On the other hand, the slowly accumulating democratic theory was

unknown to the members of the convention. In 1761 Robert Wallace

had advanced an Owenite theory of property, attacking the principle

of economic individualism as responsible for the current evils of

government by landed property; but his book, _Various Prospects_, made

no ripple on the placid waters of English liberalism.[299] In 1768

Joseph Priestley, a thinker who later was to exercise great influence

in America, who lived here for a number of years and was intimate with

Jefferson, published his essay. _First Principles of Government_, a

work embodying the first English interpretation of the perfectibility

of man, the rule of reason, the theory of the diminished state, and the

Benthamite principle of utilitarianism or expediency in statecraft,

which struck at the principle of coercive sovereignty. But the ideas

of Priestley were probably little known in America in 1787, and his

influence was undermined further by a theological attack which sought

to fasten upon him the stigma of atheism. In short, in this war of

ideas the democrats were provided with little ammunition and fought at

a great disadvantage. If the debate had taken place five years later,

after the French Revolution had provided new democratic theory, the

disparity of intellectual equipment would have been far less marked.

One other fact must be kept in mind, namely, that the great debate was

in reality two debates, one carried on in the quiet of the convention

hall, the other in the open. Each interprets the other, and taken

together they reveal the conflict of forces and ideas that determined

the form of the Constitution. In the privacy of the convention the

speakers were free to express their views frankly, and in consequence a

loose rein was given to the play of ideas; fundamental principles were

examined critically and economic motives and class interests openly

acknowledged. But in arguing the case before the generality of voters

without doors a more cautious approach was necessary; arguments must

be tempered to well-known prejudices, and circumspection must take the

place of frankness. In the earlier debate, among innumerable lesser

problems, two main questions dominated the argument: the question of

the form of the centralized state--whether it should be aristocratic or

republican; and if republican--as was inevitable--the question of what

should be done about the majority will--how representation should be so

refined as to guarantee stability to the government and security to the

minority. In the second debate the appeal was to expediency rather than

to principles, and turned on three chief points: the need of adoption

in view of the desperate condition of the country; the adaptation

of the proposed republican form to the vast extent of territory and

diversity of interests; and the necessity of providing checks upon

political parties if anarchy were to be avoided.

In the convention the need of a strong state, with powers beyond

local legislatures, was not so much debated as assumed. By common

consent it was agreed that the present lack of a centralized, coercive

sovereignty, was the source of all current evils. How many members

preferred monarchy to republicanism, in principle, it is impossible to

determine; but they all realized the inexpediency of attempting to set

it up; even Hamilton yielded to the logic of Colonel Mason’s argument:

“Notwithstanding the oppression and injustice experienced among us

from democracy, the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the

genius of the people must be consulted.” Accepting then the principle

of republicanism as a compromise between the extremes of monarchy

and democracy, the practical problem remained of erecting a system

that should secure the minority against the aggressions of political

faction. If the danger lay in an uncontrolled majority will, the way

of safety lay in imposing restraints upon that will. In elaborating

a system of checks and balances the members of the convention were

influenced by the practical considerations of economic determinism more

than by the theories of Montesquieu. They were realists who followed

the teachings of the greatest political thinkers from Aristotle to

Locke in asserting that the problem of government lay in arranging a

stable balance between the economic interests of the major classes. The

revolutionary conception of equalitarianism, that asserted the rights

of man apart from property and superior to property, did not enter into

their thinking as a workable hypothesis. The very conditions of the

unsettled times were an argument against it. Property, they argued,

is the stabilizing force in society; it is conservative and cautious;

having everything to lose by social upheavals, it is a restraining

force upon factional unrest. The propertyless, on the other hand,

having nothing to lose, easily become the victims of demagogues and

embroil society with foolish experiments. The republican experiment

might work in America because property was widely distributed, but in

the course of time a propertyless majority would arise, whose fickle

and subversive will must be held in check. The problem, therefore, was

to provide in time against such an eventuality. Certain members of the

convention did not go so far in their fear of the propertyless, but

relied upon the ability of property to protect itself by extra-legal

means. “Give the votes to people who have no property,” argued

Gouverneur Morris, “and they will sell them to the rich, who will be

able to buy them.”[300] But the more general view was expressed by

Madison:

The landed interest, at present, is prevalent, but in process of

time ... when the number of landholders shall be comparatively

small ... will not the landed interests be overbalanced in future

elections? and, unless wisely provided against, what will become of

our government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to

all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be

insecure. An agrarian law would take place. If these observations

be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of

the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share

in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to

balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to

protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.[301]

This conception of the natural sovereignty of the landed interest with

its stake-in-society theory of political rights, America inherited

from England; and although the new Constitution professed to rest

on the sovereignty of the people, the men who framed it refused to

interpret the term, sovereignty of the people, in an equalitarian

sense. They did not profess to be, in the words of John Quincy Adams,

“slavish adorers of our sovereign lords the people.” Every principle

of their social and political philosophy taught them the desirability

of limiting the majority will in order that the wiser minority will

might rule. Paul Leicester Ford has asserted that “the Federal compact

was the first deliberate attempt and assent of a majority to tie

its own hands; to give to the minority guarantees of fair and equal

treatment, without which democratic government is well-nigh impossible,

save when developed along the lines of socialism.”[302] Such partisan

misinterpretation of plain historical fact is characteristic of our

Federalist historians. If the hands of the disfranchised majority

were tied by the voting minority, it is a bit absurd to attribute the

resulting guarantees to an altruistic sense of justice, deliberately

expressed by the former. Very possibly in a world so aristocratic as

was America in 1787, no other course would have succeeded; but there is

not a single historical fact to justify so naïve an interpretation, and

the bitter partisan warfare which followed is sufficient to disprove it.

We are too prone to forget the wide popular disfavor with which the

new Constitution was received. No sooner did the second debate open

than it became evident that the majority opinion held quite a different

conception of the sovereignty of the people than was expressed by the

convention. It had no desire to tie its own hands; it did not take

kindly to the proposal to transfer power from the several states to the

Federal government. The villagers and small men were afraid of the new

instrument; they asserted that it had been prepared by aristocrats and

moneyed men, and they repudiated the stake-in-society principle. “The

Constitution,” said General Thompson in the Massachusetts Convention,

“and the reasons which induced gentlemen to frame it, ought to have

been sent to the several towns to be considered by them. My town

considered it seven hours, and after this there was not one in favor of

it.” In Rhode Island, where it was thus submitted, it was rejected “by

a very great majority.” The state of mind of the agrarian majority was

thus expressed by Amos Singletary, of Sutton, Massachusetts:

These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk

so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us, poor

illiterate people, swallow down the pill, expect to get into

Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this

Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their

own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like

the great leviathan.[303]

Among the host of pamphlets and newspaper articles that quickly

appeared, _The Federalist_ written by Hamilton and Madison with some

help from Jay, and _Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican_,

by Richard Henry Lee, fairly adequately present the opposing arguments.

By common consent _The Federalist_ was at once accepted by its party

as an unanswerable defense of the Constitution; and its fame has grown

greater with the passing years. No other work on political theory in

the American library has been rated so high, or been more frequently

cited. From the mass of contemporary pamphlets it emerges like a

colossus. It “has been seriously and reverently called the Bible of

Republicanism.” says a legal historian, which “for comprehensiveness

of design, strength, clearness, and simplicity ... has no parallel

among the writings of men, not even excepting or overlooking those of

Montesquieu and Aristotle,”[304]; and a literary historian pronounces

authoritatively, “it is so wisely thoughtful that one may almost

declare it the permanent basis of sound thinking concerning American

constitutional law.”[305]

_The Federalist_ was the work of able lawyers, with whom was joined a

notable political thinker. In very large part it is of interest only to

students of early constitutional theory and practice. It was designed

as a frankly partisan argument to appeal to an influential group in

New York, many members of which had followed George Clinton and Robert

Yates in opposition to the Constitution. On the political side it

develops four main theses: the necessity for taking effective action in

view of the self-confessed failure of the Articles of Confederation;

the urgent need of a sovereign, unitary state, to avoid the horrors

which must follow from “the political monster of an _imperium in

imperio_”; the necessity of providing that justice shall prevail over

the majority will; and the adaptability of the republican form to a

great extent of territory and divergent interests. Of these the second

and third lay bare the heart of Federalist political theory; and in the

treatment of them there is no shrinking from the conclusions of the

earlier debate, although the tone is conciliatory.

The argument for a unitary, sovereign state, developed by Hamilton,

and the argument for justice, developed by Madison, rest upon the same

basis and are regarded as the twin problems of government. The true

sanction of government is found, not in good will, as Bentham and later

democratic thinkers have urged, but in coercion;[306] and coercion

is accepted as necessary because of universal selfishness. “Why has

government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not

conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without restraint.”[307]

Granted coercive sovereignty, government must guarantee justice to

all; and justice demands that the majority shall suffer needful

restraint equally with the minority. The great and insidious danger

to good government has always been faction, the argument runs, and a

chief merit of the Constitution lay in its provisions to lessen the

disasters of factional ambition. “Complaints are everywhere heard

from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends

of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that

our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded

in the conflict of rival parties, and that measures are too often

decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the

minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing

majority.”[308]

No theory is more representative of the time than the theory of

faction. It was a first line of defense thrown up against the

advancing democratic movement. The term had long served conveniently

to stigmatize any popular unrest, the “factious multitude” having

been held synonymous in earlier usage with mob; but in the eighteenth

century the word was applied generally to political parties. In a

world moving inevitably towards manhood suffrage, a sharp alignment of

parties with definite platforms was greatly feared by the minority,

for the organization of the rank and file of voters must end in

majority control. An honest appeal to the people was the last thing

desired by the Federalists, and the democratic machinery of recalls

and referendums and rotation in office, which had developed during

the war, was stigmatized as factional devices which in the end must

destroy good government. “As every appeal to the people would carry an

implication of some defect in the government,” argued Madison,[309]

“frequent appeals would in a great measure deprive the government of

that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which

the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite

stability.” “The danger of disturbing the public tranquillity by

interesting too strongly the public passions is a still more serious

objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to

the decisions of the whole society.”

In the remarkable tenth number, which compresses within a few pages

pretty much the whole Federalist theory of political science, Madison

has explained the Federalist objections to political parties and party

government.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting

to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated

by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to

the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate

interests of the community.... If a faction consists of less than

a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which

enables the majority to defeat its sinister views, by regular

vote.... When a majority is included in a faction, the form of

popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to

its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights

of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights,

against the danger of such a faction, is then the great object

to which our inquiries are directed.... By what means is this

great object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the

existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same

time must be prevented; or the majority, having such coexistent

passion or interest, must be rendered by their number and local

situations, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of

oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to

coincide, we well know, that neither moral nor religious motives

can be relied on as an adequate control.

In full agreement with the greater political thinkers of the past,

Madison then traces political parties to economic sources. Since in

every society the diversity of economic groups creates diversity of

political programs, party divisions and party alignments are inevitable

in the ordinary course of events. The unequal distribution of property

is the realistic basis of all politics, and the “_sentiments_ and

_views_ which arise from the possession of different degrees and kinds

of property form the stuff of so-called ‘political psychology.’”[310]

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of

property originate, is ... an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity

of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first

object of government. From the protection of different and unequal

faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different

degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the

influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective

proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different

interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of

man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees

of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil

society. A zeal for different opinions ... [has] divided mankind

into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered

them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to

co-operate for their common good.... But the most common and

durable source of factions has been the various and unequal

distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without

property have ever formed distinct interests of society. Those

who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like

discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest,

a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser

interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide

them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and

views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests,

forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves

the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary

operations of the government.

