THE FRENCH REVOLUTION severely strained the relationship of the two friends and brought to the surface differences that had remained latent and largely unacknowledged. But this awareness of difference did not occur suddenly. Thomas Jefferson and most Americans welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 as a promising expression of a people seeking merely to make their monarchical constitution less autocratic and more balanced. John Adams was unusual in not joining in this initial common enthusiasm; he was immediately skeptical of what the French were doing. Europe, he said at the outset, was trying to reconcile popular government with monarchy and the contradictory experiment would never work. When the ferocity of the French Revolution began to intensify, Adams’s initial skepticism turned to outright horror. Under these circumstances, the two American statesmen sought desperately to hold their friendship together. In the end, they could do so only by ignoring what each other said and believed.
Adams wasn’t just skeptical about the capacity of the French for self-government. He was skeptical about the character of his fellow Americans as well. Even before he knew of the outbreak of the French Revolution, he had worked out a chilling assessment of the moral fiber of his own countrymen, one that prepared him to see the worst of people everywhere.
Right from the beginning of his own American Revolution, Adams had deep misgivings about whether his fellow citizens had the proper moral character needed to sustain their republican governments. “The only foundation of a free Constitution,” he said on the eve of America’s declaring independence, “is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.”1
During his long service abroad, Adams increasingly felt that his fellow Americans were showing less and less appreciation of virtue, particularly his virtue. By the mid-1780s Adams was filling his letters to confidants with complaints about the praise being lavished on Franklin and Washington while he was being ignored and mistreated. His hatred of Franklin knew no bounds. “His whole Life,” he said, “has been one continued Insult to good Manners and to Decency.” But worse, Franklin was dishonest and a liar. His reputation was grossly exaggerated. Indeed, “no Man that ever existed had such a reputation for Wisdom and such an Influence, with so many stupid opinions.”2 That someone like Franklin should be so celebrated was a reflection on America itself. Adams knew that the United States “was destined beyond doubt to be the greatest Power on Earth, and that within the Life of Man,” but could that great power remain a republic?3 He told his cousin Samuel Adams that for years he had “been in the belief that our Countrymen have in them a more ungovernable passion for Luxury than any People upon earth.”4
For Adams the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783 especially seemed to be a sign of increasing American decadence. “It is sowing the Seeds of all that European Courts wish to grow up among Us, vizt. of Vanity, Ambition, Corruption, Discord, & Sedition.” The country was clearly heading in the wrong direction. “While Reputations are so indiscreetly puffed; while Thanks and Statues are so childishly awarded, and the greatest real services are so coldly received, I had almost Said censured,” he told his friend Elbridge Gerry, “we are in the high Road to have no Virtues left, and nothing but Ambition, Wealth and Power must keep them Company.”5
By 1787 what he had feared all along had become too obvious to him to be denied. His fellow Americans had “never merited the Character of very exalted Virtue,” and it was foolish to have “expected that they should have grown much better.”6 At the outset and even in 1779, when he drafted the Massachusetts constitution, he had hoped that education and the regenerative effects of republican government would be able to mold the character of the people—to extinguish their follies and vices and inspire their virtues and abilities. As late as 1786, he told a British acquaintance that education was still important. Before government could be studied and developed in the same way as geometry and astrometry had been studied and developed, he wrote, “a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and Knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society.” Education of the nation must no longer be confined to a few; it “must become the National Care and expence, for the Information of the Many.”7
But by the time he came to write his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America a year later, he had lost much of his confidence that Americans could be educated to behave differently. Citizens in a small community might be taught to be wise and virtuous. “But the education of a great nation can never accomplish so great an end. Millions must be brought up, whom no principles, no sentiments derived from education can restrain from trampling on the laws.”8
Something else would be required to save Americans from eventual tyranny and destruction, from the fate of Europe, indeed, from the fate of every people in history. He wrote the Defence to save his fellow Americans from ruin. “It appeared to me,” he told the English radical Richard Price, “that my Countrymen were running wild, and into danger, from a too ardent and inconsiderate pursuit of erroneous opinions of Government.”9 They were too attracted to the ideas of Thomas Paine and the French philosophes, including the Marquis de Condorcet, La Rochefoucauld, and Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, the sorts of reform-minded dreamy intellectuals with whom Jefferson was most friendly.
• • •
ADAMS’S EXPERIENCE IN EUROPE was different from Jefferson’s. For Jefferson the luxury and sophistication of Europe only made American simplicity and virtue appear dearer, while for Adams Europe represented what America was fast becoming—a society consumed by luxury and vice and fundamentally riven by a struggle between rich and poor, gentlemen and commoners.
All of Adams’s long-simmering feelings and opinions—all his irritations, jealousies, and resentments—finally boiled over onto the pages of his Defence. In this huge, sprawling compilation of history and philosophy, Adams brought a lifetime of reading and personal experience to the working out of what he believed was the best scientific solution to the political problem of social inequality and the persistence of elites. The Defence, he said, was “an attempt to place Government upon the only Philosophy which can support it, the real constitution of human nature, not upon any wild Visions of its perfectibility.”10
The years riding circuit in his law practice, the months spent in the Continental Congress since independence, his involvement with Massachusetts politics during the drafting of the state’s constitution, the duplicitous behavior of diplomats abroad, his ill treatment by the Congress, the descriptions from home of the luxury and self-interestedness prevalent everywhere in the States, especially the news of the explosive conflict between western debtors and eastern creditors in his home state of Massachusetts—a conflict that led some to advocate abolishing the senate and creating a unicameral legislature—and above all, an understanding of human nature that sprang from his own tormented soul, all combined to shape his understanding of the ways societies were structured and worked.
