Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
permit the powerful to exploit the poor through the instrumentality
of government. This may explain in part his hostility to Hamilton and
his partial sympathy with Jefferson. He stood between the two rival
economies, arguing for a system of government that should be neither
agrarian nor capitalistic, but should maintain a static mean; and
in consequence he pleased nobody. His four years in the presidency
disrupted the Federalist party, and prepared the way for the triumph
of Jefferson. Though tactless and blundering in dealing with trimming
politicians, he was an honest and courageous man, and his many sterling
qualities merit a larger recognition than has been accorded them by a
grudging posterity. In spite of his dogmatisms and inconsistencies he
remains the most notable political thinker--with the possible exception
of John C. Calhoun--among American statesmen.
Footnotes
[313] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 51.
[314] _Ibid._, p. 298.
[315] Brief of speech submitting his plan of Constitution, in _Works_,
Vol. II, p. 415.
[316] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. V, p. 244.
[317] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 422.
[318] _Works of Jefferson_, Ford edition, Vol. I, p. 165.
[319] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 257.
[320] _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 207-208.
[321] “Autobiography,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 310.
[322] R. G. Adams, _Political Ideas of the American Revolution_,
Trinity College Press, 1922, pp. 92-93.
[323] _Gazette of the United States_, March, 1790; quoted in Forman,
“The Political Activities of Philip Freneau,” in _Johns Hopkins Studies
in History and Political Science_, XX, Nos. 9-10.
[324] _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 272, note.
[325] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 408.
[326] See “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, pp.
9, 57, 97.
[327] Letter to John Taylor, in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 516.
[328] _Ibid._, pp. 508-509.
[329] _Ibid._, p. 508.
[330] “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, pp.
124-125.
[331] _Ibid._, p. 64.
[332] “Letter to John Taylor,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 516.
[333] _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 211.
[334] See “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” and in particular Vol.
IV of _Works_.
[335] “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 9.
[336] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 295.
[337] “A Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 65.
[338] _Works_, Vol. IX, p. 376.
[339] For a detailed examination of the sources of his philosophy, see
the excellent discussion in C. M. Walsh, _The Political Science of John
Adams_, Chapters XV, XVI.
[340] See Beard, _The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p.
317.
Part Two: Political Democracy Gets Under Way • 1787-1800
Chapter I • The Impact of the French Revolution
The dramatic impact of the French Revolution upon a situation which
for months had been overwrought entailed disturbing consequences.
Within a week after the setting up of the new government there began
that long series of events in France which carried far and gave birth
to extraordinary hopes and fears; and throughout the remaining years
of the century the French movement exercised a determining influence
upon American parties and issues. In the words of Colonel Higginson, it
“drew a red-hot ploughshare through the history of America as well as
through that of France. It not merely divided parties, but molded them;
gave them their demarcations, their watchwords and their bitterness.
The home issues were for a time subordinate, collateral; the real party
lines were established on the other side of the Atlantic.”[341] The
stirring of political passions afresh resulted in greatly clarifying
political philosophies, and in rendering more exact, political
alignments that before had been vague and inchoate.
The creative influence of the French Revolution upon the western world
resulted from the enormous impetus which it gave to the movement to
democratize American life and institutions. In no other country to
which the sparks of revolution drifted was there such quantity of
combustible material ready for the torch; and in setting afire this
native material the French upheaval put a stop to the aristocratic
reaction which had carried everything before it during the previous
decade. It spread widely the spirit of leveling, and destroyed the
last hope of the “monarchy men.” But it did more--it gave a wide
and popular currency to the ideal of democracy. Before the French
Revolution the American mind had been curiously sensitive over the term
democrat; even Samuel Adams had been driven by expediency to reject
the word, and, amongst the radicals, few had the boldness to avow
themselves democrats. By common consent the term had been covered with
opprobrium; democracy was no other than a _bellua multorum capitum_,
the hydra-headed monster of earlier Tories, licentious, irreligious,
the very spawn of anarchy. But now the old conceptions were rapidly
swept away, and democracy was accepted by liberals as the ultimate form
of political organization, to which the American experiment was to be
dedicated.