As a means of securing a necessary balance between rival interests,

Madison approved a republican rather than a democratic form of

government:

The two great points of difference, between a democracy and

a republic, are, first, the delegation of the government, in

the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest;

secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of

country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the

first difference is, on the one hand, to refine or enlarge the

public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body

of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests

of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice,

will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial

considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen, that

the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people,

will be more consonant to the public good, than if pronounced by

the people themselves, convened for the purpose.... The other point

of difference is, the greater number of citizens, and extent of

territory, which may be brought within the compass of republican,

than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance

principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded

in the former, than in the latter.... Extend the sphere, and you

take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it

less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common

motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common

motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to

discover their strength, and act in unison with each other.[311]

In such argument Madison was adapting to his purpose the views of

Milton and other seventeenth-century republicans, to whom in the

dangerous days when the Puritan Commonwealth was breaking up, the

“noise and shouting of the rude multitude,” the drunken ribaldry of the

London rabble, was prophetic of “new injunctions to manacle the native

libertie of mankinde.” But it has long since become a commonplace of

political observation that the minority and not the majority is the

more dangerous to the common well-being, for it is the minority that

most frequently uses government to its own ends.

The contrast in temper and argument between _The Federalist_ and

Richard Henry Lee’s _Letters from the Federal Farmer_,[312] is

striking. The calmness and fair-mindedness of the work persuade one

that it ill deserves the name partisan; it comes near to being a frank

and disinterested examination of the proposed instrument of government.

Its sharpest strictures are tempered by ready acknowledgment of

excellent features. The burden of Lee’s accusation is that the

instrument is undemocratic; that it must result in placing the majority

under control of the minority; and that it in no wise reflects the

sober judgment of the body of the people. He is more restrained than

Elbridge Gerry, who asserted that it was the outcome of a conspiracy

hatched in secret, a work of “such motley mixture, that its enemies

cannot trace a feature of Democratic or Republican extract.” But the

Farmer’s restraint adds weight to the serious charges which he brings

against the instrument, and the unseemly haste of its advocates in

urging its speedy adoption. It was not to destroy the work of the

Convention that he pleaded for delay; but that it should receive full

and fair consideration, and be disposed of as its merits or defects

should warrant.

His first concern is that the Constitution should not be adopted with

the inconsiderate haste for which _The Federalist_ was pressing.

“The first principal question that occurs, is, Whether, considering

our situation, we ought to precipitate the adoption of the proposed

Constitution?” Hamilton had made much of the desperate state of affairs

that admitted of no delay; Lee replied by denying, with Franklin and

other competent observers, that the present state was desperate.

Matters were improving daily, peace was restoring the ravages of war.

I know uneasy men, who with very much to precipitate, do not admit

all these facts; but they are facts well known to all men who

are thoroughly informed in the affairs of this country. It must,

however, be admitted, that our federal system is defective, and

that some of the state governments are not well administered;

but ... we impute to the defects in our governments many evils

and embarrassments which are most clearly the result of the late

war.... When we want a man to change his condition, we describe

it as wretched, miserable, and despised; and we draw a pleasing

picture of that which we would have him assume.... It is too often

the case in political concerns that men state facts not as they

are, but as they wish them to be.... Men who feel easy in their

circumstances, and such as are not sanguine in their expectations

relative to the consequences of the proposed change, will remain

quiet under the existing governments. Many commercial and monied

men, who are uneasy, not without just cause, ought to be respected;

and by no means, unreasonably disappointed in their expectations

and hopes.... It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the

adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis--now is the

critical moment which must be seized or all will be lost; and to

shut the door against free enquiry, whenever conscious the thing

presented has defects in it, which time and investigation will

probably discover.... If it is true, what has been so often said,

that the people of this country cannot change their constitution

for the worse, I presume it still behoves them to endeavor

deliberately to change it for the better.

Granted that experience has demonstrated the need of revising the

Articles of Confederation in certain essential points, Lee maintains

that the enemies of democracy have been making undue capital out of

the shortcomings of an emergency government, in the hope of subverting

the democratic state governments and substituting a more aristocratic

form.

The confederation was formed when great confidence was placed in

the voluntary exertions of individuals, and of the respective

states; and the framers of it, to guard against usurpation, so

limited, and checked the powers, that, in many respects, they

are inadequate to the exigencies of the union.... During the

war, the general confusion, and the introduction of paper money,

infused in the minds of people vague ideas respecting government

and credit. We expected too much from the return of peace, and of

course we have been disappointed. Our governments have been new and

unsettled; and several legislatures, by making tender, suspension,

and paper money laws, have given just cause of uneasiness to

creditors. By these and other causes, several orders of men in

the community have been prepared by degrees, for a change of

government; and this very abuse of power in the legislatures,

which in some cases has been charged upon the democratic part of

the community, has furnished aristocratical men with those very

weapons, and those very means, with which, in great measure, they

are rapidly effecting their favourite object.

The methods by which the convention was brought together at a time when

the “idea of destroying ultimately, the state government, and forming

one consolidated system, could not have been admitted,” is traced

briefly with penetrating comment, and the unfortunate decision of some

excellent republicans to take no part in the work is regretted:

Here the favorable moment for changing the government was

evidently discerned by a few men, who seized it with address....

Tho’ they chose men principally connected with commerce and the

judicial departments, yet they appointed many good republican

characters--had they all attended we should see, I am persuaded, a

better system presented. The non-attendance of eight or nine men,

who were appointed members of the convention, I shall ever consider

as a very unfortunate event to the United States.--Had they

attended, I am pretty clear that the results ... would not have

had that strong tendency to aristocracy now discernible in every

part of the plan ... the young visionary men, and the consolidating

aristocracy, would have been more restrained than they have been.

Lee frankly concedes that the instrument possesses many excellent

features, but he considers it greatly vitiated by the “want of that one

important factor in a free government, a representation of the people.”

“Because we have sometimes abused democracy, I am not among those who

think a democratic branch a nuisance.” “Every man of reflection must

see, that the change now proposed, is a transfer of power from the many

to the few.” The present agitation may be traced to its source in “two

very unprincipled parties,” between whom stand the great mass of honest

and substantial people:

One party is composed of little insurgents, men in debt, who want

no law, and who want a share of the property of others; these are

called levellers, Shaysites, &c. The other party is composed of a

few, but more dangerous men, with their servile dependents; these

avariciously grasp at all power and property; you may discover

in all the actions of these men, an evident dislike to free and

equal government, and they go systematically to work to change,

essentially, the forms of government in this country; these are

called aristocrats, m--ites, &c. Between these two parties is

the weight of the community: the men of middling property, men

not in debt on the one hand, and men, on the other, content with

republican governments, and not aiming at immense fortunes, offices

and power. In 1786, the little insurgents, the levellers, came

forth, invaded the rights of others, and attempted to establish

governments according to their wills. Their movements evidently

gave encouragement to the other party, which, in 1787, has taken

the political field, and with its fashionable dependents, and the

tongue and the pen, is endeavouring to establish in a great haste,

a politer kind of government. These two parties ... are really

insignificant, compared with the solid, free, and independent part

of the community.

Calm voices such as Lee’s were few in those strident days, and the

Federalists fairly overwhelmed the silent majority with clamorous

argument. Polite culture and professional learning joined forces to

write down the agrarians. The Hartford Wits dedicated smart couplets

to the cause; Francis Hopkinson made merry over their ways; Noah

Webster confuted them with his economic interpretation of politics;

lawyer-scholars like James Wilson and John Dickinson exposed their

heresies; solid business men like Peletiah Webster contributed after

the measure of their intelligence. In their ardor the Federalists

went further. “What can be the views of those gentlemen in Boston.”

asked Lee pertinently, “who countenanced the printers in shutting up

the press against a fair and free investigation?” From the strident

debate emerged not only the Constitution, but political parties, no

longer to be spoken of as factions, but eventually to be accepted as

necessary agencies in republican government; and to understand their

rival policies we must turn to examine the political philosophies of

the outstanding leaders.

Footnotes

[298] These English liberals have been often regarded as democrats.

Thus Merriam says of Locke, “He was the most famous of seventeenth

century democratic thinkers.” _American Political Theories_, p. 90.

[299] See Laski, _Political Thought from Locke to Bentham_, p. 188.

[300] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. I, p. 386.

[301] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 449-450.

[302] _The Federalist_, Introduction, p. viii.

[303] Quoted in Harding, _The Federal Constitution in Massachusetts_.

[304] Carson, _History of the Supreme Court_, quoted by Ford, _The

Federalist_, p. xxix.

[305] Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 118.

[306] Number 15.

[307] _Ibid._

[308] Number 10.

[309] Number 49.

[310] Beard, _The Economic Basis of Politics_, pp. 29-32.

[311] Number 10.

[312] The full title is: _Observations leading to a fair examination

of the system of government, proposed by the late Convention; and to

several essential and necessary alterations in it. In a number of

Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican._ Reprinted in Ford’s

pamphlets.

Chapter III • Political Thinkers • The English Group

Of this great age of American political thought, two important

characteristics emerge: it was overwhelmingly English in its

antecedents; and it was already differentiating its program from

that of contemporary English liberalism. Nearly all the outstanding

men--Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Wilson, Mason, Madison, Gouverneur

Morris--were of the older liberal tradition, and with some notable

exceptions, of the school of Pitt. Contemporary English liberals such

as Priestley, Bentham, and Godwin numbered few adherents among the

leaders of American thought. Economic conditions in America already

were imposing conclusions that pointed in a direction other than that

which English liberalism was traveling. The doctrine of the diminished

state, which was making persistent headway among English liberals,

could make no appeal to men who desired an augmented state; and

liberalism as a policy was in ill repute at a time when men believed

they were suffering from too much liberalism. American political

thought, therefore, followed an independent path, and in spite of its

English origin came to conclusions that differentiated it broadly from

the old-world theory.

I • Alexander Hamilton • The Leviathan State

Of the disciplined forces that put to rout the disorganized party

of agrarianism, the intellectual leader was Alexander Hamilton,

the brilliant Anglo-French West Indian, then just entered upon his

thirties. A man of quite remarkable ability, a lucid thinker, a great

lawyer, a skillful executive, a masterly organizer, a statesman of

broad comprehension and inflexible purpose, he originated and directed

the main policies of the Federalist group, and brought them to

successful issue. For this work he was singularly well equipped, for

in addition to great qualities of mind and persuasive ways he was free

to work unhampered by the narrow localisms and sectional prejudices

that hampered native Americans. He was rather English than American,

with a certain detachment that refused to permit his large plans to be

thwarted by minor, vexatious details, or the perversity of stupid men.

He was like the elder Pitt in the magnificence of his imperial outlook.

Such a man would think in terms of the nation rather than of the

state. He would agree with Paine that the continental belt must be

more securely buckled. The jealousies and rivalries that obstructed

the creation of a centralized Federal government found no sympathy

with him. He was annoyed beyond all patience with the dissensions of

local home rule. In his political philosophy there was no place for

“the political monster of an _imperium in imperio_”; he would destroy

all lesser sovereignties and reduce the several commonwealths to a

parish status. For town-meeting democracies and agrarian legislatures

he had frank contempt. The American villager and farmer he never knew

and never understood; his America was the America of landed gentlemen

and wealthy merchants and prosperous professional men, the classes

that were most bitterly anti-agrarian. And it was in association with

this group of conservative representatives of business and society

that he took his place as directing head in the work of reorganizing

the loose confederation into a strong and cohesive union. When

that work was accomplished his influence was commanding, and for a

dozen years he directed the major policies of the Federalist party.

