A more difficult task remained, that of instituting “an inquiry into

the _constitutional errors_ of the English form of government,” in

order to prove what gains would result if America took herself out of

the English system. Here Paine faced, single-handed, a solid phalanx

of lawyers. He was the first pamphleteer to question the excellence of

a constitution that was proclaimed by American Tories as the wonder of

the world and the envy of other nations. In the acrimonious disputes

between 1765 and 1775, this was the single point on which all professed

to agree. A vast deal of laudation had been uttered; innumerable legal

pamphlets had been written; and no colonial had had the temerity to

question the adequacy of the British constitution to colonial needs.

And now came this republican, with penetrating comment on its origin

and working, to disturb the common complacency by pointing out how ill

fitted it was to answer the needs of America. It was a telling attack,

made with skill and shrewd insight; and it had a great part in arousing

a bitter antagonism to the English system in the minds of the American

yeomanry.

Paine was not a constitutional historian, but he had a keen eye for

realities. The fundamental fallacy of the English system, he asserted,

lay in the so-called “mixt aristocracy,” which was presumed to gather

the wisdom of the realm in council with the king, but which was no

more than a convenient arrangement for dividing the spoils. The House

of Commons had grown out of the struggles of feudal barons against

the king. It presumed to speak for the common people, but the rights

of the people were thus recognized only to be thwarted by the old

tyrannies. The “Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons,

on whose virtue depends the freedom of England,” were held in check by

the “remains of aristocratical tyranny in the person of the Peers,”

and further restrained by the “remains of Monarchical tyranny in the

person of the King.” From the play of these elements arose the system

of checks and balances which placed control in the hands of landed

property. It was based on the assumption that “the King is not to

be trusted without being looked after,” and that “the Commons, by

being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of

confidence than the Crown.” But in spite of the supposed balance “the

provision is unequal to the task,” for the Crown, as the dispenser of

places and pensions, is more than a match for Commons in the game of

politics.

The will of the king; is as much the law of the land in Britain

as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding

directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the

formidable shape of an act of parliament. For the fate of Charles

the First hath only made kings more subtle--not more just.

This was but the beginning of a long assault on the British

constitution which was to engage him much in after life. _Common Sense_

was a pronouncement of the new philosophy of republicanism that was

taking firm hold of the American mind, and which the French Revolution

was to spread so widely. It was a notable contribution, of which Paine

to the end of his life was justly proud.

As he came to America almost casually, with no conscious revolutionary

intent, so in the critical year 1787 he returned to Europe with the

peaceful intention of perfecting an iron bridge on which he was

engaged. True to his Quaker breeding he was more interested in the

arts of peace than of war, but again circumstance was too much for

him. Before he had completed his bridge, delegates from France came to

invite him to a seat in the National Assembly. A new day was rising

there; the constitution of a freer order was being constructed, and so

competent a workman could not be spared. In the thick of that eager

world of constitution-making, Paine finally clarified his political

philosophy and gave it wide currency. He became the pamphleteer of

revolution to the English-speaking world, to Philadelphia and New York

equally with London. Yet he was never an extremist; he was a Girondist

rather than a Jacobin, and when the Girondists were overthrown and a

dictatorship set up, he remained a constitutionalist. By the Jacobin

radicals he came to be regarded as a reactionary from his willingness

to retain monarchy in France; but Paine was a practical Englishman with

a shrewd judgment of what was politically possible, and he refused to

outrun reasonable expectations of accomplishment.

It was the simplicity and clarity of his political philosophy that

made its appeal so widely effective. His thinking turned on the two

fundamental questions, the source of government and the purpose for

which it is instituted among men; and the major premise on which

he reared his logic was the thesis that sovereignty inheres in the

majority will. At the basis of his philosophy was the natural-rights

theory, but given a fresh significance and vitality by the assertion

of the doctrine of continuous reaffirmation of the social compact.

Instead of deriving the sovereign state from a fictitious compact,

presumably entered into in a remote past, he derived it--as Roger

Williams had done a century and half before--from a continuous compact

reaffirmed by each generation. With the birth of each individual appear

fresh rights which no pre-contract can justly circumscribe or nullify;

ancestral arrangements are valid only to the extent that they are

acceptable to the living. Hence it follows, first, that the general

body of the people may at any time remake the fundamental law, and

bring it into accord with present desire; and second, that there can be

no law superior to this popular will expressed through the majority.

His most celebrated dictum--“That which a nation chuses to do it has a

right to do”--a dictum that aroused a bitterer hostility than any other

of his pronouncements--was the logical expression of his republicanism

that differentiated between the sovereign people and their agency, the

government; and this in turn he justified by a celebrated saying out

of Swift, “Government is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of

many heads.” Like Jefferson, he would not have government kept from the

people, the agent domineer over the principal.

The purpose of government Paine discovered in the Benthamite principle

of expediency. If a diffused well-being results from the policies

of government, such government is justified; but if the tax-levies

are wasted in unsocial ways, if unjust impositions are levied, if

exploitation or tyranny results, such government is not justified.

The agent has cheated the principal, and must be called to account.

The final test of every government Paine found in its concern for

the “_res publica_, the public affairs, or the public good”; any

government that “does not make the _res publica_ its whole and sole

object, is not a good government.” In its most obvious phase, concern

for the _res publica_ means concern for the national economy, and this

in turn conditions the taxes that shall be levied and the ends for

which they shall be spent--whether upon the arts of peace or war. A

beneficent government has no need of standing armies and navies, or an

inquisitorial police; it is established in the hearts of the people

and rests securely on the common good will. It is the injustice of

government that creates armies to defend the earnings of injustice.

But every wise government will respect its limitations. As a child of

the eighteenth century, Paine hated the leviathan state as a monster

created by a minority to serve the ends of tyranny. The political

state he accepted as a present necessity, but he would not have its

prestige magnified and the temptation to tyranny increased by the cult

of nationalism. “Government is no farther necessary,” he believed,

“than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not

conveniently competent.” At best it is an artificial thing.

Formal government makes but a small part of civilized life; and

when even the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it

is a thing more in name and idea than in fact.... The more perfect

civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because

the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself....

All the great laws of society are laws of nature.[345]

The maturest elaboration of Paine’s political philosophy is found in

_The Rights of Man_. This extraordinary work, the most influential

English contribution to the revolutionary movement, was an examination

of the English constitution in the light of what Paine held were the

true source and ends of government. It is a brilliant reply to Burke,

who rested his interpretation of the English constitution on the

legal ground of the common law of contract. Following the Revolution

of 1688, Burke had argued, the English people through their legal

representatives, entered into a solemn contract, binding “themselves,

their heirs, and posterities forever,” to certain express terms; and

neither in law nor in equity were they, of whatever generation, free

to change those terms except by the consent of both parties to the

contract. This was an elaboration of the theory of government tacitly

held by the Old Whigs, which derived government from a perpetual civil

contract as opposed to the radical doctrine of a revocable social

contract; and in attacking it Paine allied himself with such thinkers

as Price, Priestley, Franklin and Rousseau.[346] He pointed out the

absurdity of carrying over the law of private property into the high

realm of political principle--to seek to impose the dead past upon the

living sovereignty. If sovereignty inhered in the English people in

1688, it must inhere in the English people in 1793, unless it had been

violently wrested from them; no parchment terms of another age can bind

that sovereignty other than voluntarily. Over against Burke’s theory of

a single, static contract, Paine set the doctrine of the reaffirmation

of natural rights. Any generation--as the generation of 1688--is

competent to deal with its affairs as it sees fit, but it cannot barter

away the rights of those unborn; such a contract on the face of it is

null and void.

Every age and generation must be free to act for itself _in

all cases_ as the ages and generations which preceded it. The

vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most

ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.... Every generation is,

and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions

require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be

accommodated.[347]

Burke’s defense fares even worse when the argument is examined in the

light of expediency. Illogical as the English system must appear to the

political philosopher, can it plead the justification that it works;

that it does well the things it is paid to do; that it makes the _res

publica_ its main concern? The reply to such questions, Paine believed,

should be sought in the condition of the national economy; more

particularly by an examination of the account-books of the exchequer.

The English people paid annually seventeen millions sterling for the

maintenance of government, and what did they get in return? Nine

millions of the total went to pay interest on old wars, which in the

budget was known as the funded debt; of the remaining eight millions

the larger part was spent in new wars and sinecure pensions; whereas

the real needs of England--the true _res publica_--were shamelessly

neglected. The English people got little for their money except new

debts to justify new taxes. The poor were even taxed for the benefit

of the great. Thus my Lord Onslow, who was particularly zealous in

the business of proscribing Paine as “the common enemy of us all,”

drew four thousand pounds from the royal chest in sinecures, which

made him “the principal pauper of the neighbourhood, and occasioning a

greater expense than the poor, the aged, and the infirm, for ten miles

around.”[348] Government on the hereditary principle of Burke did not

appear to advantage in the light of such facts.

The injustice of aristocratic government, Paine believed, was fast

bringing it to its “rotting time” in England. “The opinions of men with

respect to government are changing fast in all countries; the enormous

expense of governments has provoked the people to think, by making

them feel.” Englishmen must soon throw aside the outworn monarchical

system and set up a republic. Economics was on the side of revolution.

The great work of revising fundamental laws was the pressing business

of the time. If this could be done peacefully, by means of a national

convention, it were well; if not, it would come by means of an uprising

of the people. It was no lawyer’s business to be determined by the

law of private property, but a practical matter of determining the

real will of the nation and putting it into execution. The judgment of

the people must be recorded, and the judgment of the people could be

had only through an adequate system of representation based on free

publicity. “I do not believe that the people of England have ever

been fairly and candidly dealt by,” Paine declared. Henceforth they

must be taken into full confidence. There must be no more _arcana

imperii_--“Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like

those of individuals, are always their defects.”[349]

One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been,

that it has led to a discovery of the principles, and laid open the

imposition of governments. All the revolutions till then had worked

within the atmosphere of a court, and never on the grand floor of

a nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers.... In

all cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up

of mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from

the understanding of the nation the only thing that was beneficial

to know, namely, _That government is nothing more than a national

association acting on the principles of a society._[350]

For the follies of government the people pay the bill--it was this

elementary lesson in public economics that Paine sought to impress upon

the popular mind; and they would still be cheated and plundered by

gentlemen who prospered in cozening, until they took matters into their

own hands. He had no fear of popular government. He believed in the

essential fairness of men and their capacity to deal wisely with the

problems of society if the necessary information were set before them.

“As far as my experience in public life extends, I have ever observed

that the great mass of people are always just, both in their intentions

and their object; but the true method of attaining such purpose does

not always appear at once,”[351] he argued before the French Assembly;

and the words express his settled conviction. Those who fear the

people usually have very good reasons. Heretofore politics had been

jealously guarded from free discussion; but now that the common people

were coming to understand that government is justified only by its

measure of service, the beginning of a new age was at hand.

The ripest product of Paine’s speculations on the relation of

government to the individual, is _Agrarian Justice_, a work too little

known to modern readers. It is a slender tract, written in the winter

of 1795-96, although not published till a year later; and it was an

answer to a sermon by Watson, Bishop of Llandaff,[352] entitled _The

Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor_. In this

remarkable essay, Paine advanced from political to social theory,

pushing his thought into the unexplored realm of economic justice. The

prime impulse of his speculation is found in the contrast between the

augmenting poverty of Europe and the ideal of equality; a contrast

which in France had lately produced a proletarian revolt under Babeuf,

and which in England was harshly aggravated by the brutal inclosure

movement of the last forty years of the eighteenth century. The

question which he considers lies at the heart of our social problem,

namely, whether civilization is competent to cure the disease of

poverty which everywhere it disseminates?