In thus imparting social idealism to political speculation, the
Revolution not only elevated the democratic ideal, but it provided a
body of philosophy, the lack of which had so seriously handicapped
the democrats during the great debate. And this new philosophy gained
extraordinarily wide currency in America under the stimulus of
revolutionary enthusiasm. It made direct appeal to the vast majority
who still remained among the political disinherited; it aroused
them to political consciousness and intensified the class alignment
that followed. The country divided sharply between left and right,
and political discussion became more intense as the French movement
developed. The English declaration of war upon France produced a crisis
in America, and sharpened the party cleavage. The Federalists went
with Great Britain and turned fiercely upon the democratic movement,
assailing it with increasing venom. The democrats, on the other
hand, became French partisans, and denounced all aristocrats with
true republican fervor, becoming more radical as French Jacobinism
developed. Never before had political passion risen to such heights in
America, not even during the early days of the American Revolution;
and never before had political ideas taken such hold upon the common
people. Out of this increasing ferment emerged certain consequences of
vast significance to the democratic movement: not only was an effective
barrier erected against the further spread of aristocratic Federalism,
but certain of its most characteristic doctrines disintegrated and
disappeared. The current dogma of faction gave way to a more democratic
interpretation of the majority will; the doctrine of the ethical
absolute--the _vox justiciae, vox dei_--quietly yielded to the more
practical conception of expediency; and the lately resurrected ideal of
an augmented state received a temporary check, the majority preferring
to intrust power to local bodies rather than to a central authority.
At the beginning the sympathy of America as a whole went heartily
with the revolutionary movement in France. The adherence of Lafayette
justified the cause to the most conservative. But with the advent of
the Girondists to power a division in American sentiment appeared:
Hamilton, John Adams, and other extreme Federalists drew back in
disapproval; and with the rise of the Jacobins, party cleavage
became sharp and bitter. All over America the liberals organized
democratic clubs, instituted committees of correspondence, and actively
forwarded the new leveling principles. The attack on ceremonial and
titles of address in Congress, of which Maclay has left record in
his _Journal_, was only a skirmish in the general war levied upon
social distinctions.[342] It was to these democratic societies that
Citizen Genêt made appeal; they rallied about him, toasted the French
principles, and assured him of the warm support of the American people.
The recall of Genêt was a blow to the American Jacobins, and they
retaliated by direct appeals to the people to repudiate the act of the
administration. Stung by their criticism of his policy of neutrality,
Washington denounced them as “certain self-created societies” that
offensively “assumed the tone of condemnation” of governmental
policies; and went so far as to imply that such criticism was
seditious. It was ill-advised for it was like a torch to dry leaves.
The Federalists fell upon the democrats with gusto. They denounced the
infidel French mobocracy and its American offspring. They declaimed
against “secret organizations,” imputing to them every evil known to
Satan: the democratic clubs were called “demoniacal clubs,” “nurseries
of sedition,” “hotbeds of atheism,” “spawn of faction”; and common
decency required that they be put down with a strong hand. In short the
most eminent Federalists joined heartily in the silly work of turning
the country into a bedlam.
A characteristic _odium theologicum_ quickly gathered about the
movement and extended to the whole democratic philosophy. Well-meaning
but ignorant gentlemen saw in Jacobinism only atheism and immorality.
John Adams professed not to know “what to make of a republic of
thirty million atheists,” and he attributed the unhappy result to the
“encyclopedists and economists, Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire
and Rousseau,” with their mad doctrines of the “equality of persons
and property.” But the more violently such men protested, the more
insidiously “the infidel and irreligious spirit” spread through the
land. It found its way into such strongholds of orthodoxy as Harvard
College, to the scandal of the respectable; and as a counterblast to
Paine’s _Age of Reason_, a copy of Watson’s _Apology for the Bible_
was presented to every Harvard undergraduate, with what results in
godliness no record remains to tell. On both sides there was more
heat than light, more passion than reason, and in consequence such a
tremendous hue and cry was worked up that the noise carried to the
farthest outposts of settlement, and brought home to the most sluggish
some realization of the significance of the world-wide movement of
democracy then under way, and left few quite indifferent to the import
of the tricolor cockade. It was the first great popularization of
democratic ideals in America and when the hubbub finally subsided it
was apparent to all that democracy had made a definite and stable
advance, from which it must move forward to still other vantage points.
Only a few unregenerate aristocrats shared with Gouverneur Morris his
reasons for joy at the final overthrow of Napoleon: “’Tis done, the
long agony is over. The Bourbons are restored. France reposes in the
arms of her legitimate prince”; or who agreed with Robert Treat Paine
in calling the democratic movement of the nineties “the melancholy
record of our national degradation.” The Federalists still hated
Jefferson and his “revolution of 1800,” but a triumphant agrarianism
had broken them and their power for the time being.
So tremendous a movement naturally developed its literature of
propaganda in America as elsewhere. In the main this was little more
than an echo of the old-world debate, and, in particular, of the
controversy between Burke and Paine which deeply stirred the entire
English reading-public. Among the innumerable pamphlets, four works
may be regarded as representative: Paine’s _Rights of Man_, Barlow’s
_Advice to the Privileged Orders_, John Adams’s _Discourses on Davila_,
and John Quincy Adams’s _Publicola_; and of these we need here concern
ourselves only with _The Rights of Man_ and _Publicola_, which clearly
reveal the divergent political philosophies of the two parties. The