II. • Political Thinkers • The French Group…

II. • Political Thinkers • The French Group

The change which came over political thought in America in consequence of the rise of French Jacobin philosophy is not inadequately revealed in the writings of two men, quite dissimilar in antecedents and training, but alike in fundamental purpose--Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Both were speculative thinkers, profoundly in sympathy with French revolutionary ideals: but the former was detached from local patriotisms and national interests, a delegate at large in the cause of human rights, concerned with spreading the gospel of freedom in all lands; the latter remained wholly American, and while a keenly interested spectator of the French upheaval, he was primarily concerned to discover principles that would apply to native conditions and further the cause of American democracy. Paine therefore became the popular disseminator of the philosophy of republicanism, and Jefferson, the practical statesman embodying it in political programs. Warm friends, their influence became closely interwoven during the years when agrarian democracy was gathering its strength to strike down the rule of Federalism.

I • Tom Paine • Republican Pamphleteer

No more striking figure emerges from the times than the figure of the Thetford Quaker. English in birth and rearing, in middle life Paine came to embody the republican spirit of the American revolution; and that spirit he made it his after business to carry overseas and spread among the discontented of all lands. He was the first modern internationalist, at home wherever rights were to be won or wrongs corrected. “My country is the world,” he asserted proudly, “to do good, my religion.” Throughout his later life he was a fearless skirmisher on the outposts of democracy--another “Free born John” Lilburne, seeking to complete the great work begun and thwarted in an earlier century; and his career remains a stirring record of a time when revolution threatened to sweep away the power and privilege of all kings and aristocracies. Naturally his zeal cost him dear in reputation. The passions of all who feared the loss of sinecures gathered about his head, and he became the victim of an odium theologicum et politicum, without parallel in our history. The Tories hunted him in packs, and their execration and vituperation outran all decency. In London clubs it became the fashion for gentlemen to wear TP nails in their boot-heels to witness how they trampled on his base principles. He was proscribed and banished, and his books burnt by the hangman. He was regarded as worse than a common felon and outlaw, because more dangerous. In America gentlemen echoed the common detestation--to be a Paine-hater was a badge of respectability. “The filthy Tom Paine,” John Adams called him, and the phrase stuck like a burr to his reputation. But “reason, like time,” as Paine remarked “will make its own way,” and the years are bringing a larger measure of justice to him.

Like Hamilton, Paine was an alien, but endowed with a heritage quite unlike that of the brilliant boy from the West Indies. When he landed in Philadelphia in the second week in December, 1774,[344] he was in his thirty-seventh year, and had seemingly made shipwreck of his life. He had been schooled in misfortune and was marked as a social inefficient. A broken staymaker and tobacconist, he had twice been removed from the office of petty exciseman for what today would be called unionizing activity. He had separated from his wife, and his mean and petty environment seemed to offer no hope of a decent living. One stroke of good fortune had come to him, when as a delegate from his union on some business with Parliament, he made the acquaintance of Franklin, who was taken with “those wonderful eyes of his,” and advised America as a likely place for getting on. So provided with little more than Franklin’s letter of introduction, he set sail for new worlds, cherishing the unmilitant plan of setting up in Philadelphia a seminary of polite learning for young ladies. But the times proved unpropitious for such a venture. He found himself in a world hesitating fearfully on the brink of revolution, the electric atmosphere of which he found strangely congenial. He at once threw himself whole-heartedly into the colonial dispute, quickly seized the main points, mastered the arguments, and thirteen months after his arrival published Common Sense, a pamphlet that was to spread his name and fame throughout America.

The amazing influence of Common Sense on a public opinion long befogged by legal quibble flowed from its direct and skillful appeal to material interests. For the first time in a tedious, inconsequential debate, it was openly asserted that governmental policies rest on economic foundations; that the question of American independence was only a question of expediency, and must be determined in the light of economic advantage. Government is no more than a utility, and that policy which was most likely to secure freedom and security “with the least expense and greatest benefit,” must be preferred. The point at issue before the American people, therefore, was whether a more useful arrangement would result from continuing the old connection with England, or from setting up for themselves; and it must be decided, not in the court room or council chambers, but in the countinghouse and market place, in the field and shop, wherever plain Americans were making a living. Let the common people consult their own needs, and determine the case without regard to legal or constitutional precedents. It was a simple matter to be judged in the light of common sense and their particular interests.

To further clear thinking on this fundamental matter Paine commented on the economic consequences to America of the English connection. Throughout colonial history, he asserted with some disregard to fact, dependence had resulted in disadvantage to America; England had systematically exploited the colonies and hampered development. Whatever prosperity had been won heretofore, had been won in spite of English hostility and interference; the peculiar economic position of the colonies had proved their best reliance in the past, and would prove still more advantageous in the future, if America were free from jealous, paternal restrictions. What reason was there to expect generous treatment from a power that had never shown generosity in past dealings? How skillful was the appeal to colonial self-interest is revealed in such passages as these:

We are already greater than the King wishes us to be, and will he not hereafter endeavour to make us less? To bring the matter to one point, Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper power to govern us? Whoever says No, to this question, is an Independent, for independency means no more than this, whether we shall make our own laws, or, whether the King, the greatest enemy this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us there shall be no laws but such as I like.

America would have flourished as much, and probably much more, had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe. As Europe is our market for trade we ought to form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions, which she never can do while by her dependence on Britain she is made the makeweight in the scale of British politics.

Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will.... ’Tis as great folly to pay a Bunker-hill price for law as for land.

But Paine well knew that self-interest may be so clouded by prejudice as not to see the way its nose is pointing. Though the colonial talked of his grievances, he remained colonial in psychology, held in unconscious subjection to English traditions. He was in the clutch of outworn loyalties--loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the British constitution; and to this difficult problem Paine addressed himself with great skill. To a republican, as Paine seems to have been from his landing in America, the odium which George III had incurred was a heaven-sent opportunity. In order to strike at the monarchical principle, it was only necessary to point out that the folly of the King was the best commentary upon the foolishness of hereditary monarchy. The boldness and audacity of Paine’s attack on the king-principle must have added greatly to the popularity of Common Sense along the frontier. It was the first clear, far-carrying appeal for republicanism addressed to American ears. How successful it was, how ruthlessly it stripped away the divinity that doth hedge a king, laying bare the stupidity of the king-cult, is suggested by the remarkable change in the American attitude towards monarchy that a few months brought about. After the appearance of Common Sense, middle and lower class Americans shed their colonial loyalties like a last year’s garment, and thenceforth they regarded the pretentions of kings as little better than flummery. King George’s disgraced exciseman had his revenge; he had thrust his royal master out of the colonial affection and destroyed the monarchical principle in America.

A more difficult task remained, that of instituting “an inquiry into the constitutional errors of the English form of government,” in order to prove what gains would result if America took herself out of the English system. Here Paine faced, single-handed, a solid phalanx of lawyers. He was the first pamphleteer to question the excellence of a constitution that was proclaimed by American Tories as the wonder of the world and the envy of other nations. In the acrimonious disputes between 1765 and 1775, this was the single point on which all professed to agree. A vast deal of laudation had been uttered; innumerable legal pamphlets had been written; and no colonial had had the temerity to question the adequacy of the British constitution to colonial needs. And now came this republican, with penetrating comment on its origin and working, to disturb the common complacency by pointing out how ill fitted it was to answer the needs of America. It was a telling attack, made with skill and shrewd insight; and it had a great part in arousing a bitter antagonism to the English system in the minds of the American yeomanry.

