Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
was driving straight towards the Hartford Convention--blind sailors
navigating the Dead Sea of Federalist pessimism.
All this was before the reputed time of plain living and high thinking.
Intellectual Boston was as parochial as political Boston. The lights
whom Bostonians regarded as the torch-bearers of New England culture
have long since been extinguished and their names forgotten even in
Beacon Street. Amongst the literati of the little Boston of 1800 the
historian need concern himself with no more than two or three: Fisher
Ames (1758-1808), the Federalist lawyer-wit, and Robert Treat Paine
(1773-1811), esteemed the ninth wonder of the Boston world. Other
figures there were, of course, in addition to the literati: Harrison
Gray Otis, the eloquent voice of Faneuil Hall, and Josiah Quincy, whom
Lowell likened to an old Roman of the elder virtuous days, and who
during a long life of ninety-two years was an example of stalwart and
antiquated Federalism. Old Boston bred dignified figures in plenty,
men admirably equipped to be college presidents, ambassadors, orators
on formal occasions, purveyors of cultivated inutilities and polished
commonplace--men like Edward Everett, whom all Boston praised while
they lived and forgot when they were dead; but it bred no thinkers or
men of letters who count in the larger history of America. Boston was
still parochial, content with little things.
II • Fisher Ames • The Oracle of the Tie-Wig School
Of this testy little world that clung to its smallclothes and tie-wig,
refusing to adopt the Jacobin innovation in dress and manners and
politics, declining to temper its prejudices to the gusty whims of a
leveling age, Fisher Ames was the universal counselor and oracle. A
vivacious little gentleman to whom politics was the breath of life,
he achieved so tremendous a reputation in his short lifetime that all
New England looked to him for leadership and Harvard College wanted to
make him its president. He came of vigorous stock, prone to consult
its own will and speak its opinions with no squeamish concern for a
neighbor’s views. His brother, Dr. Nathaniel Ames, was as violent a
Republican as Fisher was a Federalist, a hater of all lawyers whom
he accounted the “pettifogging interest”; and when the two members
of the family came together at dinner the talk must have been worth
hearing. Diverse worlds and hostile philosophies faced each other over
the roast, and the sauce no doubt was well spiced. Dr. Nathaniel had
a pretty gift himself in the way of pungent speech, and Fisher’s wit
was the admiration of all New England. When Gouverneur Morris--reputed
the greatest wit in America--visited Massachusetts, Fisher Ames was
pitted against him, and Boston believed that the honor of the Bay
State was worthily upheld. His pet hobby was the inherent tyranny of
all democracies, and when he once got astride his wooden horse and dug
in the spurs, the onset was tremendous. The letters that have come
down to us are a gold mine of picturesque vituperation, from which
one may dig a wallet of choice nuggets. The vivacity of his anathemas
is delightful, and one would give much to have heard Dr. Nathaniel’s
retort militant.
There are the solidest grounds for regarding Fisher Ames as the
representative citizen of Boston in the year 1800. He was the cleverest
and most intelligent spokesman of a social and political circle quite
untouched by the new French liberalisms, content with the habitual and
familiar, and mightily concerned that the future should be as like
the past as one generation of oysters is like another. A lawyer who
shared the strong property consciousness of the Boston merchant, and a
churchman who accepted the moral leadership of the Calvinist clergy, he
offered stout and uncompromising resistance to innovation. “A change,
though for the better, is always to be deplored by the generation in
which it is effected,” he said. “Much is lost and more is hazarded”
(_Works_, p. 15, edition of 1809). The new gospel of progress that came
in with French romanticisms, he would have none of. In the face of a
noisy Jacobinism that threatened to carry all before it, he fought a
spirited fight, turning pamphleteer when his broken health removed him
from Congress, counseling and scolding his fellow Federalists with his
last breath. Others might truckle and compromise, but not Fisher Ames.
His faith was founded on the solid granite of Yankee prejudice.
The very solidity of that prejudice made him the trenchant spokesman
of the older Boston conservatisms--that and the vivacity of his prose
style which is approved Augustan, uncorrupted by what he dubbed
“pompous Johnsonian affectation.” His contemporary reputation was
enormous. Accounted a great orator, he was accounted an even greater
political philosopher, and his pamphlets were appraised by President
Kirkland of Harvard as “the light of genius and wisdom darted athwart
the gloom of our political chaos.” “In the character of Mr. Ames,”
said the Harvard president, “the circle of the virtues seemed to be
complete, and each virtue in its proper place” (_Works_, Introduction,
p. xxviii). Yet in spite of so authoritative a pronouncement, Fisher
Ames does not seem today so great a man as he seemed to his own
generation. From the data collected in a stout volume published soon
after his death as “a voice of instruction and warning to his country,”
and from the letters published by his son in 1854, it is plain enough
that this “powerful and original genius” was a retailer of somewhat
shopworn goods, a complete Federalist Tory after the current Boston
fashion. To Fisher Ames Federalism, as understood in New England, was a
religion. He defended it with the ardor of the moralist, convinced that
it included all the political virtues, and that whoever rejected it was
a child of the devil. Whenever he considered the unpromising state of
the country--which luxury he often indulged--whether in the midst of
Shays’s Rebellion or of the Jeffersonian revolution, he fell into black
pessimism. He grew hot from fires of his own kindling, and the gloomier
he became the more vigorously he blew the bellows.