The question emerged naturally from the development of Paine’s

thinking. It was implied in his major principle of the _res publica_,

and the solution must lie in the problem of the relation of government

to social well-being. But in prescribing means to end, he parted

company from Babeuf.[353] The latter was a Communist who approached

the problem from the point of view of the proletarian who had been

disappointed of the promised equality; whereas Paine, like Jefferson,

was essentially a Physiocratic agrarian. His long residence in America

had confirmed him in the belief that land monopoly was the root of

economic inequality; and his observations of the evictions then going

on in England, uprooting the peasants and sending them to industrial

centers to become wage-workers, strengthened his conviction. The land

problem must be solved if civilization were to be worth its cost, and

the technique of the solution, he believed, must be worked out by the

state. With his usual directness Paine went to the heart of the problem:

The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought

still to be, that the condition of every person born into the

world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be

worse than if he had been born before that period. But the fact

is, that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is

far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, or

had been born among the Indians of North-America at the present

day.[354]

It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am

pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as

it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should

be.[355]... The contrast of affluence and wretchedness ... is like

dead and living bodies chained together.[356]

It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of

civilization ... to make some provision for persons becoming poor

and wretched only at the time they become so. Would it not, even as

a matter of economy, be far better to adopt means to prevent their

becoming poor?[357]

The crux of the problem, Paine proceeds to point out, lies in the

principle of private property; whether property rights are sacredly

individual--as Locke had asserted--or are limited by social needs.

In reply to this searching question Paine laid down the principle of

social values, a theory curiously modern and profoundly suggestive,

which makes _Agrarian Justice_ read like a chapter out of _Progress

and Poverty_. The principle is so broad, as Paine states it, that it

applies equally to a capitalistic and an agrarian order.

Personal property is the _effect of society_; and it is as

impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without

the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally....

All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a

man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society;

and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of

civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society

from whence the whole came ... if we examine the case minutely it

will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in

many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that

produced it; and the consequence of which is, that the working hand

perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence. It is,

perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the

profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for

the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages

daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better

for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer to guard

it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason, that because he

might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take

it.[358]

It is the value of the improvement only, and not of the earth

itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore,

of cultivated land, owes to the community a _ground-rent_ ... for

the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the

fund proposed in this plan is to issue.[359]

Having thus pointed out an equitable source of social income--the

returning to society what society has created--Paine proposed to deal

with the problem of poverty by means of a ten per cent inheritance tax

to provide a fund for the endowment of the young and the pensioning

of the old. It was an early form of the state insurance idea. In his

own thinking Paine doubtless went much farther than this, but the

practical difficulty of separating the social moiety from the private

right inclined him to favor an inheritance tax as the simplest and best

plan; that it would lead to greater things as the social intelligence

quickened, he very likely believed. To bring men to realize that

society is responsible for poverty, and that its total eradication must

be regarded as the first object of civilization, was his prime purpose.

He was seeking to awaken the social conscience of his generation--a

generation sorely in need of idealism to offset its love of profits.

_Agrarian Justice_ was a contribution to the slowly developing

humanitarian sentiment, and it made appeal to minds already aroused by

the revolutionary movement. The republican clubs that were springing up

in England and America reflected the new social thought, and the most

radical became the most humanitarian. As early as 1791, in an address

signed by Horne Tooke, one of Paine’s English lieutenants, it was

declared:

We are oppressed with a heavy national debt, a burthen of taxes, an

expensive administration of government, beyond those of any people

in the world. We have also a very numerous poor; and we hold that

the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy,

and poverty, is far superior to that of supplying the invented

wants of courtly extravagance, ambition, and intrigue.[360]

The more critically one follows the thought of Paine the more evident

it becomes that the master passion of his later years was concern for

a new social economy. The well-being of society became an engrossing

interest with him; and his zeal for political revolution was predicated

on the belief that popular control of the political state was a

necessary preliminary to a juster social economy. Nothing was to be

expected from the old aristocratic order. His main attack, therefore,

was directed against the monarchical system, but now and then he paused

to level a thrust at the rising system of capitalism. If he hated King

George and the Tories, he hated the younger Pitt and the imperialists

even more. Over against _Agrarian Justice_ should be set his pamphlet

entitled _The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance_,

written in 1796, a skillful attack upon the new funding system. Paine

could not foresee, of course, the enormous expansion of credit that was

to accompany the industrial revolution, but in his commentary on the

quantitative theory of money, and the social consequences of inflation,

he unconsciously foretold later conditions. War he regarded as the

great waster, the fruitful mother of social misery. With his Quaker

training he was dedicated to pacifism, and he spent his life warring

against war, and disease, and poverty, and injustice, and ignorance,

and unreason; but no other war would he sanction. For those futile wars

bred of the ambitions of courts and monarchs, and which for all their

cost in blood and money served no social purpose, he would substitute

arbitration. “War is the Pharo-table of governments, and nations the

dupes of the game,” he declared[361]--whereas arbitration is an appeal

to reason which alone should adjudicate and determine between nations.

It would be idle to attempt to trace to their sources the major ideas

of his philosophy. Probably Paine did not know where he got them. He

was not a student like John Adams, familiar with all the political

philosophers; rather he was an epitome of a world in revolution. He

absorbed ideas like a sponge. He was so wholly a child of his age that

the intellectual processes of the age were no other than his own. But

he was very much more than an echo; he possessed that rarest of gifts,

an original mind. He looked at the world through no eyes than his

own. There is a curious remark in an early pamphlet which admirably

expresses his method: “When precedents fail to assist us, we must

return to the first principles of things for information, and _think_,

as if we were the _first men_ that thought.”[362] It was his remarkable

ability to think from first principles that gave such freshness and

vigor to his pen. He drew largely from French thought, but at bottom he

remained English. If he was Gallic in his psychology of human nature

and his passionate humanitarianism, he was English in his practical

political sense and insistence on the economic sources of political

action. In his political theory he was curiously like Roger Williams.

A thoroughgoing idealist in aim, generous and unsparing in service

to humanity, he was a confirmed realist in the handling of facts. He

refused to be duped by imposing appearances or great reputations, but

spoke out unpleasant truths which gentlemen wished to keep hidden.

Clear and direct in expression, he seasoned his writings with homely

figures and a frequent audacity of phrase that made wide appeal.

He was probably the greatest pamphleteer that the English race has

produced-and one of its great idealists.

During his residence abroad Paine habitually thought and spoke

of himself as an American. He conceived it to be his mission to

disseminate throughout Europe the beneficent principles of the

American Revolution; yet nowhere was he hated more virulently than

in America. To the animosity which his political principles excited

among Federalists was added the detestation of the orthodox for the

deism of the _Age of Reason_. The ministers outdid the politicians in

virulent attack upon his reputation, until the generous Quaker, the

friend of humanity and citizen of the world, was shrunk and distorted

into “the infidel Tom Paine.” It was a strange reward for a life spent

in the service of mankind. Like all idealists he made the mistake of

underestimating the defensive strength of vested interests, and their

skill in arousing the mob prejudice. His thousands of followers among

the disfranchised poor could not protect his reputation against the

attacks of the rich and powerful. Although reason may “make its own

way,” it makes its way with wearisome slowness and at unreasonable

cost. How tremendous were the obstacles that liberalism confronted in

post-revolutionary America is revealed with sufficient clearness in the

odium visited upon our great republican pamphleteer.

II • Thomas Jefferson • Agrarian Democrat

The years following the great defeat were disastrous to the party of

agrarian democracy. Under the brilliant leadership of Hamilton the

Federalists went forward confidently, gaining daily a firmer grip

on the machinery of government, and establishing their principles

in far-reaching legislative enactments. Their appeal to the wealthy

classes, to those who made themselves audible above the clamor, was

electrical. Hamilton was the hero of the hour, and the effusive

approval that augmented with every added profit to the money brokers,

seemed to indicate that the country was enthusiastically behind the

Federalist policy. To what despondency the democrats were reduced is

revealed in Maclay’s _Journal_, with its caustic comment on political

measures and motives. But the tide was already at the turn. The ideas

let loose by the French Revolution were running swiftly through

America, awakening a militant spirit in the democracy. Antagonism to

the aristocratic arrogance of Federalism, and disgust at its coercive

measures, were mounting fast. If that inchoate discontent were

organized and directed by a skillful leader, it might prove strong

enough to thrust the Hamiltonian party from power. To that work Thomas

Jefferson devoted himself with immense tact and untiring patience. A

master of political strategy, he spun his webs far and wide, quietly

awaiting the time when the bumbling Federalist bees should range too

carelessly in search of their honey. Accepted at once as the leader of

agrarian America, he was to prove in the course of a long life the most

original and native of the political leaders of the time.

Despite the mass of comment that has gathered about Jefferson, the full

reach and significance of his political philosophy remains too little

understood. Uncritical praise and censure have obscured or distorted

his purpose, and allied his principles with narrow and temporary ends.

Detraction will not let him alone. The hostility of his enemies, as a

recent biographer has remarked, has frequently taken “the peculiar form

of editing his works or writing his life.”[363] For this distortion

there is, perhaps, more than usual excuse. Certainly Jefferson is the

most elusive of our great political leaders. Apparently inconsistent,

changing his program with the changing times, he seemed to his enemies

devoid of principle, a shallow demagogue who incited the mob in order

to dupe the people. One of the most bitterly hated and greatly loved

men in the day when love and hate were intense, he was the spokesman

of the new order at a time of transition from a dependent monarchical

state, to an independent republican state. Back of the figure of

Jefferson, with his aristocratic head set on a plebeian frame, was

the philosophy of a new age and a new people--an age and a people not

yet come to the consistency of maturity, but feeling a way through

experiment to solid achievement. Far more completely than any other

American of his generation he embodied the idealisms of the great

revolution--its faith in human nature, its economic individualism,

its conviction that here in America, through the instrumentality of

political democracy, the lot of the common man should somehow be made

better.

From the distinguished group of contemporary political thinkers

Jefferson emerges as the preëminent intellectual, widely read, familiar

with ideas, at home in the field of speculation, a critical observer

of men and manners. All his life he was a student, and his devotion to

his books, running often to fifteen hours a day, recalls the heroic

zeal of Puritan scholars. He was trained in the law, but he was too

much the intellectual, too curious about all sorts of things, to

remain a lawyer. For such a man the appeal of political speculation

was irresistible, and early in life he began a wide reading in the

political classics that far outweighed Coke and Blackstone in creative

influence on his mind. He was equally at home with the English

liberals of the seventeenth century and the French liberals of the

eighteenth; and if he came eventually to set the French school above

the English, it was because he found in the back-to-nature philosophy,

with its corollary of an agrarian economics and its emphasis on social

well-being, a philosophy more consonant with Virginian experience

and his own temperament than Locke’s philosophy of property. But

he was very far from being a narrow French partisan, as has been

often charged; rather he judged old-world theory in the light of its

applicability to existing American conditions, and restrained his

love of speculation by immediate practical considerations. The man of

affairs kept a watchful eye on the philosopher in his study.

In the major doctrines of his political philosophy Jefferson was

an amalgam of English and French liberalisms, supplemented by the

conscious influence of the American frontier. That fusion early took

place in his mind. The first bill that he introduced into the Virginia

Assembly, at the age of twenty-six, was a bill to permit slave-owners

to manumit their slaves; and his first published pamphlet, issued

in 1774,[364] rejected the legal reasoning of John Dickinson and

Daniel Dulaney--supporting the parliamentary right to impose external

taxation--and took its stand on the doctrine of natural right to

local self-government and freedom of trade. When two years later he

drafted the Declaration of Independence the fusion was complete. The

strong influence of French humanitarianism is revealed in the passage

on slavery that was stricken out on the floor of Congress, and more

significantly in the change in the familiar phrasing of the several

natural rights. Samuel Adams and other followers of Locke had been

content with the classical enumeration of life, liberty, and property;

but in Jefferson’s hands the English doctrine was given a revolutionary

shift. The substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property” marks

a complete break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that

Locke had bequeathed to the English middle class, and the substitution

of a broader sociological conception; and it was this substitution

that gave to the document the note of idealism which was to make its

appeal so perennially human and vital. The words were far more than

a political gesture to draw popular support; they were an embodiment

of Jefferson’s deepest convictions, and his total life thenceforward

was given over to the work of providing such political machinery for

America as should guarantee for all the enjoyment of those inalienable

rights. If the fact that he set the pursuit of happiness above

abstract property rights is to be taken as proof that Jefferson was an

impractical French theorist, the critic may take what comfort he can

from his deduction.