His strategic position as Secretary of the Treasury enabled him to

stamp his principles so deeply upon the national economy that in all

the intervening years since he quitted his post they have not been

permanently altered. That we still follow the broad principles of

Hamilton in our financial policy is a remarkable testimony to the

perspicacity of his mind and his understanding of the economic forces

that control modern society. And hence, because the Hamiltonian

principles lie at the core of the problem which has proved so difficult

of solution by modern liberalism, the life and work of Hamilton are of

particular significance in our democratic development.

Hamilton was our first great master of modern finance, of that finespun

web of credit which holds together our industrial life; and because

his policies opened opportunities of profit to some and entailed

loss upon others, they have been debated with an acrimony such as few

programs have endured. About the figure of the brilliant federalist

the myth-makers have industriously woven their tales, distorting the

man into either a demigod or a monster. The individual has been merged

in the system which he created, and later interpretation has been shot

through with partisan feeling; political and economic prejudice has

proved too strong for disinterested estimate. Any rational judgment

of Hamilton is dependent upon an interpretation of the historical

background that determined his career, and in particular of the state

of post-Revolutionary economics; and over such vexing questions

partisans have wrangled interminably. Thus Sumner, in his life of

Hamilton, asserts dogmatically that Federalism was no other than the

forces of law and order at war with the turbulent, anarchistic forces

unloosed by the Revolution, and that the putting down of the scheme

of repudiation was the necessary preliminary to the establishment

of a great nation. In the light of such an interpretation, Hamilton

the far-seeing, courageous and honest master of finance, was the

savior of nationality, the one supreme figure rising above an envious

group of lesser men. But, as has been sufficiently pointed out in

preceding chapters, the historical facts are susceptible of quite other

interpretation; and as our knowledge of the economic struggle then

going on becomes more adequate, the falsity of such an explanation

becomes patent. If, on the other hand, we concede that the crux of the

political problem in 1787 was economic--the struggle waging between

farmer and business groups for control of government--then the position

of Hamilton becomes clear; he was the spokesman of the business

economy. He thought in terms of nationality and espoused the economics

of capitalism, because he discovered in them potentialities congenial

to his imperialistic mind.

The career of Hamilton followed logically from the determining facts

of temperament and experience. He came to New York an alien, without

position or influence, ambitious to make a name and stir in the

world; and in the America of his day there could be little doubt

what doors opened widest to preferment. He made friends easily, and

with his aristocratic tastes he preferred the rich and distinguished

to plebeians. Endowed with charming manners and brilliant parts, he

fascinated all whom he met; before he was of age he was intimate with

all the Whig leaders, civil and military, on Washington’s staff and

elsewhere, lending his brains to the solution of knotty problems,

prodding stupider minds with illuminating suggestions, proving himself

the clearest thinker in whatever group he found himself. It was by

sheer force of intellect that he gained distinction. Singularly

precocious, he matured early; before his twenty-fifth year he seems

to have developed every main principle of his political and economic

philosophy, and thereafter he never hesitated or swerved from his path.

He was tireless in propaganda, urging on the proposed Constitutional

convention, discussing with Robert Morris his favorite project of

a national bank, outlining various systems of funding, advocating

tariffs as an aid to domestic manufacture, and sketching the plan of a

political and economic system under which native commercialism could go

forward. His reputation as an acute and trustworthy financial adviser

was well established with influential men north and south, when the new

government was set up, and Washington turned to him naturally for the

Treasury post, to guide financial policies during the difficult days

immediately ahead. But so able a man could not be restricted within

a single portfolio, and during the larger part of Washington’s two

administrations Hamilton’s was the directing mind and chief influence.

He regarded himself as Prime Minister and rode roughshod over his

colleagues. Major policies such as that of no entangling alliances must

receive his careful scrutiny and approval before they were announced;

and in consequence more credit belongs to Hamilton for the success of

those first administrations than is commonly recognized.

But when we turn from the administrator and statesman to the

creative thinker, there is another story to tell. The quickness of

his perceptions, the largeness of his plans and efficacy of his

methods--his clear brilliancy of understanding and execution--are

enormously impressive; but they cannot conceal certain intellectual

shortcomings. There was a lack of subtlety in the swift working of his

mind, of shades and _nuances_ in the background of his thought, that

implied a lack of depth and richness in his intellectual accumulation.

Something hard, almost brutal lurks in his thought--a note of

intellectual arrogance, of cynical contempt. He was utterly devoid of

sentiment, and without a shred of idealism, unless a certain grandiose

quality in his conceptions be accounted idealism. His absorbing

interest in the rising system of credit and finance, his cool unconcern

for the social consequences of his policies, reveal his weakness. In

spite of his brilliancy Hamilton was circumscribed by the limitations

of the practical man.

In consequence of such limitations Hamilton was not a political

philosopher in the large meaning of the term. In knowledge of history

he does not compare with John Adams; and as an open-minded student of

politics he is immensely inferior to Jefferson. Outside the domain of

the law, his knowledge does not always keep pace with his argument. He

reasons adroitly from given premises, but he rarely pauses to examine

the validity of those premises. The fundamentals of political theory he

seems never to have questioned, and he lays down a major principle with

the easy finality of a dogmatist. Compare his views on any important

political principle with those of the greater thinkers of his time, and

they are likely to prove factional if not reactionary. The two tests

of eighteenth-century liberalism were the doctrine of individualism,

and the doctrine of the minimized state; and Hamilton rejected both:

the former in its larger social bearing, and the latter wholly. He

was not even abreast of seventeenth-century liberalism, for that was

strongly republican, and Hamilton detested republicanism only a little

less than democracy. Harrington and Locke were no masters of his;

much less were Bentham or Priestley or Godwin. He called the French

revolutionary writers “fanatics in political science”; to what extent

he read them does not appear. The thinkers to whom he owed most seem to

have been Hume, from whom he may have derived his cynical psychology,

and Hobbes whose absolute state was so congenial to his temperament.

But political theory he subordinated to economic theory. He was much

interested in economics. With the Physiocratic school and its agrarian

and sociological bias he could have no sympathy, but with the rising

English school that resulted from the development of the industrial

revolution, he found himself in hearty accord. Capitalism with its

credit system, its banks and debt-funding and money manipulation, was

wholly congenial to his masterful temperament. He read Adam Smith with

eagerness and _The Wealth of Nations_ was a source book for many of his

state papers. To create in America an English system of finance, and an

English system of industrialism, seemed to him the surest means to the

great end he had in view; a centralizing capitalism would be more than

a match for a decentralizing agrarianism, and the power of the state

would augment with the increase of liquid wealth.

But granted that he lacked the intellectual qualities of the

philosopher, it does not follow that his significance diminishes. On

the contrary his very independence of contemporary European theory

enlarged his serviceableness to party. He was free to employ his

intelligence on the practical difficulties of a new and unprecedented

situation. English liberalism did not answer the needs of Federalism,

if indeed it could answer the needs of the country at large. The time

had come to decide whether the long movement of decentralization should

go further, and confirm the future government as a loose confederacy

of powerful states, or whether an attempt should be made to check

that movement and establish a counter tendency towards centralized,

organized control. If the former, it meant surrendering the country

to a democratic _laissez faire_, and there was nothing in the history

of political _laissez faire_ as it had developed in America, that

justified the principle to Hamilton. It had culminated in agrarianism

with legislative majorities riding down all obstacles, denying the

validity of any check upon its will, constitutional, legal or ethical.

The property interests of the minority had been rendered insecure.

There had been altogether too much _laissez faire_; what was needed

was sharp control of legislative majorities; the will of the majority

must be held within due metes and bounds. Even in the economic world

the principle of _laissez faire_ no longer satisfied the needs of

the situation. Parliamentary enactments had aided British interests

in their exploitation of America before the war; it was only common

sense for an American government to assist American business. The new

capitalism that was rising stood in need of governmental subsidies.

Business was languishing; infant industries could not compete on

even terms with the powerful British manufacturing interests, long

established and with ample capital. From a realistic contemplation of

these facts Hamilton deduced the guiding principle that has since been

followed, namely, that governmental interference with economic laws is

desirable when it aids business, but intolerable and unsound when it

aims at business regulation or control, or when it assists agriculture

or labor.

Throughout his career Hamilton was surprisingly consistent. His mind

hardened early as it matured early, and he never saw cause to challenge

the principles which he first espoused. He was what a friendly critic

would call a political realist, and an enemy would pronounce a cynic.

With the practical man’s contempt for theorists and idealists, he took

his stand on current fact. He looked to the past for guidance, trusting

to the wisdom of experience; those principles which have worked

satisfactorily heretofore may be expected to work satisfactorily in the

future. Whoever aspires to become a sane political leader must remember

that his business is not to construct Utopias, but to govern men; and

if he would succeed in that difficult undertaking he must be wise in

the knowledge of human nature. At the basis of Hamilton’s political

philosophy was the traditional Tory psychology. Failure to understand

human nature, he believed, was the fatal weakness of all democratic

theorists; they put into men’s breeches altruistic beings fitted only

for a Utopian existence. But when we consider men as they are, we

discover that they are little other than beasts, who if unrestrained

will turn every garden into a pigsty. Everywhere men are impelled by

the primitive lust of aggression, and the political philosopher must

adjust his system to this unhappy fact. He must not suffer the charge

of cynicism to emasculate his philosophy; “the goodness of government

consists in a vigorous execution,” rather than in amiable intentions;

it is the business of the practical man and not of the theorist.

It needs no very extensive reading in Hamilton to discover ample

justification for such an interpretation of his political philosophy;

the evidence lies scattered broadly through his pages. At the

precocious age of seventeen he laid down the thesis, “A vast majority

of mankind is entirely biassed by motives of self-interest”; and as

political systems are determined by the raw material of the mass of

the people, they must be conditioned by such egoism. A year later he

discovered in Hume the central principle of his philosophy:

Political writers, says a celebrated author, have established it

as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and

fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, _every

man_ ought to be supposed a _knave_; and to have no other end,

in all his actions, but _private interest_. By this interest we

must govern him; and, by means of it, _make him co-operate to

public good_, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition.

Without this, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of _any

constitution_.[313]

At the age of twenty-seven he reiterated the doctrine, “The safest

reliance of every government, is on men’s interests. This is a

principle of human nature, on which all political speculation, to be

just, must be founded.”[314] Obviously this was not a pose of youthful

cynicism, but a sober judgment confirmed by observation and experience.

Accepting self-interest as the mainspring of human ambition, Hamilton

accepted equally the principle of class domination. From his reading

of history he discovered that the strong overcome the weak, and as

they grasp power they coalesce into a master group. This master group

will dominate, he believed, not only to further its interests, but to

prevent the spread of anarchy which threatens every society split into

factions and at the mercy of rival ambitions. In early days the master

group was a military order, later it became a landed aristocracy, in

modern times it is commercial; but always its power rests on property.

“That power which holds the purse-strings absolutely, must rule,” he

stated unequivocally. The economic masters of society of necessity

become the political masters. It is unthinkable that government should

not reflect the wishes of property, that it should be permanently

hostile to the greater economic interests; such hostility must destroy

it, for no man or group of men will be ruled by those whom they can

buy and sell. And in destroying itself it will give place to another

government, more wisely responsive to the master group; for even a

democratic people soon learns that any government is better than a

condition of anarchy, and a commercial people understands that a

government which serves the interests of men of property, serves the

interests of all, for if capital will not invest how shall labor

find employment? And if the economic masters do not organize society

efficiently, how shall the common people escape ruin?

