Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
legal principles. Its golden rule was due process of law. Love of
one’s neighbors was, no doubt, an excellent private virtue, but it was
impractical, if not immoral, in the state. Concern for the improvident
sinners must not influence government to impair the rights of the
thrifty saints; for government was instituted and exists to safeguard
established things. “The chief duty and care of all governments,” he
argued, “is to protect the rights of property and the tranquillity of
society” (_Works_, p. 125). Hence to Fisher Ames government was the
common policeman and judge, whose function was to arrest the turbulent
and bring them to the bar of the Common Law. Its beginning and end
was the Tory principle of coercion. Its sovereignty was arrogant
and domineering, taking no account of the democratic principle of
good will. “The motives to refuse obedience to government are many
and strong,” he explained; “impunity will multiply and enforce them.
Many men would rebel, rather than be ruined; but they would rather
not rebel, than be hanged” (_Works_, “Lucius Junius Brutus”). With
government thus conceived of, naturally he desired that it should be
strong; that it should impose its will ruthlessly upon the rebellious.
Naturally also he regarded every idealist, the Rousseaus and Paines and
Jeffersons--all the mischievous hosts of “democratick babblers”--as
a dangerous enemy of law and order, desperately bent on overturning
the rights of vested interests and the tranquillity of society. This
is sufficient to explain the vindictiveness of his assault upon Shays
and his followers, as “bankrupts and sots, who have gambled or slept
away their estates”--while in the Revolutionary army--and were now
engaged in the business of treason against the commonwealth, and the
characteristic conclusion that he draws--“the certainty of punishment
is the truest security against crimes” (_Works_, “Lucius Junius
Brutus,” p. 3). To Fisher Ames and Daniel Shays, justice seems to have
had very different aspects.
To the uncritical there is a certain persuasive dignity in the
philosophy of Boston Federalism. Gentlemen like Fisher Ames were
careful to appear well in public; they liked to be regarded as
faithful stewards of the common weal. Concern for the _res publica_
they professed so heartily that it seems ungracious to question their
motives. How excellently they could make out a case for themselves will
appear from the following exposition of Fisher Ames’ philosophy, as it
was understood by a Harvard president:
Mr. Ames was emphatically a republican. He saw that many persons
confounded a republick with a democracy. He considered them as
essentially distinct and really opposite. According to his creed,
a republick is that structure of an elective government, in
which the administration necessarily prescribe to themselves the
general good as the object of all their measures; a democracy is
that, in which the present popular passions, independent of the
publick good, become a guide to the rulers. In the first, the
reason and interests of the society govern; in the second, their
prejudices and passions. The frame of the American constitution
supposes the dangers of democracy.... [The constitutional checks]
are contrivances and devices voluntarily adopted by the people
to restrain themselves from obstructing, by their own mistakes
or perversity, the attainment of the publick welfare. They are
professed means of insuring to the nation rulers, who will prefer
the durable good of the whole to the transient advantage of the
whole or a part. When these provisions become ineffectual, and
the legislator, the executive magistrate, and the judge become
the instruments of the passions of a people, or of the governing
majority, the government, whatever may be its form, is a democracy,
and the public liberty is no longer safe. True republican rulers
are bound to act, not simply as those who appoint them _would_,
but, as they _ought_; democratick leaders will act in subordination
to those very passions which it is the object of government to
control.... Then it is, that men, not laws, govern. (_Works_,
Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv.)
“The durable good of the whole” is an excellent phrase; but when the
skeptical critic asks for more exact plans and specifications, the only
answer is a request for a vote of confidence. The representative is
presumed to be wiser and more patriotic than his constituents--quite
above passion or interest--and may safely be intrusted with “the
publick good.” “The love of country,” Fisher Ames was fond of
insisting, “is the morality of politics,” and the Federal Constitution
he believed to be so happily balanced that partisan selfishness must
transmute itself into patriotism. But when we dismiss these amiable
generalities--which reveal to what straits gentlemen were reduced in
their contest with democracy--and examine the political principles that
lie behind them, they do not appear so amiable. They imply as necessary
corollaries a continuous aggrandizement of the political state, the
principle of coercion, and the psychology of fear. It is no other than
the old Tory arrogance, new-modeled to suit republican taste. Fisher
Ames seems to have had no faith in the principle of good will or the
expediency of compromise; his contempt for the opposition was as frank
as Hamilton’s.
Government does not subsist by making proselytes to sound reasons
or by compromise and arbitration with its members; but by the power
of the community compelling the obedience of individuals. If that
is not done, who will seek its protection, or fear its vengeance.
(“Lucius Junius Brutus,” _Works_, p. 5.)