That Jefferson was an idealist was singularly fortunate for America;

there was need of idealism to leaven the materialistic realism of the

times. It was a critical period and he came at the turn of a long

running tide. He watched the beginnings of the political shift in

America from isolated colonial commonwealths to a unitary sovereign

state; and his wide reading and close observation had convinced him

that the impending change was fraught with momentous issues for the

common man. He had meditated much on the social results of the slow

oscillations in western civilization between social decentralization

and centralization, with their contrasting political and economic

structures; and he understood how the movement from simplicity to

complexity--from freedom to regimentation--creates a psychology and

an institutionalism that conducts straight to the leviathan state,

controlled by a ruling caste, serving the demands of exploitation,

heedless of the well-being of the regimented mass. This great lesson

in social drifts he brought home to America. There had been created

here the psychology and institutions of a decentralized society, with

a corresponding exaltation of the individual and the breakdown of

caste. In the broad spaces of America the old-world coercive state had

dwindled to a mere police arrangement for parochial duties; the free

citizen refused to be regimented; the several communities insisted

on managing their affairs by their own agents. Such was the natural

consequence of free economics; but with the turning of the tide would

not the drift towards centralization nullify the results of earlier

American experience and repeat here the unhappy history of European

peoples?

To the philosophic mind of Jefferson, such a question was not academic,

but urgent and vital. He had been bred in that older world, he believed

passionately in the excellence of its virtues, and his political and

social philosophy was determined by that experience. He sprang from a

society deep-rooted in an agrarian economy, and he wished to preserve

that society. Born on the Virginia frontier, he had never seen a hamlet

so large as twenty houses before his eighteenth year; his neighbors

and associates were capable and vigorous frontier democrats, who

managed the affairs of local government with the same homespun skill

that went to their farming. “It is not difficult,” remarks an acute

critic, “to see how the great principle of Jefferson’s life--absolute

faith in democracy--came to him. He was the product of the first West

in American history; he grew up with men who ruled their country well,

who fought the Indians valiantly.... Jefferson loved his backwoods

neighbors, and he, in turn, was loved by them.”[365] This early

conviction of the excellence of a freehold order was confirmed by later

experience; wide observation and much travel convinced him that no

other people was so favored by circumstance as the American, or so

vigorously self-reliant. That such well-being resulted from a plastic

economics, he regarded as self-evident; and from this economic freedom

came political freedom. In his European travels he saw everywhere

want and wretchedness dwelling in the shadow of the aristocratic

state, and he could not dissociate the two. Political tyranny was the

outward and visible sign of greater tyrannies that ran down to the very

roots of society; the leviathan state was the convenient instrument

through which those tyrannies took their heavy toll of the common

well-being. America was a land of free men; it was exploited neither

by an aristocracy nor a plutocracy. Surely there could be no greater

or nobler ambition for an American than to assist in preserving his

country from the misery that must attend a change from the present

happy condition of democratic industry, to the serfdom of the European

wage-taker and peasant.

To a mind imbued with such conceptions the appeal of the Physiocratic

theory of social economics would be irresistible. The ground was

prepared for the sowing of the seeds of the liberal French thought.

With its emphasis laid upon agriculture, its doctrine of the _produit

net_, its principle of _laissez faire_, and its social concern, the

Physiocratic theory accorded exactly with his familiar experience,

and it must have seemed to Jefferson that it was little other than a

deduction from the open facts of American life. He had read much in

the works of the Physiocratic group, and was intimately acquainted

with DuPont de Nemours; and the major principles of the school sank

deep into his mind and creatively determined his thinking, with the

result that Jeffersonian democracy as it spread through Virginia and

west along the frontier assumed a pronounced Physiocratic bias. The

sharp struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton must be reckoned, in

part at least, a conflict between the rival principles of Quesnay and

Adam Smith, between an agrarian and a capitalistic economy. Much as

Jefferson feared the ambitions of an aristocracy, he feared quite as

much the creation of a proletariat. As he looked into the future he saw

great cities rising to breed their Roman mobs, duped and exploited by

demagogues, the convenient tools of autocracy; and counting the cost

in social well-being, he set his face like flint against the rising

capitalism. A free yeomanry he regarded as the backbone of every great

people, the producers of the real wealth, the guardians of manly

independence; and the number of factory workers measured for him the

extent of social disease. It is this Physiocratic conception that

explains his bitter hostility to protective tariffs, national banks,

funding manipulations, the machinery of credit, and all the agencies of

capitalism which Hamilton was skillfully erecting in America. Not to

have hated such things Jefferson must first have emptied his mind of

the teachings of experience and the lessons of the social philosophers.

In the _Notes on Virginia_ there is a well-known passage that amplifies

his favorite thesis that a sound American economy was an agrarian

economy:

The political economists of Europe have established it as a

principle, that every State should endeavor to manufacture for

itself; and this principle, like many others, we transfer to

America.... But we have an immensity of land courting the industry

of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should

be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called

off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for

the other? Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of

God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his

peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the

focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise

might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in

the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation

has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not

looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the

husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties

and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and

venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools

for the designs of ambition.... Generally speaking the proportion

which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in

any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its

unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer

whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to

labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a

work-bench, or twirling a distaff ... for the general operations

of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better

to carry provisions and materials to work-men there, than bring

them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners

and principles.... The mobs of great cities add just so much to

the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the

human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve

a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon

eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.[366]

Such was his attitude in 1782, an attitude identical with Franklin’s.

Thirty-four years later he had modified his views of industrialism.

The bitter experience of the Napoleonic wars, with the hardships

and losses visited upon neutral shipping, had convinced him of the

need of domestic manufactures, and he was then deeply interested in

improved machinery, new methods, original ventures. “We must now place

the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist,” he conceded, or

remain in economic dependence. But how much further the country should

be industrialized, whether it “shall be proposed to go beyond our own

supply” to compete in foreign markets, was not yet clear to him; the

problem remained still to be determined whether “the _surplus_ labor”

would be “most beneficially employed in the culture of the earth, or

in the fabrications of art.”[367] In such commentary Jefferson failed

to measure the thrust of economic determinism that drives every people

to go through with the industrial revolution, once it is begun; but

if we recall the primary principle of his political philosophy, that

the “care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction,

is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” we may

perhaps judge what would have been his attitude towards a centralized

industrialism. He would have judged its desirability, not by the

balance sheet of corporate business, but by the social ledger. As a

social economist he could not think in terms of the economic man, nor

simplify human beings to labor commodity, nor reduce the social tie

to the cash nexus. It is inconceivable that he should have shared

Hamilton’s satisfaction at the contemplation of women and children--and

many of the latter “of tender age”--wasting away in the mills; he was

too social-minded for that, too much an idealist, too human in short.

Though necessity might force him away from a simple agrarian economy,

it does not follow that he would become partisan to a centralizing

industrialism, with control vested in banking credit.

It is a common charge that Jefferson was consumed with suspicion, and

it is set down against him as the mark of a mean and ungenerous nature.

That in later years he was suspicious of fair-spoken advocates and

plausible programs was as true of Jefferson as of Sam Adams; he had

learned like the Boston democrat the virtue of the saying, _felix qui

cautus_, and with so much at stake he would practice caution. He feared

many things, for he was acutely aware of the incapacity of the heedless

majority to defend itself against an able and instructed minority. As

a child of an aristocratic age he fell into the mistake of visualizing

that minority in the guise of a landed gentry, rather than in the

guise of plutocracy; but in his quick fear of a minority he had all

history as counselor. When he took his seat in Washington’s cabinet

his suspicions of the Hamiltonian program were quickly aroused. He

believed that a monarchy was aimed at, and if that proved unattainable,

then a highly centralized state designed to hold in check the

democratic tendencies. His line of reasoning may be summarized thus:

In consequence of the republican enthusiasm of the early years of the

Revolution, democratic reorganization of the several state governments

had been successfully achieved. Very great progress towards democracy

had been made. Certain legislative acts of agrarian assemblies were now

being turned against democracy, to invalidate it as a working system of

government. But if agrarian majorities had used their power to enact

laws beneficial to their interests, they were only applying a lesson

learned from long experience with aristocratic legislatures. Such acts

were no serious indictment of the democratic principle, and to make

partisan use of them to justify curtailing the powers of the majority,

was a betrayal of popular rights. And this, Jefferson believed, was

the deliberate purpose of the Federalist leaders. Unable to stem the

popular tide in the several commonwealths, the wealthy minority had

devised a plan to superimpose upon the sovereign commonwealths a

centralized federal government, so hedged about as to lie beyond the

reach of local majorities, and hence able to override and nullify the

democratic will. Once safely established, this federal government would

gather fresh powers into its hands, until there emerged a rigorous

machine, modeled after the British system, and as little regardful of

the common interests. If this were not the Federalist purpose, why all

the praise of the British system as the ripe product of experience,

exactly adapted to the political genius of the English race?

In the matter of appeal to past experience, which provided the staple

of Federalist argument, Jefferson discovered fresh grounds of fear.

The past he looked upon as evil, and the record of experience was a

tale of injustice and bitter wrong. He would not have America follow

the trodden paths, for whither they led he knew too well. He would

countenance no entangling alliances with old-world upper-class systems

of statecraft, for such systems would reproduce in America the evils

it should be the chief business of America to prevent. There must be

erected here no counterpart of the European state; there must be no

king, no aristocracy, no plutocracy; but a new democratic organization

of government, in which the welfare of the whole people should be the

sole concern.

When I left Congress in ’76 [he wrote as an old man] it was in the

persuasion that our whole code must be revised, adapted to our

republican form of government, and now that we had no negatives of

Councils, Governors and Kings to restrain us from doing right, that

it should be corrected in all its parts with a single eye to reason

and the good of those for whose government it was planned.[368]

Not past experience but present need should instruct America in

drawing the plans of a new system of government and a new code of

law. In analyzing the evils of European systems Jefferson came to

certain conclusions that dominated all his later thinking, and

that may be phrased thus: The political state tends inevitably to

self-aggrandizement, the logical outcome of which is a political

leviathan, too big and too complex for popular control. With sovereign

powers vested in the hands of governmental agents, those agents lie

under a constant temptation to corruption and tyranny, and in the end

they align the powers of the state on the side of the most ambitious

and capable. The greater the power of government, the ampler its

revenues, the more energetic its administration, the more dangerous

it may become to the rights of men; for where the prize is greatest,

men struggle most ruthlessly, and what prize could be greater than the

privilege of exploiting society in the name of the state? History knows

no objective more tempting to the will to power, than the control of

the absolute state. A government adequately socialized, intent solely

upon furthering the common well-being, Jefferson would have been

unanxious about. But such governments existed only in the dreams of

Sir Thomas More and the Utopians; he could discover none such either

in the past or present. Everywhere strong governments were little more

than efficient tax-machines to support armies and provide subsidies and

places for the minority. Against such forces of corruption the people

struggle in vain.

If such was the common testimony of old-world experience--and no man

who knew the inner workings of government there would deny it--what

reason was there to expect that like causes would work unlike results

in America? To what purpose was the talk of strong government

encouraged amongst the holders of the public debt? To what end had

lobbyists for the funding bill invaded the floor of Congress? It was

idle to expect in America a nullification of the law, that where power

sits within, corruption waits without. The love of power is universal.