Such are the fundamental principles which lie at the base of Hamilton’s

philosophy. He was in accord with John Adams and James Madison and

Noah Webster, in asserting the economic basis of government, with

its corollary of the class struggle. He not only accepted the rule

of property as inevitable, but as desirable. As an aristocrat he

deliberately allied himself with the wealthy. That men divide into

the rich and the poor, the wise and the foolish, he regarded as a

commonplace too evident to require argument. The explanation is

to be sought in human nature and human capacities. For the common

people, about whom Jefferson concerned himself with what seemed to

Hamilton sheer demagoguery, he felt only contempt. Their virtues and

capacities he had no faith in. “I am not much attached to the _majesty

of the multitude_,” he said during the debate over the Constitution,

“and waive all pretensions (founded on such conduct) to their

countenance.” His notorious comment--which the American democrat has

never forgiven him, “The people!--the people is a great beast!”--was

characteristically frank. Hamilton was no demagogue and nothing was

plainer to his logic than the proposition that if the people possessed

the capacity to rule, their weight of numbers would give them easy

mastery; whereas their yielding to the domination of the gifted few

proves their incapacity. A wise statesman, therefore, will consider

the people no further than to determine how government may be least

disturbed by their factional discontent, and kept free to pursue a

logical program. Under a republican form good government is difficult

to maintain, but not impossible. The people are easily deceived and

turned aside from their purpose; like children they are diverted by

toys; but if they become unruly they must be punished. Too much is at

stake in government for them to be permitted to muddle policies.

It is sufficiently clear that in tastes and convictions Hamilton

was a high Tory. The past to which he appealed was a Tory past, the

psychology which he accepted was a Tory psychology, the law and

order which he desired was a Tory law and order. His philosophy was

not liked by republican America, and he knew that it was not liked.

Practical business men accepted both his premises and conclusions, but

republicans under the spell of revolutionary idealism, and agrarians

suffering in their pocketbooks, would oppose them vigorously. He was

at pains, therefore, as a practical statesman, to dress his views in

a garb more seemly to plebeian prejudices, and like earlier Tories

he paraded an ethical justification for his Toryism. The current

Federalist dogma of the divine right of justice--_vox justiciae vox

dei_--was at hand to serve his purpose and he made free use of it.

But no ethical gilding could quite conceal a certain ruthlessness of

purpose; in practice justice became synonymous with expediency, and

expediency was curiously like sheer Tory will to power.

In certain of his principles Hamilton was a follower of Hobbes.

His philosophy conducted logically to the leviathan state, highly

centralized, coercive, efficient. But he was no idealist to exalt the

state as the divine repository of authority, an enduring entity apart

from the individual citizen and above him. He regarded the state as

a highly useful instrument, which in the name of law and order would

serve the interests of the powerful, and restrain the turbulence of

the disinherited. For in every government founded on coercion rather

than good will, the perennial unrest of those who are coerced is a

grave menace; in the end the exploited will turn fiercely upon the

exploiters. In such governments, therefore, self-interest requires

that social unrest shall be covered with opprobrium and put down by

the police power; and the sufficient test of a strong state lies in

its ability to protect the privileges of the minority against the

anarchy of the majority. In his eloquent declamation against anarchy

Hamilton was a conspicuous disciple of the law and order school. From

the grave difficulties of post-Revolutionary times with their agrarian

programs, he created a partisan argument for a leviathan state, which

fell upon willing ears; and in the Constitutional convention, which,

more than any other man, he was instrumental in assembling, he was the

outstanding advocate of the coercive state.

In his plan of government presented to the Convention, the principle

of centralized power was carried further than most would go, and his

supporting speeches expressed doctrines that startled certain of his

hearers. He was frankly a monarchist, and he urged the monarchical

principle with Hobbesian logic. “The principle chiefly intended to be

established is this--that there must be a permanent _will_.” “There

ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular

current.”

Gentlemen say we need to be rescued from the democracy. But

what [are] the means proposed? A democratic assembly is to be

checked by a democratic senate, and both these by a democratic

chief magistrate. The end will not be answered, the means will

not be equal to the object. It will, therefore, be feeble and

inefficient.[315]

The only effective way of keeping democratic factionalism within

bounds, Hamilton was convinced, lay in the erection of a powerful

chief magistrate, who “ought to be hereditary, and to have so much

power, that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more,”

and who would therefore stand “above corruption.” Failing to secure

the acceptance of the monarchical principle, he devoted himself to

the business of providing all possible checks upon the power of

the democracy. He “acknowledged himself not to think favorably of

republican government; but he addressed his remarks to those who did

think favorably of it, in order to prevail on them to tone their

government as high as possible.”[316] His argument was characteristic:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The

first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.

The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and,

however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is

not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they

seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first

class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will

check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive

any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good

government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the

mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?

Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.

Their turbulent and uncontrollable disposition requires checks.[317]

The argument scarcely needs refuting today, although curiously enough,

it was rarely questioned by eighteenth-century gentlemen. It was the

stock in trade of the Federalists, nevertheless Hamilton was too acute

a thinker not to see its fallacy. It denied the fundamental premise

of his political philosophy. If men are actuated by self-interest,

how does it come about that this sovereign motive abdicates its rule

among the rich and well born? Is there a magic in property that

regenerates human nature? Do the wealthy betray no desire for greater

power? Do the strong and powerful care more for good government than

for class interests? Hamilton was fond of appealing to the teaching of

experience; but he had read history to little purpose if he believed

such notions. How mercilessly he would have exposed the fallacy in the

mouth of Jefferson! It was a class appeal, and he knew that it was a

class appeal, just as he knew that success knows no ethics. He was

confronted by a situation in practical politics, and in playing ignobly

upon selfish fears he was seeking to force the convention towards the

English model. He had no confidence in the Constitution as finally

adopted, and spoke in contemptuous terms of its weakness; whereas for

the British constitution he had only praise, going so far, according

to Jefferson, as to defend the notorious corruption of parliament on

the ground of expediency: “purge it of its corruption”--Jefferson

reports him as saying--“and give to its popular branch equality of

representation, and it would become an _impracticable_ government;

as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the

most perfect government which ever existed.”[318] The argument savors

of cynicism, but it is in keeping with his philosophy; the British

constitution owed its excellence to the fact that in the name of the

people it yielded control of the state to the landed aristocracy.

It was as a statesman that the brilliant qualities of Hamilton showed

to fullest advantage. In developing his policies as Secretary of

the Treasury he applied his favorite principle, that government and

property must join in a close working alliance. The new government

would remain weak and ineffective so long as it was hostile to

capital; but let it show itself friendly to capital, and capital

would make haste to uphold the hands of government. Confidence was

necessary to both, and it was a plant of slow growth, sensitive to

cold winds. The key to the problem lay in the public finance, and the

key to a strong system of finance lay in a great national bank. This,

Hamilton’s dearest project, was inspired by the example of the Bank of

England. No other institution would so surely link the great merchants

to government, he pointed out, for by being made partners in the

undertaking they would share both the responsibility and the profits.

It was notorious that during the Revolution men of wealth had forced

down the continental currency for speculative purposes; was it not as

certain that they would support an issue in which they were interested?

The private resources of wealthy citizens would thus become an asset

of government, for the bank would link “the interest of the State in

an intimate connection with those of the rich individuals belonging to

it.” “The men of property in America are enlightened about their own

interest, and would easily be brought to see the advantage of a good

plan.” Hence would arise stability and vigor of government.

Moreover, the bank would be of immense service in the pressing business

of the public debt. In regard to this difficult matter Hamilton was

early convinced that only one solution was possible: all outstanding

obligations, state and national, must be assumed by the Federal

government at face value, and funded. Anything short of that would

amount to repudiation of a lawful contract, entered into in good faith

by the purchaser; and such repudiation would destroy in the minds of

the wealthy the confidence in the integrity of the new government

that was vital to its success. It was true that speculators would reap

great and unearned profits; but the speculators for the most part were

the principal men of property whose support was so essential that any

terms were justifiable, and nothing would bind them so closely to the

government as the knowledge that it would deal generously with them.

It was true also that thousands of small men would lose by such a

transaction; but under any existing social economy the small man was

at a disadvantage, and the present state of affairs was not such as to

justify Utopian measures. To alienate the rich and powerful in order

to conciliate the poor and inconsequential seemed to him sheer folly.

The argument of expediency must prevail over abstract justice; the

government must make terms with those in whose hands lay the success or

failure of the venture.

His report on the public credit, of January 14, 1790, is one of the

significant documents in the history of American finance. It is the

first elaboration by an American statesman of the new system of

capitalization and credit developed in eighteenth-century England,

and it laid a broad foundation for later capitalistic development. To

less daring financiers of the time the public debt was no more than a

heavy obligation to be met; but to Hamilton it offered an opportunity

for revivifying the whole financial life of the nation. Let the debts

be consolidated and capitalized by a proper system of funding, and the

augmented credit would multiply capital, lower the rate of interest,

increase land values, and extend its benefits through all lines of

industry and commerce. It was a bold plan and it encountered bitter

opposition, which was not lessened by the heavy taxation that it called

for. In his tax proposals Hamilton revealed his political philosophy so

nakedly as almost to prove his undoing. His doctrine of the blessing of

a national debt smacked rather too strongly of English Toryism for the

American stomach.

A national debt, if it be not excessive, will be to us a national

blessing. It will be a powerful cement to our Union. It will also

create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which,

without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.... It were

otherwise to be feared our popular maxims would incline us to

too great parsimony and indulgence. We labor less now than any

civilized nation of Europe; and a habit of labor in the people, is

as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies, as

it is conducive to the welfare of the State.[319]

A further struggle was encountered over the proposals of an internal

revenue and a tariff. In his advocacy of the former Hamilton

encountered the vigorous opposition of the backcountry. The total

lack of adequate means of transportation rendered the problem of a

grain market a chronic difficulty to the frontier farmers. The most

convenient solution lay in distilling, and so whisky had become the

chief commodity of the farmer that was transportable and brought

a cash price. In placing a tax upon distilled liquors, therefore,

Hamilton struck so directly at the economic interests of thousands of

backwoodsmen, as to bring a rebellion upon the new administration. He

knew what he was doing, but he calculated that it was safer to incur

the enmity of farmers than of financiers; nevertheless the fierceness

of the opposition surprised him, and aroused all the ruthlessness that

lay in the background of his nature. He called for the strong arm

of the military and when the rising was put down, he was angered at

Washington’s leniency in refusing to hang the convicted leaders. In

his advocacy of a tariff he was on safer ground, for he was proposing

a solution of the difficult situation confronting the manufacturers.

Something must be done to revive industry so long stagnant. The old

colonial machinery had been destroyed and new machinery must be

provided. Industrial independence must follow political independence;

and the easiest way lay in providing a tariff barrier behind which

the infant industries of America might grow and become sufficient for

domestic needs.

In his notable report on manufactures, submitted on December 5, 1791,

Hamilton showed his characteristic intelligence in his grasp of the

principles of the industrial revolution. Certainly no other man in

America saw so clearly the significance of the change that was taking

place in English industrialism, and what tremendous reservoirs of

wealth the new order laid open to the country that tapped them. The

productive possibilities that lay in the division of labor, factory

organization, the substitution of the machine for the tool, appealed to

his materialistic imagination, and he threw himself heart and soul into

the cause of industrial development in America. He accepted frankly the

principle of exploitation. He was convinced that the interests of the

manufacturers were one with the national interests, and he proposed to

put the paternal power of the government behind them. With the larger

social effects--the consequences to the working classes, congestion of

population, the certainty of a labor problem--he concerned himself no

more than did contemporary English statesmen. He was contemptuous of

Jefferson’s concern over such things. He had no Physiocratic leanings

towards agriculture; material greatness alone appealed to him; and he

contemplated with satisfaction the increase in national wealth that

would accrue from levying toll upon the weak and helpless.

