by Myron Magnet
DEDICATION
For Barbara, Julia, Alec, and Trevor
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION The Americanness of the American Revolution
PART ONE
The Firebrands
1.Conceived in Liberty: William Livingston and the Case for Revolution
2.Conservative Revolutionaries: The Lees of Stratford Hall
PART TWO
The Federalists
3.George Washington: In Pursuit of Fame
4.General Washington
5.President Washington
6.John Jay: America’s Indispensable Diplomat
7.Alexander Hamilton and the American Dream
PART THREE
The Republicans
8.Thomas Jefferson: Monticello’s Shadows
9.James Madison: Theory
10.James Madison: Practice
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
PHOTO INSERTS
COPYRIGHT
ALSO BY MYRON MAGNET
INTRODUCTION
The Americanness of the American Revolution
THE FOUNDERS AT HOME recounts the American Founding from 1735 to 1817 in a series of biographies that together help explain why the American Revolution, of all great revolutions, was the only successful one, resulting in two centuries and more of unexampled freedom and prosperity. By contrast, the French Revolution, illuminated by America’s example and Enlightenment thought, began in blissful optimism but collapsed into a blood-soaked tyranny much worse than the monarchy it deposed. It spawned a military dictatorship that roiled Europe and half the globe for over a decade with wars of grandiose imperial aggression that slew at least three million. And the result of twenty-five years of turmoil? The Bourbon monarchy, minus the Enlightenment of its earlier incarnation, settled plumply back on its throne.
The Russian Revolution switched one despotism for another; and a century later, after the millions of deaths from its purges, slave camps, and purposely inflicted famines, Russia remains a despotism, without rights or justice. We all get only one life: imagine someone born under the billowing flags of the new Soviet Union in 1917 who had to live that whole single life without the freedom so much as to speak the truth of the squalid, oppressive reality he saw in front of his own eyes. One single life—and what you can make of the one you have depends so much on what others have done to mold the time and place in which you live.
The Founders knew that truth so well that they announced their nationhood by significantly changing John Locke’s catalog of natural rights. The shift began in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, in which George Mason emended Locke’s right to “Lives, Liberties and Estates” to “Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursueing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.”1 Two months later, Thomas Jefferson penned the final pithy formulation of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness! Who but the Americans made a revolution to vindicate the paramount right of each individual to try to make the most of his life by his own effort as he sees fit?
A key reason the Revolution succeeded was its strictly limited scope. The Founders sought only liberty, not equality or fraternity. They aimed to make a political revolution, not a social or economic one, and they didn’t seethe with an Old-World intensity of social rancor or class rage.2 Their Lockean social-contract political philosophy taught them that the preservation of individual liberty was the goal of politics. Its basis was the surrender of a portion of man’s original, natural freedom to a government that would protect the large remainder of it better than any individual could do on his own—the freedom to make your own fate, think your own thoughts, and own your own property without fear of bodily harm, unjust imprisonment, or robbery. The Founders’ study of history taught them that the British constitution under which they had lived—“originally and essentially free,” as Boston preacher Jonathan Mayhew described it—was the ideal embodiment of such a contract.3 It was “the most perfect combination of human powers in society,” John Adams wrote in 1766, “for the preservation of liberty and the production of happiness”—until George III began to violate it.4 So Americans didn’t take up arms to create a new world order according to some abstract theory. They sought only to restore the political liberty they had actually experienced for 150 years, and they constructed their new government to preserve it.
Because democratic self-government requires a special kind of culture—one that fosters self-reliant selves—the Protestantism of the Founding Fathers also helped the Revolution succeed. Their Protestant worldview placed an intense value on the individual—his conscience, the state of his soul, his understanding of Scripture, his personal relation to God, his salvation. It was an easy step for them to assume that, as each man was endowed by his Creator with an immortal soul immediately related to God, so he was similarly endowed with rights that are “not the Donation of Law,” as Constitution signer William Livingston put it, but “prior to all political Institution” and “resulting from the Nature of Man.”5 It was easy for them to assume, therefore, that the individual, not the state, took center stage in the human drama. They saw the state as merely instrumental to the fate of the individual.
