revolution
Intellectual Origins
01/15/2009 14:01
Adair was apparently a legendary professor, who mentored a generation of historians. I first ran into him in the introduction to Daniel Sisson’s published dissertation. Sisson pretty much lifted his thesis, it turns out, from Adair’s introduction. But Adair was much more careful in his statement than Sisson turned out to be in his extrapolation of it.
This dissertation was unpublished forever, but the list of borrowers of the original document at Yale is supposedly a who’s who of history, at least in the minds of the borrowers. Many of Adair’s grad students seem to have found hints and ideas in it that they were able to pursue in their own studies.
Adair begins by situating his study as a post-Beard analysis of Jefferson and Madison’s political ideas. He asks whether something more should be added to Beard’s economic analysis, to explain why, although Hamilton and Madison’s economic ideas were “practically identical,” Madison, “the great antiparty philosopher of the Constitutional Convention, went into opposition and helped organize a highly effective party with Jefferson—supposedly Hamilton’s direct antithesis in economic doctrine”? (9-10)
The answer, Adair says, is that Jefferson and Madison shared a political outlook informed by the classical traditions going all the way back to Aristotle. Hamilton was also a student of the classics, Adair says; but his scholarship was shallower, and he failed to adapt what he learned in the ancient texts to the conditions in early America. He was too much of an idealist.
This is an interesting argument, and intuitively it’s very satisfying. Elite education in the eighteenth century was classical, and all three men (and John Adams, and the rest of the members of the Constitutional Convention) had a shared language. Adair makes his case that the founders didn’t just come up with their political philosophy by watching their neighbors in the Virginia piedmont, as some Turner-influenced historians apparently claimed. But the question of specifically how each man was able to adapt this shared classical heritage into their various plans for the American republic is left largely unanswered.
Adair leans heavily on the Scottish philosophers, especially David Hume, as progenitors of the founding fathers’ world view. He lists the books Madison studied under (Scottish) John Witherspoon at Princeton. In addition to Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes, Madison read Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Adam Smith. (26) The inclusion of Smith suggests the Republicans were not the economic illiterates that supporters of Hamilton make them out to be. Fisher Ames described Madison as “a thorough master of almost every public question that can arise, or he will spare no pains to become so.” (28) In a note, Adair mentions that by the 1850s, the prominence of continental political classics in school curricula was decreasing, resulting in an observed decrease in references to the ancients in political speeches. (31) But all evidence suggests Madison and Jefferson (and their serious contemporaries) arrived on the scene at the peak of classical scholarship.
Adair says Jefferson’s most powerful influence was Aristotle, and that the hope that a class of virtuous yeomen could stabilize a republic was lifted directly from the Politics. He describes Shay’s rebellion as a debtors’ revolt, echoing an interpretation based on politically motivated contemporary sources (like Knox’s letters to Washington). Leonard Richards’ recent study of the members of the rebellion contradicts the traditional story. Adair says the “ominous event” (quoting Madison, 61) sent the founders rushing back to their shelves for answers in “Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle.” Maybe this was part of the solution…but maybe it also limited the effectiveness of the final solution. The two missing pieces of Adair’s puzzle seem to repeatedly be: how did regular people react to all this classically-inspired politics, and how accurately did the founders really understand their situation, before they fit it to the models written by the masters two millennia earlier?
Adair hints at the possibility of over-applying classical analogies, but only among Jefferson and Madison’s adversaries. Hamilton is described as brilliant, but with a shallow understanding of the classics (76). Adams’ use of Thucydides account of the sedition at Corcyra in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States is shown to be not only “the most tenuous” of analogies (65), but also to miss the point that Shays and his rebels were behaving symbolically rather than trying to take over the State of Massachusetts. Adair argues that because the principals of the debates believed these analogies significant, we should consider their relationship to the events. This is probably true with respect to Adams’ paranoia, and may be an approach to assessing not only the strengths (as Adair suggests), but the weaknesses of the founders’ vision.
Gouverneur Morris’ posthumous opinion of Hamilton is quoted at length, and probably contains the seeds of a book or two:
Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends, and not without injury to himself. More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He knew well that his favorite form [monarchy] was inadmissible, unless as the result of a civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction, that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country could be established in no other way. (77) (from)
“For nearly a generation American political thinkers had shared Locke’s exclusive concern,” Adair says, “with curbing the powers of kings. But now in the summer of 1787, the Convention delegates were almost unanimously agreed that the people themselves presented an additional problem.” (109) And perhaps the delegates’ nearly unanimous opinion highlights yet another problem. Ironically, after arguing that Beard ignored politics and ideas, Adair blames Hamilton for economic policies that “divided the American people into sharper cleavage than had existed since 1776.” (114) The reduction of the Confederacy’s problems to Hamilton’s national financial schemes, and the reduction of Hamilton to “a victim of his Plutarch and his Tacitus,” is the book’s greatest weakness. (Adair even quotes Woodrow Wilson: Hamilton was “a very great man, but not a great American,” to which a previous reader wrote in the margin, “TOSH!”)