Paine was not a constitutional historian, but he had a keen eye for realities. The fundamental fallacy of the English system, he asserted, lay in the so-called “mixt aristocracy,” which was presumed to gather the wisdom of the realm in council with the king, but which was no more than a convenient arrangement for dividing the spoils. The House of Commons had grown out of the struggles of feudal barons against the king. It presumed to speak for the common people, but the rights of the people were thus recognized only to be thwarted by the old tyrannies. The “Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England,” were held in check by the “remains of aristocratical tyranny in the person of the Peers,” and further restrained by the “remains of Monarchical tyranny in the person of the King.” From the play of these elements arose the system of checks and balances which placed control in the hands of landed property. It was based on the assumption that “the King is not to be trusted without being looked after,” and that “the Commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the Crown.” But in spite of the supposed balance “the provision is unequal to the task,” for the Crown, as the dispenser of places and pensions, is more than a match for Commons in the game of politics.

The will of the king; is as much the law of the land in Britain as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the formidable shape of an act of parliament. For the fate of Charles the First hath only made kings more subtle--not more just.

This was but the beginning of a long assault on the British constitution which was to engage him much in after life. Common Sense was a pronouncement of the new philosophy of republicanism that was taking firm hold of the American mind, and which the French Revolution was to spread so widely. It was a notable contribution, of which Paine to the end of his life was justly proud.

As he came to America almost casually, with no conscious revolutionary intent, so in the critical year 1787 he returned to Europe with the peaceful intention of perfecting an iron bridge on which he was engaged. True to his Quaker breeding he was more interested in the arts of peace than of war, but again circumstance was too much for him. Before he had completed his bridge, delegates from France came to invite him to a seat in the National Assembly. A new day was rising there; the constitution of a freer order was being constructed, and so competent a workman could not be spared. In the thick of that eager world of constitution-making, Paine finally clarified his political philosophy and gave it wide currency. He became the pamphleteer of revolution to the English-speaking world, to Philadelphia and New York equally with London. Yet he was never an extremist; he was a Girondist rather than a Jacobin, and when the Girondists were overthrown and a dictatorship set up, he remained a constitutionalist. By the Jacobin radicals he came to be regarded as a reactionary from his willingness to retain monarchy in France; but Paine was a practical Englishman with a shrewd judgment of what was politically possible, and he refused to outrun reasonable expectations of accomplishment.

It was the simplicity and clarity of his political philosophy that made its appeal so widely effective. His thinking turned on the two fundamental questions, the source of government and the purpose for which it is instituted among men; and the major premise on which he reared his logic was the thesis that sovereignty inheres in the majority will. At the basis of his philosophy was the natural-rights theory, but given a fresh significance and vitality by the assertion of the doctrine of continuous reaffirmation of the social compact. Instead of deriving the sovereign state from a fictitious compact, presumably entered into in a remote past, he derived it--as Roger Williams had done a century and half before--from a continuous compact reaffirmed by each generation. With the birth of each individual appear fresh rights which no pre-contract can justly circumscribe or nullify; ancestral arrangements are valid only to the extent that they are acceptable to the living. Hence it follows, first, that the general body of the people may at any time remake the fundamental law, and bring it into accord with present desire; and second, that there can be no law superior to this popular will expressed through the majority. His most celebrated dictum--“That which a nation chuses to do it has a right to do”--a dictum that aroused a bitterer hostility than any other of his pronouncements--was the logical expression of his republicanism that differentiated between the sovereign people and their agency, the government; and this in turn he justified by a celebrated saying out of Swift, “Government is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads.” Like Jefferson, he would not have government kept from the people, the agent domineer over the principal.

The purpose of government Paine discovered in the Benthamite principle of expediency. If a diffused well-being results from the policies of government, such government is justified; but if the tax-levies are wasted in unsocial ways, if unjust impositions are levied, if exploitation or tyranny results, such government is not justified. The agent has cheated the principal, and must be called to account. The final test of every government Paine found in its concern for the “res publica, the public affairs, or the public good”; any government that “does not make the res publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government.” In its most obvious phase, concern for the res publica means concern for the national economy, and this in turn conditions the taxes that shall be levied and the ends for which they shall be spent--whether upon the arts of peace or war. A beneficent government has no need of standing armies and navies, or an inquisitorial police; it is established in the hearts of the people and rests securely on the common good will. It is the injustice of government that creates armies to defend the earnings of injustice. But every wise government will respect its limitations. As a child of the eighteenth century, Paine hated the leviathan state as a monster created by a minority to serve the ends of tyranny. The political state he accepted as a present necessity, but he would not have its prestige magnified and the temptation to tyranny increased by the cult of nationalism. “Government is no farther necessary,” he believed, “than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent.” At best it is an artificial thing.

Formal government makes but a small part of civilized life; and when even the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it is a thing more in name and idea than in fact.... The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself.... All the great laws of society are laws of nature.[345]

The maturest elaboration of Paine’s political philosophy is found in The Rights of Man. This extraordinary work, the most influential English contribution to the revolutionary movement, was an examination of the English constitution in the light of what Paine held were the true source and ends of government. It is a brilliant reply to Burke, who rested his interpretation of the English constitution on the legal ground of the common law of contract. Following the Revolution of 1688, Burke had argued, the English people through their legal representatives, entered into a solemn contract, binding “themselves, their heirs, and posterities forever,” to certain express terms; and neither in law nor in equity were they, of whatever generation, free to change those terms except by the consent of both parties to the contract. This was an elaboration of the theory of government tacitly held by the Old Whigs, which derived government from a perpetual civil contract as opposed to the radical doctrine of a revocable social contract; and in attacking it Paine allied himself with such thinkers as Price, Priestley, Franklin and Rousseau.[346] He pointed out the absurdity of carrying over the law of private property into the high realm of political principle--to seek to impose the dead past upon the living sovereignty. If sovereignty inhered in the English people in 1688, it must inhere in the English people in 1793, unless it had been violently wrested from them; no parchment terms of another age can bind that sovereignty other than voluntarily. Over against Burke’s theory of a single, static contract, Paine set the doctrine of the reaffirmation of natural rights. Any generation--as the generation of 1688--is competent to deal with its affairs as it sees fit, but it cannot barter away the rights of those unborn; such a contract on the face of it is null and void.

Every age and generation must be free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.... Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.[347]

Burke’s defense fares even worse when the argument is examined in the light of expediency. Illogical as the English system must appear to the political philosopher, can it plead the justification that it works; that it does well the things it is paid to do; that it makes the res publica its main concern? The reply to such questions, Paine believed, should be sought in the condition of the national economy; more particularly by an examination of the account-books of the exchequer. The English people paid annually seventeen millions sterling for the maintenance of government, and what did they get in return? Nine millions of the total went to pay interest on old wars, which in the budget was known as the funded debt; of the remaining eight millions the larger part was spent in new wars and sinecure pensions; whereas the real needs of England--the true res publica--were shamelessly neglected. The English people got little for their money except new debts to justify new taxes. The poor were even taxed for the benefit of the great. Thus my Lord Onslow, who was particularly zealous in the business of proscribing Paine as “the common enemy of us all,” drew four thousand pounds from the royal chest in sinecures, which made him “the principal pauper of the neighbourhood, and occasioning a greater expense than the poor, the aged, and the infirm, for ten miles around.”[348] Government on the hereditary principle of Burke did not appear to advantage in the light of such facts.