In his rambling and long-winded volumes, Adams painted as dark and as pessimistic a portrait of the American people as anyone has ever rendered. Americans, said Adams, were as driven by the passions for wealth and superiority as any people in history. Ambition and avarice, not virtue and benevolence, were the stuff of American society. Those philosophers like Turgot who contended that the American republics were founded on equality could not have been more wrong. The promise of the Declaration of Independence could never be fulfilled. All men were not created equal; they were decidedly born unequal, which was why inequalities predominated in all societies everywhere. “Was there, or will there ever be,” he asked, “a nation, whose individuals were all equal in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches?” Every society, he said, had inequalities “which no human legislator ever can eradicate.”11
To be sure, said Adams, in America there were “as yet” no legal or artificial inequalities—no hereditary dignities symbolized by garters, titles, and ribbons. And in America there were no political and moral inequalities of rights and duties. Everyone was equal before the law. But these were superficial equalities. What really mattered in America, and, in fact in every nation, said Adams, was the overwhelming presence of real and fundamental inequalities—inequalities of wealth, of birth, of talent. These inequalities were of momentous importance to any legislator faced with the need to create a constitution; for they had “a natural and inevitable influence in society.”12 Every society contained a hierarchy of inequalities, with the few aristocratic-gentry at the top. “Some individuals, whether by descent from their ancestors, or from greater skill, industry, and success in business, have estates both in lands and goods of great value,” while others at the very bottom of society “have no property at all.” Between these two extremes existed “all the variety of degrees” of middling sorts who constituted the bulk of common people.13
• • •
THESE MIDDLING SORTS RANGED from someone like William Findley, an ex-weaver from western Pennsylvania, to someone like William Manning, a farmer and small-time entrepreneur from Billerica, Massachusetts. These were men “in the various trades, manufactures, and occupations” who had to work for a living; and by work was meant not just laboring with one’s hands but also running a business or trade. A master printer with a dozen or more journeymen and apprentices working for him was still considered to be a middling commoner. However wealthy he might be, as long as he was running his printing shop and engaging in trade, he was not generally regarded as a gentleman. By the 1780s and ’90s these middling sorts were increasingly setting themselves in opposition to those aristocratic-gentry, as Manning put it, who “live without Labour.”14
“Those that git a Living without bodily Labour,” wrote Manning, whose own writings were inspired by his reading of Benjamin Lincoln’s “Free Republican” essays, were “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosipher and school master, the Judicial & Executive Officers, & many others.” These orders of men were generally “so rich that they can live without Labour.” Once these gentry had attained their life of “ease & rest” that “at once creates a sense of superiority,” wrote Manning, in phonetic prose that was real and not some gentleman’s satiric ploy, they tended to “asotiate together and look down with two much contempt on those that labour.” Although “the hole of them do not amount to one eighth part of the people,” these gentry had the “spare time” and the “arts & skeems” to combine and consult with one another. They had the power to control the electorate and the government “in a veriaty of ways.” Some voters they flattered “by promise of favors, such as being customers to them, or helping them out of debt, or other difficultyes; or help them to a good bargain, or treet them or trust them, or lend them money, or even give them a little money”—anything or everything if only “they will vote for such & such a man.” Other voters the gentry threatened: “‘if you don’t vote for such & such a man,’ or ‘if you do’ and, ‘you shall pay me what you owe me,’ or ‘I will sew you’—‘I will turne you out of my house’ or ‘off of my farm’—‘I wont be your customer any longer.’ . . . All these things have bin practised & may be again.” This was how the “few” exerted influence over the many.15
Although Adams never read Manning’s unpublished essays, he was equally concerned with this age-old distinction between those who worked for a living and those who did not. As he said in 1790, “the great question will forever remain, who shall work? ” Not everyone could be idle, said Adams; not everyone could be a gentleman. “Leisure for study must ever be the portion of a few. The number employed in government, must forever be very small.” Adams was so keen on this point of gentlemen and high public officials not being involved in any sort of demeaning manual labor that on a voyage to Europe, he—much to the surprise of foreign observers—“scorned working at the pump, to which all the other passengers submitted in order to obviate the imminent danger of sinking, arguing that it was not befitting a person who had public status in Europe.” To risk drowning rather than to lose one’s honor as a gentleman who was not supposed to engage in physical labor tells us just how important this distinction was to Adams.16
At the same time Adams had no desire to follow Aristotle and the other ancients in excluding working people from citizenship. Not only was Aristotle’s antique view “the most unphilosophical, the most inhuman and cruel that can be conceived,” but it misjudged the capacities of ordinary people. “The meanest understanding,” said Adams, “is equal to the duty of saying who is the man in his neighborhood whom he most esteems, and loves best, for his knowledge, integrity, and benevolence.” Moreover, the understandings of husbandmen, minor merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, and other middling people were not always the meanest. From among them often arose “the most splendid geniuses, the most active and benevolent dispositions, and the most undaunted bravery.” He ought to know; he had once been one of them.17
• • •
THIS DISTINCTION BETWEEN those who worked and those who did not was important to Jefferson too, but for different reasons. When he thought about the issue of work and leisure, he focused on the institution of slavery. In his indictment of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he mentioned the “miserable condition” of the slaves, but he was far more interested in the evils that slavery inflicted upon the manners of the slaveholders themselves. Not only did slavery tend to incite the crudest passions among the slaveholders, breed despotic attitudes, and undermine their morals, but “their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.” Only a few “proprietors of slaves” were “ever seen to labour.”18
This was alarming to Jefferson not because aristocratic planters like him with hundreds of slaves were expected to engage in bodily labor, but because many ordinary farmers who might own only a few slaves (or owned none but wished to possess some) inevitably developed a contempt for work, which in turn encouraged their indolence. Jefferson, of course, hoped that “the mass of cultivators” would not become slaveholders but instead look “to their own soil and industry” for their subsistence. But the southern culture of slavery with its scorn for labor was powerful and pervasive. As many southerners pointed out, laziness had become the scourge of the South and a danger to its social health.19
In 1792 David Rice, a courageous Virginia-born Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, condemned slavery for just this reason—for sapping the moral foundations of the society. “Slavery,” Rice declared, “produces idleness; and idleness is the nurse of vice. A vicious commonwealth is a building erected on quick-sand, the inhabitants of which can never abide in safety.” When slavery becomes common, said Rice, who tried but failed to get an antislavery article inserted into Kentucky’s constitution, it makes industriousness shameful. “To labour is to slave; to work is to work like a Negro; and this is disgraceful; it levels us with the meanest of the species; it sits hard upon the mind; it cannot be patiently borne.” As a result, southern youth were “tempted to idleness, and drawn into other vices; they see no other way to keep their credit, and acquire some little importance.”20 Jefferson claimed over and over that “the cultivators of the earth” were the “most vigorous, most independent, the most virtuous” citizens.21 But, in the 1780s at least, he shared a great deal of the Reverend Rice’s sense that slavery and its promotion of idleness threatened the well-being of southern society.
As a slaveholder Jefferson naturally saw himself as a leisured aristocrat, but unlike most of his fellow southern planters, he had no contempt for those who worked. When he eventually realized that much of his political support in the North came from common people who lived by manual labor and not by their wits, he came to recognize that work was not something fit only for slaves. One of the reasons he disliked cities was because they were places where men sought “to live by their heads rather than their hands.”22
Nevertheless, slavery and its effect on work were subjects too sensitive for Jefferson to dwell on. Consequently, he never had the same intense preoccupation that Adams had with the social division between a leisured aristocracy and the common people who labored for a living. For Adams, no issue was more important, because this division lay at the heart of his entire understanding of society and politics.
• • •
IN ADAMS’S ANALYSIS, THE SOURCES of the leisured gentry’s separation from the laboring commoners were many and diverse, but slavery was not one of them. Wealth, he said, was crucially important in distinguishing one person from another. But merit and talent as well as service in the army or government could also earn “the confidence and affection of their fellow citizens to such a degree” that their advice and influence would be respected. Adams undoubtedly assumed he was among this group.
Birth was also important in distinguishing one person from another. Some individuals inherited position and privilege from their families. It was obvious, said Adams, that “the children of illustrious families have generally greater advantages of education, and earlier opportunities to be acquainted with public characters, and informed of public affairs, than those of meaner ones, or even those in middle life.” Such families were very influential and were usually venerated and respected by the general public from generation to generation simply for their name—something that Adams, in 1787 at least, obviously scorned. Despite the importance of ancestry, however, in the end he believed that wealth always had “more influence than birth.”
Then there were the liberally educated—“men of letters, men of the learned professions, and others”—who through “acquaintance, conversation, and civilities” were usually connected with the wealthy aristocracy. Alas, too many of these learned sort—“among the wisest people who live”—tended to get caught up in excessive admiration and respect for the wealthy aristocracy. Adams, who always valued his independence, clearly did not count himself among those who venerated the rich and wellborn.
