Passionate Sage (20 page)

Very much a product of the 1780s, and of his reading of English and European history, the
Defence
demonstrated that Adams, along with several other American political thinkers of the time, recognized that the revolutionary faith in public virtue so prevalent during the 1770s was inadequate as a basis for political stability once the war with England was won. “We may preach till we are tired of the theme,” Hamilton had written in 1782, “the necessity of disinterestedness in republics, without making a single proselyte.” Adams concurred that it was foolish to expect Americans to become more capable of self-denial and public spiritedness than any other people in history. To believe that the American people would behave virtuously was to think like the French Utopians, who expected a political revolution to change human nature. “The best republics will be virtuous,” he noted in the
Defence
, “and have been so; but we may hazard a conjecture, that the virtues have been the effect of the well ordered constitution, rather than the cause.”

Adams joined with a host of commentators on the American scene to argue that “the people in America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair…” Although it was a propitious moment, the act of framing new constitutions for the American republic was, he insisted, a decidedly human project taking place on this earth and not in the Garden of Eden: “It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [i.e., framing constitutions] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” He went out of his way to dispel the mythology of America as an exception to the rules of history or the revolutionary generation as instruments of divine providence. And the chief lesson that Adams claimed he had learned from his reading of history was that “without three orders, and an effectual balance among them, in every American constitution, it must be destined to frequent unavoidable revolutions.” Although Adams made the matter sound rather mechanistic—separate branches of government and a bicameral legislature automatically yielding a balanced constitution—nothing about the basic message defied the common wisdom then being implemented in the separate state constitutions or in the national convention in Philadelphia. When, years later, James Madison, the chief architect of the United States Constitution, asked Adams about foreign critics of the American system of government, Adams emphasized the same features. “When a writer on government despises, sneers, or argues against mixed governments or a balance in government,” he wrote to Madison, “he instantly proves himself”—the favorite Adams stigma—“an ideologian.”
¹¹

A close reading of the
Defence—
something very few could manage in the 1780s, given the sprawling, inchoate character of the work and the quirky schedule of its publication—revealed that Adams had been correct to worry that his apparent agreement with the broad outlines of American constitutionalism masked a fundamental disagreement that would set him against the emerging mainstream of American thinking about politics. The seeds of his aversion to liberalism, in short, were already planted in the
Defence
. Madison, in fact, had been one of the first to notice the lurking problems posed by Adams's analysis. “Men of learning find nothing new in it,” he cautioned Jefferson, who had initially congratulated Adams for his contribution to the debate over constitutional frameworks, while “Men of taste [find] many things to criticize.” Always a sharper and more sophisticated political thinker than his mentor at Monticello, Madison was hoisting the warning flags. Some of Adams's ideas, he was telling Jefferson, were not worthy of applause.
¹²

But until John Taylor published his own sprawling but comprehensive critique in 1814, no one had identified the deepest sources of Adams's political alienation. Adams himself tended to focus on two specific recommendations in the
Defence
, the power he proposed for the chief executive and the role of the Senate or upper house, believing that his chief sin had been to insist on investing more authority in those branches than the bulk of his compatriots found necessary.

And, indeed, Adams's preference for a strong executive was part of the problem. At several places in the
Defence
, Adams seemed to endorse empowering the executive, which he also called “the first magistrate,” to a degree that seemed dangerously reminiscent of the sovereign powers of European kings. He advocated “a first magistrate…invested with the whole executive authority,” and he specifically recommended that the Constitution “give that first magistrate a negative on the legislature,” a right of veto which could not be overturned by a two-thirds majority. During his term as vice president he incurred the wrath of most members of Congress and became the butt of jokes in the press for advocating royal titles for the president. He was dubbed “His Rotundity” for insisting that Washington be referred to as “his Majesty.” Throughout his retirement years, he clung tenaciously to his belief that the Americans' justifiable disenchantment with the arbitrary policies of George III, whom, after all, he had played a leading role in overthrowing, ought not blind them to the need for executive power. “The Supreme head or the executive of a great nation must be inviolable,” he noted in the margins of one book, “or the laws will never be executed.” In 1811 he told Josiah Quincy that “the President has, or ought to have, the whole nation before him, and he ought to select the men best qualified…without being shackled by any check, by law, constitution, or institution.”
¹³

Critics who accused him of secretly harboring a fondness for a divine right theory of the American presidency, or for a hereditary rather than elective chief executive, immediately found themselves drowning in a flood of Adams invective. “I never in my life went to such a length,” he complained to Rush, insisting that he was a republican to the core and not a royalist. But critics noted that his attitude toward European monarchs was disturbingly empathetic: “Talley rand once [in 1789] asked me, what I thought of the [French] King,” he recalled to John Quincy. “I answered that he was Daniel in the Lyons Den. If he ever escaped alive, it must be by Miracle.” He repeated a version of the recollection to Jefferson as late as 1823, acknowledging that “I am no king killer merely because they are kings—poor creatures they know no better—they believe sincerely and conscientiously that God made them to rule the world.”
¹⁴