The injustice of aristocratic government, Paine believed, was fast bringing it to its “rotting time” in England. “The opinions of men with respect to government are changing fast in all countries; the enormous expense of governments has provoked the people to think, by making them feel.” Englishmen must soon throw aside the outworn monarchical system and set up a republic. Economics was on the side of revolution. The great work of revising fundamental laws was the pressing business of the time. If this could be done peacefully, by means of a national convention, it were well; if not, it would come by means of an uprising of the people. It was no lawyer’s business to be determined by the law of private property, but a practical matter of determining the real will of the nation and putting it into execution. The judgment of the people must be recorded, and the judgment of the people could be had only through an adequate system of representation based on free publicity. “I do not believe that the people of England have ever been fairly and candidly dealt by,” Paine declared. Henceforth they must be taken into full confidence. There must be no more arcana imperii--“Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like those of individuals, are always their defects.”[349]

One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been, that it has led to a discovery of the principles, and laid open the imposition of governments. All the revolutions till then had worked within the atmosphere of a court, and never on the grand floor of a nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers.... In all cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from the understanding of the nation the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, That government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of a society.[350]

For the follies of government the people pay the bill--it was this elementary lesson in public economics that Paine sought to impress upon the popular mind; and they would still be cheated and plundered by gentlemen who prospered in cozening, until they took matters into their own hands. He had no fear of popular government. He believed in the essential fairness of men and their capacity to deal wisely with the problems of society if the necessary information were set before them. “As far as my experience in public life extends, I have ever observed that the great mass of people are always just, both in their intentions and their object; but the true method of attaining such purpose does not always appear at once,”[351] he argued before the French Assembly; and the words express his settled conviction. Those who fear the people usually have very good reasons. Heretofore politics had been jealously guarded from free discussion; but now that the common people were coming to understand that government is justified only by its measure of service, the beginning of a new age was at hand.

The ripest product of Paine’s speculations on the relation of government to the individual, is Agrarian Justice, a work too little known to modern readers. It is a slender tract, written in the winter of 1795-96, although not published till a year later; and it was an answer to a sermon by Watson, Bishop of Llandaff,[352] entitled The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor. In this remarkable essay, Paine advanced from political to social theory, pushing his thought into the unexplored realm of economic justice. The prime impulse of his speculation is found in the contrast between the augmenting poverty of Europe and the ideal of equality; a contrast which in France had lately produced a proletarian revolt under Babeuf, and which in England was harshly aggravated by the brutal inclosure movement of the last forty years of the eighteenth century. The question which he considers lies at the heart of our social problem, namely, whether civilization is competent to cure the disease of poverty which everywhere it disseminates?

The question emerged naturally from the development of Paine’s thinking. It was implied in his major principle of the res publica, and the solution must lie in the problem of the relation of government to social well-being. But in prescribing means to end, he parted company from Babeuf.[353] The latter was a Communist who approached the problem from the point of view of the proletarian who had been disappointed of the promised equality; whereas Paine, like Jefferson, was essentially a Physiocratic agrarian. His long residence in America had confirmed him in the belief that land monopoly was the root of economic inequality; and his observations of the evictions then going on in England, uprooting the peasants and sending them to industrial centers to become wage-workers, strengthened his conviction. The land problem must be solved if civilization were to be worth its cost, and the technique of the solution, he believed, must be worked out by the state. With his usual directness Paine went to the heart of the problem:

The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. But the fact is, that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, or had been born among the Indians of North-America at the present day.[354]

It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be.[355]... The contrast of affluence and wretchedness ... is like dead and living bodies chained together.[356]

It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of civilization ... to make some provision for persons becoming poor and wretched only at the time they become so. Would it not, even as a matter of economy, be far better to adopt means to prevent their becoming poor?[357]

The crux of the problem, Paine proceeds to point out, lies in the principle of private property; whether property rights are sacredly individual--as Locke had asserted--or are limited by social needs. In reply to this searching question Paine laid down the principle of social values, a theory curiously modern and profoundly suggestive, which makes Agrarian Justice read like a chapter out of Progress and Poverty. The principle is so broad, as Paine states it, that it applies equally to a capitalistic and an agrarian order.

Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.... All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came ... if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; and the consequence of which is, that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence. It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer to guard it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason, that because he might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take it.[358]

It is the value of the improvement only, and not of the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land, owes to the community a ground-rent ... for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.[359]

Having thus pointed out an equitable source of social income--the returning to society what society has created--Paine proposed to deal with the problem of poverty by means of a ten per cent inheritance tax to provide a fund for the endowment of the young and the pensioning of the old. It was an early form of the state insurance idea. In his own thinking Paine doubtless went much farther than this, but the practical difficulty of separating the social moiety from the private right inclined him to favor an inheritance tax as the simplest and best plan; that it would lead to greater things as the social intelligence quickened, he very likely believed. To bring men to realize that society is responsible for poverty, and that its total eradication must be regarded as the first object of civilization, was his prime purpose. He was seeking to awaken the social conscience of his generation--a generation sorely in need of idealism to offset its love of profits. Agrarian Justice was a contribution to the slowly developing humanitarian sentiment, and it made appeal to minds already aroused by the revolutionary movement. The republican clubs that were springing up in England and America reflected the new social thought, and the most radical became the most humanitarian. As early as 1791, in an address signed by Horne Tooke, one of Paine’s English lieutenants, it was declared:

We are oppressed with a heavy national debt, a burthen of taxes, an expensive administration of government, beyond those of any people in the world. We have also a very numerous poor; and we hold that the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty, is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance, ambition, and intrigue.[360]

The more critically one follows the thought of Paine the more evident it becomes that the master passion of his later years was concern for a new social economy. The well-being of society became an engrossing interest with him; and his zeal for political revolution was predicated on the belief that popular control of the political state was a necessary preliminary to a juster social economy. Nothing was to be expected from the old aristocratic order. His main attack, therefore, was directed against the monarchical system, but now and then he paused to level a thrust at the rising system of capitalism. If he hated King George and the Tories, he hated the younger Pitt and the imperialists even more. Over against Agrarian Justice should be set his pamphlet entitled The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, written in 1796, a skillful attack upon the new funding system. Paine could not foresee, of course, the enormous expansion of credit that was to accompany the industrial revolution, but in his commentary on the quantitative theory of money, and the social consequences of inflation, he unconsciously foretold later conditions. War he regarded as the great waster, the fruitful mother of social misery. With his Quaker training he was dedicated to pacifism, and he spent his life warring against war, and disease, and poverty, and injustice, and ignorance, and unreason; but no other war would he sanction. For those futile wars bred of the ambitions of courts and monarchs, and which for all their cost in blood and money served no social purpose, he would substitute arbitration. “War is the Pharo-table of governments, and nations the dupes of the game,” he declared[361]--whereas arbitration is an appeal to reason which alone should adjudicate and determine between nations.

