Passionate Sage (21 page)

For Adams, the balancing of power within the Constitution between the branches of government was a man-made response to the inherent divisions within society. But no such divisions existed within America, Taylor argued, and whatever inequalities or differences of wealth or status did remain were vestiges of the old European order, merely temporary and evanescent clusters of interest so numerous and so ephemeral that they effectively checked one another. In short, Taylor was telling Adams that the most important checks and balances, which in Adams's classical scheme were performed by a government designed to control the boistrous energies of society, in America were naturally and efficiently performed by the dynamics of society itself. All of Adams's endless prattling about the dangers of aristocracy only exposed how hopelessly trapped he remained in classical categories of analysis. Instead of being “natural and unavoidable,” aristocracies were in truth “artificial or factitious, and therefore avoidable.” A strong and active government was not necessary to constrain these pockets of power and privilege, because in America those that did exist disciplined themselves.
²¹

Adams was ready with a response. “In fine, is it not humiliating,” Adams scolded Taylor, “to see a volume of six or seven hundred pages written by a gentleman of your rank, fortune, learning, genius and eloquence, in which my system, my sentiments…are totally misunderstood and misrepresented?” But as soon as Adams began training his verbal artillery on Caroline County, it became abundantly clear that he still did not fathom Taylor's primary accusation. The charge that his entire way of thinking about politics was rooted in classical categories and an outdated vocabulary was translated in Adams's mind to the charge that the art of shaping governments had not changed since the days of the Greeks and Romans. “I have said no such thing,” he retorted to Taylor. “I know the art of government has changed, and probably will change again.” Then, however, he added that “these arts are founded in certain principles of nature, which have never been known to change; and it is the duty of philosophers, legislators and artists to study these principles.” And the reiteration of these political principles quickly led Adams back to the one, the few, and the many, the abiding clash of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, the very categories Taylor identified as the problem. In response to Taylor's charge that Adams had relegated the democratic element to an inferior status, when in fact it was the
only
element worthy of discussion in the American government, Adams denied the charge in a way that only confirmed its correctness: “That is not my doctrine, Mr. Taylor,” he wrote. “My opinion is, and always has been, that absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats, and jacobins, and
sans culottes
. I cannot say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, than any of the others.”
²²

Ironically, it was precisely because Adams remained wedded to a classical conception of politics that he also remained immune to the seductive illusions that had established themselves as central assumptions in post-revolutionary American political culture. His most piercing insights derived from the fact that, in Taylor's terms, he was an anachronism. Some of the crucial points of disagreement had revealed themselves in the exchange with Jefferson over the role of popular majorities, but the diplomacy demanded by that relationship prevented the kind of clear resolution possible with Taylor: “We make ourselves popular, Mr. Taylor, by telling our fellow citizens that we have made discoveries, conceived inventions and made improvements,” Adams observed with wry disdain for the presumption that America had somehow become an exception to the lessons of history. “We may boast that we are the chosen people; we may even thank God that we are not like other men; but, after all, it would be but flattery, and delusion, the self-deceit of the Pharisee.” If Taylor accused Adams of being irrelevant, Adams accused Taylor of being “an ideologian,” an Americanized version of those French dreamers whose rhapsodic romances led directly to Robespierre and then Napoleon.
²³

“That all men are born to equal rights is true,” Adams declared defiantly, rebuking Taylor for suggesting that he had ever thought otherwise. But to teach that “all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society…is as gross a fraud…as ever was practised by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.” Taylor had also implied that Adams's obsession with aristocracy masked an affection for European-styled titles and privileges in America. This too was ridiculous. “You seem to think aristocracy consists altogether in artificial titles, tinsel decorations of stars, garters, ribbons, golden eagles and golden fleeces, crosses and roses and lilies, exclusive privileges, hereditary descents, established by kings or by positive laws of society,” Adams lectured. But that was not the kind of aristocracy Americans needed to worry about and certainly not the kind of elite he had ever sanctioned.
²⁴

Taylor, like Jefferson and the French ideologues, seemed to believe that enduring social inequalities were created by governments and man-made laws. They were, Adams declared, not created at all. They were inherent:

 

I have seen, in the Hospital of Foundlings…at Paris, fifty babes in one room;—all under four days old; all in cradles alike; all nursed and attended alike; all dressed alike; all equally neat. I went from one end to the other of the whole row, and attentively observed all their countenances. And I never saw a greater variety, or more striking inequalities…. They were all born to equal rights, but to very different fortunes; to very different success and influence in life.
²⁵

 

If America really was, as Taylor seemed to believe, the land of social equality, then the gods had arbitrarily conspired to suspend the laws of biology, the principles of history, and even the much-praised “power of the people.” For if it was true, as Taylor would surely concur, that “the supreme…power is placed by God and nature in the people, and they can never divest themselves of it,” then it was equally true that all popular movements in recorded history demonstrated a need “to distinguish the one and the few from their own average and level.” The more democratic the society, the stronger the desire to create social gradations. “You may depend upon it,” wrote Adams, anticipating Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of American democratic culture, “the people themselves, by their own observation and experience and feelings…made these distinctions before kingcraft, priestcraft, or noblecraft had anything to do with them.” After the enslaved blacks of Santo Domingo had overthrown their white masters, Adams noted, they immediately came under the power of despots of their own color. “Bananas and water they still enjoy,” he observed, “and a whole regiment would follow a leader who should hold a saltfish to their noses.”
²⁶