Adams spent so much time describing the sources of this natural aristocracy because, like William Manning, he feared their “natural and inevitable influence in society.” No doubt the aristocratic few contained “the greatest collection of virtues and abilities in a free government.” They could become the “glory of the nation” and “the greatest blessing of society,” but only if they were controlled and institutionalized—as he put it, only if they were “judiciously managed in the constitution.” This is why he wanted to ostracize the aristocrats in a separate branch of the legislature that was balanced by a strong executive. Unless this was done, they were “always the most dangerous” order in the society; indeed, unless they were segregated in senates and checked by the executive, they never failed “to be the destruction of the commonwealth.”23
Nothing was more certain to Adams than the existence of this sort of inequality in all societies at all times. These differences among people, he said, were “not peculiar to any age”; they were “common to every people, and can never be altered by any, because they are founded in the constitution of nature.”24 No American revolutionary leader talked quite this way, and none offered a more direct challenge to the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal.
Adams, in other words, was defying the Enlightenment dream that only cultivation and different opportunities for education separated one person from another. When in 1776 Jefferson declared that all men were created equal he was not simply saying that all had equal rights under the law. Since many Englishmen believed in equality under the law, such an idea would never have been radical. Instead, he was claiming that all men (in his case at least, all white men) were born with equal blank slates and that the natural and cultural environments inscribing these blank slates through time by themselves created the obvious differences that separated one person from another. When this enlightened assumption was coupled with the power of education, everyone had an equal opportunity to become somebody of distinction.
What made Adams’s position in 1787 so unusual, so reactionary, was his denial of this optimistic assumption of 1776, which he himself had once taken so seriously. Although he had as early as 1766 declared that all men were born equal, he had changed his mind. Experience had convinced him of the opposite. All men, he now contended, were born decidedly unequal. Contrary to what many revolutionaries believed in 1776, people did not begin the race of life from the same starting point. At birth some were more intelligent, some were more handsome, and some were more wealthy. People were born possessing previously existing natural and cultural privileges. Therefore, the slates with which people began life were not blank but were already marked and engraved. Locke’s white paper was already full of inscriptions. The obvious distinctions that arose in society were inherent in the inequalities of birth. Nature, not nurture, now was what counted. In other words, Adams was reviving the traditional assumptions of the ancien régime, the assumptions about differences of blood and birth that the Revolution presumably had laid to rest.
• • •
ADAMS OFFERED HIS COUNTRYMEN a terrifying picture of themselves. He described the two orders of society—the aristocracy and the commoners—engrossed in relentless struggles for supremacy. People were constantly scrambling for distinction—for wealth, for power, for privilege, for social eminence that they hoped could be passed on to their descendants. Everyone’s desire to get ahead was limitless and all-consuming. Especially powerful were the “aristocratical passions”—avarice, vanity, and ambition. “The love of gold grows faster than the heap of acquisition.” The love of praise was so great that “man is miserable every moment when he does not snuff the incense.” As for ambition, it was voracious; it “strengthens at every advance, and at last takes possession of the whole soul so absolutely, that a man sees nothing in the world of importance to others or himself, but in his object.”25
The numerous commoners and middling sorts, driven by the most ambitious, always attempted to ruin and displace the aristocratic leaders they envied and hated. Those in particular “whose fortunes, families, and merits in the acknowledged judgment of all” seemed closest to those at the top “will be much disposed to claim the first place as their own right.”26 Those few who struggled to the top of this anxiety-ridden society would seek only to stabilize and aggrandize their superior position by trying to influence or oppress the many below them who had been left behind. Hence America, like every society, had been and would continue to be ridden by this basic social conflict, its members impelled by a fundamental desire for distinction that was rooted in human nature. Anyone, said Adams, who didn’t agree with his social analysis was simply denying reality.
Jefferson never saw society in the way Adams did. He took his leisured gentry status for granted; he never felt threatened by ambitious and scrambling middling sorts trying to displace him. Indeed, his Virginia had very few middling sorts anyhow—very few manufacturers, artisans, tradesmen, clerks, and petty merchants—and he celebrated their absence. People who were not farmers were detrimental to the society. He considered “the class of artificers as the panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberty of a country are generally overturned.”27
• • •
SINCE ADAMS’S SOCIAL ANALYSIS was designed to create a science of politics that was applicable to all peoples at all times, his conclusion in the Defence was obvious. America was essentially no different from Europe. There was, said Adams, “no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” With all the high hopes of 1776 dissipating, Adams faced the formidable task of persuading his countrymen that they were, after all, “like all other people, and shall do like other nations.” In all of American history, no political leader of Adams’s stature, and certainly no president, has ever so emphatically denied the belief in American exceptionalism.28
Adams’s description of his society as one inevitably divided in two and tortured by jealousy, envy, and resentment was so dark and so grim that no political solution could seem possible. But Adams had one: “Orders of men, watching and balancing each other, are the only security; power must be opposed to power and interest to interest.”29 A balanced constitution like that of England was the solution: the common and middling people had to be confined to the lower houses of the legislatures and the gentry-aristocrats had to be ostracized in the upper houses, with the balance maintained by a strong and independent executive.
The powerful executive was crucial to his system—the very part of government Jefferson most feared. “If there is one certain truth to be collected from the history of all ages,” said Adams, “it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive.” Only an alliance between the first magistrate and the common people was capable of putting down the cunning and craftiness of a rapacious aristocracy. “What is the whole history of the barons wars but one demonstration of this truth? What are all the standing armies in Europe, but another? These were all given to the kings by the people, to defend them against aristocracies.” It was obvious to Adams that the executive power, by whatever name it might be called, was “the natural friend of the people, and the only defence which they or their representatives can have against the avarice and ambition of the rich and distinguished citizens.”30
A bicameral legislature with a strong executive: this was Adams’s constitutional remedy for the ferocious social struggle he had laid out in such terrifying detail in his Defence, a remedy that seems disproportionate to the severity of the social scramble he had depicted. Adams never explained how the aristocrats would remain segregated in the senates, or how such powerful elites could be kept from entering or influencing politics in the lower houses, or how the common people, even in alliance with the executive, would ever be able to control the influence of such wealthy and formidable men. Yet however inadequate his constitutional remedy, Adams at least had accurately diagnosed the problem of social inequality that was plaguing American politics in the 1780s; it was one that would continue to plague the nation that prided itself on its equality.
• • •
WITH HIS USUAL GOOD MANNERS, Jefferson told Adams that he had read the volume of the Defence Adams had sent him “with infinite satisfaction and improvement. It’s learning and it’s good sense,” he said, “will I hope make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young.” He promised to try to get it translated into French, which he ultimately never did, probably because his French liberal friends objected strenuously to Adams’s argument.31
From his favorable comments, it’s clear that Jefferson did not read the book from cover to cover—who could blame him?—for if he had, he would have been deeply disturbed by so much that ran against the grain of his own thinking, indeed, that challenged almost everything he believed. Adams’s dramatic descriptions of his countrymen’s mania for distinctions and luxury, his denial of American equality, his celebration of executive authority, and his assertions that Americans were no different from Europeans—all these strongly voiced opinions expressed in his first volume would surely have shocked and alarmed Jefferson if he had read the book carefully.