It would be idle to attempt to trace to their sources the major ideas of his philosophy. Probably Paine did not know where he got them. He was not a student like John Adams, familiar with all the political philosophers; rather he was an epitome of a world in revolution. He absorbed ideas like a sponge. He was so wholly a child of his age that the intellectual processes of the age were no other than his own. But he was very much more than an echo; he possessed that rarest of gifts, an original mind. He looked at the world through no eyes than his own. There is a curious remark in an early pamphlet which admirably expresses his method: “When precedents fail to assist us, we must return to the first principles of things for information, and think, as if we were the first men that thought.”[362] It was his remarkable ability to think from first principles that gave such freshness and vigor to his pen. He drew largely from French thought, but at bottom he remained English. If he was Gallic in his psychology of human nature and his passionate humanitarianism, he was English in his practical political sense and insistence on the economic sources of political action. In his political theory he was curiously like Roger Williams. A thoroughgoing idealist in aim, generous and unsparing in service to humanity, he was a confirmed realist in the handling of facts. He refused to be duped by imposing appearances or great reputations, but spoke out unpleasant truths which gentlemen wished to keep hidden. Clear and direct in expression, he seasoned his writings with homely figures and a frequent audacity of phrase that made wide appeal. He was probably the greatest pamphleteer that the English race has produced-and one of its great idealists.

During his residence abroad Paine habitually thought and spoke of himself as an American. He conceived it to be his mission to disseminate throughout Europe the beneficent principles of the American Revolution; yet nowhere was he hated more virulently than in America. To the animosity which his political principles excited among Federalists was added the detestation of the orthodox for the deism of the Age of Reason. The ministers outdid the politicians in virulent attack upon his reputation, until the generous Quaker, the friend of humanity and citizen of the world, was shrunk and distorted into “the infidel Tom Paine.” It was a strange reward for a life spent in the service of mankind. Like all idealists he made the mistake of underestimating the defensive strength of vested interests, and their skill in arousing the mob prejudice. His thousands of followers among the disfranchised poor could not protect his reputation against the attacks of the rich and powerful. Although reason may “make its own way,” it makes its way with wearisome slowness and at unreasonable cost. How tremendous were the obstacles that liberalism confronted in post-revolutionary America is revealed with sufficient clearness in the odium visited upon our great republican pamphleteer.

II • Thomas Jefferson • Agrarian Democrat

The years following the great defeat were disastrous to the party of agrarian democracy. Under the brilliant leadership of Hamilton the Federalists went forward confidently, gaining daily a firmer grip on the machinery of government, and establishing their principles in far-reaching legislative enactments. Their appeal to the wealthy classes, to those who made themselves audible above the clamor, was electrical. Hamilton was the hero of the hour, and the effusive approval that augmented with every added profit to the money brokers, seemed to indicate that the country was enthusiastically behind the Federalist policy. To what despondency the democrats were reduced is revealed in Maclay’s Journal, with its caustic comment on political measures and motives. But the tide was already at the turn. The ideas let loose by the French Revolution were running swiftly through America, awakening a militant spirit in the democracy. Antagonism to the aristocratic arrogance of Federalism, and disgust at its coercive measures, were mounting fast. If that inchoate discontent were organized and directed by a skillful leader, it might prove strong enough to thrust the Hamiltonian party from power. To that work Thomas Jefferson devoted himself with immense tact and untiring patience. A master of political strategy, he spun his webs far and wide, quietly awaiting the time when the bumbling Federalist bees should range too carelessly in search of their honey. Accepted at once as the leader of agrarian America, he was to prove in the course of a long life the most original and native of the political leaders of the time.

Despite the mass of comment that has gathered about Jefferson, the full reach and significance of his political philosophy remains too little understood. Uncritical praise and censure have obscured or distorted his purpose, and allied his principles with narrow and temporary ends. Detraction will not let him alone. The hostility of his enemies, as a recent biographer has remarked, has frequently taken “the peculiar form of editing his works or writing his life.”[363] For this distortion there is, perhaps, more than usual excuse. Certainly Jefferson is the most elusive of our great political leaders. Apparently inconsistent, changing his program with the changing times, he seemed to his enemies devoid of principle, a shallow demagogue who incited the mob in order to dupe the people. One of the most bitterly hated and greatly loved men in the day when love and hate were intense, he was the spokesman of the new order at a time of transition from a dependent monarchical state, to an independent republican state. Back of the figure of Jefferson, with his aristocratic head set on a plebeian frame, was the philosophy of a new age and a new people--an age and a people not yet come to the consistency of maturity, but feeling a way through experiment to solid achievement. Far more completely than any other American of his generation he embodied the idealisms of the great revolution--its faith in human nature, its economic individualism, its conviction that here in America, through the instrumentality of political democracy, the lot of the common man should somehow be made better.

From the distinguished group of contemporary political thinkers Jefferson emerges as the preëminent intellectual, widely read, familiar with ideas, at home in the field of speculation, a critical observer of men and manners. All his life he was a student, and his devotion to his books, running often to fifteen hours a day, recalls the heroic zeal of Puritan scholars. He was trained in the law, but he was too much the intellectual, too curious about all sorts of things, to remain a lawyer. For such a man the appeal of political speculation was irresistible, and early in life he began a wide reading in the political classics that far outweighed Coke and Blackstone in creative influence on his mind. He was equally at home with the English liberals of the seventeenth century and the French liberals of the eighteenth; and if he came eventually to set the French school above the English, it was because he found in the back-to-nature philosophy, with its corollary of an agrarian economics and its emphasis on social well-being, a philosophy more consonant with Virginian experience and his own temperament than Locke’s philosophy of property. But he was very far from being a narrow French partisan, as has been often charged; rather he judged old-world theory in the light of its applicability to existing American conditions, and restrained his love of speculation by immediate practical considerations. The man of affairs kept a watchful eye on the philosopher in his study.

In the major doctrines of his political philosophy Jefferson was an amalgam of English and French liberalisms, supplemented by the conscious influence of the American frontier. That fusion early took place in his mind. The first bill that he introduced into the Virginia Assembly, at the age of twenty-six, was a bill to permit slave-owners to manumit their slaves; and his first published pamphlet, issued in 1774,[364] rejected the legal reasoning of John Dickinson and Daniel Dulaney--supporting the parliamentary right to impose external taxation--and took its stand on the doctrine of natural right to local self-government and freedom of trade. When two years later he drafted the Declaration of Independence the fusion was complete. The strong influence of French humanitarianism is revealed in the passage on slavery that was stricken out on the floor of Congress, and more significantly in the change in the familiar phrasing of the several natural rights. Samuel Adams and other followers of Locke had been content with the classical enumeration of life, liberty, and property; but in Jefferson’s hands the English doctrine was given a revolutionary shift. The substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property” marks a complete break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that Locke had bequeathed to the English middle class, and the substitution of a broader sociological conception; and it was this substitution that gave to the document the note of idealism which was to make its appeal so perennially human and vital. The words were far more than a political gesture to draw popular support; they were an embodiment of Jefferson’s deepest convictions, and his total life thenceforward was given over to the work of providing such political machinery for America as should guarantee for all the enjoyment of those inalienable rights. If the fact that he set the pursuit of happiness above abstract property rights is to be taken as proof that Jefferson was an impractical French theorist, the critic may take what comfort he can from his deduction.

