American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  A deferential society, and also a deferential politics—at least for a time. Before the Revolution the “best people” in Salem and Newburyport and other ports ran community affairs; voting participation was low, and dominated by the elite. Political conflict tended to be factional, personal, local, and subdued. New England merchants turned to political action less in defense of their theoretical than their economic rights. They led the Revolution—or at least financed it—not out of political or social radicalism but because Britain was threatening their maritime interests. But revolution drew in other elements—men who called themselves Sons of Liberty, mobs that seemed to have little regard for property, editors none too respectful of the gentility. Although the Yankee merchants survived the war with their social and political system largely intact, the ranks of the economic elite had been breached. At the end of the century in Newburyport, for example, an ex-cordwainer, an ex-chaise maker, and an ex-leather dresser had risen to the economic top. How would the conservative Yankees of the New England ports make out in the new, extended republic?

  If the Yankee ports were economically adventurous and cosmopolitan, politically and intellectually they tended to be conservative and even stagnant. While Portland and Salem and Hartford doubtless were too small to support lively and innovative cultures, Boston and Cambridge together comprised almost a metropolis, but most of the ruling Bostonians and Cantabrigians were rich, Whiggish, status-minded, and dignified. Some knew how to live in magnificent style, Van Wyck Brooks noted: “The Cushing house in Summer Street was surrounded with a wall of Chinese porcelain. Peacocks strutted about the garden. The Chinese servants wore their native dress. The older folk, sedate, a little complacent, dwelling in the solid garden-houses that stood about the Common, each with its flagged walk and spacious courtyard, filled with fragrant shrubs, shaded by its over-arching elms, were genial and pleasure-loving, as a rule. Harrison Gray Otis, at the age of eighty, after forty years of gout, breakfasted every morning on pâté de fois gras.”

  Although these cosmopolitans liked to call their town the Athens of America if not indeed the hub of the universe, their intellectual life, Brooks observed, was timid, cautious, and highly derivative from English culture. Things were no better in Cambridge, despite the dominant intellectual role of Harvard College. Indeed, Harvard too was parochial, complacent, more tolerant of eccentricity than innovation. It could boast a few remarkable professors, such as Levi Hedge, who had devoted fourteen years of his own and drafted adult members of his family to completing his Elements of Logic, and Dr. Henry Ware of Divinity, who had nineteen children; but classes were usually dull recitations, and the standard of learning at Harvard was not high.

  Still, one could detect cultural stirrings in these port towns. Even the smaller had their literary societies and historical associations. Religious and political disputes were often more heated than ever. Exciting young men were coming to Harvard to teach. But only the most doting parent or perspicacious teacher could have detected the potential genius of the chubby Emerson boy in Boston, the solitary, fatherless young Nathaniel Hawthorne of Salem, the frail farm youth, John Greenleaf Whittier, in Haverhill reading the poems of Robert Burns, the little orphan Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, precocious young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Portland.

  Jeffersonian Republicans held dark suspicions about the New England Federalists—even more the Boston brand, and above all the Essex Federalists, who were reported to be the aggressive and conspiratorial heart of Federalism. Federalists were indeed loosely organized in the “Essex Junto.” Lying north of Boston between the promontory of Cape Ann and the farmlands of Peabody, bounded on the north by Newburyport, on the east by Gloucester, and the south by Salem, Essex County was the heartland of fashionable waterside society. If foreigners called all Americans Yankees, and if Southerners called all Northerners Yankees, and if New Englanders called eastern Massachusetts men Yankees, then the true heartland of Yankeedom lay in this country “north of Boston.” Old-school Federalists were aided by two other forces. One was the party leadership in the cities and towns along the Connecticut from southern Vermont and New Hampshire to the Atlantic; often these Federalists were more papal than the Pope. The other was the Congregationalist leadership of New England, and the Federalist press in the seaports, which week after week followed a high Federalist line and provided powerful ideological buttressing to the views of the old school.