Although Jefferson knew that people differed from one another, he could never accept Adams’s harsh description of America’s severe and permanent social inequalities. Confident of his position in society and believing that real hereditary aristocracies existed only in Europe, he saw his own country as peculiarly egalitarian. In America, said Jefferson, “no other distinction existed between man and man” except those separating government officials from private individuals. And among these private individuals, he said, “the poorest labourer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest.”32
Like most people receiving a gift from a friend of such a dense and massive tome, Jefferson was eager to assure the author that he actually had dipped into the book, and the best way to do that was to object to a minor point in the conclusion in which Adams had said that the Congress was “only a diplomatic assembly.” When Jefferson received the second volume of the Defence six months later, he admitted that he only had time to “look into it a little.” But putting that brief look at the second volume together with his hasty reading of the first volume, he summarized what he thought Adams was getting at: “The first principle of a good government is certainly a distribution of it’s powers into executive, judiciary, and legislative, and a subdivision of the latter into two or three branches.” Since Jefferson’s superficial summary seems to be the response of most modern scholars to Adams’s Defence, it is perhaps understandable; but it scarcely did justice to Adams’s powerful and pessimistic understanding of the way society operated.33
Adams was probably fortunate that most people found the writing in his Defence impenetrable. Like Jefferson, most of his contemporaries tended to ignore his references to social estates and orders and simply concluded that he was only defending the bicameral legislatures and the separation of powers that existed in most of the state constitutions and in the new federal government. Even Adams’s notion that the senate should be socially different from the lower house was widely shared by anxious elites. But few followed his arguments about the corruption of American society and appreciated the degree to which his book challenged the basic enlightened premises of the American Revolution. To be sure, many of his fellow Americans sensed that he was enamored of the English constitution, but few grasped just how dark and forbidding and un-American a picture of their society he had painted.
• • •
BY 1787 JEFFERSON AND ADAMS had developed very different takes on what was happening in America, especially on the issue of aristocracy. Like Adams, Jefferson opposed the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati, and in 1784 he had politely outlined to George Washington his objections to this hereditary institution, which sought to preserve the fellowship of the military officers, including French officers, who served in the Revolutionary War. But once he arrived in Europe and discovered how passionately French reformers like the Comte de Mirabeau were attacking the Society of the Cincinnati, Jefferson found himself on the defensive, trying to explain to them why a nation dedicated to equality would create such an aristocratic institution.
In his observations on the entry on America in Jean Nicolas Démeunier’s encyclopedia, Jefferson was eager to downplay the significance of the Cincinnati in America and to emphasize “the innocence of it’s origins.” The criticism that arose in America, he said, was full of “exaggerations”; it had to be based on the critics’ rich imaginations, “for to detail the real evils of aristocracy they must be seen in Europe.” In the end, Jefferson claimed that Americans would have abolished the society except they did not want to insult and appear ungrateful to the French officers who had been elected to membership.34
Jefferson’s claim that no real aristocratic distinctions existed in America and that “a due horror of evils which flow from these distinctions could be excited in Europe only” could not have been more at odds with Adams’s belief that aristocracy and inequality were everywhere in America and that America, in this respect especially, was no different from Europe.35
Given their different attitudes toward America, Adams and Jefferson were bound to have different responses to Shays’ Rebellion. In 1786 several thousand distressed debtor farmers in western Massachusetts, after years of rioting and complaining of high taxes and tight money, finally took up arms in protest against eastern creditors who were foreclosing their mortgages and seizing their farms. The rebels, led by a former militia captain named Daniel Shays, closed the much despised courts and threatened to seize a federal arsenal. Although the uprising was eventually put down by privately funded eastern militia, it frightened elites up and down America, especially since it occurred in the very state that was supposed to have the most balanced and strongest constitution of all the thirteen states.
Adams was disturbed by the rebellion, calling it “extremely pernicious.” But in November 1786 he initially told Jefferson not to be alarmed, that “all will be well”; and he predicted that “this Commotion will terminate in additional Strength to Government.” Since the uprising reflected badly on his home state and the constitution he had helped create, he naturally was eager to minimize its significance. Abigail had no such inhibitions, especially since by the time she wrote Jefferson in January 1787 news of the rebellion had become more frightening. She told Jefferson that “ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principals, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretence of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations.”36
Jefferson took a much more sanguine view of Shays’ Rebellion. He told Abigail in November 1786 that he was “not alarmed at the humor shown by your countrymen.” He liked to see “the people awake and alert.” The “spirit of resistance to government” was at times so valuable that he wished it would always be kept alive. “I like a little rebellion now and then,” he declared in one of the most memorable of his statements. “It is like a Storm in the Atmosphere.”37
A year later, when the rebellion had been put down and the new federal Constitution ratified, he was even more relaxed in his view of the uprising. Not only was it not worth worrying about, he wrote in a letter to Adams’s son-in-law, but it was natural and healthy for a republic to have periodic uprisings of the people. It was the only way the people could correct misconceptions. “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” If the people remain quiet too long, “it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.” Rulers need to be warned every once in a while that the people have a spirit of resistance. What did a few lives lost every century or two matter? “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”38
With such expressions Jefferson revealed a political temperament very different from Adams’s. He had none of Adams’s doubts about the people and none of his worries that their ambitions and desires were a danger to the stability of the society. Jefferson believed that “the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army” for putting down a rebellion. “They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves.”39 With his revolutionary ideology of 1776 fixed and intact in his mind, he was essentially immune to the doubts about the people many American leaders had developed in the decade following the Declaration of Independence.
• • •
JEFFERSON SHARED FEW OF THE FEARS that his friend Madison had about the vices of the political system and the excesses of democracy in the states. Those fears led his fellow Virginian to lead a movement to scrap the Articles of Confederation in favor of an entirely new national government that operated directly on individuals rather than on the states. Like almost all Americans by 1786, Jefferson was open to revising the Articles by adding amendments that would give the Congress the powers to levy duties on imports and to regulate international trade. But he never fully grasped just how radical Madison’s plans actually were. Madison and his colleagues took the consensus in favor of adding amendments to the Articles and ran with it, using the general acceptance of reform as an opportunity to convene a meeting in Philadelphia to do much more than simply amend the Articles. In fact, Madison was eager to drastically reduce the power of the states in the Union.