Most men are potential autocrats, the strong and capable may become

actual autocrats. No man is good enough, no group of men, to be trusted

with unrestrained powers--in America any more than in Europe. A

centralized government in control of the tax-machine, and secure from

popular restraint, would undo the results of the Revolutionary War. The

movement to consolidate power, Jefferson asserted, was “but Toryism in

disguise.” “The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers

into one body ... has destroyed the liberty and the rights of men in

every government which has ever existed under the sun.”

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a

single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from

under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance

of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details

necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the

same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their

constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder

and waste.[369]

The practice of local home rule had grown up in America in response to

native conditions; it had resulted from democratic needs; and Jefferson

was too thoroughly American, too instinctively democratic, to overlook

the significance of local sovereignties in a democratic philosophy.

From the sharp contrast between American and European practice he

deduced a cardinal principle, namely, that good government springs from

a common interest in public affairs, and that such common interest

is possible only when the field of activities is circumscribed. Set

government apart from the people, or above them, and public interest

is lost in a sense of futility. The danger of an encroaching tyranny

by a superimposed sovereignty, is made easy by the public lethargy

in respect to distant and unfamiliar things, and establishes itself

through the psychology of custom. Jefferson was never greatly concerned

about stable government; he was very much more concerned about

responsive government--that it should faithfully serve the majority

will. He made no god of the political state. He had no conventional

reverence for established law and order; he inquired rather what

sort of law and order he was asked to accept, was it just or unjust.

Changing conditions make ancient good uncouth, and established

institutions tend to fall into dry-rot, or to become tyrannical. Men

are more important than constitutions, and the public well-being is

more sacred than statutes. An occasional revolution, he commented

grimly apropos of the hue and cry over Shays’s Rebellion, is salutary;

if it does not come of itself it might well be brought about. Progress

in government results from experiment; and it is easier and safer to

experiment on a small scale than on a great. Inertia increases with

size, and the more consolidated the government, the more unyielding it

becomes. The longest delayed revolutions are the gravest.

In asserting the principle of the majority will, Jefferson like other

democratic thinkers of the time, found himself countered by the

argument of abstract justice. Vehement denunciation had greeted Paine’s

doctrine that what a nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. There

can be no rights, it was confidently asserted, superior to the right.

The people may legislate, but it remains to determine the validity of

statutes in the light of justice; that which is unjust is _ipso facto_

null and void. It was Coke’s doctrine of judicial review, set up in

America after its repudiation in England, and Jefferson’s hostility

to it was bitter. As an intellectual he had none of the lawyer’s

complacency with legal principles, or conceit of the law’s sufficiency;

and as a democrat he would not yield sovereignty into the hands of the

judiciary. He had no veneration for the Common Law of England: it had

grown up by slow accretions during centuries of absolutism; how should

it be expected to answer the needs of a freer age? It must be purged

of outworn elements, imbued with democratic sympathies. The Revolution

had been fought in defense of rights that are broader and more human

than legal principles; and to hand over those rights to be interpreted

away by lawyers, seemed to him moonstruck madness. It was the law of

Blackstone rather than of Coke that he feared most--that “elegant”

canonization of the malign influences of Tory reaction, and that was

so cried up by the smatterers and “ephemeral insects of the law” in

America; whereas Coke “was as good a Whig as ever wrote”:

Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are

making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of

independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a

Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, and especially the former

[Blackstone], have done more towards the suppression of the

liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte,

and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will

stand loaded before the judgment seat of his Maker.[370]

As Jefferson grew older his fear of judicial encroachment on the

popular will became acute, but it shifted from distrust of the Common

Law to concern over the Supreme Court. A strong and outspoken hatred

of the Federal judiciary runs through all his later writings, and he

lost no opportunity to popularize the thesis--“It is a misnomer to call

a government republican, in which a branch of the supreme power is

independent of the nation.”

The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body,

like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming

advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is

engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that

which feeds them.[371]

It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider the judges as the

ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. It is one

which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.... The

Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to

whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party,

its members would become despots.[372]

As Jefferson watched Chief Justice John Marshall gathering all

things within the purview of the Federal judiciary, preparing future

strongholds by the skillful use of _obiter dicta_, legislating by

means of judicial interpretation, nullifying the will of the majority,

and with the power of repeal made nugatory by the complexity of the

process, he saw clearly what the outcome would be. Surely that was

no democracy where judge-made laws were enforced by bench warrants,

and where the sovereign power lay beyond the immediate reach of the

popular will. The government that he desired would not rest on the

legal fiction of an abstract justice above statutes and constitutions,

whereof a group of judicial gentlemen were the repositories and

guardians. It would be like Paine’s, “a plain thing, and fitted to the

capacity of many heads”; for “where the law of the majority ceases to

be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes

its place.”

Granted the truth of Jefferson’s premises that power tends to contract

to the hands of a few, and that all government of the few is

vicious, then democracy is the only form of government under which an

approximation to justice can be realized. A class will serve class

interests. Government by an aristocracy is government in the interest

of the aristocracy. For the staple argument of the Federalists, that

gentlemen of principle and property alone may be intrusted with affairs

of state, Jefferson had a quiet contempt. “I have never observed men’s

honesty to increase with their riches,” he remarked. On the contrary,

he regarded the “better sort of people” as a chief hindrance to the

spread of social justice. The past had been evil because the past had

been exploited by gentlemen of principle and property. They had kept

government away from the people, and with their secret councils and

secret diplomacy they had plundered the taxpayers and drenched nations

in blood. Their selfish rivalries everywhere exacted a heavy toll of

society and left behind a trail of poverty and wretchedness. The future

would be better in the degree that mastery passed into common hands.

From the conclusions of his democratic premise he did not shrink. If

it were indeed true that the people were beasts, then the democratic

government of the future would be a bestial government--and even that

might be better than the old arrangement of masters and slaves. But the

American people whom Jefferson trusted were very far from beasts; he

was convinced that they were honest and well-meaning; and if government

were brought close to them, kept responsive to their will, a new and

beneficent chapter in human history would open. The populistic laws

passed by the legislatures of Rhode Island and New Hampshire, about

which such an uproar was raised by fearful creditors, and which were

urged as an argument against popular government, gave him no concern.

He understood the ways of propaganda, and he never accepted judgment of

the American people from the mouths of their enemies. The cure for the

evils of democracy, he believed, was more democracy. The whole are far

less likely to be unjust than the few; and if sovereignty does not rest

in the majority will, where shall it lodge?

Hume, the great apostle of toryism, says “the Commons established

a principle, which is noble in itself, and seems specious [_i.e._

pleasing], but is belied by all history and experience, _that the

people are the origin of all just power_.” And where else will

this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men,

find the origin of _just_ power, if not in the majority of the

society? Will it be in the minority? Or in the individual of that

minority?[373]

The America of Jefferson’s day was a simple world, with a simple

domestic economy. More than ninety per cent were plain country folk,

farmers and villagers, largely freeholders, managing their local

affairs in the traditional way. There were no great extremes of

poverty and wealth, no closely organized class groups. With its sharp

restrictions on suffrage and the prestige accorded the gentry, it was

still far from a political democracy; but it was hastening towards a

more democratic order. Remote from the cesspools of European diplomacy,

and not yet acquainted with imperialism, it had no need for a leviathan

state. Economic conditions sanctioned a _laissez-faire_ government,

simple and unambitious. In such a world the well-known words of

Jefferson’s first inaugural address, justified themselves to all who

did not seek to use the state for personal advantage.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from

injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to

regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall

not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is

the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the

circle of our felicities.

In one significant direction he would extend the scope of

government--the encouragement of education. An intelligent people is

necessary to a democracy; free schools are a sign of a free society.

Tyranny thrives on ignorance and superstition, and every exploiting

group fears popular education. Free himself in thought and action,

believing in the unshackled commerce of ideas, hating all censorships,

Jefferson accounted the founding of the University of Virginia his

largest contribution to the well-being of his native commonwealth.

To all who profess faith in the democratic ideal Jefferson is a

perennial inspiration. A free soul, he loved freedom enough to deny it

to none; an idealist, he believed that the welfare of the whole, and

not the prosperity of any group, is the single end of government. He

was our first great leader to erect a political philosophy native to

the economics and experience of America, as he was the first to break

consciously with the past. His life was dedicated to the service of

freedom, and later generations may well recall his words, “I have sworn

upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny

over the mind of man.” Europe made Jefferson wholly American. From

his studies in France he came to see that where men enjoy free access

to the sources of subsistence, government is likely to be simple and

honest, and society free and content; but where a policy of preëmption

has run its course, the function of government is seduced from its

social purpose to perpetuate the inequalities which spring from the

progressive monopolization of natural resources, with augmenting

corruption and injustice. To preserve government in America from such

degradation, to keep the natural resources open to all, were the prime

desire and object of his life. That such an effort was foredoomed to

failure, in presence of imperious forces that shape society beyond the

capacity of political means to change or prevent, cannot detract from

the nobility of his ideal, or the inspiration of his life. Among the

greater thinkers of the constitutional period Jefferson remains by far

the most vital and suggestive, the one to whom later generations may

return most hopefully.

Footnotes

[344] For the date of his arrival, see _Massachusetts Historical

Society Proceedings_, Vol. XLIII, p. 246.

[345] _Rights of Man_, Part II, pp. 407, 408.

[346] For an excellent discussion of this, see C. M. Walsh, _The

Political Science of John Adams_, pp. 203-226.

[347] _The Rights of Man_, Part I, p. 278.

[348] “Letter to Lord Onslow,” in _Works_, Vol. III, p. 36.

[349] _Rights of Man_, Part II, p. 428.

[350] _Ibid._, pp. 410-411.

[351] Conway, _Life of Paine_, Vol. II, p. 4.

[352] Author of _An Apology for the Bible_ (a reply to Paine’s _Age

of Reason_), which was distributed among Harvard undergraduates. See

above, page 324.

[353] For the program of Babeuf, see R. W. Postgate, _Revolution from

1789 to 1906_, pp. 24, 54-60.

[354] _Works_, Vol. III, p. 329.

[355] This and the preceding sentence were expunged from all early

editions by the censor.

[356] _Ibid._, p. 337.

[357] _Ibid._, p. 338.

[358] _Ibid._, p. 340.

[359] _Ibid._, p. 329.

[360] _Address and Declaration of the Friends of Universal Peace and

Liberty_, quoted in Conway, _Life of Paine_, Vol. I, p. 316.

[361] _Rights of Man_, Part II, p. 413.

[362] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 155.

[363] Francis W. Hirst, _Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson_, p. 266.

[364] _A Summary View of the Rights of British America_, Williamsburg.

[365] Dodd, _Statesmen of the Old South_, p. 23.

[366] _Writings_, Vol. III, pp. 268-269.

[367] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 8.

[368] “Autobiography”, in _Writings_, Vol. I, p. 57.

[369] _Writings_, Vol. VII, p. 451.

[370] _Ibid._, Vol. VI, p. 335.

[371] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 189.

[372] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 160.

[373] _Ibid._, Vol. VII, p. 356.

Chapter III • The War of Belles Lettres

To turn from the field of political theory to the realm of polite

literature is not to quit the partisan battle-ground. The long struggle

between Federalist and Democrat was too bitter and absorbing, too

sharp in its alignment, not to conscript gentlemen of culture equally

with politicians. Every available quill was called to the colors, and

a civil war of _belles lettres_ broke out, that exceeded in animosity

any other known to our literary history. Attack and counter-attack were

slashing and acrimonious. Gentlemen forgot their manners and indulged

fiercely in tall language. Satire ran about the streets seeking new

victims to impale; slander lay in wait for every passer-by. The

crudest lies found willing listeners and sober ministers turned from

writing sermons to enshrine pothouse tales in heroic couplets. In this

virulent battle the Federalists, on the whole, had the better of it,

for they were greater masters of invective and flayed their victims

less clumsily; but the Democrats made up in ardor what they lacked in

skill, and the blows that fell on carefully tied wigs must have hurt

cruelly. As poetry those old satires may seem to us feeble enough,

but as historical documents they are eloquent. The passion of a world

in revolution, the hopes and fears of our forefathers as they watched

the great fires consuming the world in which they had grown up, still

survive in those stinging lines, as a reminder to later generations of

the rough and inhospitable way that democratic America has traveled in

its onward course.