  But despite the suspicion of powerful juntas meeting secretly to spin out their diabolical plots against innocent victims, the Essexmen had little political influence, at least after the turn of the century. They constituted a tiny minority of the Federalist party, which kept its distance from them when elections had to be won or legislation passed. Their strength lay chiefly in their absolute ideological commitment to reaction; the “Essex-men,” according to David Fischer, “were conservative in the double sense that they resisted change and sought to restrict the power of the people; their conservatism was ideological, for they defended not merely a fixed position but fixed principles.” Those principles were the fundamental inequality of men and especially women, the sanctity of property and of contracts, social deference, the necessity of upper-class leadership, the danger of popular rule and of devices that would facilitate popular rule. All these principles were anathema not only to the rising body of Jeffersonian Republicans but to moderate Federalists as well.

  So ideologically committed were the Essexmen, and so socially prestigious, that their pronunciamentos, amplified by press and pulpit, loomed like a small but ever-threatening thundercloud over the turn-of-the-century political scene. By taking a position so far to the right, the Essexmen moved the political spectrum in their direction. Still, their influence was sharply limited. For one thing, few Essexmen were willing to plunge into the political arena that they disdained, or saw the need to. But even more, their ideology, as they applied it, had a hypocritical ring to it. Much as they prated about public service, self-sacrifice, the public good, and the like, most Essexmen were ultimately committed to protecting their own commercial interests. They were too devoted to “personal and selfish views,” John Quincy Adams said. And the occasions when the Essexmen fought hardest in politics were times when the national government took actions that seemed to hurt their maritime and commercial interests, although they were astute enough to flesh out the proclamation of their position with ardent denunciations of “mobocrats” and Francophiles.

  Buffeted by the winds of revolution, tempered in the stresses of the founding period, the elitist and capitalistic ideas of the Yankee merchants flowed into three great currents of Federalist thought and action at the turn of the century. One of these currents brought an authentic expression of Anglo-American conservatism. Another contributed indirectly to the evolution of an enduring party system. The third led to Hartford.

  No one in America embodied and practiced the first brand of conservatism more zealously than John Adams. Born and brought up amid the Massachusetts maritime economy, educated in the lecture halls of Harvard and the courtrooms of Boston, steeped in the New England heritage of Calvinistic Puritanism combined with a Unitarian faith in reason as a means of finding the true meaning of God, Adams stood by those conservative ideas as tenaciously as any man could who lived for—and off—appointment and election to high office for most of his working life. The power of his philosophy lay in the way in which his theories of the ineluctable nature of man linked with his views on the proper ends of man, and both of these undergirded his ideas as to the proper organization of government. “Aim at an exact Knowledge of the Nature, End, and Means of Government,” he instructed himself early in his career. “Compare the different forms of it with each other and each of them with their Effects on public and private Happiness. Study Seneca, Cicero, and all other good moral Writers. Study Montesque, Bolinbroke.…” Study them he did, and any other work he could get his hands on.

  He grimly, yet happily, rejected all notions of the natural goodness
of man. Neither totally depraved nor totally innocent, men had natural tendencies toward corruption, pride, faction, folly, and ambition. Men would constantly be tested, and must resist temptation. By no means did he exempt himself from this internal struggle.

  “Which, dear Youth, will you prefer?” he addressed himself—a life of “Effeminacy, Indolence and obscurity, or a life of Industry, Temperance, and Honour?…Let no…Girl, no Gun, no Cards, no flutes, no Violins, no Dress, no Tobacco, no Laziness, decoy you from your Books.…” He chastised himself for waking up late, so that by ten in the morning his “Passion for knowledge, fame, fortune or any good” was too languid for him to apply with spirit to his books.