That Jefferson was an idealist was singularly fortunate for America; there was need of idealism to leaven the materialistic realism of the times. It was a critical period and he came at the turn of a long running tide. He watched the beginnings of the political shift in America from isolated colonial commonwealths to a unitary sovereign state; and his wide reading and close observation had convinced him that the impending change was fraught with momentous issues for the common man. He had meditated much on the social results of the slow oscillations in western civilization between social decentralization and centralization, with their contrasting political and economic structures; and he understood how the movement from simplicity to complexity--from freedom to regimentation--creates a psychology and an institutionalism that conducts straight to the leviathan state, controlled by a ruling caste, serving the demands of exploitation, heedless of the well-being of the regimented mass. This great lesson in social drifts he brought home to America. There had been created here the psychology and institutions of a decentralized society, with a corresponding exaltation of the individual and the breakdown of caste. In the broad spaces of America the old-world coercive state had dwindled to a mere police arrangement for parochial duties; the free citizen refused to be regimented; the several communities insisted on managing their affairs by their own agents. Such was the natural consequence of free economics; but with the turning of the tide would not the drift towards centralization nullify the results of earlier American experience and repeat here the unhappy history of European peoples?

To the philosophic mind of Jefferson, such a question was not academic, but urgent and vital. He had been bred in that older world, he believed passionately in the excellence of its virtues, and his political and social philosophy was determined by that experience. He sprang from a society deep-rooted in an agrarian economy, and he wished to preserve that society. Born on the Virginia frontier, he had never seen a hamlet so large as twenty houses before his eighteenth year; his neighbors and associates were capable and vigorous frontier democrats, who managed the affairs of local government with the same homespun skill that went to their farming. “It is not difficult,” remarks an acute critic, “to see how the great principle of Jefferson’s life--absolute faith in democracy--came to him. He was the product of the first West in American history; he grew up with men who ruled their country well, who fought the Indians valiantly.... Jefferson loved his backwoods neighbors, and he, in turn, was loved by them.”[365] This early conviction of the excellence of a freehold order was confirmed by later experience; wide observation and much travel convinced him that no other people was so favored by circumstance as the American, or so vigorously self-reliant. That such well-being resulted from a plastic economics, he regarded as self-evident; and from this economic freedom came political freedom. In his European travels he saw everywhere want and wretchedness dwelling in the shadow of the aristocratic state, and he could not dissociate the two. Political tyranny was the outward and visible sign of greater tyrannies that ran down to the very roots of society; the leviathan state was the convenient instrument through which those tyrannies took their heavy toll of the common well-being. America was a land of free men; it was exploited neither by an aristocracy nor a plutocracy. Surely there could be no greater or nobler ambition for an American than to assist in preserving his country from the misery that must attend a change from the present happy condition of democratic industry, to the serfdom of the European wage-taker and peasant.

To a mind imbued with such conceptions the appeal of the Physiocratic theory of social economics would be irresistible. The ground was prepared for the sowing of the seeds of the liberal French thought. With its emphasis laid upon agriculture, its doctrine of the produit net, its principle of laissez faire, and its social concern, the Physiocratic theory accorded exactly with his familiar experience, and it must have seemed to Jefferson that it was little other than a deduction from the open facts of American life. He had read much in the works of the Physiocratic group, and was intimately acquainted with DuPont de Nemours; and the major principles of the school sank deep into his mind and creatively determined his thinking, with the result that Jeffersonian democracy as it spread through Virginia and west along the frontier assumed a pronounced Physiocratic bias. The sharp struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton must be reckoned, in part at least, a conflict between the rival principles of Quesnay and Adam Smith, between an agrarian and a capitalistic economy. Much as Jefferson feared the ambitions of an aristocracy, he feared quite as much the creation of a proletariat. As he looked into the future he saw great cities rising to breed their Roman mobs, duped and exploited by demagogues, the convenient tools of autocracy; and counting the cost in social well-being, he set his face like flint against the rising capitalism. A free yeomanry he regarded as the backbone of every great people, the producers of the real wealth, the guardians of manly independence; and the number of factory workers measured for him the extent of social disease. It is this Physiocratic conception that explains his bitter hostility to protective tariffs, national banks, funding manipulations, the machinery of credit, and all the agencies of capitalism which Hamilton was skillfully erecting in America. Not to have hated such things Jefferson must first have emptied his mind of the teachings of experience and the lessons of the social philosophers.

In the Notes on Virginia there is a well-known passage that amplifies his favorite thesis that a sound American economy was an agrarian economy:

The political economists of Europe have established it as a principle, that every State should endeavor to manufacture for itself; and this principle, like many others, we transfer to America.... But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? 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 phenomenon 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 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 whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff ... for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to work-men there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles.... The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.[366]

Such was his attitude in 1782, an attitude identical with Franklin’s. Thirty-four years later he had modified his views of industrialism. The bitter experience of the Napoleonic wars, with the hardships and losses visited upon neutral shipping, had convinced him of the need of domestic manufactures, and he was then deeply interested in improved machinery, new methods, original ventures. “We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist,” he conceded, or remain in economic dependence. But how much further the country should be industrialized, whether it “shall be proposed to go beyond our own supply” to compete in foreign markets, was not yet clear to him; the problem remained still to be determined whether “the surplus labor” would be “most beneficially employed in the culture of the earth, or in the fabrications of art.”[367] In such commentary Jefferson failed to measure the thrust of economic determinism that drives every people to go through with the industrial revolution, once it is begun; but if we recall the primary principle of his political philosophy, that the “care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” we may perhaps judge what would have been his attitude towards a centralized industrialism. He would have judged its desirability, not by the balance sheet of corporate business, but by the social ledger. As a social economist he could not think in terms of the economic man, nor simplify human beings to labor commodity, nor reduce the social tie to the cash nexus. It is inconceivable that he should have shared Hamilton’s satisfaction at the contemplation of women and children--and many of the latter “of tender age”--wasting away in the mills; he was too social-minded for that, too much an idealist, too human in short. Though necessity might force him away from a simple agrarian economy, it does not follow that he would become partisan to a centralizing industrialism, with control vested in banking credit.

It is a common charge that Jefferson was consumed with suspicion, and it is set down against him as the mark of a mean and ungenerous nature. That in later years he was suspicious of fair-spoken advocates and plausible programs was as true of Jefferson as of Sam Adams; he had learned like the Boston democrat the virtue of the saying, felix qui cautus, and with so much at stake he would practice caution. He feared many things, for he was acutely aware of the incapacity of the heedless majority to defend itself against an able and instructed minority. As a child of an aristocratic age he fell into the mistake of visualizing that minority in the guise of a landed gentry, rather than in the guise of plutocracy; but in his quick fear of a minority he had all history as counselor. When he took his seat in Washington’s cabinet his suspicions of the Hamiltonian program were quickly aroused. He believed that a monarchy was aimed at, and if that proved unattainable, then a highly centralized state designed to hold in check the democratic tendencies. His line of reasoning may be summarized thus: In consequence of the republican enthusiasm of the early years of the Revolution, democratic reorganization of the several state governments had been successfully achieved. Very great progress towards democracy had been made. Certain legislative acts of agrarian assemblies were now being turned against democracy, to invalidate it as a working system of government. But if agrarian majorities had used their power to enact laws beneficial to their interests, they were only applying a lesson learned from long experience with aristocratic legislatures. Such acts were no serious indictment of the democratic principle, and to make partisan use of them to justify curtailing the powers of the majority, was a betrayal of popular rights. And this, Jefferson believed, was the deliberate purpose of the Federalist leaders. Unable to stem the popular tide in the several commonwealths, the wealthy minority had devised a plan to superimpose upon the sovereign commonwealths a centralized federal government, so hedged about as to lie beyond the reach of local majorities, and hence able to override and nullify the democratic will. Once safely established, this federal government would gather fresh powers into its hands, until there emerged a rigorous machine, modeled after the British system, and as little regardful of the common interests. If this were not the Federalist purpose, why all the praise of the British system as the ripe product of experience, exactly adapted to the political genius of the English race?