Besides this advantage of occasional employment to classes having

different occupations, there is another, of a nature allied to

it, and of a similar tendency. This is the employment of persons

who would otherwise be idle, and in many cases, a burthen on the

community, either from bias of temper, habit, infirmity of body,

or some other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them for the

toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark, that,

in general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the

latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments, than

they would otherwise be. Of the number of persons employed in

the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that

four-sevenths, nearly, are women and children; of whom the greatest

proportion are children, and many of them of a tender age.[320]

If the material power and splendor of the state be the great end of

statesmanship--as Hamilton believed--no just complaint can be lodged

against such a policy; but if the well-being of the individual citizen

be the chief end--as Jefferson maintained--a very different judgment

must be returned.

Although the fame of Hamilton has been most closely associated with

the principle of constitutional centralization, his truer significance

is to be found in his relation to the early developments of our modern

capitalistic order. In his understanding of credit finance and the

factory economy, he grasped the meaning of the economic revolution

which was to transform America from an agrarian to an industrial

country; and in urging the government to further such development, he

blazed the path that America has since followed. “A very great man,”

Woodrow Wilson has called him, “but not a great American.” In the

larger historical meaning of the term, in its democratic implications,

that judgment is true; but in the light of our industrial history,

with its corporate development and governmental subsidies, it does not

seem so true. As the creative organizer of a political state answering

the needs of a capitalistic order--a state destined to grow stronger

as imperialistic ambitions mount--he seems the most modern and the

most American of our eighteenth-century leaders, one to whom our

industrialism owes a very great debt, but from whom our democratic

liberalism has received nothing.

II • John Adams • Realist

Midway between Hamilton and Jefferson stands John Adams, the most

painstaking student of government and the most widely read in political

history, of his generation of Americans. The noble art of government

was a lifelong passion with him--the sublimest subject, in his opinion,

which a free citizen could study. Solid, pragmatic, unimaginative, he

was an admirable representative of the later eighteenth century with

its vigorous understanding, its distrust of idealisms, its contempt for

social theory. He was the political counterpart of Dr. Johnson. To a

generation sniveling over the sorrows of life and seeking panaceas in

Rousseau sentimentalisms, the English Tory proffered the consolation of

the realist. Things are bad enough, heaven knows; poverty, injustice,

disease, death, are evils which no optimism can shut its eyes to. But

what can be done? The malady of human nature is a disease beyond the

reach of romantic plasters. No quack remedies will cure ills that

lie too deep for laws or kings--they only aggravate the trouble.

Be sensible therefore. Endure like men what cannot be cured. Stop

sniveling and make the best of things as they are.

The analogy between these two vigorous exponents of common sense is

too obvious to miss. For years the chief business of John Adams was

to bring home to Americans the lesson in realism which Samuel Johnson

was urging upon his countrymen. The mischief of romantic idealisms was

spreading widely in America, disseminated by propagandists like Tom

Paine and theorists like Jefferson; there was high need that the people

be brought back to sober reality. This duty he took upon himself. He

was an uncompromising realist who refused to be duped by fine dreams or

humanitarian panaceas; he was much given to throwing cold water on the

hope of social regeneration through political agencies. And the reward

which he gained for his voluntary labors was a personal unpopularity

beyond that of any other statesman of the time. He was charged

with apostasy from his earlier democratic faith, and the charge had

sufficient foundation, unfortunately, to make it credible if one wished

to believe it.

During the revolutionary struggle he had been a member of the left

wing; during the early struggles under the Constitution he was a member

of the right wing. The young man had been a stalwart defender of human

rights, the old man was a stalwart defender of property rights; and

this shift of position was fatal to his reputation with the rising

democratic party. The French Revolution marked the critical turning

point in his intellectual development. As a politician he was well-nigh

ruined by it; but as a political thinker he owed it much. Before that

vast upheaval came to challenge his somewhat conventional mind, he

was a hard-working lawyer-politician, with a liking for legalistic

constitutional theory; but as the Revolution went forward, he was

forced into uncompromising reaction. While ardent young Americans

were becoming pro-French, he became pro-British; while they were

accepting the new leveling principles, he searched history to prove

how inevitable are social distinctions and economic classes; while

they looked hopefully forward to a democratic future, he gathered his

materials for an interpretation of political forces that revealed

aristocracy as the dominant factor in every society. Both Adams and his

critics were products of the French upheaval, but facing in different

directions; naturally, the antagonism between them became sharp and

bitter.

The severest critic cannot deny to John Adams excellent qualities

of mind and heart. A sound lawyer, a capable statesman, a vigorous

thinker and courageous debater, he fought his way from obscurity

to high position and many honors, and in every responsibility he

acquitted himself in a fashion altogether worthy of the notable

Adams posterity. A stubborn intellectual independence and a vigorous

assertiveness were his distinguishing characteristics. He revealed

to the full the Adams trait of going its own way and coming to its

own conclusions. He was never the victim of mob psychology, and he

was never careful of occasion or circumstance in speaking out his

convictions. America has had too few independent minds, and much of

Adams’s unpopularity was the result of his refusal to hunt with the

pack. Unfortunately his admirable qualities were offset by a blundering

tactlessness and a colossal vanity that brought many troubles upon

his head. He loved to be in the public eye and he studied the little

arts of self-advertising. In his youthful diary he set down these

characteristic words: “Reputation ought to be a perpetual subject of

my thoughts, and aim of my behavior. How shall I spread an opinion of

myself as a lawyer of distinguished genius, learning, and virtue?”

Self-confident, domineering, and jealously suspicious--always on the

lookout lest some honor due him should fall to another--he struggled

through a career strewn with animosities and heartburnings that a

nicer tact and a more generous nature would have avoided. He was his

own worst enemy. He did not spare himself in public service, but he

demanded strict payment and was inclined to haggle over the terms; in

consequence his later days were embittered and his fame was less than

he deserved.

Our present concern, however, is with the political scientist and not

with the politician; with the theories of government that occupied so

much of his thought, rather than with the policies of the statesman.

He wrote voluminously, heavily, with no grace of style or savor of

wit, and the long row of his collected writings may well appall the

reader who proposes to make his acquaintance. Ponderous treatises are

supplemented by lesser works and flanked by innumerable letters; his

industry was prodigious and no one will wonder at his exclamation, “My

hand is impatient of the pen and longs to throw it down.” His important

work divides broadly into two main divisions: his contribution to the

colonial debate with England, and his elaborate system of government

formulated during the years of French revolutionary debate. A brief

consideration will suffice for the first, but the second requires more

careful examination.

In his contributions to the colonial debate Adams concerned himself

mainly with questions of constitutional law. He placed little reliance

on the appeal to natural rights, and showed scant respect for “popular

talk and those democratical principles which have done so much mischief

in this country.”[321] The American cause, he believed, should be based

on constitutional principles, but those principles required restatement

in the light of existing fact. They must be rescued from the narrow

interpretation of little Englanders and adapted to meet the pressing

needs of imperial federation. The English people were not all residents

of the British Isles, and a constitutional practice suited to compact

groups in a common environment, was ill adapted to the needs of widely

sundered bodies of British subjects. Into this difficult and momentous

business of imperial federation, Adams plunged earnestly in an endeavor

to chart the unexplored field. That the problem was the gravest then

confronting Englishmen is abundantly evident today; that it received

grossly inadequate consideration on both sides of the Atlantic is

equally clear. In this field John Adams was a pioneer and his work

possesses still some historical interest. This fact, too frequently

overlooked, has been emphasized by a recent student, who has summarized

the final results of Adams’s thinking in the following theses: that the

empire was an association of equals, each with independent legislative

powers; that the British constitution was the fundamental law of the

empire, defining the relationship of the constituent parts; and that it

was the function of the judiciary to disallow a legislative act of any

of the several legislatures which did not comport with the fundamental

law, or which attempted to impose the will of one of the partners in

violation of the fundamental understanding and its guarantee.[322]

Such, in compressed form, was Adams’s elaboration and justification

of the dogma of Otis, that an act against the constitution was void.

In its relation to current English constitutional practice it was

at once revolutionary and reactionary. It implied a double attack

upon parliamentary sovereignty, first in limiting its powers by a

super-parliamentary constitution, and then in subjecting its acts to

judicial review. The final result would be the transfer of sovereignty

from the legislature to the judiciary. The idea had been toyed with

by English lawyers, but never seriously considered; it was alien to

the whole theory and history of parliamentary development. English

landed gentlemen have never been minded to grant the veto power to

the judiciary, but have persistently retained sovereignty in the

legislature. Nevertheless in such early speculation is found the germ

of our later practice, as it finally developed through the decisions of

Chief Justice Marshall.

In the works of his later period, such as _A Defence of the

Constitution of Government of the United States of America_ and

_Discourses on Davila_, Adams emerged from the narrow field of

constitutional law and elaborated a theory of government based on wide

reading and long observation. It was by way of reply to the French

thinkers, and it contributed in large measure to the partisan passions

of the time. Unfortunate circumstances attended the publication of

the works. The _Defence of the Constitution_ appeared at the moment

when newspaper accounts of the absurd dress in which he appeared at

the Court of St. James’s were provoking republican jests; and the

_Discourses on Davila_ came out in the _Gazette of the United States_,

when the country was buzzing about his childish fondness for titles and

ceremonies. It was impolitic for Adams to publish in the _Gazette_,

a virulently Federalistic sheet and anathema to all liberals. His

unpopular theories could not fail to arouse republican antagonism when

set over against such seeming commentary as this:

_Take away thrones and crowns from among men and there will

soon be an end of all dominion and justice._ There must be some

adventitious properties infused into the government to give it

energy and spirit, or the selfish, turbulent passions of men can

never be controlled. This has occasioned that artificial splendor

and dignity that are to be found in the courts of many nations. The

people of the United States may probably be induced to regard and

obey the laws without requiring the experiment of courts and titled

monarchs. In proportion as we become populous and wealthy must the

tone of the government be strengthened.[323]

The unfortunate effect of _Davila_ upon a highly wrought public opinion

Adams himself records: “the rage and fury of the Jacobinical journals

against these discourses, increased as they proceeded, intimidated the

printer, John Fenno, and convinced me, that to proceed would do more

hurt than good. I therefore broke off abruptly.”[324] But the mischief

to his reputation had been done; henceforth Adams was popularly

regarded as anti-republican. Debating the nature of aristocracy in the

New York Constitutional Convention, one of the speakers said, “I would

refer the gentleman for a definition of it to the Hon. John Adams, one

of our natural aristocrats.” Madison went so far as to charge that he

was secretly a monarchist. The charge was absurd, as any examination of

his political theory will convince. “It is a fixed principle with me,”

he wrote to Samuel Adams in 1790, “that all good government is and must

be republican.” But that he advocated a system of government hostile to

agrarianism, that he was bitterly antagonistic to French Jacobinism

and all its works, is apparent to the most casual reader. He was a

realist of the seventeenth-century school of English republicanism,

attacking what he regarded as the delirium of democracy, appealing to

experience in answer to abstract theory.

Adams erected his political system upon what he called “self-evident

truths.” He went to the root of the matter and directed his inquiry

into the validity of the humanitarian psychology which asserted that

men are good by nature, and may be trusted to deal justly with their

fellows. He appealed to the whole unhappy record of past misrule to

disprove the thesis. Instead of discovering in the average man a

kindly, rational being--as Jefferson professed to discover--Adams

found quite the contrary; and he summoned a host of historians and

philosophers to witness that Machiavelli was right in his contention

that “those who have written on civil government lay it down as a

first principle ... that whoever would found a state, and make proper

laws for the government of it, must presume that all men are bad by

nature; that they will not fail to show that natural depravity of heart

whenever they have a fair opportunity.”[325] In further substantiation

of this fact he examined the history of governments past and present,

and he found everywhere testimony to the truth that the mass of men are

naturally indolent, selfish, given to luxury, shortsighted, jealous,

tending to faction and all mischievous intrigue. Never does he find

them given to virtue, choosing wisdom, seeking justice. They cannot

endure that others should be superior in virtue, or rank, or power;

but driven by ambition they strive to pull down their superiors in

order themselves to rise. The men in any society who possess sufficient

virtue to set justice above self-interest, are few and count for little

in the scale against the selfish many.[326]

This Calvinistic doctrine that “human nature is not fit to be

trusted,” and that “men are never good but through necessity,” being

accepted--and John Adams was as clearly satisfied of its truth as

“of any demonstration of Euclid”--he proceeded to translate it

into political terms, and examine the bearing of it upon systems

of government. At once a second fallacy of the humanitarian school

emerged--men are impelled not by ideals but by needs, not by reason,

as Godwin argued, but by the desire for goods. In a social state the

natural selfishness of human nature impels to economic aggression.