But their Protestantism also gave them a history that helps explain why the colonists didn’t need or want a social revolution. The many non-Anglican Dissenters among them had already had such a revolution: they had had to uproot themselves from their relatives and friends, from “the fair cities, villages, and delightful fields of Britain,” fleeing religious persecution into “the arms of savages and barbarians” in pursuit of liberty of conscience, as Mayhew put it in 1763.6 The Plymouth Pilgrims, who wrote a literal social compact in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, were only the first wave of a tide of such immigrants fleeing persecution: English and Scottish Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers; German pietists; French Huguenots; and others followed. In the eighteenth century, their offspring—John Jay, for example, descended from New York’s huge contingent of Huguenot refugees from Catholic oppression, or Livingston, whose Presbyterian great-grandfather fled Scotland for Holland after the Stuart restoration—had as lively a sense of lucky escape from the Old Country’s murderous religious tyranny as had American Jews whose forebears had escaped Russian pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust in the twentieth century. They had as acute a sense of having had to start their lives over again in a land that afforded them almost providential religious and political freedom, safety, and opportunity. They cherished liberty with the clarity and concreteness that only the experience of oppression confers.
It was that historical understanding that made Founders like Livingston or James Madison begin their journey to revolution with an assertion of freedom of conscience, which led to freedom to examine and judge for yourself, to think your own thoughts and speak and write them—and all the rest, since they knew that liberty is seamless. An “equal TOLERATION of Conscience,” Livingston wrote, “is justly deem’d the Basis of public Liberty in this Country.”7 To Madison, for whom America “offer[ed] an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion,” an established, official, obligatory religion, with dogmas you must profess, though it is seemingly “distant from the Inquisition, . . . differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.”8 Even George Washington, who never knew that his great-great-grandfather, an Anglican cleric, suffered religious persecution at the hands of Cromwell’s Pur
itans, often liked to speak of America, with an endearing mix of Old and New Testament echoes, as “a Land of promise, with milk & honey,” which offered a refuge to “the poor, the needy & the oppressed of the Earth; and anyone therefore who is heavy laden.”9 He wasn’t alone among the colonists in thinking of the settlement of America in terms of the Israelites’ providential deliverance from Egyptian tyranny to the Promised Land.10
Others had made their own personal social and economic revolution by uprooting themselves from home and coming to America for economic opportunity. From laborers signing on as indentured servants, up to younger sons of gentlefolk with no inheritance in prospect, immigrants came to make their own fortunes as best they could. If they believed their rights came from nature, not from government, they believed the same thing of their property, as people had believed from biblical and classical times and as Locke had reemphasized in the modern era. In explaining the origin of property rights, Locke had remarked of the State of Nature that “in the beginning all the World was America,” where people create property by working “the wild Common of Nature.” Their labor made the land and its produce their own, since “labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things, we enjoy in this World”—in fact, he calculated, “of the Products of the Earth, useful to the Life of Man 9/10 are the effects of labour.”11 Human effort, in other words—guided by human intelligence and imagination, the greatest of all natural resources—transforms the raw material of nature into something of use: we don’t eat grain but bread, for example, which we then take to market over roads we have built to exchange for other products of human industry.
The colonists, because they and their ancestors had created wealth out of a wilderness, took for granted, with Locke, their right to their own property. And though they believed in the inborn equality of natural rights, they assumed, with Madison, that in a society where every man has the right to pursue his happiness and forge his fate, the unequal distribution of talents will naturally and unobjectionably produce inequality of wealth.12 So economic equality—as opposed to an equality of rights and equality under the law—was no part of their revolutionary goal. Quite the reverse: “an equal division of property,” Madison pronounced in Federalist 10, would be an “improper” and “wicked project.”13
Colonists without personal experience of Old World oppression, or oft-heard family memories of it, knew from history and Scripture—from tales of Pharaoh and Herod, of Caesar, Nero, and Caligula, of Bloody Mary and the Stuarts—that even though government exists to preserve liberty, it too often has been freedom’s destroyer. Even more vividly, they knew from the presence of slavery in their own midst just what monstrosities of organized cruelty and licensed oppression men are capable of inflicting on one another, given the power to do so; and, with tragic irony, the knowledge of their homegrown injustice made them all the more determined never to submit to the Crown’s efforts “to make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway,” as Washington vowed in 1774—a vow whose full import he grasped only late in life.14 From Magna Carta and from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the colonists knew that Englishmen had had to resist tyranny at swordpoint and reassert the strict limits that the social contract had placed on royal power. They knew what it had cost to assure, as Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder put it, that “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” Or as the Jacobean chief justice Sir Edward Coke (pronounced cook), whose Institutes of the Laws of England every colonial lawyer had read, phrased it more succinctly 150 years earlier, “A man’s house is his castle.”