In the matter of appeal to past experience, which provided the staple of Federalist argument, Jefferson discovered fresh grounds of fear. The past he looked upon as evil, and the record of experience was a tale of injustice and bitter wrong. He would not have America follow the trodden paths, for whither they led he knew too well. He would countenance no entangling alliances with old-world upper-class systems of statecraft, for such systems would reproduce in America the evils it should be the chief business of America to prevent. There must be erected here no counterpart of the European state; there must be no king, no aristocracy, no plutocracy; but a new democratic organization of government, in which the welfare of the whole people should be the sole concern.

When I left Congress in ’76 [he wrote as an old man] it was in the persuasion that our whole code must be revised, adapted to our republican form of government, and now that we had no negatives of Councils, Governors and Kings to restrain us from doing right, that it should be corrected in all its parts with a single eye to reason and the good of those for whose government it was planned.[368]

Not past experience but present need should instruct America in drawing the plans of a new system of government and a new code of law. In analyzing the evils of European systems Jefferson came to certain conclusions that dominated all his later thinking, and that may be phrased thus: The political state tends inevitably to self-aggrandizement, the logical outcome of which is a political leviathan, too big and too complex for popular control. With sovereign powers vested in the hands of governmental agents, those agents lie under a constant temptation to corruption and tyranny, and in the end they align the powers of the state on the side of the most ambitious and capable. The greater the power of government, the ampler its revenues, the more energetic its administration, the more dangerous it may become to the rights of men; for where the prize is greatest, men struggle most ruthlessly, and what prize could be greater than the privilege of exploiting society in the name of the state? History knows no objective more tempting to the will to power, than the control of the absolute state. A government adequately socialized, intent solely upon furthering the common well-being, Jefferson would have been unanxious about. But such governments existed only in the dreams of Sir Thomas More and the Utopians; he could discover none such either in the past or present. Everywhere strong governments were little more than efficient tax-machines to support armies and provide subsidies and places for the minority. Against such forces of corruption the people struggle in vain.

If such was the common testimony of old-world experience--and no man who knew the inner workings of government there would deny it--what reason was there to expect that like causes would work unlike results in America? To what purpose was the talk of strong government encouraged amongst the holders of the public debt? To what end had lobbyists for the funding bill invaded the floor of Congress? It was idle to expect in America a nullification of the law, that where power sits within, corruption waits without. The love of power is universal. Most men are potential autocrats, the strong and capable may become actual autocrats. No man is good enough, no group of men, to be trusted with unrestrained powers--in America any more than in Europe. A centralized government in control of the tax-machine, and secure from popular restraint, would undo the results of the Revolutionary War. The movement to consolidate power, Jefferson asserted, was “but Toryism in disguise.” “The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body ... has destroyed the liberty and the rights of men in every government which has ever existed under the sun.”

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.[369]

The practice of local home rule had grown up in America in response to native conditions; it had resulted from democratic needs; and Jefferson was too thoroughly American, too instinctively democratic, to overlook the significance of local sovereignties in a democratic philosophy. From the sharp contrast between American and European practice he deduced a cardinal principle, namely, that good government springs from a common interest in public affairs, and that such common interest is possible only when the field of activities is circumscribed. Set government apart from the people, or above them, and public interest is lost in a sense of futility. The danger of an encroaching tyranny by a superimposed sovereignty, is made easy by the public lethargy in respect to distant and unfamiliar things, and establishes itself through the psychology of custom. Jefferson was never greatly concerned about stable government; he was very much more concerned about responsive government--that it should faithfully serve the majority will. He made no god of the political state. He had no conventional reverence for established law and order; he inquired rather what sort of law and order he was asked to accept, was it just or unjust. Changing conditions make ancient good uncouth, and established institutions tend to fall into dry-rot, or to become tyrannical. Men are more important than constitutions, and the public well-being is more sacred than statutes. An occasional revolution, he commented grimly apropos of the hue and cry over Shays’s Rebellion, is salutary; if it does not come of itself it might well be brought about. Progress in government results from experiment; and it is easier and safer to experiment on a small scale than on a great. Inertia increases with size, and the more consolidated the government, the more unyielding it becomes. The longest delayed revolutions are the gravest.

In asserting the principle of the majority will, Jefferson like other democratic thinkers of the time, found himself countered by the argument of abstract justice. Vehement denunciation had greeted Paine’s doctrine that what a nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. There can be no rights, it was confidently asserted, superior to the right. The people may legislate, but it remains to determine the validity of statutes in the light of justice; that which is unjust is ipso facto null and void. It was Coke’s doctrine of judicial review, set up in America after its repudiation in England, and Jefferson’s hostility to it was bitter. As an intellectual he had none of the lawyer’s complacency with legal principles, or conceit of the law’s sufficiency; and as a democrat he would not yield sovereignty into the hands of the judiciary. He had no veneration for the Common Law of England: it had grown up by slow accretions during centuries of absolutism; how should it be expected to answer the needs of a freer age? It must be purged of outworn elements, imbued with democratic sympathies. The Revolution had been fought in defense of rights that are broader and more human than legal principles; and to hand over those rights to be interpreted away by lawyers, seemed to him moonstruck madness. It was the law of Blackstone rather than of Coke that he feared most--that “elegant” canonization of the malign influences of Tory reaction, and that was so cried up by the smatterers and “ephemeral insects of the law” in America; whereas Coke “was as good a Whig as ever wrote”:

Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, and especially the former [Blackstone], have done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte, and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment seat of his Maker.[370]

As Jefferson grew older his fear of judicial encroachment on the popular will became acute, but it shifted from distrust of the Common Law to concern over the Supreme Court. A strong and outspoken hatred of the Federal judiciary runs through all his later writings, and he lost no opportunity to popularize the thesis--“It is a misnomer to call a government republican, in which a branch of the supreme power is independent of the nation.”

The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.[371]

It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. It is one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.[372]

As Jefferson watched Chief Justice John Marshall gathering all things within the purview of the Federal judiciary, preparing future strongholds by the skillful use of obiter dicta, legislating by means of judicial interpretation, nullifying the will of the majority, and with the power of repeal made nugatory by the complexity of the process, he saw clearly what the outcome would be. Surely that was no democracy where judge-made laws were enforced by bench warrants, and where the sovereign power lay beyond the immediate reach of the popular will. The government that he desired would not rest on the legal fiction of an abstract justice above statutes and constitutions, whereof a group of judicial gentlemen were the repositories and guardians. It would be like Paine’s, “a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads”; for “where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place.”

