Scholarly Writing #5: Between Correspondence and Action: Macaulay and the American Republic

While my last reflection offered a close reading of Macaulay’s Address, arguing that America functioned for her not merely as a site of imperial crisis but as a space in which republican principles might be enacted and Britain’s political decay exposed, this reflection now shifts focus to Macaulay’s personal connections to America and the transatlantic world of correspondence through which those ideas circulated. In doing so, it shows that Macaulay’s letters did not simply reflect republican politics but actively constituted a form of political action through which women asserted historical authority, mediated revolutionary ideas, and evaluated the American experiment itself.

Networks of (Classically-Inflicted) Letters Across the Atlantic

Prior to the American Revolution, Macaulay’s History of England enjoyed an enthusiastic reception among American readers, a response she actively cultivated by sending copies to influential figures such as James Otis, John Dickinson, and Ezra Stiles. [1] These exchanges were not incidental. Through letters, Macaulay positioned herself within American political debates, aligning her historical interpretation of seventeenth-century England with colonial arguments about liberty, representation, and resistance to arbitrary power.

Among these transatlantic connections, one of the most important American correspondents was James Otis Jr. (1725–83), a Boston lawyer whose constitutional arguments against arbitrary power made him a central figure in early colonial resistance. Macaulay’s decision to write to Otis was strategic rather than deferential. By aligning her History of England with Otis’s arguments against writs of assistance and arbitrary power, she embedded her interpretation of seventeenth-century English history within contemporary colonial resistance theory, effectively claiming that American constitutional arguments were the logical continuation of English republican principles. [2]

Otis’s political writings, including A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives (1762) and The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), explicitly compared the American situation to the English Civil War and grounded political authority in natural law and consent. [3] Macaulay seized upon this continuity, writing to Otis that the principles on which she had written the history of the Stuart monarchs were “in some measure correspondent to those of the great Guardian of American Liberty.” [4] In doing so, she claimed that American constitutional arguments were not innovations but the logical continuation of England’s own republican tradition.

Otis, in turn, confirmed the success of this alignment, assuring Macaulay that her History “had been much admired here from its first publication & is every day sought often and read with great avidity.” [5] Yet this promising exchange was abruptly cut short when Otis was violently assaulted by a customs officer and subsequently rendered unfit for public life. With Otis’s collapse, Macaulay’s American correspondence did not diminish but instead reconfigured itself around his sister, Mercy Otis Warren. Such a transition reveals how epistolary networks enabled women to inherit, adapt, and expand political authority denied to them in formal institutions. [6]

Mercy Otis Warren and the Reconfiguration of Epistolary Authority

James Otis’s political collapse coincided with a decisive escalation in colonial–British tensions following the Boston Massacre in March 1770. In the aftermath of the crisis, Otis suffered a severe mental breakdown that rendered him unfit for public life. [7] Within a year, he lost his seat in the Massachusetts assembly and was eventually declared legally incapacitated. For Mercy Otis Warren, the event marked not only the loss of her brother’s political influence but a personal and national injury – one she attributed to the violence and corruption of British authority. Otis’s removal from public life created a vacuum within the patriot network that correspondence would soon fill.

Her brother’s mental health issues might have caused Mercy to consider a more expanded political role for herself. She began to assume some of her brother’s duties as his health declined, beginning with his correspondence with Macaulay. [8] Turning forty-three that year, she saw every action by the British that infringed upon her natural rights – from the imposition of taxes to the treatment of her brother – as reinforcing her allegiance to the patriot cause. 

While she advanced James’s political principles with equal conviction, her mode of engagement with those same ideals differed. Her earliest public interventions took literary form: anonymous satiric dramas and political poems that circulated widely in print, allowing her to critique imperial authority while remaining formally excluded from political institutions. Between 1772 and 1775, she produced several such works, including The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Group, alongside at least two overtly political poems, “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs” and “To the Hon. J. Winthrop, Esq.” (both 1774). [9] Her objectives, as Jeffrey Hacker writes, were not theatrical but rather political: to expose the corruption of British leaders, rally colonists in the struggle for freedom, and, if nothing else, to provide entertainment in the form of dramatic sketches. [10]