  The existence of evil tendencies in men made all the more necessary a spirit of moral reform, of public virtue in the community. “There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty.…” The enemy of public virtue was individual self-interest. Americans respected the “rights of society” over “private pleasures, passions and interests” as much as any other people, but even in New England he had “seen all my life such selfishness and littleness.” The “spirit of commerce” above all corrupted “the morals of families” and threatened the purity and nobility necessary in a great republic. Virtue in a people was necessary but not adequate.

  What, then, could safeguard and express virtue, could suppress the evils of ambition, faction, selfishness, corruption, self-indulgence? The solution lay in a properly designed government—a government carefully balanced among popular, aristocratic, and monarchical elements through an institutionalized equilibrium of executive, upper legislative chamber, lower chamber. Left alone, each of these elements “ran headlong into perversion in the eager search by the rulers, whether one, few, or many, for more power,” Gordon Wood has summarized this view. “Monarchy lunged toward its extremity and ended in a cruel despotism. Aristocracy, located midway on the band of power, pulled in both directions and created ‘faction and multiplied usurpation.’ Democracy, seeking more power in the hands of the people, degenerated into anarchy and tumult. The mixed or balanced polity was designed to prevent these perversions.”

  Adams wished above all to protect the power of the executive in such a balanced system. Legislatures, representing both popular and aristocratic forces, tended to outbalance the executive—a tendency dramatically manifested in the state constitutions adopted during the Revolution. The American President, he felt, should hold absolute power of making federal appointments, framing treaties, and even declaring war. “You are afraid of the one—I of the few,” he wrote Jefferson a few months after the Constitution was framed.

  No wonder that Adams was appalled by the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776: A unicameral legislature; a weak, practically nonexistent executive; annual rotation in office; But what else would one expect from the likes of Franklin and Paine?

  The animating force behind all Adams’ ideas was his belief in liberty and his abhorrence of equality. It was a love of universal liberty, he said, that had “projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.” But there preyed on his mind the constant fear that liberty would degenerate into licentiousness and anarchy. And here Adams’ fear of equality sapped his love of liberty. He loathed the very thought of “leveling,” of mob action, of the rabble taking over. Extend the vote in Massachusetts, he warned, and “new claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not closely enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state.”

  Under the press of events Adams’ defense of liberty often was reduced to that of property. “Property,” he said, “is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.” He drew lurid pictures of a majority of the poor attacking the rich, abolishing debts, dividing all property among them, and all this ending in idleness and debauchery. The idea of property as liberty was shared by many of Adams’ fellow citizens, even by good republicans, but Adams never made clear where personal or private liberty in property left off, and commercial or corporate liberty of property began. In the end—as most cruelly demonstrated by the Alien and Sedition Acts—he was willing to sacrifice liberty of speech before he would give up the right of property.

  It is not granted to many leaders to carry out in practice what they had conceived in theory. Adams had that privilege—and that misfortune. A popularly elected House to represent the people, an indirectly chosen Senate to protect property, a strong executive to make appointments and conduct foreign relations, an expansion of national over state power, all expressed in a stable, respectable, high-toned federal government—Adams rose with this kind of government as Vice-President and President, and fell with it when the Republicans swept to electoral victory in 1800. But intellectually the ultimate victory was his, for he left a bequest of thought and action on which American leaders long would draw.

  FEDERALISTS: THE TIDE RUNS OUT

  Almost two hundred years later the fall of the Federalist party is still something of a mystery. The Federalists assumed power so readily and exercised it so effectively during the 1790s that one might have expected a long one-party rule like those in many other post-revolutionary regimes. In Washington, Adams, and Hamilton the party possessed unsurpassed political leadership, and this trio was backed up by scores of brilliant congressional and state leaders. Whatever their day-to-day blunders and miscalculations, the Federalists worked out in that decade a strategy of government and policy that seemed well attuned to the long-term needs of the American people.