Granted the truth of Jefferson’s premises that power tends to contract to the hands of a few, and that all government of the few is vicious, then democracy is the only form of government under which an approximation to justice can be realized. A class will serve class interests. Government by an aristocracy is government in the interest of the aristocracy. For the staple argument of the Federalists, that gentlemen of principle and property alone may be intrusted with affairs of state, Jefferson had a quiet contempt. “I have never observed men’s honesty to increase with their riches,” he remarked. On the contrary, he regarded the “better sort of people” as a chief hindrance to the spread of social justice. The past had been evil because the past had been exploited by gentlemen of principle and property. They had kept government away from the people, and with their secret councils and secret diplomacy they had plundered the taxpayers and drenched nations in blood. Their selfish rivalries everywhere exacted a heavy toll of society and left behind a trail of poverty and wretchedness. The future would be better in the degree that mastery passed into common hands.

From the conclusions of his democratic premise he did not shrink. If it were indeed true that the people were beasts, then the democratic government of the future would be a bestial government--and even that might be better than the old arrangement of masters and slaves. But the American people whom Jefferson trusted were very far from beasts; he was convinced that they were honest and well-meaning; and if government were brought close to them, kept responsive to their will, a new and beneficent chapter in human history would open. The populistic laws passed by the legislatures of Rhode Island and New Hampshire, about which such an uproar was raised by fearful creditors, and which were urged as an argument against popular government, gave him no concern. He understood the ways of propaganda, and he never accepted judgment of the American people from the mouths of their enemies. The cure for the evils of democracy, he believed, was more democracy. The whole are far less likely to be unjust than the few; and if sovereignty does not rest in the majority will, where shall it lodge?

Hume, the great apostle of toryism, says “the Commons established a principle, which is noble in itself, and seems specious [i.e. pleasing], but is belied by all history and experience, that the people are the origin of all just power.” And where else will this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just power, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in the individual of that minority?[373]

The America of Jefferson’s day was a simple world, with a simple domestic economy. More than ninety per cent were plain country folk, farmers and villagers, largely freeholders, managing their local affairs in the traditional way. There were no great extremes of poverty and wealth, no closely organized class groups. With its sharp restrictions on suffrage and the prestige accorded the gentry, it was still far from a political democracy; but it was hastening towards a more democratic order. Remote from the cesspools of European diplomacy, and not yet acquainted with imperialism, it had no need for a leviathan state. Economic conditions sanctioned a laissez-faire government, simple and unambitious. In such a world the well-known words of Jefferson’s first inaugural address, justified themselves to all who did not seek to use the state for personal advantage.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

In one significant direction he would extend the scope of government--the encouragement of education. An intelligent people is necessary to a democracy; free schools are a sign of a free society. Tyranny thrives on ignorance and superstition, and every exploiting group fears popular education. Free himself in thought and action, believing in the unshackled commerce of ideas, hating all censorships, Jefferson accounted the founding of the University of Virginia his largest contribution to the well-being of his native commonwealth.

To all who profess faith in the democratic ideal Jefferson is a perennial inspiration. A free soul, he loved freedom enough to deny it to none; an idealist, he believed that the welfare of the whole, and not the prosperity of any group, is the single end of government. He was our first great leader to erect a political philosophy native to the economics and experience of America, as he was the first to break consciously with the past. His life was dedicated to the service of freedom, and later generations may well recall his words, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Europe made Jefferson wholly American. From his studies in France he came to see that where men enjoy free access to the sources of subsistence, government is likely to be simple and honest, and society free and content; but where a policy of preëmption has run its course, the function of government is seduced from its social purpose to perpetuate the inequalities which spring from the progressive monopolization of natural resources, with augmenting corruption and injustice. To preserve government in America from such degradation, to keep the natural resources open to all, were the prime desire and object of his life. That such an effort was foredoomed to failure, in presence of imperious forces that shape society beyond the capacity of political means to change or prevent, cannot detract from the nobility of his ideal, or the inspiration of his life. Among the greater thinkers of the constitutional period Jefferson remains by far the most vital and suggestive, the one to whom later generations may return most hopefully.

Footnotes

[344] For the date of his arrival, see Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, Vol. XLIII, p. 246.Return to passage

[345] Rights of Man, Part II, pp. 407, 408.Return to passage

[346] For an excellent discussion of this, see C. M. Walsh, The Political Science of John Adams, pp. 203-226.Return to passage

[347] The Rights of Man, Part I, p. 278.Return to passage

[348] “Letter to Lord Onslow,” in Works, Vol. III, p. 36.Return to passage

[349] Rights of Man, Part II, p. 428.Return to passage

[350] Ibid., pp. 410-411.Return to passage

[351] Conway, Life of Paine, Vol. II, p. 4.Return to passage

[352] Author of An Apology for the Bible (a reply to Paine’s Age of Reason), which was distributed among Harvard undergraduates. See above, page 324.Return to passage

[353] For the program of Babeuf, see R. W. Postgate, Revolution from 1789 to 1906, pp. 24, 54-60.Return to passage

[354] Works, Vol. III, p. 329.Return to passage

[355] This and the preceding sentence were expunged from all early editions by the censor.Return to passage

[356] Ibid., p. 337.Return to passage

[357] Ibid., p. 338.Return to passage

[358] Ibid., p. 340.Return to passage

[359] Ibid., p. 329.Return to passage

[360] Address and Declaration of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty, quoted in Conway, Life of Paine, Vol. I, p. 316.Return to passage

[361] Rights of Man, Part II, p. 413.Return to passage

[362] Works, Vol. I, p. 155.Return to passage

[363] Francis W. Hirst, Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson, p. 266.Return to passage

[364] A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Williamsburg.Return to passage

[365] Dodd, Statesmen of the Old South, p. 23.Return to passage

[366] Writings, Vol. III, pp. 268-269.Return to passage

[367] Ibid., Vol. X, p. 8.Return to passage

[368] “Autobiography”, in Writings, Vol. I, p. 57.Return to passage

[369] Writings, Vol. VII, p. 451.Return to passage

[370] Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 335.Return to passage

[371] Ibid., Vol. X, p. 189.Return to passage

[372] Ibid., Vol. X, p. 160.Return to passage

[373] Ibid., Vol. VII, p. 356.Return to passage

III. • The War of Belles Lettres

To turn from the field of political theory to the realm of polite literature is not to quit the partisan battle-ground. The long struggle between Federalist and Democrat was too bitter and absorbing, too sharp in its alignment, not to conscript gentlemen of culture equally with politicians. Every available quill was called to the colors, and a civil war of belles lettres broke out, that exceeded in animosity any other known to our literary history. Attack and counter-attack were slashing and acrimonious. Gentlemen forgot their manners and indulged fiercely in tall language. Satire ran about the streets seeking new victims to impale; slander lay in wait for every passer-by. The crudest lies found willing listeners and sober ministers turned from writing sermons to enshrine pothouse tales in heroic couplets. In this virulent battle the Federalists, on the whole, had the better of it, for they were greater masters of invective and flayed their victims less clumsily; but the Democrats made up in ardor what they lacked in skill, and the blows that fell on carefully tied wigs must have hurt cruelly. As poetry those old satires may seem to us feeble enough, but as historical documents they are eloquent. The passion of a world in revolution, the hopes and fears of our forefathers as they watched the great fires consuming the world in which they had grown up, still survive in those stinging lines, as a reminder to later generations of the rough and inhospitable way that democratic America has traveled in its onward course.