To the sinful publican self-conscious virtue is peculiarly irritating,
and since Fisher Ames accounted most of his generation political
publicans, he was at odds with all but a scant remnant of Federalist
saints. From this isolation, from the defeat that overwhelmed his party
in the great election of 1800, and from aggravating ill health, which
beginning when he was thirty-seven incapacitated him three years later
for public life, he fell into a state of chronic political despondency
that extracted a grim pleasure from the contemplation of democratic
follies and the anarchy towards which the country was hastening. During
his last years his wit became acid; his letters are filled with caustic
comment to sharpen the temper of those on the fighting line. Of these
racy comments, so characteristic of Federalist spleen, a few examples
must serve to convey the spirit: “Our country is too big for union,
too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty.” “We are in the
hands of the philosophers of Lilliput.” “I have as loyal and respectful
an opinion as possible of the sincerity in folly of our rulers.” “As
to liberty, we are to have none--democracy will kindle its own hell,
and consume in it.” “Democracy is a troubled spirit, fated never to
rest, and whose dreams, if it sleeps, present only visions of hell.” In
his last years Fisher Ames had become a shrill Jeremiah crying in the
gates of an Israel that mocked the old prophets.
His political philosophy was simple, yet so native to Calvinist-Yankee
New England, and historically so characteristic, that it provides
a useful candle to throw light into the old New England garrets.
In certain aspects it is close kin to the Whiggery of Locke and
Pitt, particularly in its concern for the sacred right of property
rule--a principle that he casually recognizes in his frequent
assertion that “the mass of the federalists are the owners of the
commercial and monied wealth of the nation” (_Works_, p. 426).
But in post-Revolutionary Boston, suffering from the acute fright
inflicted by Daniel Shays, this English Whiggery had come to assume
a particular native form that differentiated it from its original.
In the primitive Calvinist-Yankee world political theory had been
shaped by the theocratic conception of stewardship, by which was
meant an authoritative leadership reposing in the best and wisest,
yet subject to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Minister
and magistrate, therefore, professed to justify their acts, not by
expediency or interest, but by absolute ethical standards. From this
early practice developed the pronounced ethical temper of New England
political thought that set it apart from the Virginia school, a temper
that persisted after the transfer of authority from Puritan minister
and magistrate to Tory merchant and lawyer. With the growth of the
aristocratic spirit in the middle eighteenth century, the squirearchy
assumed unchallenged political leadership, and it was from the remnant
of the old gentry remaining after the expulsion of the Loyalists,
strengthened by a new generation of merchants and lawyers, that Boston
Federalism drew its personnel. It professed republicanism, but it was
instinctively aristocratic. It was true to its Puritan origins in
expounding its political philosophy in terms of an absolute morality,
and true to its aristocratic origins in assuming to be the special
custodians of law and order. It no more questioned its special right
to rulership in the state than it questioned its social position; and
in both politics and society it professed the ancient doctrine of
stewardship.
The kinship between the political philosophy of Fisher Ames and John
Adams is quite evident. They are cut out of the same Puritan-Yankee
cloth, but the former is a more careless tailor. Founded on less
adequate analysis and lacking the wide historical appeal of Adams,
assuming rather than proving the fact of a universal property
aristocracy, and the economic origins of political power, the
philosophy of Ames postulates the same ideal of justice as the end of
government, discovers in faction the dragon to be slain, and concludes
that only a static division of powers can insure political stability.
Nevertheless the difference between the two men is enormous. John Adams
was a philosopher, and Fisher Ames was only a lawyer-politician. The
ideal of justice which the former postulated was fundamentally noble,
whereas the ideal of justice which the latter assumed was narrowly
legal. Both accepted the Puritan doctrine of human wickedness--a
doctrine derived from medieval Toryism--and from it deduced the
necessity of a coercive sovereignty; but Fisher Ames went further and
assumed that the Puritan doctrine of the elect and the Yankee doctrine
of the successful were one and the same, and that God’s remnant in
Israel was no other than the prosperous merchants and lawyers of
Boston. All the great multitude of the unprosperous, by the same
doctrine, were the mass of the unregenerate, condemned for the good of
society to be ruled by a rod of iron.
The noble doctrine of justice, therefore, became for Fisher Ames
little more than the divine right of the minority to coerce the
majority, in the name and through the agency of laws and statutes. In
his view justice was little more than a drab realist in a lawyer’s
wig, adjudicating title deeds, and delivering its findings out of law
books. Its one concern was to safeguard what had been got, rather than
to secure just and equal rights. It dreaded all rude and tumultuary
innovation, and would tolerate no change that was not implicit in