Underneath the turbulent unrest which threatens every government is

economic ambition. This is the rock on which all schemes of social

justice founder--a rock which every sound political thinker will chart

and recognize as a danger reef. Economics and biology provide the major

social drives. “That the first want of every man is his dinner and the

second want his girl were truths well known ... long before the great

philosopher Malthus arose to think he enlightened the world by his

discovery.”[327] The supposed liberty of a democratic state proves in

practice to be no other than anarchy, running swiftly into license and

ending in tyranny. All human societies are rooted in exploitation, the

bitter fruit of which is domestic warfare.

The universal social state is one of ruthless class struggle, wherein

the strong conquer the weak--this is the third deduction from the

premises which Adams laid down. It cannot be otherwise, he argued, from

the natural inequality of men. The rude mass being shiftless, ignorant,

spendthrift, they are at the mercy of the strong, ambitious, and

capable, who exploit them freely. Hence in every society emerges the

division between patricians and plebeians, developing into caste as the

social order grows complex. The self-interest of the patricians teaches

them the need of class solidarity, and with intelligent solidarity the

few easily seize control of the state and use it to their ends. Hence

arises an aristocracy or oligarchy, which maintains its power through

control of the economic resources of society. Control of property means

control of men; for sovereignty inheres in economics. In presence of

this historical fact it is foolish to declaim about natural rights;

there are no rights except such as are won either by property or the

sword.

That there should long exist a society without a property aristocracy

Adams regarded as inconceivable. The French democrats with their

talk of equality and fraternity were mischievous visionaries. “Every

democracy ... has an aristocracy in it as distinct as that of Rome,

France, England.” In older societies the aristocracy maintained

supremacy through possession of the land. In America the vast extent

of territory and the wide diffusion of landholding presented the most

favorable opportunity in history for democratic development if such

were possible; nevertheless the evidences of an aristocracy developing

here were too patent to miss. The abundance of economic resources,

Adams pointed out, was an invitation to gigantic exploitation, the

logical outcome of which must be the emergence of a master group,

richer and more powerful than the world has ever known. The power of

economic appeal was nullified in America by no special providence.

Paper wealth has been a source of aristocracy in this country,

as well as landed wealth, with a vengeance. Witness the immense

fortunes made _per saltum_ by aristocratical speculations, both in

land and paper.... But, sir, land and paper are not the only source

of aristocracy. There are master shipwrights, housewrights, masons,

&c. &c., who have each of them from twenty to a hundred families

in their employment, and can carry a posse to the polls when they

will. These are not only aristocrats, but a species of feudal

barons....

Should a planter in Virginia sell his _clarissimum et

illustrissimum et celeberricum locum_ with his thousand negroes,

to a merchant, would not the merchant gain the aristocratical

influence which the planter lost by his transfer? Run down, sir,

through all the ranks of society ... from the first planter and the

first merchant to the hog driver, the whiskey dram-seller, or the

Scottish peddler, and consider, whether the alienation of lands,

wharves, stores, pike stock, or even lottery tickets, does not

transfer the aristocracy as well as the property.[328]

Believe--as John Adams believed regarding the funding operations--that

“paper wealth is the madness of the many for the profit of the

few,”[329] it is nevertheless a modern illustration of the old truth

that the few do profit from the madness of the many, and by reason of

such profit set themselves up as masters. If then the historian cannot

escape the conclusion that political systems and social classes rest

upon economic foundations, this fundamental fact must preside over

the speculations of the political philosopher. Democracy is out of

the question, even if it were desirable. The great and sole object

of political science must be the preservation of liberty--the right

of every individual to life, freedom, property, in an aristocratic

society--and the frustration of the universal drive of self-interest

which leads on the one hand to tyranny, and on the other to anarchy.

Between these two poles of tyranny and anarchy, of oligarchy and

democracy, every society oscillates; to prevent such oscillation and

discover some mean between the extremes must be the business of the

political philosopher. The pregnant fallacy of the French school,

Adams insisted, lay in its doctrines of equality and fraternity. The

meanest underling does not desire equality; men kiss the feet above

them and trample on the fingers beneath. That the people love a lord

is a sign of their abundant folly. Should the democrats abolish the

principle of hereditary rank by law, it would still remain in fact; for

the property basis on which it rests is transmitted legally from father

to son, and each successive generation gains an adventitious advantage

from its substantial heritage as well as from the historical splendor

of the family name. On this rock every attempt at a democracy has

foundered.

If these words are true, no well ordered commonwealth ever existed;

for we read of none without a nobility, no, not one, that I can

recollect, without a hereditary nobility; ... It would be an

improvement in the affairs of society, probably, if the hereditary

legal descent could be avoided; and this experiment the Americans

have tried. But in this case a nobility must and will exist,

though without the name, as really as in countries where it is

hereditary.[330]

The mortal weakness of democracy, Adams agreed with Madison and the

Federalists generally, lay in faction, a disease which in the nature of

the case he regarded as incurable. The use of party power other than

justly was factional, and because the mass of men do not set justice

above present interest, the unbridled rule of the majority drives

straight towards mass tyranny. Despoiled by the superior ability of the

aristocracy, the exploited plebeians fight back blindly; and where the

constitution of government permits them to band together in a political

party, they override the rights of the minority as ruthlessly as the

latter before had denied the rights of the majority. Aristocratic

exploitation leads to democratic leveling; and the resultant anarchy is

but prelude to the rise of another aristocracy to repeat the unhappy

process.

The passions and desires of the majority of the representatives

being in their nature insatiable and unlimited by any thing within

their own breasts, and having nothing to control them without, will

crave more and more indulgence, and, as they have the power, they

will have the gratification.[331]

If you give more than a share in the sovereignty to the democrats,

that is, if you give them the command or preponderance in the

sovereignty, that is, the legislature, they will vote all property

out of the hands of you aristocrats, and if they let you escape

with your lives, it will be more humanity, consideration, and

generosity than any triumphant democracy ever displayed since the

creation. And what will follow? The aristocracy among the democrats

will take your places, and treat their fellows as severely and

sternly as you have treated them.[332]

The end of every democratic experiment, Adams pointed out, has been the

man on horseback. So inevitably does democracy culminate in despotism,

that “in reality, the word democracy signifies nothing more nor less

than a nation of people without any government at all, and before any

constitution is instituted.”[333] “Democracy never has been and never

can be so desirable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts,

is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It

soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy

that did not commit suicide.” “The proposition that the people are

the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the

worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge,

act, think, or will, as a political body. Individuals have conquered

themselves; nations and large bodies never.”[334]

Having thus examined the major doctrines of the French democratic

school, namely, that men are good by nature, that the social end

is liberty, equality, fraternity, and that social well-being will

result from an appeal to reason, Adams had cleared the problem of

what he regarded as misconceptions, and was ready to lay out a

system of government which should demonstrate his skill in political

architecture. The determining factor in laying down the main lines was

sufficiently clear. Since property lies at the root of the problem

of government, the business of devising a just and stable system of

government resolves itself into the question, What shall be done about

property? As an orthodox Whig Adams found part of his answer ready

to hand. With Locke he believed that property rights are sacred, and

that it is a chief business of government to protect private property

against unjust expropriation. The security of property may be taken as

the measure of the stability of government. “The moment the idea is

admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of

God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect

it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”[335] “The very name of a republic

implies, that the property of the people should be represented in

the legislature, and decide the rule of justice,” he argued, quoting

Cicero.[336] Moreover, the futility of any other arrangement was

axiomatic in his philosophy. If property is not granted representation,

it will usurp it; if attacked, it will know how to defend itself; and

the end will be the setting up of an oligarchy on the ruins of the

republic. But if Adams agreed with Hamilton that the state should

deal tenderly with the rights and interests of property, he refused

to go with the latter in his sole concern for the wealthy. Greater

property interests must be held in due balance with the smaller, for

if unchecked the strong will drive on to ruthless exploitation of the

weak, and society will be endangered from the top as in a democracy it

is endangered from the bottom. It was this desire for a mean between

oligarchy or monarchy on the one hand, and democracy on the other, that

determined his choice of a republican form of government.

The difficult problem of property-power in the state, Adams was

convinced, could be solved justly and permanently only by a judicious

system of balanced interests. Subjected, as every government must be,

to a persistent stress of rival interests, it must be constructed with

calculated nicety, or the structure would fall of its own weight;

and the sole principle, he believed, is that of the Gothic arch--the

principle of thrust and counter-thrust. Provide in such manner that the

selfishness of one group in society shall be neutralized by the counter

selfishness of other groups, let the buttress support the arch at its

weakest point, and upon such an equilibrium of counterforces great

vaults and noble towers may be erected. It is the apotheosis of the

system of checks and balances.

It is agreed that “the end of all government is the good and ease

of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their rights, without

oppression”; but it must be remembered, that the rich are _people_

as well as the poor; that they have rights as well as others; that

they have as clear and as sacred a right to their large property

as others have to theirs which is smaller; that oppression to them

is as possible and as wicked as to others. The rich, therefore,

ought to have an effectual barrier in the constitution against

being robbed, plundered, and murdered, as well as the poor; and

this can never be without an independent senate. The poor should

have a bulwark against the same dangers and oppressions; and this

can never be without a house of representatives of the people. But

neither the rich nor the poor can be defended by their respective

guardians in the constitution, without an executive power, vested

with a negative, equal to either, to hold the balance even between

them, and decide when they cannot agree.[337]

Such in brief was the master principle of that system of mixed

government which John Adams advocated so persistently in the teeth

of the popular demand for a simpler, more responsive form. It based

itself frankly upon the dogma of the class struggle; it provided each

class--as he recognized them in his simple social analysis--with a

legislative arm with which to defend itself; and it set as arbiter

between them an executive, carefully selected, who was supposed to

represent that abstract _tertium quid_, the public. The keynote is

struck in a line from Pope set on the title-page of the _Defence_--“All

Nature’s difference keeps all Nature’s peace.” That Adams greatly

admired his handiwork is beyond doubt; that he was intellectually

honest with himself is very likely true; but that there is a note of

disingenuousness, a failure to take into account his pronounced bias

towards property interest, is certain. There was ample ground for the

popular dislike of his theory. This is not the place to enter upon an

examination of the system of checks and balances, nor to insist that

any such system becomes in practice an impossibility. It is more to

the point to remark upon certain fallacies in his theory which Adams

himself must have seen if his mind had been quite free from bias.

Adams’s intelligent analysis of social forces should have saved him

from the major fallacy of the doctrine of checks and balances. In

imposing the doctrine of a separation of powers upon the doctrine of

property power, he effectively denied the validity of the latter.

