Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 30

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had" (177). That is, the Address emphasized the wisdom of neutrality precisely because the United States could not "isolate"
themselves from the rivalries of the European powers. See also Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton
and War and Free Government (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), and Lawrence S. Kaplan, Alexander Hamilton:
Ambivalent Anglophile (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), who faults Hamilton for failing to appreciate how
frightening his visions of national greatness appeared to the Jeffersonian opposition. He quotes John Adams to the effect that
Hamilton "knew no more of the sentiments and feeling of the people of America, than he did of those of the inhabitants of
one of the planets" (159).
David C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789-1941 (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2009), 25-34. Washington was enraged by suggestions that his policies had ulterior or self-
serving motives. Thus, when he heard rumors that Jefferson was accusing him of secret favoritism toward Britain, Washington
candidly wrote that he assumed the rumors had to be false "unless (which I do not believe) he has set me down as one of the
most deceitful, & uncandid men living. . . . Having determined, as far as lay within the powers of the Executive, to keep this
country in a state of neutrality, I have made my public conduct accord with the system, and whilst so acting as a public charac-
ter, consistency, & propriety as a private man, forbid those intemperate expressions in favor of one Nation, or to the prejudice
of another, wch many have indulged themselves in-I will venture to add-to the embarrassment of government, without
producing any good to the Country. With very great esteem & regard I am-Dear Sir Your Obedt & Affecte Go. Washing-
ton": private letter to Henry Lee (August 26, 1794), in David Hoth and Carol S. Eber, eds., The Papers of George Washington,
Presidential Series 16 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 603-4.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp-emphasis added.
Identifying the radical gene in Americans' DNA is about the only thing Robert Kagan gets right in Dangerous Nation:
America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2006). On Jefferson's
fanatical streak, see Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist, The Atlantic 278, no. 4 (October 1996):
53-74.
Charles Sumner, Prophetic Voices Concerning America: A Monograph (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1874), 175.
Charles W. Calhoun, "Civil Religion and the Gilded Age Presidency: The Case of Benjamin Harrison," Presidential Studies
Quarterly 23, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 651-67.
Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988); James
David Fairbanks, "The Priestly Functions of the Presidency: A Discussion of the Literature on Civil Religion and Its Implica-
tions for the Study of Presidential Leadership, Presidential Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 214-32; "good old max-
ims," etc., in Fornieri, Lincoln's Political Faith, 5; "sympathy" and "commercial" in Calhoun, "Civil Religion and the Gilded
Age," 663; "We Americans," in David C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2009), 262.

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