Reading by Generation

Six men at age twenty

It helps to picture each Founder at the same age. Twenty-year-old is a useful marker because that is roughly when a reading habit forms and hardens. The colonial reading culture each man encountered at twenty was the one that left a mark.

Franklin turned twenty in 1726. He was a runaway apprentice from Boston who had just landed in Philadelphia. The reading available to him was what Boston printers reprinted from London, with a long lag. Shakespeare was in circulation, but the canon Franklin absorbed at this stage of his life was Addison, Bunyan, and the King James Bible. His later Shakespeare engagement is stylistic rather than citational. The ‘Tis case study traces this absorbed mode back to his Silence Dogood essays, written at sixteen, where the older English contraction is already a tell.

Washington turned twenty in 1752. He was a young surveyor marking out land in the Virginia interior. Shakespeare would have come to him through the educated planter class he eventually married into, not through anything we would recognise as deep literary engagement. His one strict-catalogue Shakespeare reference is a by-name “good name” borrowing from 1796. The “band of brothers” phrase he used at Valley Forge, the most famous Shakespeare in his record, famously fails the strict test; the Band of Brothers case study tells that story.

Adams turned twenty in 1755. He had just finished Harvard. He was reading, in roughly equal measure, Shakespeare and Plutarch and Bolingbroke and Sallust. His 1758 diary is the single most extended display of Shakespeare reading anywhere in the project’s 24-million-word corpus. The Macbeth case study walks through the sixteen verbatim passages from Acts 1 to 5 that Adams works through across those late-1758 entries. The 1750s catalogue number for Adams, 32, is mostly produced by that one document and the cluster around it.

Jefferson turned twenty in 1763. The Stamp Act crisis was two years away. Jefferson at twenty was at the College of William and Mary, reading what an educated Virginia gentleman read. His later catalogue puts Shakespeare squarely in the literary-canon category, alongside Pope, Milton, and Dryden. In a famous 1771 letter to Robert Skipwith advising on a gentleman’s library, Jefferson lists Shakespeare with the moral-philosophy poets. He names Shakespeare twenty-six times in the surviving correspondence. He never copies a passage.

Madison turned twenty in 1771. He was at the College of New Jersey, soon to be Princeton, taking John Witherspoon’s course in moral philosophy. The reading was Hutcheson, Hume, Locke, and the classical historians. Madison’s catalogue contains zero direct quotations and zero by-name Shakespeare references; even his two apparent hits dissolved under source-level scrutiny. His intellectual lineage runs through the Scottish Enlightenment and the classical republicans, and the data shows it.

Hamilton turned twenty in 1777. The Revolutionary War was in its second year. Hamilton was George Washington’s aide de camp. The reading available to him in those years was the urgent reading of the political crisis: Locke, Hume, Vattel, Polybius. His subsequent writing draws on those sources, not on Shakespeare. He never names the playwright in any letter in the surviving corpus.

The 1765 cut

The break in the Founders’ reading culture has a date. It is March 22, 1765, the day the Stamp Act became law. From that point forward, the educated American gentleman’s reading list was reorganised around the political crisis. The documents the Founders cite in the years after 1765 are Hume’s History of England, Pufendorf, Vattel, Locke’s Second Treatise, Plutarch, and the Roman historians. Literary reading didn’t stop, but it moved off the centre of the cultural stage.

Three of the six Founders had finished their formal education before the 1765 cut: Franklin, Washington, and Adams. Two were still in their student years when it happened: Jefferson had left William and Mary in 1762 and was reading law under George Wythe; Madison was a schoolboy with Princeton still ahead of him. Hamilton was eight years old in 1765 and would not start at King’s College, in Manhattan, until 1773.

The catalogue numbers track this cleanly. Adams’s Shakespeare engagement is densest in the 1750s, when he is twenty, and remains strong for the rest of his life because the habit had formed. Jefferson’s engagement peaks in the 1780s, when he is in his late thirties and serving as Minister to France, with time to read literature again. Madison’s engagement never starts. Hamilton’s is zero. Their formative reading years happened on the wrong side of the political break.

Adams across his life

Adams’s case is instructive because he supplies the counterfactual. His Shakespeare engagement is dense enough, across enough decades, to show what a lifelong reader looks like in the data.

Thirty-two references in the 1750s. Four in the 1760s. Seven in the 1770s. Eleven in the 1780s. Seventeen in the 1790s. Twelve in the 1800s. Eighteen in the 1810s. Seven in the 1820s. Adams in retirement, in his seventies, was reading Shakespeare harder than at any point since his early twenties and quoting him more often than at any decade between. The reading habit that formed before 1765 survived sixty years of revolutionary politics.

Adams’s 1818 letter invoking Patrick Henry’s “Caesar had his Brutus” speech is one of those late-1810s references. He is eighty-two years old and still using the political-historical material he absorbed in his Harvard reading sixty-three years earlier.

Compare that to Jefferson. Jefferson’s decadal distribution is: 4 in the 1770s, 12 in the 1780s (Paris), 0 in the 1790s (Secretary of State, Vice-President, the period immediately before he assumes the Presidency), 2 in the 1800s (the Presidency), 2 in the 1810s (early retirement), 6 in the 1820s (last years at Monticello). Jefferson reads Shakespeare when he has time. He stops when politics takes over.