By opening correspondence with Macaulay, Warren was drawing in the most famously politicized woman in the Atlantic republican community into her epistolary circle. Both women possessed a command of classical history and commonwealth theory, and both treated historical knowledge as immediately applicable to contemporary crises. [11] Their friendship, sustained almost entirely through letters for nearly two decades, demonstrates the political work of epistolary exchange: letters provided a space in which women articulated judgment, tested political arguments, and negotiated the relationship between public principle and domestic life. Warren wrote to Macaulay with optimism about the necessity of women’s engagement in revolutionary debate, expressing her conviction in the political purpose of her letters and women’s writing more generally. [12]

But what really connected Macaulay and Warren, as historian Kate Davies suggests, was the continuity both women perceived between sentiment and sensibility and the historical political characters they claimed as republican women. [13] Both women often described themselves as Roman matrons, figures whose patriotism and public status were bound to the personal, their family, and moral privacy. Warren celebrated Roman women in her Revolutionary poems and her Sack of Rome (1790), and her epistolary pseudonym Marcia suggests some political identification beyond the confines of the eighteenth-century and into antiquity. Macaulay was popularly represented in the character of a Roman Matron and at times referred to the American colonies as though they were her children. [14] As Davies argues, “Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Warren could be represented as bellicose Minervas or as weeping, bereaved Marias; as sentimental Clarissas taking a stand against parental-political tyranny or as aggressive Medeas striking an unnatural blow at the heart of the imperial or federal family.” [15] Their republicanism in the debates over the American War and the constitution of the United States also meant they could be associated with a sort of gender deviance, as well. By taking up the pen and writing as women to weigh in on colonial and early American political issues through classical metaphors, Warren and Macaulay pushed gender binaries that might have otherwise reserved such writing and classical references for elite men. 

Warren was not merely a participant in these exchanges but an active mediator within them. She copied letters, forwarded pamphlets, and retransmitted political intelligence across her network, blending military news, policy debate, and domestic detail within the same epistolary space. Through such correspondence, Warren and women like her inhabited what might be understood as a republic of letters, one that allowed for political intervention even as formal authority remained inaccessible.

Women, Correspondence, and Republican Politics

Macaulay’s engagement with women’s political networks extended beyond Warren. In the same month she first corresponded with James Otis, and shortly before beginning her exchange with Warren, she received a letter from “Sophronia,” or Sarah Prince Gill.  Prince Gill informed Macaulay that Otis could no longer engage in public affairs and suggested she might correspond with John Adams instead. Sophronia wrote expressing her admiration for the author of the History of England, her gratitude for the “noble zeal” Macaulay had “exerted in the Sacred Cause of Liberty & the Rights of Mankind,” and to attach a copy of the unfinished Chronological Annals of New England by her father Thomas Prince (1687-1785) in the hope that Macaulay could write her own history of the American colonies. [16]

Prince Gill’s letter reflects a shared classical learning and historical interest. She boasted that “New England, the Land of <my> Nativity (A Privilege I glory in!) was First settled on the plan of Civil & Religious Freedom. Worthy Men, and Patriots all were those who Formed this Civil Community … We their Descendants possess as Yet the Fruits of the generous Adventure; we venerate their Manes, and Aim to Maintain the same Cause.” [17] Yet Prince Gill’s concerns went beyond history: she lamented that many “City Ladies… [have] absorbed…every Care” in amusement and display, neglecting the cultivation of reason and virtue. [18] Instead, she encouraged Macaulay to see “Rationals” and “Friends of Liberty” as evident in her lineage of New England ancestors as models of female engagement in public life, connecting gender explicitly to republican politics. [19] 

This correspondence demonstrates how women in America actively shaped political discourse, insisting on both learned participation and moral responsibility. Macaulay had to navigate these expectations carefully: her letters expressed masculine force and political judgment while simultaneously acknowledging the constraints of her gender. Such exchanges illuminate the evolving role of women in the revolutionary Atlantic world, where they could be celebrated for learning and virtue or critiqued for indulgence and frivolity.

This broader network of female correspondents also foreshadows Macaulay’s eventual transition from distant observer to visiting participant. By the time she traveled to America in 1784, she was already deeply embedded in a transatlantic community of women whose epistolary authority complemented and reinforced the political debates she followed and shaped. Her letters to and from Warren, Prince Gill, and others had prepared her for encounters that were as social as they were political, setting the stage for her face-to-face engagement with both friends and prominent American leaders.

From Correspondence to Contact: Macaulay’s Trip to America

Macaulay did not merely correspond with her friends in America; in 1784, she went off to visit them. Macaulay’s journey to America marked a shift from epistolary imagination to empirical observation. No longer engaging America as an abstract republican ideal, she encountered the material conditions, social hierarchies, and cultural contradictions of the new republic – conditions that would complicate her earlier optimism.

That spring, British papers reported that “the celebrated Mrs Macaulay Graham and her husband embarked on board a ship in the Downs, bound to North America.” [20] The timing of the trip was particularly opportune: by 1784, Macaulay’s character in Britain was more often a subject of ridicule than celebration. During the conflict with America, she had opposed government policies that conservatives and nationalists considered dangerously radical. Her republicanism was widely regarded as excessive, both sexually and politically. Even Americans expressed apprehension: Abigail Adams was reportedly shocked by Macaulay’s marriage to William Graham, 26 years her junior, and women like Sarah Vughan did not wish to meet her. [21]

Nevertheless, Macaulay’s journey proved successful. Accompanied by her husband, Macaulay was the first English radical to visit the United States after the Treaty of Paris had been ratified on January 14, 1784 (her visit lasted from July 15, 1784, to July 17, 1785). The trip climaxed with a ten-day stay at Mount Vernon, where General Washington allowed Macaulay to peruse his military records. After her departure, Washington wrote to Richard Henry Lee to thank him for “introducing a Lady to me whose reputation among the literati is high, and whose principles are so much and so justly admired by the friends of liberty and of mankind.” [22] Macaulay also visited James Otis and Mercy Warren, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee (through Samuel Adams).

Out of all the people she met in America, perhaps the visit with Warren, one of her dearest friends and a long-time correspondent, would have been the most personally significant. In November 1784, Warren wrote to her son Winslow, describing Macaulay as “a lady whose resources of knowledge seem to be always inexhaustable. She has suffered much by the spirit of party, but I think her not only a learned but a virtuous worthy character with much sensibility of heart & Dignity of Manners. Indeed when I contemplate the superiority of her Genius I blush for the imperfections of human Nature, & when I consider her as my Friend, I draw a Veil over the Foibles of the Woman . . . Mr. G appears to be a Man of understanding & Virtue.” [23] This deep respect and affection for Macaulay underscores the strength of their friendship, even as their differing views on social conduct and virtue would soon bring them into gentle conflict over Boston’s emerging social culture.

The Sans Souci Debate and Competing Republican Femininities

Macaulay’s arrival in Boston brought her into the heart of the city’s social and political life, where republican virtue was not only debated in print but performed in social practice. One site where these tensions became visible was the Sans Souci Club, a Boston venue for dances, card games, and coffee socials that soon became a point of friction in her friendship with Mercy Warren.

While Warren and other New England patriots viewed the club as emblematic of the luxury and moral excess that threatened postwar republican values, Macaulay initially regarded it as evidence of sociability and cosmopolitan refinement compatible with republican life. Her decision to subscribe to the club prompted Warren to remark, [24] in a letter to her son, that it “casts a shade on [Macaulay’s] character.” [25] The episode exposed a fundamental disagreement over how republican virtue should be embodied, particularly by women, in the new nation.

For Warren, republican femininity required austerity, restraint, and vigilance against the corrupting influence of luxury. For Macaulay, learning, cultivated taste, and sociability could coexist with political commitment and moral seriousness. Macaulay’s participation in spaces associated with refinement, despite her longstanding critique of aristocratic excess, thus positioned her ambiguously, leaving observers uncertain whether she represented exemplary republican culture or its dangerous drift toward indulgence.

The disagreement was sharpened by the timing of Macaulay’s visit. Although the two women had long expressed a desire to meet, Warren approached the encounter with some hesitation, given news of Macaulay’s recent scandal and the Sans Souci controversy. Their interaction nevertheless reflected a mutual awareness of difference rather than outright rupture. Boston itself offered competing models of femininity: one linking consumption and sociability to moral decline, and another associating women’s learning and civic engagement with republican stability. The Sans Souci debate emerged at precisely this intersection, revealing how women’s political identities were negotiated through everyday social practices.

Despite the tension, the episode proved fleeting. What ultimately sustained their relationship was a shared sense of patriotism and historical purpose. Correspondence resumed after Macaulay’s return to England and continued until her death. As Macaulay wrote to Warren upon her departure, “Can patriotism dwell in a heart where friendship has no place?” [26] Both women had been hurt by the representations of their characters during the Sans Souci controversy, but their shared political commitment and awareness of their differences allowed for a renewed friendship. 

In her last letter to Macaulay (May 31, 1791), which the desired recipient could have never read (she passed on June 22), Warren wrote:

“I wish I could flatter myself with the idea of once seeing my friend here. I am sure that she would enjoy her visit in higher degree than she did at Milton. I have always felt more happy in this place where I have a little social circle around me, than I did in my residence nearer the Capital. Indeed, I think we should both enjoy a felicity unknown to the interested and unfeeling part of mankind, if we could spend a few days together in the pleasant little village of Plymouth, beneath the shade of retirement amid philosophical contemplation.” [27]

The bittersweet letter emphasized the same sentiment as Macaulay’s letter to Warren: the women could find joy in shared intellectual and social engagement, even amid personal and political disagreements.

The Sans Souci debate was therefore not a trivial social dispute but a lens through which to understand the negotiation of gendered authority in republican politics. Women like Macaulay and Warren demonstrated that public judgment, political engagement, and historical authority could operate alongside, but sometimes in tension with, social expectations of femininity. Ultimately, their ability to reconcile these tensions demonstrates how women carved out spaces for personal and political collaboration even within constrained social norms.

Historical Authority and the Washington Correspondence

Despite the friction over Sans Souci, the political and social networks Warren and Macaulay shared remained intact. This enduring bond would not only facilitate Macaulay’s engagement with American leaders but also allow her to assert her authority as a historian and republican thinker, most strikingly during her meeting with George Washington. 

While still in Boston, Warren helped facilitate Macaulay’s meeting with Washington. In a glowing review to Martha Washington (to relay to George), Warren wrote:

“The truly republican spirit of Mrs. Macaulay Graham awakened a curiosity in her to see the American world, which has done so much to establish their principles among mankind. She thinks she should neither do justice to herself or to the opinions she has disseminated by her writings if she finished her excursion without paying her compliments to a gentleman whose name stands at the head of a list of heroes, who have ventured their all, in a cause which has entailed on them a degree of glory, that neither time nor the adventitious circumstances of future revolutions will ever erase.”  [28]

Warren’s letter underscores the esteem in which Macaulay was held and sets the stage for her historic engagement with Washington, highlighting how her reputation as a learned and politically committed woman preceded her arrival.

Macaulay and Graham arrived at Mount Vernon on June 4, 1785. During the visit, Macaulay had several conversations with Washington that culminated in a striking gesture: after one such exchange, Washington recalled that he “placed [his] Military records into the Hands of Mrs. Macaulay Graham for her perusal & amusement.” [29] By placing his military records in Macaulay’s hands, Washington recognized her not merely as a sympathetic correspondent but as a historian whose judgment would shape the Revolution’s future meaning. The gesture inverted conventional gendered hierarchies of authority: Macaulay appears not as a recipient of history, but as one of its arbiters.

That authority was reinforced in the correspondence that followed her departure for New York. Writing that her “present feebleness” obliged her to desist from “arduous undertaking,” she explained that she knew “the delicacy of your mind makes you as backward to meet applause as you are forward to deserve it.” [30] Macaulay’s indirect praise is not simply polite restraint but a mode of judgment that allows her to praise, evaluate, and authorize male political actors without appearing to overstep the bounds of republican modesty or feminine decorum.

Washington’s reply confirms that he understood both the tone and the significance of her letter. “The plaudits of a lady, so celebrated as Mrs. Macaulay Graham,” he wrote, “could not fail [to make] a deep impression on my sensibility,” adding that his “pride was more than a little flattered by [her] approbation of my conduct through an arduous contest.” [31] The exchange situates Macaulay’s visit within the broader transatlantic world of correspondence through which political reputation and historical judgment continued to circulate after the Revolution.

Yet these polished expressions of mutual esteem only partially capture Macaulay’s experience of America. Beneath the civility of letters and visits lay a more searching assessment of the new republic, one shaped by her anxieties about luxury, political inequality, and constitutional fragility. Macaulay’s reflections in other letters reveal not the voice of a grateful guest, but that of a historian who regarded America as an experiment still very much in progress. In other words, while the public exchange with Washington emphasized friendship, civility, and recognition, her private correspondence reveals a sharper, diagnostic eye aimed at the young nation itself.

Macaulay’s Reflections on the American Experiment

Although the pleasantries exchanged between Macaulay and Washington highlight mutual respect and cordiality, her letters reveal a more probing assessment of the American experiment. The question that guided her observations was clear: was America living up to the republican ideals she had envisioned when writing her Address?

In a reprint of an undated letter to George Washington in the March 1786 volume of the Scots Magazine, she wrote that, while visiting America, she had “found the state of things well, or perhaps better than a philosopher would have expected.” [32] She was nonetheless concerned about the dangers that luxury posed to the fledgling republic. In a 1790 letter to Washington, she warned that when an era of prosperity arrived, the country would “have it in their power to import all the l⟨uxur⟩ies and copy all the excesses of the Mother Country, and to vye with her Citizens in all the deceitful pleasures of a vicious dissipation; it is more than possible, that the novelty of such seductive enjoyments will overturn all the virtue which at present exists in the Country.” [33] She feared that public interest might be neglected in favor of private gratification, and she saw evidence that Americans were already showing a greater inclination toward the “fripperies of Europe” than to classic simplicity. [34] These anxieties were reinforced when Washington’s responses indicated that her concerns demanded serious acknowledgement. [35]

Macaulay also worried that the absence of a feudal past left Americans unprepared to resist aristocratic pretensions that could threaten political equality. When Warren identified an influential faction that might secretly favor democratic excess during the constitutional deliberations of 1787, Macaulay’s doubts about the soundness of the American Constitution deepened. She questioned the wisdom of dividing the legislature into Upper and Lower houses, fearing that distinctions in the Upper House could create new inequalities. [36] Yet she was ultimately reassured by Washington’s election, confident that he would “check the progress” of enemies to liberty and serve as a “bright example” to future presidents. [37]

Macaulay’s criticisms of the new nation contrasted with a euphoric vision of America that many other English radicals held. [38] Unlike them, Macaulay refused to treat the United States as a model for England. Though never condescending to Americans, she positioned herself as an advisor rather than a pupil, believing that her perspective as a historian and European allowed her to perceive potential dangers in the American experiment that might elude those immersed in it. Macaulay was aware of the social, economic, and cultural differences between England and America, and while she admired republicanism, did not want her country to adopt the American democratic form of government. [39]

Ultimately, Macaulay’s correspondence reveals a republicanism that is neither celebratory nor disillusioned but diagnostic. Her geographic, cultural, and gendered distance allowed her to identify risks invisible to those living within the revolutionary moment, positioning her as a transatlantic historian whose judgment spanned both sides of the Atlantic.

Works Cited

1. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 43. Green cites the following: ‘I received by Dr Jeffries the singular honor of your letter with an elegant edition of your excellent history,’ James Otis to Catharine Macaulay, July 27, 1769, GLC01796; ‘It was with singular pleasure I received the very acceptable present of your [justly] celebrated History of England,’ William Livingston to Catharine Macaulay, September 22, 1769, GLC01793; ‘ … it would be in vain for Me to think of sending you a Present, equal in Value to that with which you have honored Me,’ John Dickinson to Catharine Macaulay, December 17, 1770, GLC01790.03; ‘By Mr Marchant we see the elegant copy of your publications in five Volumes, which you did us the honor of presenting to the Redwood Library in this Town,’ Ezra Stiles to Catharine Macaulay, November 13, 1772, Newport, Rhode Island, Ezra Stiles Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 
2. The move to write to Otis was by no means accidental; Macaulay offered to send copies of her History to Otis, the man who had, in 1761 defended a case brought against the right of the customs commissioner and Massachusetts courts to issue writs of assistance – writs that called instruments of arbitrary power and destructive of English liberty (Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 80). 
3. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 80.
4. Warren-Adams Letters, Vol. 1 1743-77, Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 72, Catharine Macaulay to James Otis, London April 27, 1769.
5. James Otis to Catharine Macaulay, July 27, 1769 in Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 98–​101.
6. Devastated by her brother’s condition, and with the attack feeding her patriotic fervor, Mercy wrote later in her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805) that James was the “first martyr to American freedom” (Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1:49.)
7. That night, in the cobblestone square at the foot of the Town House, a lone British soldier faced taunts from a small but growing band of neighborhood men and boys. As the gathering grew larger, eight redcoats carrying loaded muskets showed up as reinforcements. With snowballs, rocks, and spit raining down on them, one of the soldiers, and consequently the rest, opened fire on the crowd. When the 29th Regiment and Gov. Hutchinson finally dispersed the mob, three Bostonians lay dead and two others mortally wounded (Hacker, Minds and Heart, 16). The next edition of the Boston Gazette carried a front-page engraving by Paul Revere that depicted the shooting under the headline, “The Boston Massacre.” On March 16, with Samuel Adams waging a propaganda war over the incident and John Adams lying low after agreeing to defend the soldiers in court, James Otis went on a “mad freak,” smashing windows in the Town House (John Rowe, Diary, March 16, 1770, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, 10 (1896): 74. A Boston merchant and selectman, Rowe is perhaps best known as the owner of the Eleanor, one of the ships later involved in the Boston Tea Party; Hacker, Minds and Heart, 116). That spring, unfit to serve, Otis lost his seat in the assembly. By November 1771, Jemmy was legally declared non compos mentis – insane. Mercy would never forgive Hutchinson or forget the loss to the country of her brother’s talents. 
8. Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 55.
9. Such dramatic form may have seemed unlikely for Warren, given the hostility to theatrical performance in Puritan New England (in the early 1770s, several colonies still had blue laws on books that banned stage acting as profane) (Hacker, Minds and Heart, 126). 
10.  Ibid.
11.  Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 2.
12. Ibid., 21.
13. Ibid., 20.
14. Ibid., 277.
15. Ibid., 305.
16. Sarah Prince Gill to Catharine Macaulay, April 25, 1769, December 8, 1769, and March 24 [1770], Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 93–​7; Monica Letzring, ‘Sarah Prince Gill and the John Adams-​ Catharine Macaulay Correspondence’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 88 (1976), 107–​ 11.
17. Sophronia [Sarah Prince Gill] to Catharine Macaulay, 25 April 1769, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
18. Sophronia [Sarah Prince Gill] to Catharine Macaulay, 8 December 1769, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
19. Ibid.
20. Gentleman’s Magazine (1784), 378.
21. See Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 299, who cites Sarah Vaughn to Catherine Livingston, 20-26 May 1785, Ridley Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Or see, for example, Abigail Adams to John Thaxter Braintree, 15 Feb. 1778, and Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 10 May 1785, in the L. H. Butterfield (ed.), Adams Family Correspondence, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), ii. 391, vi. 140.
22. Richard Henry Lee to Washington, 3 May 1785, in Ballagh, Letters of Richard Henry Lee, 2:352.
23. Mercy Otis Warren to Winslow Warren, November 11, 1784, in Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris, eds., Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 192.
24. Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 174.
25. Warren, ‘Samuel Adams and the Sans Souci Club in 1785’, 34; Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 238-9.
26. Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, 247 cited as CM to MOW, 15 July 1785, WAP. 
27. Mercy Otis Warren to Catharine Macaulay, May 31, 1791, in Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 175.
28. Mercy Otis Warren to Winslow Warren, November 11, 1784, in Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris, eds., Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 198-9.
29. The Diaries of George Washington, inThe Papers of George Washington, Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 4: 149.
30. Catharine Macaulay Graham to Washington, July 13, 1785, in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, 3: 115-17.
31. Washington to Catharine Macaulay Graham, January 10, 1786, in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, 3: 502-03.
32. Macaulay, Catharine. “From Mrs. Macaulay.” The Scots Magazine, vol. 48 (March 1786): 112.
33. “Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham to George Washington, June 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 5, 16 January 1790 – 30 June 1790, ed. Dorothy Twohig, Mark A. Mastromarino, and Jack D. Warren. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996, pp. 573–575.]
34. Ibid.
35. “George Washington to Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, 10 February 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 7, 1 December 1790 – 21 March 1791, ed. Jack D. Warren, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998, pp. 328–329.]
36. “Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham to George Washington, June 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 5, 16 January 1790 – 30 June 1790, ed. Dorothy Twohig, Mark A. Mastromarino, and Jack D. Warren. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996, pp. 573–575.]
37. “Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham to George Washington, 30 October 1789,” Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 4, 8 September 1789 – 15 January 1790, ed. Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 257–259.]
38.  John Adams, a staunch Federalist, convinced radicals like Richard Price, John Jebb, and Brand Hollis of the merits of the system of checks and balances incorporated in the Constitution. Adams’s hostility to Antifederalism led him to reevaluate radical works he had admired before the war. He called Macaulay’s writings “extremely mistaken in the true conception of a free government,” and wrote his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America to counter the influence of her ideas, as well as those of Buigh and Thomas Paine. (Some radicals, such as Richard Price, expressed concern about the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. The new constitution, however, quieted most of their fears about the new nation’s survival (Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, 171-184; John Adams to Richard Price, 20 May 1789, in C. F. Adams, Works of John Adams, 9558-559.)
39.  “Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham to George Washington, June 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 5, 16 January 1790 – 30 June 1790, ed. Dorothy Twohig, Mark A. Mastromarino, and Jack D. Warren. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996, pp. 573–575.]