I • The Federalist Group

1. The Hartford Wits

What Federalism was capable of in the way of polite letters is

sufficiently revealed in the work of a coterie of poetasters who

are known in our literary histories as the Hartford Wits. The title

of the group suggests their literary antecedents. They were the

representatives of a literary mode that had slowly percolated through

the crust of Puritan provincialism and imparted a certain sprightliness

to a dour temper. They were the literary old-guard of the expiring

eighteenth century, suspicious of all innovation, contemptuous of every

idealistic program. They stood stoutly by the customary and familiar.

The nineteenth century was knocking at their door, but they would

not open to it. And as they saw that new century coming in the guise

of revolution, exciting to unheard-of innovations in the fields of

politics and economics and religion and letters, giving rise to Jacobin

Clubs and Jeffersonian democracy, they set themselves seriously to

the work of barring its progress through their own little world. They

conveniently associated the economic unrest of post-war days, that

gave birth to a strange progeny in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and

Massachusetts, with the contamination of French atheism, charged all

unrest to the account of democracy, and hastened to put it down in the

name of law and righteousness. They hated new ways with the virtuous

hatred of the well-to-do, and dreamed of a future America as like the

past as one generation of oysters is like another.

There is a certain historical fitness in the fact that the Wits

should have arisen in Connecticut and been the intellectual children

of Yale. For generations the snug little commonwealth had been the

home of a tenacious conservatism, that clung to old ways and guarded

the institutions of the fathers with pious zeal. Nowhere else in New

England did the ruling hierarchy maintain so glacial a grip on society.

The Revolution of ’76 had only ruffled the surface on Connecticut life;

it left the social structure quite unchanged. The church retained its

unquestioned control of the machinery of the commonwealth; and the

church was dominated by a clerical aristocracy, hand in glove with a

mercantile aristocracy. Fresh currents of thought that were stirring

the pulpits of eastern Massachusetts--suggestions of an Arianism that

was to lead to the Unitarian schism--did not reach so far as New Haven,

and Yale was content to remain the bulwark of an obsolete Calvinism.

In such a soil Federalism would flourish like Jonah’s gourd; and it

exuded a special odor of sanctity from the Calvinism in which it was

rooted. To stout Federalists like Timothy Dwight, the current dogma of

total depravity sufficed to disprove the validity of all democratic

aspiration. It was a presumption little short of blasphemous to

assert that sinners are competent to manage the temporal affairs of

society. The doctrine of equalitarianism was a particular stench in the

nostrils of the aristocratic clergy, who disliked all leveling. The

Irish immigrants seem to have been the most offensive equalitarians.

A New England gentleman, traveling in Pennsylvania in the nineties,

wrote home: “I have seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a few

exceptions, they are ... the most God-provoking Democrats on this side

of Hell.” And in 1798 Harrison Gray Otis wrote: “If some means are not

adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and

others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty &

property.”[374] To prevent, if possible, such an unhappy outcome, the

upper classes of New England fell to organizing and drilling all the

elements of conservatism for a vigorous defense. They wrote and spoke

and preached, till the mind of respectable New England was saturated

with prejudice. The democratic principle was converted into a bogey to

frighten the simple. Such a hideous misshapen imp of darkness, such a

vile hag of anarchy had never before been painted for the imagination

of honest Yankees to shudder at; and if democracy seemed to them a

wild and fearsome thing making ready to destroy their venerated social

order, they only believed what the minister preached on the Sabbath and

the squire asserted on week days. The plebeian democrat, very likely

in debt, was quite overwhelmed by the organized forces of village

respectability.

In this great work of saving the commonwealth of Connecticut from the

pollutions of democracy the Hartford Wits were competent laborers. The

more important members of the group were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight,

Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, and

Theodore Dwight. To these may be added the names of Dr. Elihu Hubbard

Smith and Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, who were friends and occasional

collaborators. Nearly all were Yale men with a pronounced Yale

predilection for Calvinism and Federalism, admirable representatives

of the oligarchical upper class of the provincial Connecticut society.

Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was a minister and

president of Yale; Hopkins, Smith and Cogswell were physicians of high

professional standing; Trumbull and Theodore Dwight were lawyers;

Barlow and Humphreys found their way into the diplomatic field, and

Alsop was a merchant. They were all comfortably well off and several

were wealthy. Alsop was one of the few millionaires of the time; Barlow

acquired a fortune in France; and Humphreys late in life established

a textile industry incorporated for half a million. Hot Federalists,

they found in Washington, Governor Trumbull, and Fisher Ames, their

political mentors and guides. The most active of the group politically,

was Theodore Dwight, who with his cousin Timothy was a director of

the Eagle Bank, a Federalist institution, and bitterly opposed to the

chartering of Republican banks. When one of the latter applied to the

legislature for a charter he denounced it as a “child of intrigue and

the mother of Discord.” He was deep in the Hartford Convention, serving

as its secretary and later as its historian. He denounced Jeffersonian

republicanism as seeking to “discredit the ministry, decry religion,

and destroy public worship,” and as he saw it spreading through New

England he attributed to it the certain decay of morality and the

impending break-up of family ties, exclaiming with somewhat extreme

vivacity: “The outlaws of Europe, the fugitives from the pillory and

the gallows, have undertaken to assist our own abandoned citizens, in

the pleasing work of destroying Connecticut.... Can imagination paint

anything more dreadful on this side of hell!”

Later generations remember best the massive character of Timothy

Dwight, a man endowed with all the Connecticut virtues and walking

amongst his fellows with magnificent confidence in his powers.

A great preacher, an authoritative theologian, a distinguished

administrator--“every inch a college president”--a ready counselor on

any knotty point be it in law or politics or finance or agriculture or

_belles lettres_, a born leader of men, and by way of recreation an

inditer of Hebraic epics and huge didactic poems and ample Connecticut

pastorals, a confirmed traveler observing the manner of life in many

commonwealths and preserving his observations in solid volumes--he was

a man to compel the admiration of his fellows and put his stamp upon

his age. So vast was the contemporary reputation of Timothy Dwight, and

so many-sided, it may seem ironical that time should have shrunk him

to the narrow compass of a paragraph in our literary history. And yet

the more curiously one considers the work of the great president of

Yale, the more insistent become one’s doubts concerning the fineness

of this nugget of Connecticut gold. It shows very suspicious signs of

tarnish. His commanding presence and authoritative manner, his sonorous

eloquence, his forwardness in defense of what few doubted, his vehement

threshing of straw long since reduced to chaff, his prodigious labors,

his abundant printing, no longer seem so authentic a seal of greatness

as they seemed to his open-mouthed contemporaries; and one suspects

that he impressed his fellow citizens by the completeness with which

he measured up to every Connecticut ideal, rather than by the creative

vigor of his mind. The great Timothy, in short, seems to a later

generation to have been little more than a walking repository of the

venerable Connecticut _status quo_.

The intellectual inquisitiveness that gave birth to disintegrating

theory in the mind of his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, and made him a

profoundly revolutionary influence in his time, was wholly lacking in

the grandson. The latter refused to follow the questioning intellect

into unsurveyed fields. He would not meddle with change. His mind

was closed as tight as his study windows in January. He read widely

in the fields of rationalism, but he read only to refute. Now and

then to be sure, certain generous promptings visited him: he spoke

out against slavery; he encouraged the higher education of women.

But from such temptations to become a living voice he turned away to

follow the main-traveled road of Connecticut prejudice. His eyes were

fixed lovingly upon the past, and his fondest dreams for his native

commonwealth hovered about the ideal of a church-state which John

Cotton had labored to establish and Increase Mather to preserve. It

is with those capable theocrats of Massachusetts Bay, rather than

with Thomas Hooker of Hartford, that he is to be associated. Two

men could scarcely be more alike than Timothy Dwight and Increase

Mather; their careers ran in similar lines; each was the unmitered

pope of his generation, and each owed his extraordinary influence

to the same sterling qualities. As ecclesiastical politicians they

drew no line between religious and secular affairs, but were prompt

with a hand in every affair of the commonwealth. They spoke and

wrote with unquestioned authority. They regarded the minister as the

responsible leader of society who must not suffer his flock to be

led astray. The church was the guardian of morality, and the state

was its secular arm. The true faith must not be put in jeopardy by

unfaith. To Timothy Dwight infidelity and democracy went hand in

hand, and to suffer the commonwealth to fall under the control of

the godless meant the end of all morality and religion. To uphold the

established order--of which he was a distinguished member--was for him

the first of Christian duties. A stalwart Federalist, he was a good

hater of all Jacobins. His detestation of Jefferson was virulent and

he swallowed the nastiest tales about the great Virginian without a

qualm, never doubting their authenticity. It was sometimes hinted that

he was too much the aristocrat to feel the warmest sympathy for the

unprosperous, and there seems to have been ground for the suspicion.

The unprosperous were likely to be infected with Jeffersonian heresies,

and as he watched them being drawn off to the York-state frontier,

he rejoiced that their voting power was no longer to be feared. Such

restless spirits, he pointed out, “are impatient of the restraints of

law, religion, and morality; grumble about the taxes, by which Rulers,

Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported.... We have many troubles

even now; but we should have many more, if this body of foresters had

remained at home.”[375] If the disaffected did not like the way the

Congregational-Federalist party managed the good state of Connecticut,

it were a godsend if they should remove beyond its boundaries.

But it is with the literary work of Timothy Dwight that we are more

immediately concerned, and in all his abundant output, totaling

fourteen volumes and perhaps as much more in manuscript, the same

solid qualities are revealed. It is the occasional work of a man

wanting humor, playfulness, grace, lacking subtlety and creative

suggestiveness, but with a shrewd common sense, a great vigor, and a

certain grandiose imagination. A sonorous declaimer, he dearly loved

combat and the shock of marshaled argument. He went out of his way

to invite majestic effects. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ he described

so many thunderstorms that Trumbull suggested he ought to furnish a

lightning rod with the poem. Such a man could not move easily in narrow

spaces. An epic was none too slight to contain his exuberant rhetoric.

His ready versification, one often feels, runs like a water pipe with

the faucet off; the words flow in an unbroken stream with never a pause

to pick or choose. Yet even in his amazing copiousness there is vigor;

a well-stocked mind is pouring out the gatherings of years. When he

pauses to give advice--as he was fond of doing--his abundant sense

is worth listening to; the homely wisdom of his talk to the farmers

in the sixth part of _Greenfield Hill_ is not unlike Franklin. As a

satirist he belongs to the Churchill school; he is downright, abusive,

often violent, quite lacking the lightness of touch and the easy gayety

that runs so pleasantly through _M’Fingal_. His _Triumph of Infidelity_

is solid old-fashioned pulpit-thumping. The spirit of toleration was

withheld from him by his fairy godmother, and he knew no other way of

dealing with those who persisted in disagreement after their mistakes

had been pointed out, than the cudgel. In this tremendous poem he lays

about him vigorously. On Hume and Voltaire and Priestley, and all their

followers, his blows fall smartly. Bloody crowns ought to be plentiful,

but--though he does not seem to know it--the blows fall on straw men

and none proves mortal. On the whole one prefers him in the pastoral

mood when he lays aside his ministerial gown, and _Greenfield Hill_,

unless one excepts the _Travels in New England and New York_, remains

his most attractive work. Yet even that is sadly in need of winnowing.

