American Experiment (42 page)

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.

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.”

Fisher Ames could even joke about the matter. “I derive much entertainment from the squabbles in Madam Liberty’s family,” he wrote. “After so many liberties have been taken with her, she is no longer a
miss
and a virgin, though she still may be a goddess.”

The younger generation of Federalist leaders, however, put modern organization ahead of old ideas. The Federalists had ended the century a disorganized as well as a defeated party. “The Federalists hardly deserve the name of a party,” Fisher Ames complained. “Their association is a loose one, formed by accident, and shaken by every prospect of labor or hazard.” For a time Federalists mocked the organizational efforts of their Republican foes. A Federalist satire, “The Grand Caucus,” presented four Jeffersonians—“Will Sneakup, Esq., Obedumb Bragwell, Esq., Squire Quorom, Esq., and Lord Cockedoodledoo”—constituted as a “self-created convention” which after various shenanigans came up with that very same foursome as its candidates for office.