Assuming for the sake of the argument that the Senate will represent

property, what reason justified the assumption that the House would

represent the small men, or that the President would speak for the

whole? If property is sovereign, as Adams maintained--“Harrington

has shown that power always follows property. This I believe to be

as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are

equal, is in mechanics”[338]--will it not rule the House equally with

the Senate? above all, will it not control so important an officer as

the President? The theory that the President represents an abstract

public is a disingenuous political fiction; in the light of Adams’s

theory of economic determinism it is a gross absurdity. Moreover, Adams

invalidated his entire system by refusing to provide the necessary

machinery by which the House could represent the small man. In denying

manhood suffrage, he eliminated the proletarian and the renter from

the political equation, and left them without political power; in his

definition the small man was the freeholder, the representative of

the middle class. The House, therefore, equally with the Senate, was

the mouthpiece of property interests; the former more likely to be

representative of land, the latter of capital.

Where did Adams get the major ideas of his political philosophy?[339]

An omnivorous reader, he gathered from many sources, and his memory was

a well-stocked storehouse of fact and theory. As a young man he was

disciple of Locke and the natural-rights school, but as he grew older

he abandoned the natural-rights theory. His interpretation of human

nature he took over from Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hume, discovering in

their psychology of self-interest and emulation--often mean but many

times admirable--a conception in harmony with the Calvinism of his

early training. He owed much to Bolingbroke, whom he read five times,

but to James Harrington, the Commonwealth intellectual, he turned with

a zest of discovery so great that he may not unjustly be called one

of Harrington’s disciples. From the _Oceana_ he drew so abundantly

that the most casual student of political theory must remark his

indebtedness. Many of the major doctrines of Adams, which by dint of

iteration have become associated with his name, were taken straight

out of Harrington: such as the doctrine of a natural aristocracy; the

economic basis of sovereignty, discovered in the close relation of

property to power; the necessity of effecting a balance between rival

interests, with the ideal state rendered static by a nice balance of

governmental machinery; the conception of government by laws and not

by men; and finally, the historical method of approach, the cautious

appeal to past experience. Since Harrington’s time many of these

ideas had been restated: the defense of property rights by Locke; the

principle of the separation of powers and the historical method by

Montesquieu; the psychology of emulation by Hume and Robert Wallace,

the latter of whom is another Adams in his thesis, “Lust of power

sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich.” But in spite

of these later reinterpretations and his own additions, John Adams

remained essentially a seventeenth-century republican, preferring with

Milton the rule of the aristocracy to that of plebeians, and hating

all Jacobin radicalisms as the spawn of a dangerous romanticism that

disregarded the plain teachings of history and the admonitions of

common sense.

Though Adams was fiercely assailed as an advocate of class government,

he was far less hostile to agrarianism than was Hamilton. He was no

believer in unchecked government by wealth. His honest realism taught

him the sophistry of Hamilton’s assumption that gentlemen of property

are equally gentlemen of principle, and that wealth voluntarily

abdicates selfish interest. He feared the aggressions of the rich as

much as the turbulence of the poor. The bulk of his property was in

land, and his sympathies were enlisted on the side of a law-abiding

agrarianism, rather than on the side of a speculative capitalism.[340]

He would put down vigorously all such leveling as was implied in

Shays’s program, and the repudiations of Rhode Island; but he would not

permit the powerful to exploit the poor through the instrumentality

of government. This may explain in part his hostility to Hamilton and

his partial sympathy with Jefferson. He stood between the two rival

economies, arguing for a system of government that should be neither

agrarian nor capitalistic, but should maintain a static mean; and

in consequence he pleased nobody. His four years in the presidency

disrupted the Federalist party, and prepared the way for the triumph

of Jefferson. Though tactless and blundering in dealing with trimming

politicians, he was an honest and courageous man, and his many sterling

qualities merit a larger recognition than has been accorded them by a

grudging posterity. In spite of his dogmatisms and inconsistencies he

remains the most notable political thinker--with the possible exception

of John C. Calhoun--among American statesmen.

Footnotes

[313] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 51.

[314] _Ibid._, p. 298.

[315] Brief of speech submitting his plan of Constitution, in _Works_,

Vol. II, p. 415.

[316] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. V, p. 244.

[317] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 422.

[318] _Works of Jefferson_, Ford edition, Vol. I, p. 165.

[319] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 257.

[320] _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 207-208.

[321] “Autobiography,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 310.

[322] R. G. Adams, _Political Ideas of the American Revolution_,

Trinity College Press, 1922, pp. 92-93.

[323] _Gazette of the United States_, March, 1790; quoted in Forman,

“The Political Activities of Philip Freneau,” in _Johns Hopkins Studies

in History and Political Science_, XX, Nos. 9-10.

[324] _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 272, note.

[325] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 408.

[326] See “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, pp.

9, 57, 97.

[327] Letter to John Taylor, in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 516.

[328] _Ibid._, pp. 508-509.

[329] _Ibid._, p. 508.

[330] “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, pp.

124-125.

[331] _Ibid._, p. 64.

[332] “Letter to John Taylor,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 516.

[333] _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 211.

[334] See “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” and in particular Vol.

IV of _Works_.

[335] “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 9.

[336] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 295.

[337] “A Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 65.

[338] _Works_, Vol. IX, p. 376.

[339] For a detailed examination of the sources of his philosophy, see

the excellent discussion in C. M. Walsh, _The Political Science of John

Adams_, Chapters XV, XVI.

[340] See Beard, _The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p.

317.

Part Two: Political Democracy Gets Under Way • 1787-1800

Chapter I • The Impact of the French Revolution

The dramatic impact of the French Revolution upon a situation which

for months had been overwrought entailed disturbing consequences.

Within a week after the setting up of the new government there began

that long series of events in France which carried far and gave birth

to extraordinary hopes and fears; and throughout the remaining years

of the century the French movement exercised a determining influence

upon American parties and issues. In the words of Colonel Higginson, it

“drew a red-hot ploughshare through the history of America as well as

through that of France. It not merely divided parties, but molded them;

gave them their demarcations, their watchwords and their bitterness.

The home issues were for a time subordinate, collateral; the real party

lines were established on the other side of the Atlantic.”[341] The

stirring of political passions afresh resulted in greatly clarifying

political philosophies, and in rendering more exact, political

alignments that before had been vague and inchoate.

The creative influence of the French Revolution upon the western world

resulted from the enormous impetus which it gave to the movement to

democratize American life and institutions. In no other country to

which the sparks of revolution drifted was there such quantity of

combustible material ready for the torch; and in setting afire this

native material the French upheaval put a stop to the aristocratic

reaction which had carried everything before it during the previous

decade. It spread widely the spirit of leveling, and destroyed the

last hope of the “monarchy men.” But it did more--it gave a wide

and popular currency to the ideal of democracy. Before the French

Revolution the American mind had been curiously sensitive over the term

democrat; even Samuel Adams had been driven by expediency to reject

the word, and, amongst the radicals, few had the boldness to avow

themselves democrats. By common consent the term had been covered with

opprobrium; democracy was no other than a _bellua multorum capitum_,

the hydra-headed monster of earlier Tories, licentious, irreligious,

the very spawn of anarchy. But now the old conceptions were rapidly

swept away, and democracy was accepted by liberals as the ultimate form

of political organization, to which the American experiment was to be

dedicated.

In thus imparting social idealism to political speculation, the

Revolution not only elevated the democratic ideal, but it provided a

body of philosophy, the lack of which had so seriously handicapped

the democrats during the great debate. And this new philosophy gained

extraordinarily wide currency in America under the stimulus of

revolutionary enthusiasm. It made direct appeal to the vast majority

who still remained among the political disinherited; it aroused

them to political consciousness and intensified the class alignment

that followed. The country divided sharply between left and right,

and political discussion became more intense as the French movement

developed. The English declaration of war upon France produced a crisis

in America, and sharpened the party cleavage. The Federalists went

with Great Britain and turned fiercely upon the democratic movement,

assailing it with increasing venom. The democrats, on the other

hand, became French partisans, and denounced all aristocrats with

true republican fervor, becoming more radical as French Jacobinism

developed. Never before had political passion risen to such heights in

America, not even during the early days of the American Revolution;

and never before had political ideas taken such hold upon the common

people. Out of this increasing ferment emerged certain consequences of

vast significance to the democratic movement: not only was an effective

barrier erected against the further spread of aristocratic Federalism,

but certain of its most characteristic doctrines disintegrated and

disappeared. The current dogma of faction gave way to a more democratic

interpretation of the majority will; the doctrine of the ethical

absolute--the _vox justiciae, vox dei_--quietly yielded to the more

practical conception of expediency; and the lately resurrected ideal of

an augmented state received a temporary check, the majority preferring

to intrust power to local bodies rather than to a central authority.

At the beginning the sympathy of America as a whole went heartily

with the revolutionary movement in France. The adherence of Lafayette

justified the cause to the most conservative. But with the advent of

the Girondists to power a division in American sentiment appeared:

Hamilton, John Adams, and other extreme Federalists drew back in

disapproval; and with the rise of the Jacobins, party cleavage

became sharp and bitter. All over America the liberals organized

democratic clubs, instituted committees of correspondence, and actively

forwarded the new leveling principles. The attack on ceremonial and

titles of address in Congress, of which Maclay has left record in

his _Journal_, was only a skirmish in the general war levied upon

social distinctions.[342] It was to these democratic societies that

Citizen Genêt made appeal; they rallied about him, toasted the French

principles, and assured him of the warm support of the American people.

The recall of Genêt was a blow to the American Jacobins, and they

retaliated by direct appeals to the people to repudiate the act of the

administration. Stung by their criticism of his policy of neutrality,

Washington denounced them as “certain self-created societies” that

offensively “assumed the tone of condemnation” of governmental

policies; and went so far as to imply that such criticism was

seditious. It was ill-advised for it was like a torch to dry leaves.

The Federalists fell upon the democrats with gusto. They denounced the

infidel French mobocracy and its American offspring. They declaimed

against “secret organizations,” imputing to them every evil known to

Satan: the democratic clubs were called “demoniacal clubs,” “nurseries

of sedition,” “hotbeds of atheism,” “spawn of faction”; and common

decency required that they be put down with a strong hand. In short the

most eminent Federalists joined heartily in the silly work of turning

the country into a bedlam.

A characteristic _odium theologicum_ quickly gathered about the

movement and extended to the whole democratic philosophy. Well-meaning

but ignorant gentlemen saw in Jacobinism only atheism and immorality.

John Adams professed not to know “what to make of a republic of

thirty million atheists,” and he attributed the unhappy result to the

“encyclopedists and economists, Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire

and Rousseau,” with their mad doctrines of the “equality of persons

and property.” But the more violently such men protested, the more

insidiously “the infidel and irreligious spirit” spread through the

land. It found its way into such strongholds of orthodoxy as Harvard

College, to the scandal of the respectable; and as a counterblast to

Paine’s _Age of Reason_, a copy of Watson’s _Apology for the Bible_

was presented to every Harvard undergraduate, with what results in

godliness no record remains to tell. On both sides there was more

heat than light, more passion than reason, and in consequence such a

tremendous hue and cry was worked up that the noise carried to the

farthest outposts of settlement, and brought home to the most sluggish

some realization of the significance of the world-wide movement of

democracy then under way, and left few quite indifferent to the import

of the tricolor cockade. It was the first great popularization of

democratic ideals in America and when the hubbub finally subsided it

was apparent to all that democracy had made a definite and stable

advance, from which it must move forward to still other vantage points.

Only a few unregenerate aristocrats shared with Gouverneur Morris his

reasons for joy at the final overthrow of Napoleon: “’Tis done, the

long agony is over. The Bourbons are restored. France reposes in the

arms of her legitimate prince”; or who agreed with Robert Treat Paine

in calling the democratic movement of the nineties “the melancholy

record of our national degradation.” The Federalists still hated

Jefferson and his “revolution of 1800,” but a triumphant agrarianism

had broken them and their power for the time being.

