33; Jefferson to Duane, 4 Aug. 1812, in ibid., Volume V, 294.

⁴⁵ Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Feb. 1796, in AJL, 260.

⁴⁶ Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813, in ibid., 391.

⁴⁷ On this point it is worth noting that, unlike later generations who took these characteristics for granted as fixed or rooted in nature, Jefferson always located the peculiarities of American character in history, suggesting that the traits he considered normative for the exercise of democratic republicanism could be lost over time without vigilant attendance to their maintenance. See the important reflections on the nature of this problem in Daniel Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S., eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21–40, esp. 22–23Google Scholar; and Foner, Eric, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?”, in History Workshop Journal, 17 (1984), 57–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Degler, Carl N., in “In Pursuit of an American History,” in American Historical Review, 92 (Feb. 1987), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McGerr, Michael, “The Price of the New Transnational History,” in American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1056–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On this theme in Jefferson's thought, see Steele, 123–30.

⁴⁸ Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 164; Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1786, in PTJ, Volume X, 448. Like many other observers at the time, Jefferson passed over multiple inequalities in Revolutionary America that would be glaring to later scholars, and Jefferson's confidence about the American common man was predicated, especially in Virginia, to a degree that he was rarely explicit about, upon the enslavement of much of the laboring class. Nevertheless, this theme of unusually widespread prosperity (especially relative to Europe) is as old as the idea of America and remains a prominent component in contemporary American exceptionalism. See Greene, Jack P., The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an effort to quantify American prosperity and social mobility in the late eighteenth century see Main, Jackson Turner, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ To Thomas Cooper, 10 Sept. 1814, L&B, Volume XIV, 182. Also see Notes, 133.

⁵⁰ First Annual Message, 8 Dec. 1801, in TJW, 503.

⁵¹ “Notes of a Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley,” PTJ, Volume XIII, 27–28; 36 n. 29, emphasis added.

⁵² Jefferson to Charles Bellini, 30 Sept. 1785, PTJ, Volume VIII, 568.

⁵³ Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours, 24 April 1816, in Malone, Dumas, ed., Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, 1798–1817 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 181Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Jefferson to Richard Price, 7 Aug. 1785, in FE, Volume IV, 448.

⁵⁵ Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, L&B, Volume XV, 35.

⁵⁶ Jefferson to John Breckenridge, 29 Jan. 1800, in L&B, Volume X, 149, emphasis added.

⁵⁷ Jefferson, Anas, in Ford, ed., FE, Volume I, 183.

⁵⁸ To James Warren, 21 March 1801, PTJ, Volume XXXIII, 398–99, emphasis added.

⁵⁹ Jefferson to Justice William Johnson, 12 June 1823, in TJW, 1470. See also Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 16 Jan. 1811, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume III, 305: Hamilton believed “in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men”: a deplorable lack of imagination or attention to American realities, in Jefferson's view.

⁶⁰ One good place to begin exploring the question is the excellent collection of essays edited by Ben-Atar, Doron and Oberg, Barbara B., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁶¹ A distinction effectively made also in Davis's, David Brion introduction to The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971), esp. xiii–xivGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Hollinger, David, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of American Ideas (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985), xGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ For example, see the essays in Shafer, Byron E., ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ See McDonald, “Thomas Jefferson's Changing Reputation.”

⁶⁵ On Federalist conceptions of citizenship see Rogers M. Smith, “Constructing American National Identity: Strategies of the Federalists,” in Ben-Atar and Oberg, 19–40; Pani, Erika, “Saving the Nation through Exclusion: Alien Laws in the Early Republic in the United States and Mexico,” The Americas, 65 (Oct. 2008), 217–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and especially Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution, esp. chapters 3–4, 6. On Federalist conceptions of the public see Cotlar, Seth, Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 188, 199Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Romney speech at the New Hampshire Primary, Washington Post, 10 Jan. 2012. Romney, in contrast, claimed that he would “never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the earth.” Romney's campaign tract was similarly entitled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010).

⁶⁷ Doctorow, E. L., “Unexceptionalism: A Primer,” New York Times, 28 April 2012Google Scholar. On this theme see Onuf, Peter S., “American Exceptionalism and National Identity,” American Political Thought, 1 (Spring 2012), 77–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Godfrey Hodgson notes that in the first half of the twentieth century, “anti-Americanism” in Britain was “essentially a distemper of the British Right” which disparaged American “egalitarianism, economic opportunity, and uninhibited fun” and its hostility to aristocracy, monarchy, and colonialism. Now, Hodgson argues, hostility to America is the province of the British left, which associates America with Thatcherism. Once, he says, America “was seen as a great engine for benevolent change; now, justly or unjustly, it is widely seen as a beneficiary of the inequalities and inequities of the status quo.” See Godfrey Hodgson, “Anti-Americanism and American Exceptionalism,” ITEAS Lecture, University of Dundee, 11 Nov. 2003.