Because both Jefferson and Adams were abroad when the Constitutional Convention met in the summer of 1787, they had to learn about the new Constitution months after it was drafted. Although Jefferson thought the Convention was “an assembly of demi-gods,” he objected to its vow of secrecy and was shocked by the Constitution it created. He told Adams he didn’t think a new constitution was necessary. “Three or four new articles,” he said, might have been “added to the good, old, and venerable fabric” of the Articles of Confederation. He especially objected to the office of the president. It seems, he said, “to be a bad edition of a Polish king,” who, once elected, served for life—which is what Jefferson feared would happen with the American president. Instead, he wanted the president to serve for only four years and be ineligible for a second term.40
By contrast, Adams was pleased that the Articles had been scrapped. The new Constitution so much resembled the balanced government and the separation of powers he advocated in his Defence that he naturally was satisfied with much of it. Unlike Jefferson, he approved of the office of the president, and having the president chosen over and over was “so much the better.” Since Adams feared aristocracy more than monarchy, he told Jefferson that he would “have given more Power to the President and less to the Senate,” especially in the appointment of officers. “Elections to offices, which are great objects of Ambition,” Adams told Jefferson, ought to be regarded “with terror”—an extraordinary remark for someone who was supposed to be a republican.41
Jefferson let this provocative remark pass. Perhaps that was because he and Adams in 1787–1788 were so caught up in issues involving negotiating loans, international trade, and a civil war in the Netherlands that offhand remarks about elections scarcely seemed to matter. But Jefferson also had a propensity to overlook important points in letters or, as in the case of the Defence, books that did not fit with his conceptual world. In the fall of 1787, Madison wrote Jefferson an incredibly lengthy letter, explaining in great detail the thinking that went into the making of the new federal Constitution. He especially emphasized his own ideas about the dangers of majority rule in a republic. In his response Jefferson scarcely acknowledged Madison’s sophisticated account of the thinking behind the Constitution. Instead, he set forth his objection to a president who could be continually reelected, and reaffirmed his “principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail”—precisely the point that Madison had most systematically questioned.42 Still, there is no doubt that Jefferson’s growing appreciation of his friend Madison’s great contribution to the creation of the Constitution helped him to come around and support the Constitution more enthusiastically than he had at the outset.43
One other “bitter pill” Jefferson found in the Constitution was its lack of a bill of rights.44 Adams also raised that omission with Jefferson, mainly because he had included a declaration of rights in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution. But Jefferson seems to have desired a bill of rights at least partly out of embarrassment over what “the most enlightened and disinterested characters” among his liberal French friends might think, especially since they were busy drawing up drafts of possible declarations of rights for their own nation. No matter that Madison had tried to explain to Jefferson in great detail that the new government did not resemble traditional governments that had had to be bargained with and that writing out the people’s rights might actually have the effect of limiting them. Jefferson knew, and that was enough, that “the enlightened part of Europe have given us the greatest credit for inventing this instrument of security for the rights of the people, and have been not a little surprised to see us soon give it up.”45
• • •
WHILE HIS FELLOW AMERICANS back home were creating a new federal Constitution and debating its ratification, Jefferson, despite his official position as minister to France, was becoming more deeply involved in the efforts of Lafayette and his other French friends to reform the French monarchy. These efforts, which culminated in the French Revolution, ultimately changed Jefferson’s attitude toward the world and in particular his attitude toward the American Revolution. He came to believe that the American Revolution was not simply an event whose significance was confined only to Americans. It became for him, much more clearly than he had realized in 1776, a historic event that had launched a republican revolutionary movement that would spread around the world. He came to see the French Revolution as a consequence of the American Revolution. He eventually concluded that France had become a sister republic to the United States, and because of that relationship he became much more emotionally invested in the success of the French Revolution than many of his countrymen and certainly more than John Adams. Indeed, Adams became skeptical of the French Revolution at the outset and thus began the estrangement of the two American friends.
It took a while for Jefferson to realize the seriousness of the emerging crisis in France. In August 1786 he had no inkling whatsoever of any trouble brewing among the French people. In contrast to England, which had experienced an assassination attempt on George III, the French people were engaged in “singing, dancing, laugh, and merriment.” There were, he told Abigail Adams, “no assassinations, no treasons, rebellions or other dark deeds. When our king goes out, they fall down and kiss the earth where he has trodden: and then they go on kissing one another. . . . They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.”46
When the Assembly of Notables met early in 1787 and was widely mocked, Jefferson concluded that the French were not seriously interested in reform. But all the turmoil, he complained, was ruining social life in Paris. “Instead of that gaiety and insouciance which has distinguished it heretofore, all is filled with political debates into which both sexes enter with equal eagerness.”47 Although he said he was a mere spectator of events, he couldn’t resist the requests from his liberal French friends—Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, du Pont de Nemours, Condorcet, and others—for constitutional advice. Indeed, he periodically met in an informal seminar on political theory with these friends, members of what Jefferson called “the Patriotic party.” He seemed to think that the Patriots were merely French versions of the American patriots of 1776. They were “sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, [and] longed for occasions of reforming it.” They would “from the natural progress of things . . . press forward to the establishment of a constitution which shall assure them a good degree of liberty.”48 With his usual optimism Jefferson was sure that everything could be sorted out in a rational manner.
As early as December 1787, Adams, with his skeptical view of human nature, saw things quite differently. He realized that all of Europe was talking of reviving assemblies and calling for meetings of estates, with France taking the lead. Surely, he told Jefferson, some improvement, some lessening of superstition, bigotry, and tyranny, would result from all this ferment. But he had doubts that things could be kept under control. “The world will be entertained with noble sentiments and enchanting Eloquence, but will not essential Ideas be sometimes forgotten, in the anxious study of brilliant Phrases?” Europe, he said, had tried such experiments before, and they had never worked out. “Contradictions will not succeed, and to think of Reinstituting Republicks . . . would be to revive Confusion and Carnage, which must again End in despotism.”49
In response Jefferson expressed none of these doubts. He was pretty sure that France’s “internal affairs will be arranged without blood.” The opposition was moderate, and if it could remain so, he said, “all will end well.”50 In November 1788 he asked John Jay, who was now the American secretary for foreign affairs in the Confederation government, for a leave of absence for five or six months to go home to attend to his plantation. Jefferson fully expected to return to France. When he learned that the Estates-General would convene in May 1789—the assembly of clergy, nobles, and the Third Estate of commoners hadn’t met since 1614—he predicted that France in two or three years would probably enjoy “a tolerably free constitution, and that without it’s having cost them a drop of blood.”51 He had come to realize, as he told Washington in December 1788, that “the nation has been awakened by our revolution, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.”52 Instead of a republic, however, he thought France would end up with a constitutional monarchy like that of England.
By May 1789, while his countrymen were getting their new national government on its feet, Jefferson was still in France and still enthusiastic about the course of its Revolution. “The revolution in this country has advanced thus far without encountering any thing which deserves to be called a difficulty,” he reported to John Jay. But, he admitted, there had been riots in Paris and elsewhere, with several hundred Frenchmen killed by government troops. This was not a little rebellion feeding the tree of liberty; indeed, these mobs, he said, were composed of “the most abandoned banditti of Paris,” and their rioting was totally unprovoked and unjustified. Believing that France was involved merely in a constitutional reformation, Jefferson had little sense of the deep rumbling anger of the French people that was beginning to erupt. None of these riots, he claimed in all innocence, had “a professed connection with the great national reformation going on.”53
Sometimes Jefferson seemed to forget that he was the U.S. minister to a foreign country; instead of maintaining an official detachment from French affairs, he began acting as if he himself were one of the French reformers—in violation of all diplomatic protocol. He was in constant touch with his friends in the Patriot party, badgering them to create a constitution modeled on that of England. The king, he suggested, might be set over a bicameral legislature with the orders of the clergy and the nobility located in an upper house. He counseled his friends on the role of juries, and drafted a ten-point charter of rights that he sent to Lafayette. But the Third Estate ignored both his advice and his charter and, calling itself the National Assembly, persuaded many of the clergy and the nobility to join it and agree to vote by persons, not by “orders” or estates, thus creating a single uniform nation—the very sort of unicameral body Adams hated and feared. At this point Jefferson told Jay he wouldn’t report to him as frequently as he had in the past, “the great crisis being now over.”54
But events kept outrunning his high hopes for a compromise between the king and the people. On July 11, 1789, Jefferson assured Thomas Paine that the Revolution was once again effectively over, only to be confronted with the momentous events of the succeeding days, including the destruction of the Bastille. But even these bloody events did not shake Jefferson’s confidence that all would soon be well, as long as his Patriot friends were in control. In August, he hosted at his house a six-hour meeting of eight of the leading French liberal reformers as they plotted what steps to take. The discussion, he recalled, was “truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity, as handed down to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero.”55 (The next day he apologized to Louis XVI’s minister of foreign affairs for this extraordinary diplomatic impropriety.)
