JEFFERSON & FRANKLIN

...He wishes they may be suitable, as Mrs...

...Typographically it is a fitting tribute to Franklin the printer...

...Of greatest interest, perhaps, are Jefferson's reactions to American Constitution-making...

...It is its natural manure...

...Times are altered since Mademoiselle de Sanson had the honour of knowing her...

...The uprising he had in mind was not the French Revolution, not even the American Revolution, but simply Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts...

...So far, so good...

...Reviewed by Arthur Bestor IN Philadelphia, on the 25th of May, 1787, the Federal Convention began the business of hammering out a new Constitution for the United States...

...To return again to the correspondence, the volumes under review reveal a side of Jefferson rarely glimpsed in his letters...

...And he felt that the results were already immense...

...845 pp...

...Typically, during these years, he was in Paris, a vantage point from which he could contemplate the agitations of two hemispheres...

...Should they be too small however, she will be so good as to lay them by a while...

...The new edition, sponsored by the Institute of Early American History at Williamsburg, will remain standard for a long time to come, for its text is authoritative and its notes copious enough for all the purposes of the general reader...

...And this, too, is a good thing in the present year, the 250th anniversary of his birth...

...This monumental series, sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Yale, will rival the Jefferson Papers in significance and in the scholarship lavished upon it...

...William Stephens Smith, John Adams' daughter: "Mr...

...Yale University Press...

...the editors of the present volume...

...One thinks of Franklin...

...The context of this remark is often forgotten...

...Notes on the State of Virginia, by Thomas Jefferson...

...250th Anniversary Edition...

...To make thinking of him easier, the Yale University Press has published one of the handsomest volumes of the year, Mr...

...Politics never pushed science aside in Jefferson's correspondence...

...He argued that one rebellion in one of thirteen states in eleven years "comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state" —a small price to pay for warning rulers "that their people preserve the spirit of resistance...

...His sympathy for the French Revolution, indeed, was formed during its earliest phases...

...I think that in the course of three months the royal authority has lost, and the rights of the nation gained, as much ground, by a revolution of opinion only, as England gained in all her civil wars under the Stuarts...

...Indeed, he found himself saddled with a bill for forty-six pounds sterling for the skin and skeleton of a moose, which he triumphantly presented to the naturalist Buffon as proof that animal species do not degenerate in the American climate...

...On first reading the completed Constitution, Jefferson was shocked, for he saw in the proposed Presidency "a bad edition of a Polish king...

...Writing to Charles Thomson of Philadelphia he expressed the sensible wish that explorers who come upon Indian antiquities would simply "make very exact descriptions of what they see," because "the moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the tracts which favor that theory...

...4.95...

...The link between the two nations thus wrestling with constitutional change was Thomas Jefferson, American minister to France...

...Before labeling Jefferson a wild-eyed Jacobin on the basis of this letter, one should note its disarming conclusion: "The want of facts worth communicating to you has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation...

...This, he felt, had assumed too prominent a place in the thinking of the delegates at Philadelphia, "and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order...

...Franklin: A Selection from His Personal Letters...

...Its earlier chapters are to be found in his one full-fledged book, Notes on the State of Virginia, now republished as a separate volume for the first time in more than half a century, under the expert editorship of William Peden...

...Smith and to send her the two pair of Corsets she desired...

...In Versailles, on the same day, the Assembly of Notables was dissolved, and the reforms it had ineffectually attempted were left for bloodier-minded men to accomplish in later years...

...There are ebbs as well as flows in this world...

...Benjamin Franklin, by Carl Van Doren...

...3.75...

...The guillotine was not to be unveiled for another five years, and Jefferson was never to witness its gruesome efficiency, for he left France less than three months after the fall of the Bastille...

...The proceedings of the Philadelphia Convention were, of course, secret, hence even his most faithful correspondents could supply no more than hints until the finished Constitution reached his hands in early November 1787...

...It is a straightforward narrative, lively, amusing, and wide-ranging because faithful to the man himself...

...This gesture was, of course, the continuation of an old debate...

...In the meantime he had noted down succinctly his own ideas on what should be done: "I wish to see our states made one as to all foreign, and several as to all domestic matters, a peaceable mode of compulsion over the states given to Congress, and the powers of this body divided, as in the states, into three departments—legislative, executive and judiciary...

...One thing in particular he feared: "this class of human lions, tygers and mammouts called kings...

...61 pp...

...Edited by William Peden...

...But Jefferson goes on to discuss the stratification of rocks, and comes up with the following conclusion: "It is now generally agreed that rock grows, and it seems that it grows in layers in every direction, as the branches of trees grow in all directions...

...Viking Press...

...The most famous (or notorious) aphorism of this period of his career was part of his initial reaction: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants...

...The 250th anniversary is celebrated also by a new edition of Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin, which still holds the commanding position in biography that it earned when the Pulitzer Prize was bestowed upon it in 1939...

...His observations and reflections upon events now rapidly moving make the two newly published volumes (the eleventh and twelfth) of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson as fascinating as any that have preceded...

...Why seek further the solution of this phaenom-enon...

...One letter is particularly interesting as revealing both the Tightness of his judgment concerning the conditions of scientific observation and the egregious errors of speculation into which he was capable of falling...

...Smith omitted to send her measure...

...University of North Carolina Press...

...On the day in question he happened to be in Bordeaux, nominally on vacation, but actually taking assiduous notes on viticulture, vintages, soils, and the wages of labor...

...Consider this, to Mrs...

...Fifteen critical months (January 1787 through March 1788) are presented, with the completeness and the meticulous editing that have brought this series recognition as a masterpiece of American historical scholarship...

...Jefferson has the honour to present his compliments to Mrs...

...315 pp...

...The present prelude has the charm of variety in its contents—a many-sided man self-painted in miniature...

...We must be contented to amuse, when we cannot inform...

...What he was observing in the autumn of 1787 were its quite bloodless preliminaries...

...Fortunately Jefferson usually did seek further, and his correspondence is a record of his seeking...

...Franklin: A Selection from His Personal Letters, edited by Leonard W. Larabee and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr...

...Textually it is an exciting foretaste of the forthcoming edition of his complete papers, to be edited by Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr...