Your Questions Answered
From: Bob Garringer
Question: Some people assign John Quincy Adams a place among the
Founders. Others do not.
Viewing the Founding Era as ending in the period following the War of
1812, as foundations of our federal system and sense of nationalism were
still being laid, it seems to me that Adams would have to be regarded
as very closely tied to the Founders at least.
I am inclined to say he spoke "with them" as one of their number.
He at least spoke "of them" with a firsthand experience that
is significant.
With his experience as ambassador in many places, his commendations from
Washington and others, his role as secretary to his father negotiating
an end to the Revolution, and his subsequent service in the House, Senate,
as Secretary of State, and as President, his place among the Founders
seems secure to me.
How do you respond?
Answer: Assigning John Quincy Adams (or "JQA"
as he was known to us when I was an editor of the Adams Papers) to "Founding
Fathers" status depends, of course, on your definition of the "Founding
Era." If you extend it through Monroe's administration, then you'd
certainly have to include JQA. If you end it at 1801, then he's out.
Have you looked at the recent biographies of JQA? I think you'll find
them interesting -- there's been a real flurry in interest in him in the
past few years:
John Quincy Adams, by Lynn Hudson Parsons (1998), John Quincy
Adams : Policymaker for the Union, by James E. Lewis, Jr. (2001),
and John Quincy Adams, by Robert V. Remini (2002).
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From: John
McNeil
Question: Of the thirteen original colonies, what were the general
qualifications for voting on elective officials at the time of the revolution
and perhaps just afterwards? I was under the impression that only white
males who owned property could do so, albeit one or two colonies may have
had looser rules.
Answer: You may be interested in reading this comprehensive
history of voting rights that appeared in the first issue of History Now:
http://www.historynow.org/preview/09_2004/historian.html
This article should give you a good overview. In addition, the following
books would be your best sources for specifics on voting qualifications
in the colonies and the early states:
American Suffrage; from Property to Democracy, by Chilton Williamson
(1960)
The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United
States, by Alexander Keyssar (2000)
The First Liberty; a History of the Right to Vote in America, 1619-1850,
by Marchette Gaylord Chute (1969)
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Question: I'm a history teacher. I love to use primary sources in the classroom, but sometimes even I'm stumped when it comes to giving a clear and complete definition of what a primary source is. For example, if I make a xerox copy of a document, is the copy a primary or secondary source? If something has been translated from its original language into another one, is it still a primary source? If I don't have the actual Declaration of Independence or Constitution in front of me to analyze, then is any other facsimile a secondary source?
Answer: A primary source if any piece of "evidence" rather than "any piece of information" that can be used for "constructing history." Primary sources are sometimes wrong and that you have to go to secondary materials for reliable information (for instance, a man writing in 1825 about the number of people who showed up for the opening the Erie Canal might have been dead wrong in his estimate. An author writing a secondary source 150 years later, relying on several contemporary accounts, could give a more accurate number).
You ask, very sensibly, how "primary" the form of your source needs to be. This is a question that far too few people, classroom teachers or academic historians, bother to raise. The most hard and fast rule to use here is: employ your common sense.
For historic documents like the Constitution or Declaration of Independence, for instance, no one can get "closer" to the original than a facsimile of the manuscript. In fact, the original manuscript of the Declaration became so faded by the mid-nineteenth century that we now must rely on reproductions based on an engraved facsimile made in the 1820s! Eighteenth century handwriting is a little hard to handle for most modern readers, so a reliable printed text is perfectly acceptable as a primary source.