His naïve faith in the future was breathtaking. He had witnessed the mobs destroying the Bastille and “saw so plainly the legitimacy of them” that he never lost a bit of sleep. Since “quiet is so well established here . . . there is nothing further to be apprehended.” There was no want of bread, and the members of the National Assembly were in control. Being “wise, firm, and moderate. . . they will establish the English constitution, purged of it’s numerous and capital defects.” He had, he said, “so much confidence in the good sense of man, and his qualifications for self-government” and had such little fear of failure “where reason is left free to exert her force” that he was willing “to be stoned as a false prophet” if everything in France did not end well.56
Years later, in his autobiography, Jefferson set forth his account of what had happened and revealed how little understanding he had of the origins of the French Revolution. The queen, Marie Antoinette, he claimed in retrospect, was ultimately responsible for everything. If she, wallowing in her “inordinate gambling and dissipations,” had not prevented her weak husband, Louis XVI, from acting sensibly, things would have been different. “I have ever believed,” Jefferson concluded, “that had there been no queen, there would have been no revolution.”
Despite this unsophisticated conception of the historical process, Jefferson by 1821 had nevertheless come to appreciate the world-shattering consequences of the French Revolution. It had unleashed forces that had spread everywhere, with the result being “the condition of man thro’ the civilized world will be finally and greatly ameliorated.” Like the American Revolution, which was sparked by “a two penny duty on tea,” the French Revolution, he said, was “a wonderful instance of great events from small causes.”57
• • •
IN 1789 ADAMS WROTE JEFFERSON that “your Friend” had come in second in electoral votes to Washington and was thus going to be vice president. With his usual protective sarcasm, he told Jefferson that “it may be found easier to give Authority than to yield Obedience.”58
By December 1788, Jefferson had already heard that Adams—along with John Hancock, John Jay, and Henry Knox—was being suggested in the middle and northern states for vice president, it being taken for granted that Washington would become president. In October 1788, Madison had informed Jefferson that Adams and Hancock were “the only candidates in the Northern States brought forward with their known consent.” Madison thought both men were “objectionable” and wished that they would be satisfied with lesser positions in the government. Adams, he said, had “made himself obnoxious to many particularly in the Southern states by the political principles avowed in his book.” Others objected to Adams because he presumably had caballed against Washington during the war and was extravagantly self-important. Some wondered why, given his modest means, Adams preferred “an unprofitable dignity to some place of emolument better adapted to private fortune.” It seemed that he might have his “eye on the presidency,” and because of his “impatient ambition might even intrigue for a premature advancement,” especially if some “factious characters . . . should get into the public councils.” At any rate, said Madison, many believed that “he would not be a very cordial second to the General.”59
As it turned out, Adams received thirty-four votes to Washington’s sixty-nine. With every elector allowed to vote for two persons from two different states, Washington received every possible electoral vote. Adams’s thirty-four votes were just shy of a majority, with most of them coming from New England. The rest of the electoral votes were scattered among several individuals, with no one receiving more than John Jay’s nine votes.60 Adams knew that the southerners did not like him but was upset that the New Yorkers seemed to oppose him as well. With Washington, the Virginian, guaranteed to be president, it was natural for the electors to vote for a northerner, especially a New Englander, for their second choice; and Adams seemed to be the most famous New Englander. He made it clear to friends that he would not become a senator; in fact, he implied that he would accept nothing less than the vice presidency.
Although Adams had every right to feel that his election as vice president was a mark of respect for him, he nevertheless thought he had been elected “in a scurvy manner” and not out of “the Gratitude” that he thought was due him. Despite his election as vice president, he could not refrain from telling his friends privately how ignorant and inexperienced the American people were and how they had forgotten that “laws are the fountain of Freedom and Punctuality the source of Credit.”61 By 1789 Adams had become as fearful of the majority of commoners as he was of the aristocracy.
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS, UNLIKE JEFFERSON, did not personally get involved in the French Revolution, his Defence of the Constitutions did. Early in 1789, Jefferson’s liberal friends Condorcet, du Pont de Nemours, and the Italian physician and agent for Virginia during the Revolution Philip Mazzei brought out a French translation of John Stevens’s Observations on Government, which had been originally published in New York in 1787.62 Stevens’s pamphlet was a severe attack on both Adams’s Defence and on De Lolme’s Constitution of England. Writing anonymously as a “Farmer of New Jersey,” Stevens, a well-to-do future inventor, who seems to be one of the few Americans who actually read the Defence with care, condemned Adams for suggesting that American governments resembled the English constitution and for promoting aristocracy in America. Stevens denied that there were any orders or estates in America, and therefore Adams’s rationale for a mixed or balanced government in the United States was misplaced. Since Stevens accepted a bicameral legislature with an independent executive, many, including some scholars, could not understand what his quarrel with Adams was about.63 But Stevens rightly realized that Adams in his Defence was presuming a social order of aristocrats in America, and he wanted no part of that claim. For him and for most Americans by 1787, there were no estates or social orders in America that had to be embodied in separate parts of the government as in England; instead, all parts of America’s governments—lower houses, senates, and executives—had become simply different kinds of representatives of the sovereign people. America had no aristocratic social power or an aristocracy of any sort, said Stevens. Adams was simply too caught up in his admiration for the English constitution to appreciate America’s uniqueness.
