The Elusive Republic
05/28/2010 07:10
McCoy begins with the very important (if not original) observation that “Contemporary Americans all too often presume an unjustified familiarity with their Revolutionary forebears. It is easy to assume that our basic concerns were theirs, and especially that our understanding of the Revolution and its legacy accurately reflects the meaning and significance they attached to it...few acknowledge how frightening and even distasteful twentieth-century America might appear to the members of a Revolutionary generation.” (5) This is due, he says, not only to the unimaginable changes that separate them and us, but also to the fact that they were knowingly engaged in an anachronistic, “poignant struggle to adapt the traditional, classical republican impulse to modern commercial society.” (9) Since “The Revolutionaries lived during an age when a consideration of the normative dimension of economic life” was still expected, McCoy sets out to describe their attempt to “establish...a republican system of political economy in America.” (7)
“American republicanism.” McCoy says, “must be understood as an ideology in transition.” (10) It might also be described, to extend his train of thought, as a system idealists like Jefferson tried to apply to a reality they didn’t (and didn’t want to)completely understand. Or, if one were cynical, it might be described as a political ideology, presented to a European audience (via Francois Marbois) wondering how America was going to arrange its affairs. Consider this description by noted deist and suspected atheist Jefferson:
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition...generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer to measure its degree of corruption.” (Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia)
Okay, so this is supposed to be the core statement of the Jeffersonian agrarian myth. But look at it! In the first place, “chosen people of God”?! But okay, let’s call that a figure of speech, and give it the benefit of the doubt. Even so, why should the breasts of farmers be the only possible “deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”? Is it only because Jefferson says so -- and that’s why he needs to resort to “God”? And “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators...” He’s either not talking about Virginia at all, or he’s talking about the slaves. In either case, what’s the foundation of his virtuous republic? If it’s Virginia gentlemen farmers, then he’s conveniently forgetting not only that they owned slaves, but that they owned slaves specifically because they were not living in virtuous subsistence, but producing for foreign commercial markets! And if his virtuous cultivators are slaves, then there goes his whole republican formula.
“Dependence begets subservience,” is only a short step from some type of Rousseau-ian belief that any social interaction is a “fall” from a pure state of nature. But again, it’s not a state of nature Jefferson has ever seen. Of course, he probably wasn’t aware that slaves made his life as a Virginia-aristocrat-with-delusions-of-rusticity possible in the first place. This is why I can’t stand Jefferson.
But back to McCoy. Republicans like Jefferson and George Mason, he says “never doubted that the natural sequence of social development would culminate inevitably in the form of society he feared.” (16) It was the classical paradigm of declension, the fall, the feet-of-clay story. It is interesting, as McCoy notes, how these people are able to mix these ancient paradigms with “enlightenment” ideas from Hume and Adam Smith, in ways that seem unreasonable to us now.
McCoy spends some time defending Adam Smith, in an argument that seems to fit well with Appleby’s (later?) contributions to the “capitalist transition” debate. He says Smith both “emphatically approved of an advanced division of labor as the basis of continuing economic growth and social progress, [and] was also concerned with its concomitant tendency to relegate the laboring classes to a brutish existence that crippled their minds and bodies.” (37) Smith is the smartest guy in this book, offering nuanced, qualified observations, such as his statement that under mercantilism, “the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part of society” was taken to be “the general interest of the whole.” (quoting Wealth of Nations, 43). Other insights are provided by Franklin: “Manufactures are founded in poverty...it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture.” (quoting “The Interest of Great Britain Considered,” 51) and John Adams: “the balance of power in a society [parallels] the balance of property in land [so society must] make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society [or] make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.” (68)
McCoy suggests there was some “uneasy suspicion (and sometimes recognition) among the Revolutionaries that even predominantly agricultural America was already a relatively advanced commercial society.” (70) They made practical distinctions, however, between “wealth that accrued through the perseverance of habitual industry” and the “sudden fortunes acquired through the manipulation and chicanery of speculators and stockjobbers.” (85) This seems to go to the heart of the republican objection to Hamilton. After all, as Thomas Paine said, “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe.” (quoting Common Sense, 89)
The cause of America’s problems, in McCoy’s story, was the new nation’s inability to sell its agricultural surpluses freely in Europe and the West Indies. In this sense, Britain nearly defeated the American republic, by causing a political crisis that split the founding generation into republican and federalist partisans. Jefferson and Madison’s idea of “developing across space rather than through time” depended on both the availability of a frontier and the “ability of new settlers to get their surpluses to market.” (121-2) The Embargo and attempts to eliminate foreign luxuries and focus on domestic manufacture of “necessaries” raise interesting questions about the role of government in economic development. McCoy reminds the reader that even Hamilton insisted “the development of advanced manufactures in America would require extensive government encouragement.” (quoting the “Report on Manufactures,” 159) He concludes that the republicans’ revolution, the “escape from time,” had always been understood by Madison as temporary. (259) At some point, the frontier would close. By his 1815 annual message, Madison had begun explicitly supporting “manufacturing establishments...of the more complicated kind.” (245) Was this Madison’s acknowledgement of the basic mismatch between classical republicanism and nineteenth century America? Was it a political victory for the capitalists and their cronies in professional government? Maybe the defining moment, in political changes like the demise of agrarian republicanism and its reappearance as an American myth, is not when the other guys finally win out, but when its proponents give it up.