Adair says Hamilton’s reductive mistake was his assumption of class struggle, that ultimately “faction [would] pivot entirely upon the conflict of haves and have-nots.” (120) Madison saw past this Hobbesian error after long review of his classics, Adair says, and “challenged the basic postulate upon which the ancient mixed government depended for its justification; and in so doing he exploded the justification for a permanent will in the community to keep the immutable strife of the few and the many within bounds.” But he never really says what those other elements of factionalism were, or how Madison proposed to keep them in check or play one against the other to stabilize his system. This is where a look back at Turner, who Adair threw out in the preface, might be helpful. Both Jefferson and Madison had experienced the frontier, and when the Louisiana Purchase was completed Madison breathed a sigh of relief and added a generation onto his expectation for America’s survival. (160) But Madison did the math, and decided that by 1930, Americans would “necessarily [be] reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessities of life. The proportion being without property…cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its right to be safe depositories of power over them.” (161) “It would be impossible to base a republican government on a minority, without creating ‘a standing military force, dangerous to all parties and to liberty itself.’” Madison’s classics apparently held no answer; he simply hoped when the time came “the wisdom of the wisest patriots” in a future generation would pull them through (from “Notes on Suffrage” written during the Virginia Convention of 1829-30).
The American Revolution of 1800
12/29/2008 13:56
This was originally a PhD dissertation, apparently for Douglass Adair, who Sisson says inspired his research. It begins well, and I was impressed enough after 30 pages to want a copy of this for my library (which is saying something, as I’ve pared that down to about 30 books). The reviewers almost unanimously hated it, and the book does bog down pretty quickly, while at the same time not going deep enough into unpublished primary material. Most of Sisson’s primary quotes seem to be lifted from secondary sources or published selections of his subjects’ papers.
Even so, Sisson’s thesis is provocative. He challenges historians with finding the modern two party system too soon in post-Revolutionary America, insisting that this was emphatically NOT the goal of anyone in the 1790s. Instead, he builds a definition of revolution based on Jefferson’s understanding of the classics. Following the Gracchi brothers, Sisson says, Jefferson and his Republican associates built a “second city” revolutionary movement to take power away from the Federalists they believed were betraying the spirit of ’76 and moving toward monarchy.
Sisson quotes Jefferson’s claim that “The Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” One of his reviewers points out that this quote comes from a private letter, and is taken out of context. Regardless, it may highlight Jefferson’s understanding of what he was doing in the 1790s. Sisson opens an interesting train of thought here. Why did the ’76 revolution fail to produce the changes Jefferson wanted, requiring a second “revolution” in 1800? What did the 1790s teach Americans about the operation of democracy, in a world where there wasn’t the unanimity they may have expected? Did the Republicans think they were wiping out the monarchists and finishing the revolution, while at the same time they were showing Americans how to operate their democracy? Did Henry Adams undermine Jefferson’s own interpretation of his campaign and presidency?
Sisson claims “During the period of High Federalist ascendancy Jefferson noted again and again the Federalists’ lack of faith in the meaning of the first American Revolution.” (11) There’s a lot of space to examine the real intentions of the diverse group that united to produce the revolution, and no reason to suppose that Jefferson’s interpretation of its “meaning” is the true or legitimate one. It succeeded because he rallied the people to it in 1800, but was he following or shaping public opinion? Sisson also observes that Jefferson “adopted a posture of philosophical vagueness that allowed his opponents to read into his intentions a positive view of the future.” Jefferson’s ability to clothe (disguise?) his program to create a mass movement for it is interesting, but it’s precisely the idea of partisanship that Sisson is arguing against.
Sisson mentions Bernard Bailyn and Douglass Adair repeatedly; the best things I get out of this book may be echoes of them, and the references to their work—that I’ll now go and find.
Sisson portrays Adams’ firing of Pickering from his cabinet as his moment of clarity, when he realizes the High Federalists have betrayed the revolution and “plung[es] a sword” into his own administration. (21) It’s interesting that he refuses to throw Adams under the bus; but he needs to sustain that argument that the original revolution lived on in the minds of the founders, so how could Adams betray it? Even though his argument is weak, I come away from it with new interest in both Jefferson and Adams.
Jefferson’s remark that “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time,” (50) pretty much damns Sisson’s argument that the politicians of 1790 were unaware of partisanship. His point that they abhorred the idea of parties and factions in their writing begs questions about the purposes of the writings he quotes. Could Jefferson and his contemporaries have desired a one-party state in the same way current politicians desire “bipartisanship”? As a code for “us getting our way and the other guys seeing the errors of their ways?
Were the Republicans and Federalists REALLY scared it was going to come down to war again? Or were they using popular reaction to the French Revolution for political purposes? No doubt they were sincere; but maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we don’t like to see the “founding fathers” using all these tawrdy political devices to achieve what we consider our historic destiny?
To the extent that the standard histories see the 1790s as the beginning of a completely modern 2 party system, I think Sisson makes a compelling counter-argument. Ironically, it reminds me a lot of the 2008 campaign. Two parties each trying to completely wipe out the other, a candidate with a revolutionary goal which he dissembles in order to build a mass movement and avoid alarming his opponents, charges by ideological purists that “he’s not going far enough.”
Sisson opens some space around (what he claims is) the standard interpretation and stirs things up, as does Jefferson’s observation that the same parties have always existed. If this is the case, then what did the founders EXPECT to happen after they won? And, if the binary, 2-party choice continually reproduces these poles, is this really the way to go? If the only choices are black and white, then people will choose the pole they think is closest to their real color, even though it’s a poor match. Maybe the mistake is in mobilizing campaigns around these poles (or believing that’s what the founders were about), rather than changing the game so that everyone gets more of what they want. If Sisson’s point is that the founders thought they were doing that, then it was an interesting one.