Not only was Adams willing to invest the presidency with powers that many readers of the
Defence
found downright monarchical, he also exhibited a curious fascination with the role of the Senate. At Philadelphia, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had eventually seen fit to create an upper house in order to provide the smaller states with a legislative body in which there would be equal representation rather than representation proportional to populations. But Adams's motives for favoring the creation of a senate were entirely different and seemed to smack of an affection for a European-styled aristocracy. “The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense,” he wrote in the
Defence
. He argued that these natural aristocrats “must, therefore, be separated from the mass and placed by themselves in a senate,” an arrangement, he claimed, “that is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism.”
¹⁵

The notion that the people of the United States ought to conceive of senators as some kind of elected aristocracy struck most readers as odd. The belief that empowering such creatures by electing them into the Senate was a means of
limiting
their influence struck most readers as bizarre. Nevertheless, there it was in the
Defence
, not just an incidental point made in passing, but one of Adams's major preoccupations. In every society known to man, he assured his readers, “an aristocracy has risen up in a course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families, who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate.” Best to put these talented but troublesome creatures in one place, the Senate, and watch them carefully. He seemed to be saying that the Senate was simultaneously a podium for the natural aristocrats and a prison.
¹⁶

He had, in fact, been harping on this theme from the time he was a young man. In 1765, in his
Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law
, his polemic against arbitrary power was based on the ominous warning that priests and lords constituted an oligarchic gang that used its privileges to tyrannize the rest of society. The mechanistic and rather silly idea that one could harness the potentially disruptive energies of the aristocracy by housing it in the upper branch of the legislature actually came from John Louis DeLolme, a Swiss writer whose
The Constitution of England
first suggested the scheme, which was obviously a rationale for the English House of Lords. Adams acknowledged DeLolme's influence in the
Defence
, then clung unrepentantly for the rest of his life to the view that the Senate was, or at least should be, a combined haven and detention center for America's elite. While his social analysis of the role played by aristocratic or elite factions in both Europe and America had profound implications, his description of the Senate as an institutionalized solution to the problem of elite power was more a gimmick than an idea and more a measure of his desperation at finding an answer to what he regarded as the central dilemma of political science. Meanwhile, readers of the
Defence
could plausibly conclude that Adams's obsession with aristocracy implied an affinity for coats-of-arms and hereditary privileges. His view of the Senate, well, that was sheer lunacy.
¹⁷

 

The thrust of John Taylor's long-winded and much-delayed critique of Adams's
Defence
was to argue that, apart from specific disagreements about the power of the presidency and the role of the Senate, Adams's entire way of thinking about politics was hopelessly out of date and, in the end, fundamentally un-American. Taylor apologized for the twenty-year delay in getting his own thoughts into print, claiming that he had waited “until age had abated temporal interests and diminished youthful prejudices.” He acknowledged that, given his own and Adams's advancing years, his published thoughts “are almost letters from the dead.” Although the tone of Taylor's remarks was not personal—he was properly respectful toward one of the nation's patriarchs and claimed to have “a high opinion of his virtue and talents”—the message of Taylor's book was devastating. If Taylor was right, Adams was an intellectual anachronism who had missed the political significance and meaning of the American Revolution.
¹⁸

For his part, Adams let it be known that he was not going to defer gracefully or apologetically, nor had age diminished his vaunted capacity to defend himself. “You must allow me twenty years to answer a book that cost you twenty years of meditation to compose,” he warned Taylor. One could hear the rounds clicking into Adams's chambers and the salvo being aimed toward Caroline County. He expressed the hope that Taylor's work would not burden him with “the absurd criticism, the stupid observations, the jesuitical subtleties, the stupid lies that have been printed concerning my writings, in this my dear, native country, for five and twenty years….” If so, Taylor should expect no quarter from the self-professed “Hermit of Quincy.”
¹⁹

The core of Taylor's critique was to charge that Adams was the prisoner of a classical way of thinking about politics that was no longer appropriate for post-revolutionary America. What Taylor called “the numerical analysis” was the classical assumption that all political arrangements were variations on the same eternal theme: namely, the proper balancing of the interests of the one, the few, and the many. In the
Defence
, this ancient formula had caused Adams to adopt the old classical categories of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Because Adams's mind remained trapped “within the magick circle of the numerical analysis,” he had failed to recognize that the American Revolution had changed everything. “Monarchy, aristocracy and democracy” were not timeless truths, but “rude, and almost savage political fabricks.” Constructing a new constitution for America with these elements was “like…erecting a palace with materials drawn from Indian cabins.” Adams might be excused for thinking in the old way and offering readers “a cloud of quotations…collected from the deepest tints of ancient obscurity.” After all, he had been abroad in France and England for most of the 1780s, when American political thinking “had advanced more rapidly…than the philosophy and policy comprising his references had in twenty centuries.” But, excuses aside, Adams continued to live and think within a classical paradigm that had been blown to pieces by the democratic and egalitarian implications of the very revolution he had done so much to foster.
²⁰

Although it is doubtful that Adams fully digested what Taylor was saying, from a historical perspective Taylor's critique was important because it laid bare for the first time the underlying reasons for Adams's alienation from the American political mainstream. The very language and categories of analysis Adams relied upon had become strange and nearly treasonable in American political culture. To talk calmly of monarchy and aristocracy as elemental ingredients in the social equation was to challenge implicitly the inherently democratic character of the new American government. To suggest by such language that there were enduring social divisions, orders, factions, or classes—Adams used all these terms—was to question the existence of a rough version of social equality in America and, even worse, to imply that the goal of equality was a pipedream.