⁶⁸ See Nussbaum, Martha, “Toward a Globally Sensitive Patriotism,” in Daedalus, 137 (Summer 2008), 78–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cotlar, 52–111; and Onuf, Nicholas and Onuf, Peter S., Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 219–46Google Scholar. Also see Hansen, Jonathan, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a compelling endorsement of American “covenanted patriotism” see the too-neglected essay by Schaar, John C., “The Case for Patriotism,” in American Review, 17 (May 1973), 59–99Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Douglass to Horace Greeley, 15 April 1846, in Foner, Philip S., ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 147Google Scholar. On this strain in Douglass's thought see Sundquist, Eric J., “Introduction,” in Sundquist, , ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–22, 14–15Google Scholar. For an overview of the literature on American exceptionalism see Lipset, Seymour Martin and Marks, Gary, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: Norton, 2000), 15–41Google Scholar. For a critique of the practice described here see Kaplan, Amy, “A Call for a Truce,” American Literary History, 17 (2005), 141–47, esp. 146CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an affirmation of it see Leo Marx, “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies,” ibid., 118–34, esp. 131–32.

⁷⁰ Hollinger, David, “The Historian's Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Bender, Thomas, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 381–95, 392Google Scholar; Ross, “Lincoln, and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History (Sept. 2009), 386.

⁷¹ See Pells, Richard, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 76–82Google Scholar. Also see Aaron Copland's brief and suggestive description of the banning of his Lincoln Portrait from the Eisenhower inauguration concert at Constitution Hall, in Copland, Aaron and Perlis, Vivian, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), 346–47Google Scholar.

⁷² See also Edmund S. Morgan's classic argument that the flourishing of democratic republican institutions and individual freedom for whites was inseparable from the institution of black slavery in the early republic: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

⁷³ Jefferson to Thomas Law, 15 Jan. 1811, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume III, 298–99. Also see Davis, Fear of Conspiracy, xvi.

⁷⁴ Hollinger, David, Postethnic America: Beyond Multicultualism (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 134–35Google Scholar; Smith, Rogers, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Miller, Perry, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Rorty, Richard, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ See Wolin, Sheldon, “Injustice and Collective Memory,” in Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 32–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Guyatt, Nicholas, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 256–61, 282–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers a substantive critique of this tendency. Also see Bodnar, John, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 199, 236CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ Todd Gitlin has suggested that the American left followed the same path in the 1960s: disgusted by the nation's complicity with injustice, many critics denied “its very right to exist,” and thus, to an extent, embraced the right's definition of them as un-American. See Gitlin, Todd, The Intellectuals and the Flag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 131–36Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Lincoln to Pierce, Henry L. and Others, 6 April 1859, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1858–1865, ed. Feherenbacher, Don E. (New York: Library of America, 1989), 19Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Speech on Kansas–Nebraska, Peoria, Illinois, 16 Oct. 1854, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989) 339–40, 340–41; First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1858–1865, 224. To be clear, Lincoln admitted – most eloquently in the Second Inaugural – that slavery was, in fact, American, after all. His point, though, was that what had become American practice was a violation of American ideology and that the sin demanded repentance and redemption. It seems worth noting, though, by way of clarification, that Lincoln spent his entire political career arguing that slavery was in fact un-American. This is what makes his later admission striking. The point is that he was in a struggle over whether what he considered un-American would remain so.

⁸⁰ Hendrickson, David C., “A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy,” World Policy Journal (Spring 2004), 102–13, 110 and 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Kaplan, “A Call for a Truce,” 146. Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁸¹ See Smith, Rogers, “Beyond Toqueville, Mydral, and Hartz,” American Political Science Review, 87 (Sept. 1993), 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Civic Ideals, for extensive discussion and commentary on the ebb and flow of what Smith calls this ascriptive “ideology” and practice in American history.

⁸² Note, apropos of the critiques of Wolin and Guyatt (see note 76 above), that Jim Crow segregation and the internment of Japanese Americans is (conspicuously?) ignored in Roth's story.

⁸³ See Adams, Michael C. C., The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and especially Bodnar, The “Good War in American Memory.”