The reading habit that survives political pressure is the one that was formed before politics arrived. Adams formed his Shakespeare habit at twenty, in 1755. It survived the Continental Congress, the diplomatic missions, the Vice-Presidency, the Presidency, the bitter 1800 loss, and the long retirement. Jefferson formed his after 1765, in a more politically saturated environment, and his Shakespeare engagement is correspondingly thinner and more episodic.

What the youngest two were reading instead

Madison and Hamilton are the project’s two quietest Founders on Shakespeare, sitting at the bottom of the composite ranking — Madison alone at 0.11, with Hamilton one step above at 0.25 after a source-level audit dropped the two false positives that had previously tied them. The Hamilton Silence essay treats their parallel absence as the project’s third substantive finding: both are dramatically less Shakespearean than the four Founders above them on most of the measures the project applies.

The generational frame explains why. Both men did their formative reading after 1765, both at colleges (Madison at Princeton under Witherspoon, Hamilton at King’s in Manhattan) with curricula heavy on political philosophy and the classical historians. Both men were drafted into the political crisis early; both produced their major writing between 1787 and 1804, in the registers of constitutional law and economic policy.

Their writing is full of the reading that did form them. Federalist No. 6, by Hamilton, is built around episodes from Plutarch, Thucydides, and the European wars of the seventeenth century. Federalist No. 10, by Madison, draws on Hume’s essay on factions. The Federalist Papers contain approximately zero Shakespeare. The project’s data does not turn this into a finding about the Federalist Papers specifically; it turns it into a finding about a kind of reader. Federalist Hamilton and Federalist Madison are the same kind of reader: post-1765 American gentlemen for whom Shakespeare was not the natural source of political language.

The thematic-allusions data, separately, surfaces the one place Hamilton does use Shakespeare: the Roman Julius Caesar figure, invoked once in his correspondence to make a political point about a contemporary general. As argued in The Shakespeare-Only Characters, the Caesar Hamilton invokes is the politicised cultural figure, by then so diffuse you could pick it up without ever having read a play.

Birth year alone won’t do it

Two complications keep the generational story from being a clean rule. Franklin is the first; Washington is the second.

Franklin is born in 1706, twenty-nine years before Adams, forty-five years before Madison. He had finished his formative reading by 1730, decades before any colonial political crisis. He should, by the rule, be the densest Shakespeare quoter in the corpus. He is not. His catalogue contains zero direct quotations and just two by-name references across roughly 1.6 million words.

Franklin’s Shakespeare engagement runs deep but lives below the surface. His prose absorbed seventeenth-century English so thoroughly that the project’s statistical measures place him as close to Shakespeare in style as any Founder. He just never quoted. Perhaps the autodidact had learned to write by imitating without attribution; perhaps the printer’s trade taught him to absorb voices rather than display them. The Two Modes essay treats Franklin as the project’s strongest case of the absorbed mode.

Washington is the second complication. Washington was born in 1732, three years before Adams. By the generational rule he should be a Shakespeare reader. His catalogue contains a single reference, far less than Adams or Jefferson. Washington’s case is best explained on educational rather than generational grounds. He did not attend college; he became a surveyor at sixteen. His Shakespeare came late and through other people: through the educated planter class he married into, through the army officers around him at Valley Forge, through the writers who drafted his speeches in the 1790s. He used “band of brothers” because he had heard it. The Band of Brothers case study traces all five of his uses.

Twenty in 1755, twenty in 1777

The cleanest version of the generational finding is also the simplest. Three of the six Founders were old enough by 1765 to have formed an adult reading habit. Three were not. Birth year didn’t pick anyone’s books (Jefferson, on the young side of the line, still holds twenty-six catalogue references), but it constrained the menu. The two youngest, Madison and Hamilton, whose formative reading happened entirely inside the political crisis, contribute nothing to the strict catalogue at all.

Adams turned twenty in 1755 with a Harvard education and Shakespeare on the desk. Hamilton turned twenty in 1777 in Washington’s headquarters, fighting a war that demanded Polybius and Vattel. They were operating from different reading lists because the political world had reorganised the American educated class’s sense of what mattered to read.

Both patterns make sense in the same frame. Hamilton came of age during the Revolution and read the books the Revolution demanded. Adams came of age a decade before the Stamp Act and read the books a Harvard graduate of the 1750s read for pleasure. The catalogue records the difference, year by year, sixty years out, even when the men in question are sitting in the same room writing the same documents together.

The project finds, across its six subjects, the trace of a cultural shift that historians of the period have described in other terms. The shift from the British colonial literary culture of the 1740s and 1750s to the Atlantic political culture of the 1770s and 1780s is visible in the data. It is visible in who quotes Shakespeare and who does not.

For per-Founder profiles see the Founder index, and for Adams’s character-as-type Shakespeare invocations across decades, see The Shakespeare-Only Characters. The decade-by-decade data underlying this essay is viewable through the Quotation Timeline.