For let it be remarked, that a feeble government produces more
factions than an oppressive one; the want of power first makes
individuals legislators, and then rebels. Where parents want
authority, children are wanting in duty. It is not possible to
advance further in the same path; the one will conduct us first
to anarchy, and next to foreign or domestick tyranny; the other,
by the wise and vigorous exertion of lawful authority, will lead
to permanent power, and general prosperity. I am no advocate for
despotism; but I believe the probability to be much less of its
being introduced by the corruption of our rulers, than by the
delusion of the people. (“Camillus,” _Works_, p. 17.)
A weak, government, Ames argues insistently, is no other than a
hotbed of faction, and faction is the fruitful mother of democratic
anarchy. Again and again he returns to an exposition of the familiar
eighteenth-century dogma that found its classic exposition in the
tenth number of _The Federalist_; and his argument takes on darker
colors from the Calvinist background of his mind. To those who have
been reared on the sour doctrines of reprobation and election, the
children of Adam become a major political concern. If God has cast
off and denied the mass of the unregenerate, how shall the political
philosopher hope to redeem them? If divine wisdom has granted them no
part in the congregation of the righteous, what rights have they in
the republic of the patriotic? To Fisher Ames town and village and
farm showed plentiful examples of those whom the devil had marked for
his own, and if they were gathered into a numerical democracy with the
saints, how should the minority of the latter safeguard the Ark of
the Sanctuary? How should the durable good of the whole be provided
for? Thrift and godliness were not exactly synonymous terms to the
Calvinist-Yankee, but it was clear that the godly will practice thrift,
and those who have thriven, have _ipso facto_ made out a case for their
godliness. In this uncertain world two things seemed reasonably clear:
that the poor are in a more doubtful state than the rich; and that in
a moral world only the elect may be expected to serve the cause of
morality. The wicked incline to democratic faction, but the prosperous
serve the durable good of the whole.
To one cradled in such prejudices, the current phrase, “gentlemen of
principle and property”--a phrase that provides the chorus to his
thought--lacked the savor of cynicism that it suggests to modern ears.
It was compounded of the ideals of Puritan and Yankee, and Fisher Ames
seems never to have questioned its adequacy, or doubted its finality.
To gentlemen of principle and property he looked to provide a bulwark
against the immoral multitude; they were the stewards of society, on
whom devolved the duty of protecting the whole from democratic faction.
They had erected the Federal Constitution, which Jacobins were seeking
to destroy; and in defense of that Constitution he brought forth his
heaviest artillery. He contributed nothing new to the discussion; but
he repeated the familiar arguments with the gusto of a dogmatist.
“Simple governments,” he asserted, “are despotisms; and of all
despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent”
(_Works_, “American Liberty,” p. 382). The mortal weakness of all
democracies he discovered in their immorality. A democracy will make
every people “thoroughly licentious and corrupt.” “The known propensity
of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the
ignorant believe to be liberty.”
The great object, then, of political wisdom in framing our
constitution, was to guard against licentiousness, that inbred
malady of democracies, that deforms their infancy with grey hairs
and decrepitude. (_Ibid._, p. 384.)
There is universally a presumption in democracy that promises
everything; and at the same time an imbecility that can accomplish
nothing, not even preserve itself. (_Works_, “Falkland,” p. 151.)
“Politics should have no passions,” this caustic old Federalist
professed to believe, yet his bitterness against the Jeffersonians who
threatened to overturn the funding law, the national bank, the midnight
judicial appointments, and other measures of the best Federalist minds,
was almost unseemly. It would appear that “the durable good of the
whole” flew out at the window, when danger to commercial interests came
in at the door. To erect a strong government and then lose control of
it was a disaster indeed. With the political state in the hands of
atheistic democrats, Fisher Ames was prepared to welcome the coming of
anarchy, and his pessimism throve on the prospect. But that no warning
might be lacking he laid down the whole theory of government in plain
terms, that even Jefferson might understand:
But the essence, and almost the quintessence, of good government
is, to protect property and its rights. When these are protected,
there is scarcely any booty left for oppression to seize; the
objects and the motives to usurpation and tyranny are removed. By
securing property, life and liberty can scarcely fail of being
secured: where property is safe by rules and principles, there is
liberty. (_Works_, “Phocion,” p. 181.)
This is pure Federalism, stripped of all cant, speaking out frankly.
It is the philosophy of John Locke brought in to serve the rising
capitalism of New England, threatened by a Physiocratic agrarianism.
The dogma of political morality has yielded to economic realism. The
stake-in-society principle is the reply of the Puritan-Yankee to the
democratic romanticism of Jefferson and Madison--a principle which,
fortunately, “these apostles from the race-ground and the cock-pit”
paid little heed to.
To a sophisticated generation, long familiar with the political ways of
gentlemen of principle and property, Fisher Ames appears as a caustic
little gentleman, vivacious and intolerant, who nodded his tie-wig
dogmatically, and spoke his opinions oracularly. He quite evidently