Finally, Adams chose to drive home his point about the illusory character of Taylor's egalitarian ideology with the kind of personal attack he would never have made on Jefferson. How could it be, he asked rhetorically, that the loudest criticism of his writings on aristocracy should come from a slaveholder with vast estates and vast wealth, much of it inherited from his wife's side of the family? Taylor was a distinguished Virginian, Adams noted wryly, who had then “married well, obtaining both an amiable consort, and a handsome fortune.” He was, in short, a perfect example of the kind of aristocrat Adams was talking about. “If you complain that this is personal,” Adams explained, “I confess it, and intend it should be personal, that it might be more striking to you.” If Taylor was offended by the analysis, Adams promised to “give you full leave to ask me any questions relative to myself, my ancestors, my posterity, my natural or political friends.” Although he did not say it outright, Adams clearly insinuated that celebrations of American social equality were hardly credible when they came from privileged leaders of the Virginia aristocracy whose status depended on inherited estates and a labor force of enslaved blacks.
²⁷

But then, Adams's observations on the inevitability of social inequality created problems for his reputation that went beyond credibility. Adams kept insisting that he was not celebrating the enduring social divisions within America at all; he was only calling attention to their existence, refusing to believe the lovely lie that the American environment acted as a kind of solvent that dissolved away all social distinctions and class differences. Nor did he wish to stigmatize Virginia's planter class. If one were to study the history of any New England town, he acknowledged, one would almost always discover that two or three families owned most of the good land and dominated the town government long before and again after the American Revolution. Whether one liked this state of affairs was beside the point. The real point was to recognize that social inequality and elite power were as much a part of the social fabric of America as Europe. Pretending that they did not exist was utter delusion. Believing that they could be eliminated altogether was utopian nonsense. “All that men can do,” he apprised Taylor, was to design governments that “modify, organize and arrange the powers of human society,” striving to achieve a political balance that would regulate social divisions “in the best manner to protect, secure, and cherish the…natural rights of mankind.” It served no purpose other than obfuscation to pretend that the endlessly challenging task of governing consisted solely in uttering magic words like “democracy.” As Adams was fond of explaining, democracy was like “a young rake who thinks himself handsome and well made…. Democracy is Lovelace, and the people are Clarissa.”
²⁸

If Adams was correct in accusing Taylor and other proponents of democracy of using the magic word in a misleading way, he himself had a maddening tendency to expand and contract his definition of aristocracy without warning, sometimes referring to the oligarchic segment of the government, sometimes referring to elite members of society, sometimes referring to any constellation of political or economic power, sometimes even referring to beautiful and articulate women at a dinner party. Since the problem of aristocracy was his favorite political obsession, he seemed to see it wherever he looked: “Every government is an aristocracy in fact,” he wrote Rush. “The despotism of Genghis Kahn was an aristocracy. The government of the most popular French convention…was an aristocracy. The most democratical canton in Switzerland was an aristocracy. The most leveling town meeting in New England is an aristocracy.” If six women were to gather together, he explained to Taylor, and four of them were beautiful and talented while the other two were ugly and ill-tempered, it was extremely likely that the former would succeed at marriage, improve their station, and therefore illustrate the principle of aristocracy. In the political realm, it was even easier to identify an aristocrat: “I will tell you in a few words what I mean by an aristocrat,” he told Taylor. “By an aristocrat, I mean every man who can command or influence
TWO VOTES; ONE BESIDES HIS OWN
.” Nor did it make any difference how the influence was achieved. It could be “by his virtues, his talents, his learning, his loquacity, his taciturnity, his frankness, his reserve”—Adams was in mid-flight now, just warming up—it could also be “his face, figure, eloquence, air, attitude, movements, wealth, birth, art, address, intrigue, good fellowship”—now the conclusion of the litany would drive home the darker side of aristocratic power—it could even be “drunkenness debauchery, fraud, perjury, violence, treachery, pyrrhonism, deism or atheism, for by every one of these instruments have votes been obtained or will be obtained.” Taylor could hardly be faulted for wondering how such a sprawling, all-inclusive version of aristocracy retained any coherent meaning at all.
²⁹

On the other hand, Adams could hardly be faulted for the elusiveness of his American aristocracy, since it now seems clear that it was a concept that he employed in response to the equally protean, many-faceted, and elusive concept of American democracy. Aristocracy had become Adams's antidote for exuberant liberal expectations in several forms: the notion that popular majorities invariably elected the best representatives; the notion that legislative assemblies represented the considered will of the people; the notion that equality of opportunity would usually lead to at least a semblance of social equality; the notion that economic competition in the marketplace would generate a roughly equitable distribution of goods; the notion, first formulated by Madison in
Federalist 10
, that the vastness of the American continent assured the interaction of so many factions and interest groups that no monopoly of economic and political power was likely to develop or to require government supervision. Each of Adams's different explications of aristocracy was a counter to these liberal assumptions—Adams thought them presumptions. If he often shifted his ground or the angle of his argument about the role of aristocracy, it was because his target—the emergent liberal values of nineteenth-century America—was devilishly difficult to pin down. It was hard to be precise when questioning a set of convictions whose credibility derived in part from being so self-evident as to require no defense.

If Adams's aristocracy was a many-faceted creature that kept changing its character in order to counter the protean illusions about democracy, the nub of his argument was more straightforward; namely, that in all societies for which there was any kind of historical record, political power and wealth tended to go hand in hand; and a few people invariably accumulated more wealth and power than the others. The central problem of American politics was to make political use of the aristocracy while still controlling its influence, to design governments and then use government's authority to assure that the energies of the elite flowed toward public ends. One way to assure that this did
not
happen, indeed one way to assure domination by a plutocracy or oligarchy, was to pretend that aristocracy had become extinct in America.