Passionate Sage (30 page)

Lincoln's attempt to enlist “the fathers” in the anti-slavery cause was more morally powerful than historically correct. Jefferson had indeed proposed the abolition of slavery in the original northwest territories in the 1780s, but by the end of his life had argued strongly for the extension of slavery into Missouri. The views of other members of the revolutionary generation were scattered across the spectrum. If there was a clear legacy passed down from the revolutionary generation, it was a legacy of compromise, a recognition that slavery was incompatible with the ideals espoused in the movement for American independence, but an equally strong commitment to gradualism and to a willful evasion of the moral issue in the hope that time would eventually eradicate the peculiar institution and make the matter mute.
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Adams, however, was one member of the revolutionary generation who fit Lincoln's prescription perfectly. In the Continental Congress he had opposed the attempt to place the abolition of slavery in the South on the agenda, fearing that it would subvert the national cooperation necessary for success in the Revolution, believing that slavery was an anachronism that would die out in good time because it was less productive than free labor. By 1820, however, when it became clear during the debate over Missouri that slavery was not going to die a natural death, Adams had vigorously opposed its extension on moral grounds, even claiming that such a policy was in accord with the best hopes of his fellow founders. And he had bequeathed that clear position to John Quincy, who spent the last years of his life opposing the extension of slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives.
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On the other side of the debate, Douglas could easily have cited Adams too, since the doctrine of popular sovereignty that he vainly espoused for the territories could be traced back to popularly elected conventions created to ratify the original state constitutions in 1776. Adams had been the leader within the Continental Congress on this constitutional issue, insisting that each new state constitution must be approved by representatives of the people-at-large. The very principle Douglas was advocating in the new territories drew upon the one political conviction that Adams embraced that was unabashedly and unequivocally democratic in spirit.

Of course, when it came to democracy, Jefferson was the hands-down champion. And so it would have been eminently plausible for Douglas to cite Jefferson as the founder who expressed the deepest faith in the capacity of ordinary citizens to decide their own fate; this would have then set up a mid-nineteenth-century version of the Adams-Jefferson dialogue, with Douglas wrapping his argument in the Jeffersonian rhetoric of majority rule and Lincoln countering with the Adams conviction that majorities have no magic pipeline to the truth, that crucial matters of principle—and slavery was certainly one such matter—were too important to be resolved at the ballot box.