“Had Mr. Adams been a native of the old, instead of the new world,” wrote Stevens, “we should not have been so surprised at his system.” In Europe, he said, “wealth and power [were] everywhere in the hands of a few—nobility almost universally established,” especially in the English constitution.64
For Jefferson’s liberal French friends this was precisely the point that attracted them to Stevens’s pamphlet: they wanted to discredit the English constitution as a model for France and collapse that separate estate of the aristocracy into the Third Estate, so that everyone would become a commoner in a single body of the people. They issued their French edition of Stevens’s pamphlet to boost their effort to do away with orders or estates in the French government. Condorcet and Du Pont added so many notes and commentary to Stevens’s pamphlet that their version turned out to be several times longer than the original. They annotated and manipulated Stevens’s work as they saw fit, turning his 56-page pamphlet into a 291-page book that included 174 pages of notes, a translation of the U.S. Constitution, and some notes from the Virginia ratifying convention. All this was done with the purpose of justifying a single assembly that would represent the whole nation. As their translation of Stevens’s pamphlet was invoked repeatedly in the debates that took place in the National Assembly during 1789, Adams had become a whipping boy for the problems of French society.65
• • •
BEFORE JEFFERSON DEPARTED for his six-month leave in the United States, fully intending to return to Paris, he wrote a remarkable letter to Madison outlining his idea “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Apparently discussions with his physician, Richard Gem, an elderly Englishman who was friendly with the philosophes and a supporter of the American Revolution, helped to gel his thinking about the issue of “whether one generation of men has a right to bind another.” Jefferson had in fact discussed this problem of the rights of succeeding generations with Lafayette in January 1789. He was particularly interested in the burden of debt that one generation left for successive generations, understandable since he was just becoming aware of the extent of his own personal debts.66 He suggested that these successive generations ought to be able to repudiate debts that had been incurred by previous generations. Constitutions ought to be treated in the same way. No single generation, which Jefferson with mathematical precision decided was nineteen years in length, should be able to “make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. . . . Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”67
In his response, Madison very tactfully suggested that Jefferson’s extraordinarily utopian idea was not “in all respects compatible with the course of human affairs,” and he went on to point out its various impracticalities. Jefferson respected Madison’s advice and never sought to implement his notion legally or constitutionally. Nevertheless, he remained stubbornly convinced for the rest of his life that the past should never be a burden to the present: it was central to his radical approach to the world, that people should never be held back by the dead hand of history.68
Adams, who probably had read more history than Jefferson and had certainly written more of it—three volumes of what he called “all genuine History”—never thought that society could ever be free of the past: it was a record of constant struggles between aristocrats and democrats from which mankind must learn the truths of politics. “Lessons,” he told Jefferson, “are never wanting. Life and History are full” of them. Describing these lessons in his volumes had cost him “a good deal of Trouble and Expence.” He had delved “into Italian Rubbish and Ruins,” among many other sources, but he had found “enough of pure Gold and Marble . . . to reward the Pains.” The past was the invaluable source of lessons for the present. Nearly all the commentators on the French Revolution, he lamented, had no sense of history whatsoever, which was why they so misjudged it. The only commentator, he said, who understood the importance of the past was Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.69
• • •
WHEN JEFFERSON ARRIVED back in the United States in the fall of 1789, both he and America had changed. Living in Europe had given him a new perspective on his country. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, he had criticized his fellow Virginians for their backwardness and the likelihood of their losing all sense of virtue—often in terms similar to those of Adams. He had urged reform of everything—of the Virginia constitution, of the laws, of religion, of slavery. He had warned that “from the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.” Our rulers would become corrupt and the people careless. The people would be forgotten and their rights disregarded. “They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money.”70
But now he was no longer obsessed with reforming his state and society. Even eliminating slavery was no longer uppermost in his mind; instead he emphasized ameliorating the conditions of his slaves at Monticello. His experience with European sophistication and luxury had given him a new appreciation of the plainness and provinciality of America. He was “savage enough,” he told a German correspondent in 1785, “to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital” of Paris. America didn’t need reforming, but old decayed oppressive Europe did. Indeed, Jefferson returned from Europe convinced that America must avoid at all costs becoming more like Europe.71
But when he arrived in the temporary federal capital of New York in March 1790 to take up the position of secretary of state in the new federal government, a responsibility he accepted reluctantly, he discovered that many Americans wanted to do just that—become more like decadent, monarchical Europe. He was “astonished,” he later recalled, “to find the general prevalence of monarchical sentiments,” especially sentiments in favor of the English constitution. At dinner parties and other social occasions, he found very few Americans who seemed willing to support “republicanism.”72
Jefferson’s memory was not faulty. America had changed a great deal since he had left in 1784, and talk of royalism and monarchy had indeed become more prevalent, especially in New England and New York. Benjamin Tappan, the father of the future abolitionists, told Henry Knox in 1787 that “monarchy” had become “absolutely necessary to save the states from sinking into the lowest abyss of misery.” Not only had the Constitution been created largely out of fear of too much democracy, but the strong independent president was very much welcomed as an elected monarch, resembling the Polish king that Jefferson had predicted.
In 1789 the president had been greeted with acclamations of “Long live George Washington!” with some calling his inauguration as president “a coronation.” One of his future secretaries of war even saluted Washington, “You are now a King, under a different name”—may you “reign long and happy over us.” With toasts being drunk to “his Highness,” it was not surprising that, in the first draft of his inaugural address, Washington attempted to counter these monarchical expectations by pointing out that he had no offspring, “no family to build in greatness upon my country’s ruins.” Although Madison talked him out of this draft, Washington’s desire to show the public that he entertained no kingly ambitions revealed just how widespread was the talk of monarchy in 1789.73
Jefferson recalled that the most anyone in 1790 would do in support of republican features in the new government was to say that the Constitution was inevitably going to become more monarchical in time.74 Indeed, that was a common supposition of those who favored a stronger, more monarchical-like government in 1789—the Federalists, they called themselves, clinging to the name the supporters of the Constitution had adopted. Many of these Federalists thought that time was on their side. They were well versed in the theory of the Scottish social scientists that held that states progressed through four stages of development—from hunter-gathering, to herding, to an agricultural phase, and finally to the sophisticated commercial stage that characterized the modern states of Britain and France. As American society inevitably left the agricultural stage and became more mature, more unequal, and hierarchical, and came to resemble the societies of Europe, the Federalists concluded that the United States would necessarily have to become more monarchical. Rawlins Lowndes of South Carolina thought that America was halfway there. Its government, he said, so closely resembled the British form that everyone naturally expected “our changing from a republic to monarchy.”75
• • •
AS FAR AS JOHN ADAMS WAS CONCERNED, the United States was already a monarchy, a republican monarchy, to be sure, but nevertheless a monarchy. “The Constitution of Massachusetts is a limited Monarchy,” he said. “So is the new Constitution of the United States.” No one could understand what he meant. By his lights, however, any state that had a strong independent executive was a monarchy of some sort, a concept that most Americans found confusing, if not absurd. Most, especially most southerners, were convinced that all Adams cared about was the monarchical English constitution.76
Since southern aristocrats were more confident of their position in the society and less fearful of democracy than elites in the North, they became the most fervent supporters of liberty, equality, and popular republican government and at the same time the most severe critics of both Adams and the northern talk of monarchy. Like Jefferson, these southern aristocrats could claim to be full-fledged republicans without fearing the populist repercussions their northern counterparts had come to dread.
It was not surprising, as Senator William Maclay from Pennsylvania noticed, that most of those who supported titles and dwelled on other monarchical formalities in government came from New England, where the social structure was most equal and the gentlemen-aristocrats, such as they were, were always more vulnerable to challenge. Southern slaveholding aristocrats, whose elite status could usually be taken for granted, could therefore, as one Marylander did, easily mock Adams’s talk of “the awful distance which should be maintained between some and others” and more readily ridicule his rants “upon the necessity of one of his three balancing powers, consisting of the well born, or of those who are distinguished by their descent from a race of illustrious ancestors.” Where in America, asked this sarcastic Marylander, “are those well born to be found?”77
Adams knew where they could be found. They existed all over America, especially in his own state; indeed, he declared that Massachusetts possessed as many aristocratic families as any place on earth, and these social inequalities were impossible to eradicate.78 In his stubborn, perverse way, Adams was defying the egalitarian assumptions of Jefferson shared by most Americans. By positing the inevitable presence of aristocracy, he confronted American culture head-on.