  Yet at century’s turn Washington was dead, Adams defeated, Hamilton compromised, the party repudiated. These misfortunes and setbacks need not have been fatal, but in fact the party never again won the presidency or lasting majorities in Congress and finally it died. Why? Not because it had become—in 1800—a merely sectional party, shrunken to its New England enclaves; the Federalists still had large constituencies in New York, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas. Not because it stagnated organizationally; the Federalists experimented with party machinery that served as models for the party systems that developed later. Not because its leadership died away; in the void left by the defeat of the party in 1800, a host of new, young, vigorous, practical leaders came forward to rejuvenate the party—and to constitute another major current of Federalism.

  Despite all this, the party could not re-establish itself in the new century. The Federalists scored some signal successes in various states over the next decade and a half, and they maintained their opposition role in Congress for a time, but in the electoral college, even allowing for its artificial inflations of majorities, their string of defeats was awesome: 1804—Jefferson 162 to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney 14; 1808—Madison 122 to Pinckney 47; 1812—Madison 128 to (Federalist-supported) De Witt Clinton 89; 1816—Monroe 183 to Rufus King 34. It is not easy to kill off a great political party, as later political history has attested; how did the Federalists accomplish such a convincing demise?

  The problem was partly one of leadership. The Federalists had always been peculiarly dependent on elevated leadership; Washington, Hamilton, and the rest helped compensate for the Federalist lack of grass-roots organization. Yet high Federalists had an anomalous relationship with the men who had to build coalitions and win votes. John Adams’ “curious relationship” with the “gentlemen of the old school,” in David Fischer’s words, illustrated the problem. Not only did Adams scorn the Boston merchants’ preoccupation with moneymaking, and warn against diverting people “from the cultivation of the earth to adventures upon the sea.” As a vote-seeking politician Adams was difficult for the high Federalists to figure out. “With regard to Mr. A.,” wrote an Amherst Federalist, “it is impossible to calculate upon him. It would puzzle the angels to develop the motives of his conduct.” Angered by old Federalists’ hostility, Adams accused
them of “stiff-rumped stupidity.”

  As with father, so with son. The mentality of the Essex Junto was manifested in the apostasy of John Quincy Adams. With John Adams safely retired to Quincy and somewhat protected against the slings and arrows of outraged Federalists, his son proceeded to make himself equally unpopular by his posture of being above party politics. Adams had openly supported some of Jefferson’s policies and he differed with the pro-British stance of the Essex Junto. Aroused by the Chesapeake affair, young Adams, although a United States senator ostensibly elected as a Federalist, met openly with Republican leaders to plan strategy against British depredations. The Essexmen were angry when Adams supported the embargo, and furious when he attended a Republican congressional caucus for the presidential nomination for 1808. Federalists moved smoothly to the task of party discipline. Six months before the normal time for choosing senators, they replaced John Quincy Adams with one of their own. Instructed also to oppose the embargo, he promptly resigned. Following the old Massachusetts political admonition of “Don’t get mad, get even,” he used his new Republican party affiliation to counterattack Federalism and win the presidency a generation later.

  A major reason for Federalist party decline lay in their hallowed but increasingly anachronistic beliefs in the stewardship of gentlemen of learning and virtue, in the need to protect the rights of property, in order as a prerequisite to liberty, in the natural hierarchical order among citizens, in the need for balance and harmony among classes and interests. These ideas were becoming increasingly incompatible with the expanding market society, the growing materialism and acquisitiveness of Americans, the scuffle of persons and interests for self-advantage. Their ideas were not necessarily wrong, but rather mean and elitist and outdated at the time of rising democratic sentiment. The high Federalists’ crabbed view of liberty contrasted with the broader Jeffersonian concept. Thus Federalist judge Samuel Chase: “liberty…did not consist in the possession of equal rights, but in the protection by the law of the person and property of every member of society, however various the grade in society he filled.” Samuel Lyman, Massachusetts congressman: “a higher degree of liberty cannot exist without endangering the whole …nothing is so unequal as equality.” Samuel Sewall, Massachusetts judge: “Liberty is security, destroy security, therefore, and you destroy liberty.”