A great college president Timothy Dwight may very well have been; he

was worshiped by his admirers only this side idolatry; but a great

thinker, a steadfast friend of truth in whatever garb it might appear,

a generous kindly soul loving even publicans and sinners, regardful of

others and forgetful of self, he assuredly was not.

2. “The Anarchiad”

Most of the political satire of the Wits was done in collaboration,

and consists of occasional sketches contributed to newspapers--with

explanatory comments and notes--dealing with matters of current

interest. Of the major works thus produced, _The Anarchiad_, _The

Echo_, and _The Political Greenhouse_, the first will suffice to reveal

the political sympathies of the Hartford group. _The Anarchiad_ is a

mock epic designed to counteract the populistic tendencies of post-war

times. It was published in _The New Haven Gazette_ between October 26,

1786, and September 13, 1787. In 1861 it was resurrected from a long

sleep by Luther G. Riggs, and reissued with an introduction and notes.

“This fearless satire,” according to the editor, “is supposed to have

exerted great and beneficial influence upon the public mind, and to

have tended in no small degree to check the leaders of insubordination

and infidel philosophy”; and it must be regarded as “a _national Poem_,

battling nobly for the right universal, for the majesty of law, and for

the Federal government.” The idea was got from a contemporary English

screed entitled _The Rolliad_, one of the numerous political satires

of which the late eighteenth century was so fond. Probably most of the

members of the group had a hand in it, but the acrid quality of its

comment owes more to Hopkins than to the others.

For such work the angular Connecticut physician was admirably fitted.

The son of a Waterbury farmer. Dr. Lemuel Hopkins was the most

picturesque member of the Hartford Wits, the most characteristically

Yankee. Brought up at the plow-tail, he received nevertheless an

excellent education, and because of a hereditary predisposition

to consumption turned to the medical profession. After serving

his apprenticeship at Wallingford he entered upon his practice at

Litchfield in 1776. During the Revolution he served for a short time

as a volunteer, but soon returned to his lancet and medicine case. In

1784 he removed to Hartford where he spent the remainder of his life.

In person he was tall, lean, stooping, rawboned, with coarse features

and large brilliant eyes. His uncouth appearance and eccentricity of

manner made him a striking figure, and his caustic wit rendered him

a redoubtable antagonist. As a physician he stood at the head of the

Connecticut profession. He was one of the founders of the Medical

Society of Connecticut, and as a frequent contributor to professional

literature he exerted a wide influence on the current practice.

The eccentric doctor seems to have been as honest as he was outspoken.

He was uncompromising in his warfare on all quacks, both medical and

political. For a time as a young man he was a disciple of French

infidel philosophy, but he cured his mental indisposition by a severe

Biblical regimen, and having restored himself to the robust health of

Calvinistic Christianity, he devoted himself to the work of curing

others. He became in consequence a specialist in the treatment of the

ravages caused by the _bacillus gallicus_. For every sort of humbug

he had a hearty contempt, and any political nostrum not listed in the

Federalistic materia medica he regarded as arrant quackery. He thought

no better of old wives’ remedies in government than in medicine,

and when the Rhode Island legislature passed its paper-money act in

1785, and six months later Shays’s Rebellion broke out, and mobs were

besieging the legislature of New Hampshire, he proposed to speak

plainly to the good people of Connecticut on the follies of popular

delusions. This would seem to have been the origin of _The Anarchiad_.

It sprang from the indignation of Dr. Hopkins, when, to quote from the

poem,

In visions fair, the scenes of fate unroll,

And Massachusetts opens on my soul.

There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway,

And mobs in myriads blacken all the way.

The sardonic temper of Dr. Hopkins fitted him for virulent satire,

and in this bitterest of the productions of the Wits, the reins were

on the neck of the muse. Scarcely another New England satire reflects

so sharply the class consciousness that underlay the bitter struggle

between agrarianism and capitalism. It is a slashing attack upon

agrarian economics and democratic liberalism, a versified echo of

the anger of creditors who were fighting the measures of populistic

legislatures. The staple of the satire is the wickedness of all

paper-money issues, with the State of Rhode Island as the chief of

agrarian sinners. About this main theme is gathered a miscellany

of Federalist shibboleths--the godlessness of Shays and his crew,

the seditious spirit of all who oppose the new Constitution, the

demagoguery of democratic politicians--and the satire rises to a

patriotic crescendo in declaiming against the folly of the democratic

ideal. So tremendous a work, however, cannot be adequately described;

the lines must speak for themselves. The following bits may serve in

lieu of the whole, the first of which is a comment on Rhode Island, the

pariah of States:

Hail! realm of rogues, renown’d for fraud and guile,

All hail! ye knav’ries of yon little isle.

There prowls the rascal, cloth’d with legal pow’r,

To snare the orphan, and the poor devour;

The crafty knave his creditor besets

And advertising paper pays his debts;

Bankrupts their creditors with rage pursue,

No stop, no mercy from the debtor crew.

Arm’d with new tests, the licens’d villain bold,

Presents his bills, and robs them of their gold;

Their ears, though rogues and counterfeiters lose,

No legal robber fears the gallows noose.

Look through the State, the unhallow’d ground appears

A pen of dragons, and a cave of bears;

A nest of vipers, mix’d with adders foul;

The screeching night-bird, and the greater owl:

For now, unrighteousness, a deluge wide,

Pours round the land an overwhelming tide;

And dark injustice, wrapp’d in paper sheets,

Rolls a dread torrent through the wasted streets;

While net of law th’ unwary fry draws in

To damning deeds, and scarce they know they sin.

New paper struck, new tests, new tenders made,

Insult mankind, and help the thriving trade.

Each weekly print new lists of cheats proclaims,

Proud to enroll their knav’ries and their names;

The wiser race, the snares of law to shun,

Like Lot from Sodom, from Rhode Island run....[376]

Nor less abhorr’d, the certain woe that waits

The giddy rage of democratic States,

Whose pop’lar breath, high-blown in restless tide,

No laws can temper, and no reason guide:

An equal sway, their mind indignant spurns;

To wanton sway, the bliss of freedom turns;

Led by wild demagogues, the factious crowd,

Mean, fierce, imperious, insolent and loud,

Nor fame, nor wealth, nor power, nor system draws--

They see no object, and perceive no cause;

But feel, by turns, in one disastrous hour,

Th’ extremes of license, and th’ extremes of power....

Will this vain scheme bid restless factions cease,

Check foreign wars, or fix internal peace?

Call public credit from her grave to rise,

Or gain in grandeur what they lose in size?...

But know, ye favor’d race, one potent head

Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread.

The finance regulate, the trade control,

Live through the empire, and accord the whole.

Ere death invades, the night’s deep curtain falls,

Through ruin’d realms the voice of +UNION+ calls; ...

On you she calls! attend the warning cry;

+Ye live united, or divided die!+[377]

But chief the race allured by fleeting fame,

Who seek on earth the politicians name;

Auspicious race! whom folly joys to bless,

And wealth and honor crown with glad success;

Formed, like balloons, by emptiness to rise

On pop’lar gales, to waft them through the skies ...

See, from the shades, on tiny pinions swell

And rise, the young +DEMOCRACY+ of _hell!_

Before their face the _powers of Congress_ fade,

And _public credit_ sinks, an empty shade;

Wild severance rages, wars intestine spread,

Their boasted +UNION+ hides her dying head;

The forms of government in ruin hurl’d,

Reluctant empire quits the western world.[378]

Amid such democratic welter and mortal confusion the sole hope of

safety lies in Federalism, and the sapient leader who shall bring order

out of the wild misrule is thus greeted:

Ardent and bold, the smiling land to save,

In council sapient as in action brave,

I fear’d young Hamilton’s unshaken soul,

And saw his arm our wayward host control; ...

Fire in his eye, and thunder on his tongue.[379]

Other work the Hartford Wits did, but none which need detain us. Soon

changes and removals broke up the coterie, and they went diverse ways

to diverse rewards: Timothy Dwight to safeguard Yale undergraduates in

New Haven, Humphreys to the American legation at Paris, Trumbull to

the Michigan frontier, and Barlow to his notable career in Europe. But

happily not before they had contributed their portion of sweetness and

light to the great debate. The Wits were no skulkers in presence of

“insubordination and infidel philosophy,” when their economic interests

were touched.

II • The French Group

The Wits were not devoid of cleverness, but they were wanting in

ideas. They were partisans rather than intellectuals. In the rôle of

self-appointed custodians of Federalist moralities they were rather

tedious fellows, who substituted fustian for creative thought, and blew

up their verses with flatulent rhetoric. They sealed the windows of

their minds against the disturbing winds of doctrine that were blowing

briskly; they inspected the family tree of every new idea to determine

its respectability. An occasional fresh idea is necessary to keep one

from falling into staleness and mediocrity; but the Wits chose to

remain too ignorant to be interesting, and it is a relief to turn from

them to the more stimulating company of the French partisans. Here at

least there was intellectual sincerity: a genuine desire to understand

what was going on in the larger world of thought; to use what brains

God had given them to better the lot of the American people. Philip

Freneau, Joel Barlow, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge were not intellectual

giants, but they represent the best intelligence then being devoted to

literature in America, and their work retains a suggestiveness today

far beyond that of the Hartford Wits.

1. Philip Freneau • Poet of Two Revolutions

It is fitting that our first outstanding poet should have been a

liberal. The idealist has always seen deeper into the spirit of America

than the realist, and been less complacent with halfway achievement.

And it is equally fitting that his idealism should have got him into

trouble with the dominant group of his generation. Philip Freneau

was a volunteer in two revolutions, a color-sergeant carrying the

newly unfurled flag of democracy in the thick of civil strife. He

was a lifelong rebel, whose rebellions turned out to be patriotic or

seditious as they went with or against the purpose of the victorious

party. In the Revolution of ’76 he fought shoulder to shoulder with

John Adams and Hamilton and Washington, and his services were accorded

high praise. His poems inspired patriotic enthusiasm, greatly aided the

national cause, and won wide approval. But in the Revolution of ’93 he

parted company with Adams and Hamilton and Washington. When the old

leaders turned back in fear at the unloosing of democratic aspirations,

he went forward to new battles. He served the cause of ’93 with the

same ardor that had inspired his pen in ’76. It was not a new cause in

his eyes, but the old; not a different war, as Federalists asserted,

but other battles of the same war--the never ceasing struggle for human

freedom.

In thus breaking with the party of Federalism and casting his lot with

the democratic Jacobins, Freneau contracted a serious _mésalliance_

that destroyed his good name. Thereafter he was marked as a vulgar

democrat, a disseminator of insubordination and infidelity, an evil

influence among a respectable, God-fearing people. The further he went

in his new crusade, the lower he sank in decent opinion, until the

poet of the American Revolution came to be regarded as the hireling

mouthpiece of Jefferson, a writer of wretched and insolent doggerel,

an incendiary journalist--a mean and paltry figure beside the stately

forms of the Fathers of the Constitution. Gentlemen exhausted the

resources of ample vocabularies to express their detestation of his

leveling ways. To Timothy Dwight he was “A mere incendiary, or rather

... a despicable tool of bigger incendiaries, and his paper ... a

public nuisance.” To the gentle-natured Irving he was “A barking cur,”

and to Washington, whose words were accorded a quasi-royal respect,

he was “That rascal Freneau”: rather loose expressions, certainly,

for cultivated gentlemen to apply to another cultivated gentleman,

the friend of Madison and Brackenridge. It is evident that Freneau

and the great Federalist leaders disagreed somewhat violently in

their interpretations of the purpose and scope of the new venture in

republicanism.