So when, after 150 years of letting Americans run their own affairs, the British government began to meddle malignly with their liberty once twenty-two-year-old George III became king in 1760, following the death of his grandfather, George II, the colonists unsurprisingly responded with outrage. After decreeing new colonial customs duties and stricter enforcement in 1764, London imposed its first direct levy on the colonies in 1765 in the Stamp Act, taxing every colonial newspaper, journal, legal document, almanac, playing card, and other paper product, in flagrant contravention of the “standing Maxim of English Liberty,” as Livingston had quoted it more than a decade earlier, “‘that no Man shall be taxed, but with his own Consent.’”15 As George Washington wrote to a friend, “I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more Right to put their hands into my Pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into your’s, for money.”16 Property doesn’t belong to the government, and the social contract gives government no right to tell you what to do with your own.
The American Revolution, then, was doubly limited in its aims: limited to making only a political change without altering social or economic arrangements, and determined to set strict limits to its new government, fearful that any governmental power beyond the barest minimum necessary to protect liberty too easily could become a threat to liberty itself. So apprehensive were the Founders on this score that the governmental structure they erected after the Declaration of Independence proved too weak to perform its essential function of protecting their lives, liberties, and properties adequately, prolonging the Revolutionary War and increasing the hardships of the men who fought it. With great misgivings, the Founders had to create a new Constitution to give government the necessary powers, but their most urgent concern was to make those powers limited and enumerated, hedged round with every check and balance they could think of to prevent tyrannical abuse.
With similar prudence and modesty, when they wrote the new Constitution the Founders nursed no grandiose illusions that they were going to change human nature by altering the structure of government. Except for Thomas Jefferson, they didn’t believe in human perfectibility, as did some of the French philosophes whose worldview Jefferson had absorbed from his years in Paris as well as from his voluminous reading. The Founders certainly didn’t aspire to create something like the New Soviet Man. They had a very clear-eyed assessment of human nature. After all, their social-contract theory rested on a psychology that acknowledged what Patrick Henry called, conventionally enough, “the depravity of human nature,” with its lusts, aggression, and greed no less inborn than its rights.17 They tried to create a republic that would flourish with human nature as it is, with all its cross-grained passions and interests. They never forgot, as Alexander Hamilton cautioned, “that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”18
Still, they weren’t cynics. Despite human nature’s failings, they believed men capable of virtue, as history, literature, observation, and introspection taught them. Not all men, and not all the time; but if “there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” Madison observed in Federalist 55, then only “the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring each other.”19 The question that vexed many throughout the Founding was what conditions virtue needed to thrive. What kind of culture and education would nourish it? Could it survive in a large republic? Would commerce and investment stifle it, especially since they breed luxury, which “the Voice of History” teaches, wrote Livingston, is “a Kind of political Cancer, which corrodes and demolishes the best regulated Constitution”?20 Just look at “Rome; e’er-while the Nurse of Heroes, and the Terror of the World; but now the obscene Haunt of sequestered Bigots, and effeminate Slaves,” he wrote in 1753; and for the next three decades Americans worried that liberty couldn’t survive a culture of riches, with its “musicians, pimps, panders, and catamites,” as one signer of the Declaration of Independence fretted.21 In such a money-corrupted culture, some Founders worried, legislators and offices would be for sale.
The best answer to that fear was the example of the Founders themselves—men of luminous public spirit, who had no hesitation in “appealing to the Supreme
Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” in the Declaration of Independence. And that is the last, and largest, reason why the American Revolution succeeded where others failed. Its leaders were men of extraordinary character, intelligence, wisdom, and, in the case of Washington, the Founding’s presiding genius, of heroic private virtue too. They had the unshakeable courage to “pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to assure the Revolution’s success. Already social leaders, professional successes, or both, they had no psychological need to exalt themselves, and certainly not by abasing or terrorizing others, like such revolutionary sociopaths as Robespierre or Lenin. They never dreamed of placing themselves above the laws that they had made as the people’s representatives, and they wholeheartedly agreed with Madison that if the “spirit that nourishes freedom” should “ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.”22 And when they had played their parts and done their duty, they were content, indeed eager, to go home.
That so many great men came together at that time and place to do such great deeds is one of history’s most profound miracles. That’s why I thought it instructive to tell the story of the Founding through a series of biographies: to show not just what the Founders did but to dramatize who they were, what made and drove them, what they said in their own words about the meaning and rationale of their enterprise. Men, not abstract forces, made the Revolution, framed the American government, and set it in motion. They had ideals and purposes that they articulated with vigorous eloquence and successfully embodied in historical reality with steadfast dedication. The “who” and “why” of the Founding is as important as the “what,” especially if we want to use the past to understand and judge the present, and shape the future.