By 1789 almost no political figure was willing to admit publicly that he was a member of an American aristocracy. Even Alexander Hamilton, when accused by the sharp-witted anti-Federalist Melancton Smith in the New York ratifying convention of being an aristocrat, felt compelled to deny the charge vehemently. Smith, Hamilton contended, would certainly never admit that he was demagogically accusing men of being aristocrats simply to arouse passions and create prejudices. “Why then are we told so often of an aristocracy? For my part,” said Hamilton, “I hardly know the meaning of the word as it is applied.” There was no aristocracy in America, said Hamilton, or else “every distinguished man is an aristocrat,” which, if that was what Smith meant, he said, rendered the term meaningless.79 But that was pretty close to what Adams eventually came to mean by an aristocrat.80
However confused his critics were by Adams’s discussions of aristocracy, they were basically correct in claiming that he wanted to change the state constitutions and the federal Constitution. In 1789 only Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the new federal government gave even a limited veto power to their executives; no government in America yet possessed the absolute executive veto power that Adams thought essential for a properly balanced constitution.
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS PROTESTED that he was “as much a republican as I was in 1775,” many of his ideas seemed out of place in the America of 1789–1790.81 Since most of his fellow Americans had abandoned or never clearly held Adams’s traditional conception of a mixed republic, with its balance of the social orders of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, his talk of “monarchical republics” and “republican monarchies” was bound to confuse people and raise suspicions. Couldn’t his countrymen follow what he was saying? “How is it possible,” he said, in frustration, “that whole nations should be made to comprehend the principles and rules of government, until they shall learn to understand one another’s meaning by words?”82
Roger Sherman of Connecticut, for example, could not grasp Adams’s unusual definition of a republic as “government where sovereignty is vested in more than one person.” Adams actually celebrated the fact that this strange definition of republican government made England as much of a republic as America, “a monarchical republic, it is true,” Adams admitted, “but a republic still.” England was a republic, he said, to Sherman’s bewilderment, because “the sovereignty, which is the legislative power . . . is equally divided between the one, the few, and the many, or in other words, between the natural division of mankind in society,—the monarchical, the aristocratical, and democratical.”
For Sherman this made no sense at all. For him a republic was the opposite of a monarchy, “a commonwealth without a king,” a government in which all parts, executives as well as the two branches of the legislature, were elected agents of the people. What especially made a state “a republic,” said Sherman, was “its dependence on the public or people at large, without any hereditary powers.”83
To Adams, Sherman’s definition was just another example of the “peculiar sense to which the words republic, commonwealth, popular state” were being used by people “who mean by them a democracy, or rather a representative democracy.” But for most Americans by 1789 that was precisely what the United States had become—a representative democracy, even though it contained single executives and bicameral legislatures at both the state and federal levels. For Sherman and most other Americans, all these various parts of their governments had become different kinds of representatives of the people—at least that was what they were calling them in public.
Captivated as he was by the historical meaning of mixed government as a balancing of social estates and lacking any sense of political correctness, Adams could not understand what Sherman and others were talking about. For him a democracy or a representative democracy was simply “a government in a single assembly, chosen at stated periods by the people, and invested with the whole sovereignty.” If the government contained a single executive and a senate, Adams believed that it necessarily had to be something other than a democracy, or even a representative democracy; indeed, it had to be a “limited monarchy” or “a monarchical republic.” That gap in understanding between him and his countrymen was never closed.
Because America to Adams was a monarchical republic, its president being a kind of elective king and an embodiment of the order of the “one” in the society, “it is essential to a monarchial republic,” he declared, “that the supreme executive should be a branch of the legislature, and have a negative on all the laws.” Without a full and proper share in the legislature by the monarchical order, he told Sherman, the desired balance of the state “between the one, the few, and the many” could not be preserved.84
By 1789 this justification for the executive veto was peculiar to Adams and was not at all shared by Sherman and most other Americans. An absolute veto, said Sherman, may have made sense in England where the rights of the people and the rights of the nobility had to be offset by the Crown’s possessing a complete negative power over all laws. But the American republics, “wherein is no higher rank than that of common citizens,” had no such social orders to balance. The qualified veto power given to executives in America, said Sherman, had nothing to do with embodying a monarchical social order in the government; it was designed “only to produce a revision” of the laws and to prevent hastily drawn legislation.
As a final blow to Adams’s conception of government and society, Sherman claimed that there were “no principles in our constitution that have any tendency to aristocracy.” Since “both branches of Congress are eligible from the citizens at large, and wealth is not a requisite qualification, both will commonly be composed of members of similar circumstances in life.” Thus there could be no social struggle between the several branches of government; all were equal agents of the people, “directed to one end, the advancement of the public good.”85
In his conventional republican rhetoric, Sherman may have understood correctly how Americans had come to conceive of their government, but by so casually and mindlessly denying the existence of any aristocracy in America, he, like other Americans, did not do justice to the power and complexity of Adams’s analysis of their society. Adams may have misunderstood the rationale Americans now gave for the structure of their balanced governments, but he realized better than most of his countrymen the inherent inequality of their society and the inevitability of elites.
In the face of this kind of mounting criticism, Adams clung to his unorthodox views of government only more firmly. He published two more volumes of his Defence in which he laid out even more fully his pessimistic but realistic analysis of American society. He realized that his critics conceived of aristocracy in formal legal terms, but they were letting their predilections get in the way of the truth; their ideology was obscuring social realities. “Perhaps it may be said,” Adams declared, “that in America we have no distinctions of ranks, and therefore shall not be liable to those divisions and discords which spring from them.” But this was just wishful thinking. “All we can say in America is, that legal distinctions, titles, powers, and privileges, are not hereditary.” The craving for distinction—basic to human nature—was as strong in America as anywhere. Weren’t the slightest differences of rank and position, between laborers, yeomen, and gentlemen, “as earnestly desired and sought, as titles, garters, and ribbons are in any nation of Europe”?86
In fact, said Adams, almost a half century before Tocqueville made the same penetrating observation, the desire for distinction was even stronger in egalitarian America than elsewhere. Aristocrats, of course, had to keep up their distinctiveness, “or fall into contempt and ridicule.” But in America “the lowest and the middling people,” despite their continual declamations against the rich and the great, were really no different. They were as much addicted to buying superfluities as the aristocracy. Indeed, “a free people,” said Adams, “are the most addicted to luxury of any.” Their republican emphasis on equality hurried them into buying more than they needed. A man would see his neighbor “whom he holds his equal” with a better coat, hat, house, or horse. “He cannot bear it; he must and will be on a level with him.” In the 1780s, said Adams, the American people “rushed headlong into a greater degree of luxury than ought to have crept in for a hundred years.” Indeed, he told Benjamin Rush, because America was “more Avaricious than any other Nation that ever existed,” it would be foolish to expect the country to free itself from the passion for distinctions.87
In April 1790 Rush told Adams that he and Jefferson in the previous month had had a conversation about Adams. “We both deplored your attachment to monarchy and both agreed that you had changed your principles since the year 1776.” Adams replied to Rush immediately and vehemently denied both charges. So by the time Jefferson joined the administration in the spring of 1790, he had at least an inkling of his friend’s strange monarchical thinking. But as yet the two had not directly confronted each other over their differences. That was soon to change.88