The source of their disagreement lay in divergencies of social

philosophy too great to be bridged. In his republicanism Freneau

had gone far in advance of the Federalists. He was a democrat while

they remained aristocrats. He had rid himself of a host of outworn

prejudices, the heritage of an obsolete past, which held them in

bondage. He had read more clearly the meaning of the great movement

of decentralization that was shaping a new psychology, and must

lead eventually to democratic individualism. He had no wish to stay

or thwart that development; he accepted it wholly with all its

implications. He had freed his mind from the thralldom of caste; he

was impelled by no egoistic desire to impose his will upon others;

he was wholly free from the lust of economic aggression, either for

himself or for his class. He was an idealist who cared only for the

_res publica_, the common well-being, and he desired chiefly that the

new American government should serve the needs of a free people. There

was no envy in the soul of Freneau, and no self-seeking. He was the

friend of civilization rather than the advocate of particular forms

of government. He put his trust in local self-rule rather than in a

coercive state. Like Paine he distrusted all centralizing power. Like

Franklin he regarded the every-day world of business and politics as

a preposterous arrangement, unconcerned with justice; and he took it

on himself to do what he could to make it over. All his life he was an

unmuzzled advocate of whatever new movements gave promise of lessening

the old tyrannies. In championing the cause of democracy, he championed

a score of lesser causes: Unitarianism, deism, antislavery, Americanism

in education: thereby bringing down on his head the resentment of

all the conservatisms, religious, political, economic, social, then

prospering in America. Nevertheless he went his way through a sordid

world of politicians and speculators, feeding upon whatever shreds of

beauty he met with, a dreamer and an idealist sneered at by exploiters,

a spirit touched to finer issues than his generation cared for.

The chief desire of Freneau’s life was to be a poet, and if the country

had not been turmoiled by revolution, doubtless he would have been

content to “live unpromoted and write poems.” But revolution and not

poetry was the serious business of the age, and he chose to have a hand

in that business. Many later critics have lamented his choice. They

regret that he did not turn aside from the battle-ground to wander in

pastoral fields; that he was not content with the _noctes coenaeque

deum_ where the minstrel’s song is sufficient passport to hospitality.

It is a nice question of literary ethics. The raw material of poetry

was in Philip Freneau; there was need only of calm years to master

his art and clarify the vague romanticism of his nature. He had only

to stand apart from the turmoil, refusing to soil his hands with

politics, and cultivate his faculty for verse, to have made himself the

indisputable founder of American poetry. He was endowed with a romantic

imagination and love of natural beauty, a generation before the

romantic revival, and he might well have become a notable contributor

to that revival.

But he refused to stand apart. He would not hire a substitute to

defend the cause of freedom. There was rough work to be done, and

the democrats were too few to spare so competent a workman. So when

poetry proved unequal to the task he turned journalist, and set to

work in a field unclaimed by the muses. It was an immense sacrifice,

bringing disaster to all hope of contemporary fame, and tarnishing his

reputation in after years. His place in American letters was fixed by

a Federalist verdict, and he has since remained obscure and neglected

by all, save an occasional historian who dips into a few poems, regrets

that the smell of revolution is so rank, and dismisses him with the

comment that Campbell and Scott did him the honor to appropriate a

figure of speech without acknowledgment. Only within recent years

has a collected edition of his poems been accessible, and his prose

writings still remain buried in newspaper files. In consequence the

literary critics have echoed the political critics, and given new

life to the old partisanship. Thus Professor Wendell remarks that

“a considerable part of his poetry ... consists of rather reckless

satire, not conspicuously better or worse than much other satire of the

period.”[380] Even Professor Tyler, usually so generous in sympathy for

our early writers, dismisses Freneau with these words:

The poor old man, thus found dead on the lonely New Jersey moor,

had undoubtedly some sweetness in his heart; but he permitted

very little of it to work its way down to the tip of his pen.

With that pitiless pen of his he had fought many a fierce fight

in his day.... He was the poet of hatred, rather than of love....

Among all his verses, the reader finds scarcely one lyric of

patriotic enthusiasm, nor many lines to thrill the hearts of the

Revolutionists by any touch of loving devotion to their cause, but

everywhere lines hot and rank with sarcasm and invective against

the enemy.... Like Odell, Freneau was a good hater; his was the

wrathful muse; his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing, deadly. He

was the satirical gladiator on behalf of the Revolution, even as

Odell was the satirical gladiator in opposition to it.[381]

Such commentary is neither discriminating nor just. That the ways of

Freneau were often ruthless it needs only a casual reading of his

satire to perceive; that he was a good hater is quite as apparent;

but that the deeper springs of his nature were bitter is not true. He

was no satirist like Churchill to love filth and delight in venom.

It was an age of partisan ruthlessness, and if Freneau was a fierce

partisan it was because the new hope then whispering to liberals was

in danger of being stifled by selfish men who feared it. The vision of

a free republic arising on the ruins of colonial monarchy had taken

possession of his imagination; a republic admirable in justice and

righteous in all its ways. That vision, he believed, might be realized

if the republicans stood firm in its defense. A thousand perils beset

it. The lingering colonial traditions--the ties of old custom--were

powerful advocates of the old inequality; the greed of profit and

power--the ambitions of a monied aristocracy--were equally powerful

advocates of new tyrannies. Not only must George III and his Tory

supporters be driven from the land, but the work thus begun must be

carried through. An army of domestic enemies must be dealt with--a

formidable aristocracy of wealth and family. Naturally it would be no

holiday task. The King had no mind to be driven out of his American

dominions, and the Federalists had no mind to surrender control of the

new American state. And so no choice remained to the republicans but

to make the advocates of monarchy and aristocracy appear so hateful in

the eyes of the people that they would rise and destroy them.

In times of profound upheaval the demands of partisanship are stern

and exacting. The gray-goose quill may serve the cause of peace, but

the porcupine quill stings and rankles more; and if Freneau was given

to using the latter it was because he cared greatly for the ends to

be achieved. “How oft has rugged nature charged my pen with gall,”

he lamented late in life as he contemplated the enemies he had made.

Sensitive and proud, he had a Gallic impetuosity of onset. If he

plundered the broadsides of their store of abuse and ransacked the

dictionaries of their wealth of scurrility, it was not because he loved

abuse and scurrilities. If like Sam Adams, he was given to robbing men

of their characters, it was due to no personal or selfish motives;

those great ones whom he lampooned so fiercely, he believed were

enemies of the new order. If “his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing,

deadly,” as Professor Tyler asserts, it was because he was fighting for

a great ideal against men who were equally grim, unsparing, deadly.

Unembittered laughter had little opportunity to try its sanative

qualities in that long warfare of bushwhackers.

During the last quarter of the century the writings of Freneau in verse

and prose constitute an abstract and brief chronicle of the times. If

they seem old-fashioned to us today, they were quite new-fashioned

to the men who first read them. The early satires, printed in 1775

must have fallen upon American ears with almost startling effect.

A revolutionary change had come over Freneau; he had broken wholly

with the colonial temper and turned nationalist a year before the

Declaration of Independence. When he graduated from Princeton College

in the summer of 1771, he wrote in collaboration with Hugh Henry

Brackenridge a commencement poem entitled _The Rising Glory of

America_, in which the youthful collegians, bred up in a hotbed of

Whiggery, were as British as Pitt himself. The new English imperialism

fairly rioted in the swelling couplets. The poem is a prophecy of the

time when the British flag should wave from the Atlantic to the Pacific

over a contented people, who “warm in liberty and freedom’s cause,”

gloried in the name of Briton. Agriculture and commerce are duly

celebrated as the twin pillars of American prosperity, and the pages of

colonial history are combed for great names and heroic deeds. On the

roll of American heroes Braddock, Sir William Johnson, and Whitefield

are the most conspicuous. Oddly enough Washington’s valor at the time

of Braddock’s defeat was unknown to these collegians in 1771, but

was afterwards discovered and inserted in later editions. Following

independence Freneau revised the poem and the changed circumstances

played havoc with the colonial text. Braddock was silently expunged

together with “Britannia’s warlike troops, Choice spirits of her isle.”

“False Gallia’s sons” becomes “Gallia’s hostile sons.” A notable

tribute to English generosity seemed incongruous to Freneau after his

experience on the prison ship and was deleted. He no longer felt that

The British epithet is merciful,

And we the sons of Britain learn like them

To conquer and to spare.

What happened to Freneau during the years following his graduation is

uncertain, but in July, 1775, he appeared in New York City with his

pockets stuffed with another sort of verse, which he scattered among

the print-shops, the rebellious spirit of which may be judged from the

prayer,

_Libera Nos, Domine._--Deliver us, O Lord, not only from British

dependence, but

From the scoundrel, Lord North, who would bind us in chains,

From a royal king Log, with his tooth-full of brains,

Who dreams, and is certain (when taking a nap)

He has conquered our lands, as they lay on his map.

From a kingdom that bullies, and hectors, and swears,

We send up to heaven our wishes and prayers

That we, disunited, may freemen be still,

And Britain go on--to be damned if she will.[382]

The colonial slipped easily from Freneau and left him wholly American.

And with the colonial psychology there slipped from him also the

useless impedimenta of old-world social and political philosophies.

How far he advanced towards the democratic conception of society,

during those first rebellious years, is not clear; but he had set his

foot on a path that must conduct him far if he did not turn back.

And it is certain that he never turned back. His declaration of

independence from King George was the first of many such declarations

of independence--for himself and his fellow Americans. Thereafter

his serious business was the work of stripping from the colonial

every loyalty which still bound him to England. He supplemented the

work of Paine in teaching men whose fathers were English that they

were of another nation; that they could no longer remain both English

and American, but must make choice between the two allegiances. Year

after year he stirred the troubled waters, arousing the spirit of

nationalism by attacking everything pro-British. His attacks on the

English generals, the Tories, the royalist printers, were but means to

the great end of uprooting the traditional dependence on England and

quickening the new national psychology.

The second stimulus to Freneau’s revolutionary ardor came from the

French uprising. Later in the summer of 1775 he had quitted New York

and sailed for the West Indies. He spent two years on the Island of

Santa Cruz, then and later engaging in sea voyages about the islands

and along the American coast. They were creative years, when removed

equally from the distractions of war and the utilitarianism of America,

he was free to cultivate the romantic strain of poetry that was strong

in him. Then followed unhappier days. A period of stagnation had come

to him during the years of post-war reaction; and if fresh fuel had

not been brought from overseas to kindle anew his social enthusiasms,

it is likely that he would have drifted into a stale and unprofitable

old age. The spirit of romantic poetry was deadened by an unsympathetic

environment, but with the democratic hope rising in France came a fresh

call to arms. He discovered a larger and nobler interpretation of his

republican creed, that was to transform it into French Jacobinism

and arm it for a new leveling crusade. If he could not be a poet to

America he would enlist in the army of democracy. Not only must the

new government be made French-democratic instead of English-Whig,

but all distinctions of rank must be swept away, together with every

tyrannical dogma of church and state. In short there must be a social

house-cleaning, the limits of which were to be determined only by

reason and the common democratic good. So Freneau enthusiastically

joined with Paine and Jefferson in the partisan labor of spreading the

new faith.

His literary activity during this second period was remarkable. Songs

and odes and satires came from his ready pen in unending stream, eager,

cutting, vibrant with feeling. It requires an intimate knowledge of

the times to make out the identity of every figure at which he shoots

his arrows, but it needs no very intimate knowledge to measure the

intensity of his partisanship. The democratic hopes and fears of those

vibrant days find reflection in many an acrid verse. He was at one with

Jefferson in his concern at the monarchical reaction.

In ten short years, of freedom weary grown

The State, Republic, sickens for a throne.

The man who attached to the pen name of Peter Slender the letters O. S.

M.--One of the Swinish Multitude--would not fail to take the part of

the private soldier neglected by the state:

Sold are those arms which once on Britons blazed,

When, flushed with conquest, to the charge they came;

That power repelled, and Freedom’s fabrick raised,

She leaves her soldier--famine and a name![383]

Nor would he fail to capitalize the aristocratic contempt of the

Federalists for that same swinish multitude.