So tremendous a movement naturally developed its literature of

propaganda in America as elsewhere. In the main this was little more

than an echo of the old-world debate, and, in particular, of the

controversy between Burke and Paine which deeply stirred the entire

English reading-public. Among the innumerable pamphlets, four works

may be regarded as representative: Paine’s _Rights of Man_, Barlow’s

_Advice to the Privileged Orders_, John Adams’s _Discourses on Davila_,

and John Quincy Adams’s _Publicola_; and of these we need here concern

ourselves only with _The Rights of Man_ and _Publicola_, which clearly

reveal the divergent political philosophies of the two parties. The

chief point of difference is the familiar issue, so acrimoniously dealt

with during the debate over the Constitution, the question of minority

rights as opposed to the majority will. Paine had made wide appeal

with his argument of social expediency against Burke’s doctrine of

pre-contract. His celebrated dictum, “That which a whole nation chuses

to do, it has a right to do,” if granted, must destroy the reasoning

not of Burke alone, but of American Federalism, for it rested on an

interpretation of sovereignty that was vital to the question. To Paine

sovereignty was necessarily inherent in the present majority will; to

assume that it rested elsewhere, whether in crown or judiciary or past

generations, was to deny the fundamental tenet of democracy. There can

be no trusteeship superior to the sovereign people, he asserted--no

constitution beyond their rightful power to alter or destroy.

It was against this doctrine of the present sovereignty of the

majority will that eleven articles signed _Publicola_, and appearing

in the _Columbian Centinel_ of Boston from June 8 to July 27, 1791,

were directed. They were from the pen of John Quincy Adams, then in

his early twenties and lately admitted to practice at the Boston

bar. Written with considerable skill, they were at once accepted as

the most effective reply offered to Paine’s argument; but they have

lost their appeal today and seem rather slight and tenuous essays in

Federalistic legalism. The outstanding note is concern for minority

rights. To permit the majority will to function unchecked seemed to

this young lawyer to open wide the door to tyranny. It is justified by

no political philosophy, he argued, certainly not by the doctrine of

natural rights. If all men are endowed by their creator with certain

inalienable rights, it follows that such rights must suffer abridgment

from no power, whether monarchical or democratic. Power may override

those rights temporarily, but power and rights are not synonymous

terms. The gist of Adams’s argument is thus set down:

This principle, that a whole nation has a right to do whatever it

pleases, cannot in any sense whatever be admitted as true. The

eternal and immutable laws of justice and of morality are paramount

to all human legislation. The violation of those laws is certainly

within the power, but it is not among the rights of nations. The

power of a nation is the collected power of all the individuals

which compose it.... If, therefore, a majority ... are bound by no

law human or divine, and have no other rule but their sovereign

will and pleasure to direct them, what possible security can any

citizen of the nation have for the protection of his unalienable

rights? The principles of liberty must still be the sport of

arbitrary power, and the hideous form of despotism must lay aside

the diadem and the scepter, only to assume the party-colored

garments of democracy.[343]

Concerning the repository of the “eternal and immutable laws of justice

and morality,” which are paramount to all human legislation, Adams

is as vague as other Federalists; but he seems to imply that it is

the body of English Common law, and that abstract justice is somehow

interwoven with the British constitution. In other words, his argument

conducts straight to the familiar doctrine of _vox justiciae, vox

dei_, with its implied sovereignty of the judiciary. In this, with

other thinkers of the abstract justice school, Adams was upholding

the principle of judicial trusteeship in opposition to the democratic

principle of the majority will. The distinction reveals exactly the

different positions of the two parties: the democrats accepted the

principle of utilitarian expediency; the Federalists espoused the

doctrine of the ethical absolute as the final law. To a generation

still strict in religious professions, the doctrine of the ethical

absolute made strong appeal; but the democrats attacked it so sharply

that it survived only by skillfully metamorphosing itself into judicial

sanctions.

The final outcome of the long acrimonious discussion of fundamental

principles was a curious reversal of positions: whereas the democrats

were charged with being political and social romantics, appealing to

a false psychology and following abstract theory, they were in fact

idealists who pointed to the sordid facts of economic and social

reality, in justification of new programs. No change could make

things worse. The Federalists, on the other hand, finding the appeal

to realism making against them, and fearful of the majority that was

discontented with the _status quo_, took their stand upon abstract

principle that was cousin german to a rigid legalism. It was a

significant impasse to which they were brought by the exigencies of the

political struggle.

Footnotes

[341] Quoted in Hazen, “Contemporary American Opinion of the French

Revolution,” in _Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and

Political Science_, Extra Vol. XVI. The material in this excellent

study has been used freely in the present chapter.

[342] For an amusing account see Hazen, _ibid._, pp. 209-219.

[343] _The Writings of John Quincy Adams_, edited by W. C. Ford, Vol.

I, pp. 70-71.

Chapter II • Political Thinkers • The French Group

The change which came over political thought in America in consequence

of the rise of French Jacobin philosophy is not inadequately revealed

in the writings of two men, quite dissimilar in antecedents and

training, but alike in fundamental purpose--Thomas Paine and Thomas

Jefferson. Both were speculative thinkers, profoundly in sympathy with

French revolutionary ideals: but the former was detached from local

patriotisms and national interests, a delegate at large in the cause

of human rights, concerned with spreading the gospel of freedom in

all lands; the latter remained wholly American, and while a keenly

interested spectator of the French upheaval, he was primarily concerned

to discover principles that would apply to native conditions and

further the cause of American democracy. Paine therefore became the

popular disseminator of the philosophy of republicanism, and Jefferson,

the practical statesman embodying it in political programs. Warm

friends, their influence became closely interwoven during the years

when agrarian democracy was gathering its strength to strike down the

rule of Federalism.

I • Tom Paine • Republican Pamphleteer

No more striking figure emerges from the times than the figure of the

Thetford Quaker. English in birth and rearing, in middle life Paine

came to embody the republican spirit of the American revolution;

and that spirit he made it his after business to carry overseas and

spread among the discontented of all lands. He was the first modern

internationalist, at home wherever rights were to be won or wrongs

corrected. “My country is the world,” he asserted proudly, “to do good,

my religion.” Throughout his later life he was a fearless skirmisher on

the outposts of democracy--another “Free born John” Lilburne, seeking

to complete the great work begun and thwarted in an earlier century;

and his career remains a stirring record of a time when revolution

threatened to sweep away the power and privilege of all kings and

aristocracies. Naturally his zeal cost him dear in reputation. The

passions of all who feared the loss of sinecures gathered about his

head, and he became the victim of an _odium theologicum et politicum_,

without parallel in our history. The Tories hunted him in packs,

and their execration and vituperation outran all decency. In London

clubs it became the fashion for gentlemen to wear TP nails in their

boot-heels to witness how they trampled on his base principles. He

was proscribed and banished, and his books burnt by the hangman. He

was regarded as worse than a common felon and outlaw, because more

dangerous. In America gentlemen echoed the common detestation--to be a

Paine-hater was a badge of respectability. “The filthy Tom Paine,” John

Adams called him, and the phrase stuck like a burr to his reputation.

But “reason, like time,” as Paine remarked “will make its own way,” and

the years are bringing a larger measure of justice to him.

Like Hamilton, Paine was an alien, but endowed with a heritage quite

unlike that of the brilliant boy from the West Indies. When he landed

in Philadelphia in the second week in December, 1774,[344] he was

in his thirty-seventh year, and had seemingly made shipwreck of his

life. He had been schooled in misfortune and was marked as a social

inefficient. A broken staymaker and tobacconist, he had twice been

removed from the office of petty exciseman for what today would be

called unionizing activity. He had separated from his wife, and his

mean and petty environment seemed to offer no hope of a decent living.

One stroke of good fortune had come to him, when as a delegate from

his union on some business with Parliament, he made the acquaintance

of Franklin, who was taken with “those wonderful eyes of his,” and

advised America as a likely place for getting on. So provided with

little more than Franklin’s letter of introduction, he set sail for new

worlds, cherishing the unmilitant plan of setting up in Philadelphia

a seminary of polite learning for young ladies. But the times proved

unpropitious for such a venture. He found himself in a world hesitating

fearfully on the brink of revolution, the electric atmosphere of which

he found strangely congenial. He at once threw himself whole-heartedly

into the colonial dispute, quickly seized the main points, mastered

the arguments, and thirteen months after his arrival published _Common

Sense_, a pamphlet that was to spread his name and fame throughout

America.

The amazing influence of _Common Sense_ on a public opinion long

befogged by legal quibble flowed from its direct and skillful appeal to

material interests. For the first time in a tedious, inconsequential

debate, it was openly asserted that governmental policies rest on

economic foundations; that the question of American independence was

only a question of expediency, and must be determined in the light of

economic advantage. Government is no more than a utility, and that

policy which was most likely to secure freedom and security “with the

least expense and greatest benefit,” must be preferred. The point at

issue before the American people, therefore, was whether a more useful

arrangement would result from continuing the old connection with

England, or from setting up for themselves; and it must be decided,

not in the court room or council chambers, but in the countinghouse

and market place, in the field and shop, wherever plain Americans

were making a living. Let the common people consult their own needs,

and determine the case without regard to legal or constitutional

precedents. It was a simple matter to be judged in the light of common

sense and their particular interests.

To further clear thinking on this fundamental matter Paine commented

on the economic consequences to America of the English connection.

Throughout colonial history, he asserted with some disregard to

fact, dependence had resulted in disadvantage to America; England

had systematically exploited the colonies and hampered development.

Whatever prosperity had been won heretofore, had been won in spite of

English hostility and interference; the peculiar economic position of

the colonies had proved their best reliance in the past, and would

prove still more advantageous in the future, if America were free

from jealous, paternal restrictions. What reason was there to expect

generous treatment from a power that had never shown generosity in past

dealings? How skillful was the appeal to colonial self-interest is

revealed in such passages as these:

We are already greater than the King wishes us to be, and will he

not hereafter endeavour to make us less? To bring the matter to one

point, Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper

power to govern us? Whoever says _No_, to this question, is an

Independent, for independency means no more than this, whether we

shall make our own laws, or, whether the King, the greatest enemy

this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us _there shall be no

laws but such as I like_.

America would have flourished as much, and probably much more,

had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by

which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and

will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.

As Europe is our market for trade we ought to form no partial

connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America

to steer clear of European contentions, which she never can do

while by her dependence on Britain she is made the makeweight in

the scale of British politics.

Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our

imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will.... ’Tis as

great folly to pay a Bunker-hill price for law as for land.

But Paine well knew that self-interest may be so clouded by prejudice

as not to see the way its nose is pointing. Though the colonial

talked of his grievances, he remained colonial in psychology, held

in unconscious subjection to English traditions. He was in the

clutch of outworn loyalties--loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the

British constitution; and to this difficult problem Paine addressed

himself with great skill. To a republican, as Paine seems to have

been from his landing in America, the odium which George III had

incurred was a heaven-sent opportunity. In order to strike at the

monarchical principle, it was only necessary to point out that the

folly of the King was the best commentary upon the foolishness of

hereditary monarchy. The boldness and audacity of Paine’s attack

on the king-principle must have added greatly to the popularity of

_Common Sense_ along the frontier. It was the first clear, far-carrying

appeal for republicanism addressed to American ears. How successful

it was, how ruthlessly it stripped away the divinity that doth hedge

a king, laying bare the stupidity of the king-cult, is suggested by

the remarkable change in the American attitude towards monarchy that

a few months brought about. After the appearance of _Common Sense_,

middle and lower class Americans shed their colonial loyalties like a

last year’s garment, and thenceforth they regarded the pretentions of

kings as little better than flummery. King George’s disgraced exciseman

had his revenge; he had thrust his royal master out of the colonial

affection and destroyed the monarchical principle in America.