Douglas, in fact, defended his case for popular sovereignty along just such Jeffersonian lines, claiming that the practicality of the solution was less compelling to him than its hallowed association with the Sage of Monticello. But Lincoln, instead of citing Adams, contested Douglas's appropriation of Jefferson. The key Jeffersonian document, as Lincoln saw it, was the Declaration of Independence, and he based his attack against Douglas on the immorality of slavery when judged by the Jeffersonian assertion of human equality in the Declaration. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, in short, drew on the wisdom of the founders all right, but both sides in the debate claimed to be speaking for Jefferson; or, to put it differently, the argument over the place of slavery in the republic became a dialogue between different sides of Jefferson's thought. Jefferson, it seemed, was everywhere; Adams was unmentioned, unnoticed, invisible.
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He was also conspicuously—and even more inexplicably—absent from the most influential critique of the Jeffersonian tradition ever written. The book was
The Promise of American Life
(1909), and the author was Herbert David Croly, a grotesque-looking wisp of a man, whose frail appearance belied his powerful ideas, ideas that shaped the terms of the national political debate from the Progressive era to the New Deal. Croly actually succeeded brilliantly in doing what so many journalists and aspiring intellectuals before and since have frustrated themselves in trying to do; namely, write a book steeped in scholarship and grounded in an understanding of American history that alters forever the way political leaders of the day think about government. Much of what Croly had to say about what was right and wrong with American politics was eerily reminiscent of Adams. But in what was a long and intricate book, Adams's name never appeared at all, either in the text or in the index. And to make matters worse, he had somehow been replaced in Croly's version of the great dialogue of American politics by the one person in the world Adams genuinely and thoroughly despised.
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Looking back from the vantagepoint of the early twentieth century, Croly discerned a dual tradition in the public discourse; as he put it, any thoughtful observer could detect “the existence from the very beginning of our national career of two different and, in some respects, antagonistic groups of political ideas….” Clearly, one of the voices in the dialogue belonged to Jefferson, whose most effective and disarming quality was “a sincere, indiscriminate, and unlimited faith in the American people.” No one was Jefferson's equal in articulating the democratic ideal, in dreaming the American dream, if you will, which envisioned a nation populated by free and enterprising individuals unburdened by government restrictions, and—thanks to the open-ended continent made available by God and then secured by the American Revolution for posterity—free to pursue the promise of American life with degrees of success and levels of serenity previously unknown in human history.
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If this sounded too good to be true, Croly observed in his dispassionately abstract prose, it was because Jeffersonian ideals were
not
true, except as seductive visions parcelled out to a gullible democratic audience that obviously appreciated being told that its judgment was infallible. The Jeffersonian sermon always took “the people” as its text and always closed with the comforting conclusion that, as Croly put it, “individual members needed merely to be protected against privileges and to be let alone, whereafter the native goodness of human nature would accomplish the perfect consummation.”
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Croly had warned his readers early on that his analysis was not designed to be popular, that it would “meet with a far larger portion of instinctive opposition and distrust than it will of acquiescence.” For over four hundred pages the hammer blows fell relentlessly and resoundingly on the unquestioned articles of faith underlying the Jeffersonian creed. Jefferson had misguidedly sought to achieve “an essentially equalitarian and even socialistic result by means of an essentially individualistic machinery.” He had incorrectly presumed “a complete harmony both in logic and in effect between the idea of liberty and the idea of equality; and just in so far as there is any antagonism between those ideas, his whole political system becomes unsound and impracticable.”

But by the early twentieth century, one did not need to be a brilliant logician or profound historian to recognize that Jeffersonian political beliefs had led directly, if inadvertently, to unprecedented levels of social and economic inequality, the enshrinement of private greed as a natural right by the American plutocracy—the so-called captains of industry—and the doctrinaire rejection of government's authority to do anything about it. Jefferson, in short, was an “amiable enthusiast” who had known how to turn phrases that appealed to popular illusions, but he and his followers had “perverted the American democratic idea” with a lullaby disguised as a set of political principles. Under any kind of honest scrutiny, the Jeffersonian side of the political dialogue must be judged, so said Croly, a baleful blend of “intellectual superficiality and insincerity.”
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Croly's indictment of the Jeffersonian legacy was couched in a labyrinthian, intensely moralistic style—“Crolier than thou,” as one angry critic put it—but stripped to its essentials, it recapitulated most of the criticisms that Adams had delivered in his personal correspondence with Jefferson and Jefferson's disciple, John Taylor. To be sure, Croly enjoyed the splendid advantage of hindsight, so his treatment of Jefferson's bucolic vision was informed by the experience of the Industrial Revolution, urban poverty, and the rationalizing nostrums of Social Darwinism, none of which either Adams or Jefferson could have been expected to foresee clearly, if at all. On the other hand, even without the benefit of hindsight, Adams had warned Jefferson that individual freedom and social equality were incompatible ideas, that ignoring their conflict only assured the triumph of the privileged, as in fact happened. More tellingly, Adams had accused Jefferson of making a religion of “the people” that was just as fanciful as the old religion of “the king.” And, again like Croly, Adams had insisted that government needed to play an active role in managing national priorities; that it was not, as Jefferson seemed to believe, only and always a source of oppression.