Lodge where you must, drink small-beer where you can,

But eat no roast pig, if no Federal man....

Your mouth was made for rye or barley bread;

What claims have you to halls of state,

Whose business is to stand and wait,

Subservient to command?

What right have you to white-bread, superfine,

Who were by nature destin’d for “_a swine_”--

As said good Edmund Burke,

The drudge of Britain’s dirty work,

Whose mighty pamphlets rous’d the royal band![384]

During the tumultuous year of ’93 Freneau issued a series of

_Probationary Odes by Jonathan Pindar, Esq._, which reflect sharply

the partisan passions aroused by the French Revolution. They were

lampoons directed at members of government who were in the democratic

black-book, chiefly John Adams, Knox, and Hamilton. The introductory

poem was addressed _To all the Great Folks in a Lump_; the second, _To

Atlas_, was an attack on Hamilton; the third, _To A Select Body of

Great Men_, was a lampoon of the Senate; and the fourth, _To a Would Be

Great Man_, was addressed to Freneau’s particular _bête noire_, John

Adams. This last, apropos of _Davila_, will serve to show the popular

reception which that unfortunate work received.

Daddy Vice, Daddy Vice,

One may see in a trice

The drift of your fine publication.

As sure as a gun

The thing was just done

To secure you a +PRETTY HIGH+ station.

When you tell us of _kings_

And such pretty things

Good mercy! how brilliant your page is!

So bright is each line

I vow you’ll shine

Like--a glow worm to all future ages.

On Davila’s page

Your discourses so sage

Democratical numskulls bepuzzle,

With arguments tough

As white leather or buff,

The republican Bull Dogs to muzzle.

’Tis labor in vain,

Your senses to strain,

Our brains any longer to muddle;

Like Colossus you stride

O’er our noddles so wide

We look up like frogs in a puddle.

If Freneau’s hatred of the men who opposed the democratic movement

was immeasurable, his enthusiasm for the new age of reason that he

believed was rising was as boundless. His pages during those years of

Jacobin radicalism are dotted thick with odes to liberty and addresses

to republicans; probably more fully than any other pages they reflect

the spirit that in England and America was forming Tom Paine clubs,

and projecting innumerable programs of social reform. A new social

conscience was stirring in Freneau, broadening immensely the horizon of

his thought; and if he counted rather too confidently on the appeal to

reason to bring the golden age, he proved himself thereby a true child

of his generation. In such lines as these one discovers the spirit that

moved Godwin to write _Political Justice_.

How can we call those systems just

Which bid the few, the proud, the first,

Possess all earthly good;

While millions robbed of all that’s dear

In silence shed the ceaseless tear,

And leaches suck their blood....

Let laws revive, by heaven designed,

To tame the tiger in the mind

And drive from human hearts

That love of wealth, that love of sway,

Which leads the world too much astray,

Which points envenomed darts:

And men will rise from what they are;

Sublimer, and superior, far,

Than Solon guessed, or Plato saw;

All will be just, all will be good--

That harmony, “not understood,”

Will reign the general law.

For, in our race, deranged, bereft,

The parting god some vestige left

Of worth before possessed;

Which full, which fair, which perfect shone,

When love and peace, in concord sown,

Ruled, and inspired each breast.[385]

In quite another vein, that reveals Freneau’s unusual mastery of

colloquial prose, is the following passage, impersonating Robert

Slender, the country philosopher.

Mr. Editor,

Having heard that there was a tavern at about the distance of a

mile or so from my favorite country spot, where now and then a few

neighbors meet to spit, smoke segars, drink apple whiskey, cider

or cider-royal, and read the news--a few evenings ago, I put on my

best coat, combed out my wig, put my spectacles in my pocket, and a

quarter dollar--This I thought was right; for although Mrs. Slender

told me eleven-pence was enough, says I, I’ll e’en take the quarter

dollar, for a man always feels himself of more consequence when he

has got good money in his pocket--so out I walks with a good stout

stick in my hand, which I always make a point to carry with me,

lest the dogs should make rather freer with my legs than I could

wish. But I had not gone more than half the way, when, by making a

false step, I splash’d my stocking from the knee to the ancle. Odds

my heart, said I, see what a hand I have made of my stocking; I’ll

be bail, added I, I’ll hear of this in both sides of my head--but

it can’t now be helped--this, and a thousand worse accidents,

which daily happen, are all occasioned by public neglect, and the

misapplication of the public’s money--Had I, said I, (talking to

myself all the while) the disposal of but half the income of the

United States, I could at least so order matters, that a man might

walk to his next neighbor’s without splashing his stockings or

being in danger of breaking his legs in ruts, holes, gutts, and

gullies. I do not know, says I to myself, as I moralized on my

splash’d stocking, but money might with more profit be laid out

in repairing the roads, than in marine establishments, supporting

a standing army, useless embassies, exorbitant salaries, given to

many flashy fellows that are no honor to us, or to themselves,

and chartering whole ships to carry a single man to another

nation--Odds my life, continued I, what a number of difficulties a

man labors under, who has never read further than Lilly’s grammar,

and has but a poor brain--had I been favored with a good education,

I could no doubt readily see the _great usefulness_ of all these

measures of government, that now appear to me so unaccountable--I

could then, said I, still talking to myself, see the reason why

the old patriots, whose blood flowed so freely in purchasing our

independence, are cast aside, like a broken pitcher, (as the

Scripture says) and why the old tories and active refugees are

advanced to places of power, honor and trust.[386]

In another writer so whimsical a note would have no other purpose than

to fill a Spectator paper. But the garrulous Robert Slender is Freneau

in quieter vein, pursuing his old purpose. As a social philosopher

his opinions are oddly like those of Tom Paine. In commenting on

the government’s use of the people’s money he was seeking to awaken

interest in the social possibilities of government: that government

would better serve the _res publica_ through internal improvements,

than by creating armies and navies and providing posts and pensions

for great men. This was a fashion of thought which Paine had done much

to spread, and in the midst of a pompous Federalism, when gentlemen

professed to believe that government could acquire reverence in the

people’s eyes only by being hedged about with ceremonial, Robert

Slender’s cogitations were very much to the point. If government were

truly democratized, if it concerned itself with realities, serving the

people in the homely affairs and common needs of everyday life, there

would be no need of aristocratic ceremonial. Like Paine, Freneau was an

idealist, with his head full of ideas which to practical men were only

silly French notions; and yet the idealist, in this matter of the _res

publica_, was the true realist.

For all his Jacobinism Freneau might have been spared some of the

odium that gathered about his head if he had not turned partisan

journalist and put himself in the thick of the fight. In the eighteenth

century the newspaper editor had not yet wholly risen from the rank

of mechanic; he was still a master-printer, with hands much too

ink-stained to pass himself off as a gentleman, and with financial

resources too limited to be intellectually independent. If his paper

were largely literary he made no powerful enemies, but let him enter

politics or seek to mold public opinion on important matters, and he

was likely to meet the fate of John Mein, outspoken editor of the

_Boston Chronicle_, who was destroyed for exposing the weakness of the

merchants’ non-importation policy.[387] Freneau had had considerable

experience in newspaper work at times when his sea life had grown

irksome, but he took no active part in politics until the fall of 1791,

when he set up the _National Gazette_ in Philadelphia, and began that

tumultuous career lasting two years which brought so much abuse upon

him.

The detailed story of his connection with the _Gazette_ is given in an

admirable study,[388] and need not be recounted further than to bring

into relief the bare essentials. Soon after the formation of the new

government Hamilton had provided himself with a newspaper, _The United

States Gazette_, that was an effective advocate of all Hamiltonian

policies. The editor, John Fenno, seems to have been a vigorous fellow,

into whose hands Hamilton threw much of the public printing, and whose

debts he paid when they became pressing. Alarmed at the influence

wielded by the newspaper, Jefferson and Madison approached Freneau,

who had been contemplating a new venture, with the suggestion that

he set up a rival democratic paper. To encourage him Jefferson gave

Freneau a small post as translator in the State Department, worth $250

a year. The _National Gazette_ was thereupon established, and for two

years a war between the hostile papers went on fiercely. If the _United

States Gazette_ lauded the virtues of the English government, extolled

the wisdom of Hamilton and abhorred all Jacobins, the _National

Gazette_ retorted in kind, attacking the Secretary of the Treasury

and applauding the growing Jacobite spirit that struck at every form

of aristocracy. It became the common clearing house for democratic

propaganda, and Freneau’s influence spread so widely that he may justly

be regarded as “the leading editor in America” during those critical

years.

It is quite evident today that “the chief business of the _Gazette_

was to destroy Hamilton.” Probably more largely than any other

writer, Freneau awakened a popular distrust of Federalist men and

measures, which a few years later was to break the party. Jefferson’s

often-quoted remark, “His paper has saved our Constitution _which was

fast galloping into monarchy_, and has been checked by no one means so

powerfully as by that paper,” is somewhat extravagant; nevertheless the

universal detestation in which Freneau was held by all Federalists is

sufficient testimony to his influence. Washington was greatly ruffled

and wanted to remove him from his petty post in the State Department,

but Jefferson would not consent. It seems that Washington felt no

ill-will toward John Fenno, who drew six times the sum from the public

treasury that Freneau received. But Fenno was no democrat, “hostile to

garter, ribbon, crown, and star;” Fenno was no unsparing critic who

would attack even Washington if he lent himself to undemocratic ends;

whereas Freneau was plain-spoken, and no gentleman likes plain speaking

from subordinates.

All this was a hundred years ago and more. The inditers of those

partisan scurrilities, Democrat and Federalist alike, have long since

ceased their bickerings. Words which once stung like a whiplash

have become only echoes of dead passions. As the struggles of those

tumultuous years fall into truer perspective, the figure of Philip

Freneau takes on larger and nobler proportions. The cloud of calumny

that long obscured his virtues is dissipating, and we discover in him

an eager child of an age of democratic aspiration, the friend and

advocate of social justice. Like Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, he

was a notable American, who gave himself unselfishly to the work of

furthering the common well-being. “It was a long and stormy life,” says

Forman, “and it was lived for human rights and human freedom”--

Still on the people’s, still on Freedom’s side;

Still in the cause of man severely true.

After all, the poet in Freneau was deeper than the partisan. Despite

his conviction that a sordid America cared nothing for poetry--that “an

age employed in edging steel can no poetic raptures feel”--his love of

beauty was never killed nor the spring of poetic creation dried up.

In moments of release from cares he found solace in the poetry that

welled up from the unembittered depths of a rich and generous nature.

The portrait drawn by Professor Tyler depicts one side of Freneau; the

following lines, from a very late poem, reveal another:

The world has wrangled half an age,

And we again in war engage,

While this sweet, sequestr’d rill

Murmurs through the valley still....

But, with all your quiet flow,

Do you not some quarrels know!

Lately, angry, how you ran!

All at war--and much like man.

When the shower of waters fell,

How you raged, and what a swell!

All your banks you overflow’d,

Scarcely knew your own abode!

How you battled with the rock!

Gave my willows such a shock

As to menace, by its fall,

Underwood and bushes, all:

Now you are again at peace:

Time will come when that will cease;

Such the human passions are;

--You again will war declare.

Emblem, thou, of restless man;

What a sketch of nature’s plan!

Now at peace, and now at war,

Now you murmur, now you roar;

Muddy now, and limpid next,

Now with icy shackles vext--

What a likeness here we find!

What a picture of mankind![389]

This was the valedictory of Philip Freneau. His life was bitter and

turbulent, cast in a bitter and turbulent age; yet he found some grains

of comfort in the contemplation of nature and the exercise of the

poet’s craft. Through it all his heart remained clean and his hands

unstained. If he was not a great poet whom all the critics praise, he

loved beauty and served it in a careless world among an indifferent

people, and it ill becomes America to forget his contribution or deny

him some portion of the honor that has fallen generously to others no

more deserving.

2. Joel Barlow • Jacobin