There were other similarities, but most of them only came clear in the context of the other side of Croly's argument, which must have sent the ghost of Adams into an apoplectic fit; for Croly claimed that Hamilton, not Adams, was the realistic counter to Jefferson's beguiling dreams, the sober and more far-sighted side of the American political dialogue. Croly's Hamilton was “the sound thinker, the constructive statesman, the candid and honorable, if erring, gentleman” he was also admirable—Adams must have been flailing his arms at this—for his willingness to court unpopularity. Hamilton had his faults, Croly acknowledged, the chief one being that he “perverted the American nationalist idea almost as much as Jefferson perverted the American democratic idea.” This was an indirect way of suggesting that Hamilton's commitment to a powerful executive and an energetic national government sometimes lurched over into a fondness for absolute monarchy or dictatorship and a total disregard for individual rights. Such autocratic dalliances did not overly disturb Croly, however, since he himself was prepared to admit that “the time may come when the fulfillment of a justifiable democratic purpose may demand the limitation of certain rights, to which the Constitution affords such absolute guarantees.” It was Hamilton's unbridled nationalism that Croly most admired and that he saw as the historical precedent for a vigorous federal government and a proto-socialistic American state in the twentieth century.
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Croly's enshrinement of Hamilton would have seemed bizarre to most members of the revolutionary generation, who acknowledged him as a political genius of massive daring and vision, but too eccentric and dangerous to fit easily within the American ideological spectrum. If Adams and Jefferson were planets orbiting around the sun that was Washington, Hamilton was a comet that streaked through the late-eighteenth-century sky, blazing trails of glory, then disappeared. Until the Civil War, his name and reputation were largely ignored by historians and biographers as too exotic or Napoleonic to permit emulation. When he did appear, it was usually in the speeches of Jacksonian Democrats, who used his name as a combination curse and epithet, the symbol of the banking conspiracy and moneyed aristocracy.

After the Civil War, however, again like the proverbial comet, he reappeared, the beneficiary of several converging trends: the Union victory in the war generated a need for nationalistic heroes; American historians who studied in Germany or were influenced by the new German scholarship suddenly found charismatic leaders with despotic tendencies more necessary and alluring; Wall Street capitalists, who had always harbored a private affection for the one founder who appreciated the power of money, used the newfound status they enjoyed as cultural leaders in the Gilded Age to publicize a champion of wealth. By the time Croly sat down to write
The Promise of American Life
, then, Hamilton's reputation had surged nearly to the front rank; several of the standard histories had linked him symbolically with Jefferson as the opposing presence, more relevant than Jefferson for a burgeoning nation-state that was exploding onto the world stage as a commercial and imperial power.
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Croly's elevation of Hamilton clinched and effectively sealed his reputation for the twentieth century.
The Promise of American Life
proved to be one of the most influential books in modern American history, not just because it redefined the political agenda of the liberal tradition, which it unquestionably did, but also because it recast, in a way that proved both credible and accessible, the political legacy of the founding generation. Croly redefined the American dialogue so that it fit more neatly the competing imperatives of the conservative and liberal mainstream of the twentieth century, which usually translated into the competing platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. It was the few against the many, limited government against big government, capitalism against democracy, freedom against equality. Croly's major theoretical contribution, of course, was to declare the need for governmental power to offset and regulate corporate power; the use of Hamiltonian means, as he put it, to achieve Jeffersonian ends. But his major historical contribution, if one can call it that, was to adapt the legacy of the revolutionary generation to the political needs of the twentieth century. And this necessarily entailed the suppression of the classical or republican mentality that Adams epitomized.

Of course, all attempts at making the past relevant to the present inevitably require some measure of distortion. In Croly's case, however, the distortion, though it proved functional and efficacious, achieved relevance at the expense of ignoring an entire way of thinking about politics that predated the issues his version of Hamilton and Jefferson symbolized. In Croly's formulation, the American dialogue represented a disagreement over the proper means to achieve agreed-upon ends, which ultimately boiled down to a disagreement over the power and role of the federal government. By eliminating Adams from the dialogue, in short, more fundamental questions about just what the promise of American life was or ought to be became mute. For Jefferson, it was a birthright of personal contentment unencumbered by government. For Adams, it was a legacy of public obligation rendered possible by government. More on this major theme shortly. For now, it is sufficient to establish, not just another non-sighting of Adams in a place where we might reasonably have expected to encounter him, but also what proved to be the decisive episode in his permanent deletion from the national discourse on the remembered meaning of the American political tradition.