I • The Federalist Group

1. The Hartford Wits

What Federalism was capable of in the way of polite letters is sufficiently revealed in the work of a coterie of poetasters who are known in our literary histories as the Hartford Wits. The title of the group suggests their literary antecedents. They were the representatives of a literary mode that had slowly percolated through the crust of Puritan provincialism and imparted a certain sprightliness to a dour temper. They were the literary old-guard of the expiring eighteenth century, suspicious of all innovation, contemptuous of every idealistic program. They stood stoutly by the customary and familiar. The nineteenth century was knocking at their door, but they would not open to it. And as they saw that new century coming in the guise of revolution, exciting to unheard-of innovations in the fields of politics and economics and religion and letters, giving rise to Jacobin Clubs and Jeffersonian democracy, they set themselves seriously to the work of barring its progress through their own little world. They conveniently associated the economic unrest of post-war days, that gave birth to a strange progeny in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with the contamination of French atheism, charged all unrest to the account of democracy, and hastened to put it down in the name of law and righteousness. They hated new ways with the virtuous hatred of the well-to-do, and dreamed of a future America as like the past as one generation of oysters is like another.

There is a certain historical fitness in the fact that the Wits should have arisen in Connecticut and been the intellectual children of Yale. For generations the snug little commonwealth had been the home of a tenacious conservatism, that clung to old ways and guarded the institutions of the fathers with pious zeal. Nowhere else in New England did the ruling hierarchy maintain so glacial a grip on society. The Revolution of ’76 had only ruffled the surface on Connecticut life; it left the social structure quite unchanged. The church retained its unquestioned control of the machinery of the commonwealth; and the church was dominated by a clerical aristocracy, hand in glove with a mercantile aristocracy. Fresh currents of thought that were stirring the pulpits of eastern Massachusetts--suggestions of an Arianism that was to lead to the Unitarian schism--did not reach so far as New Haven, and Yale was content to remain the bulwark of an obsolete Calvinism. In such a soil Federalism would flourish like Jonah’s gourd; and it exuded a special odor of sanctity from the Calvinism in which it was rooted. To stout Federalists like Timothy Dwight, the current dogma of total depravity sufficed to disprove the validity of all democratic aspiration. It was a presumption little short of blasphemous to assert that sinners are competent to manage the temporal affairs of society. The doctrine of equalitarianism was a particular stench in the nostrils of the aristocratic clergy, who disliked all leveling. The Irish immigrants seem to have been the most offensive equalitarians. A New England gentleman, traveling in Pennsylvania in the nineties, wrote home: “I have seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a few exceptions, they are ... the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.” And in 1798 Harrison Gray Otis wrote: “If some means are not adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty & property.”[374] To prevent, if possible, such an unhappy outcome, the upper classes of New England fell to organizing and drilling all the elements of conservatism for a vigorous defense. They wrote and spoke and preached, till the mind of respectable New England was saturated with prejudice. The democratic principle was converted into a bogey to frighten the simple. Such a hideous misshapen imp of darkness, such a vile hag of anarchy had never before been painted for the imagination of honest Yankees to shudder at; and if democracy seemed to them a wild and fearsome thing making ready to destroy their venerated social order, they only believed what the minister preached on the Sabbath and the squire asserted on week days. The plebeian democrat, very likely in debt, was quite overwhelmed by the organized forces of village respectability.

In this great work of saving the commonwealth of Connecticut from the pollutions of democracy the Hartford Wits were competent laborers. The more important members of the group were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight. To these may be added the names of Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith and Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, who were friends and occasional collaborators. Nearly all were Yale men with a pronounced Yale predilection for Calvinism and Federalism, admirable representatives of the oligarchical upper class of the provincial Connecticut society. Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was a minister and president of Yale; Hopkins, Smith and Cogswell were physicians of high professional standing; Trumbull and Theodore Dwight were lawyers; Barlow and Humphreys found their way into the diplomatic field, and Alsop was a merchant. They were all comfortably well off and several were wealthy. Alsop was one of the few millionaires of the time; Barlow acquired a fortune in France; and Humphreys late in life established a textile industry incorporated for half a million. Hot Federalists, they found in Washington, Governor Trumbull, and Fisher Ames, their political mentors and guides. The most active of the group politically, was Theodore Dwight, who with his cousin Timothy was a director of the Eagle Bank, a Federalist institution, and bitterly opposed to the chartering of Republican banks. When one of the latter applied to the legislature for a charter he denounced it as a “child of intrigue and the mother of Discord.” He was deep in the Hartford Convention, serving as its secretary and later as its historian. He denounced Jeffersonian republicanism as seeking to “discredit the ministry, decry religion, and destroy public worship,” and as he saw it spreading through New England he attributed to it the certain decay of morality and the impending break-up of family ties, exclaiming with somewhat extreme vivacity: “The outlaws of Europe, the fugitives from the pillory and the gallows, have undertaken to assist our own abandoned citizens, in the pleasing work of destroying Connecticut.... Can imagination paint anything more dreadful on this side of hell!”

Later generations remember best the massive character of Timothy Dwight, a man endowed with all the Connecticut virtues and walking amongst his fellows with magnificent confidence in his powers. A great preacher, an authoritative theologian, a distinguished administrator--“every inch a college president”--a ready counselor on any knotty point be it in law or politics or finance or agriculture or belles lettres, a born leader of men, and by way of recreation an inditer of Hebraic epics and huge didactic poems and ample Connecticut pastorals, a confirmed traveler observing the manner of life in many commonwealths and preserving his observations in solid volumes--he was a man to compel the admiration of his fellows and put his stamp upon his age. So vast was the contemporary reputation of Timothy Dwight, and so many-sided, it may seem ironical that time should have shrunk him to the narrow compass of a paragraph in our literary history. And yet the more curiously one considers the work of the great president of Yale, the more insistent become one’s doubts concerning the fineness of this nugget of Connecticut gold. It shows very suspicious signs of tarnish. His commanding presence and authoritative manner, his sonorous eloquence, his forwardness in defense of what few doubted, his vehement threshing of straw long since reduced to chaff, his prodigious labors, his abundant printing, no longer seem so authentic a seal of greatness as they seemed to his open-mouthed contemporaries; and one suspects that he impressed his fellow citizens by the completeness with which he measured up to every Connecticut ideal, rather than by the creative vigor of his mind. The great Timothy, in short, seems to a later generation to have been little more than a walking repository of the venerable Connecticut status quo.

The intellectual inquisitiveness that gave birth to disintegrating theory in the mind of his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, and made him a profoundly revolutionary influence in his time, was wholly lacking in the grandson. The latter refused to follow the questioning intellect into unsurveyed fields. He would not meddle with change. His mind was closed as tight as his study windows in January. He read widely in the fields of rationalism, but he read only to refute. Now and then to be sure, certain generous promptings visited him: he spoke out against slavery; he encouraged the higher education of women. But from such temptations to become a living voice he turned away to follow the main-traveled road of Connecticut prejudice. His eyes were fixed lovingly upon the past, and his fondest dreams for his native commonwealth hovered about the ideal of a church-state which John Cotton had labored to establish and Increase Mather to preserve. It is with those capable theocrats of Massachusetts Bay, rather than with Thomas Hooker of Hartford, that he is to be associated. Two men could scarcely be more alike than Timothy Dwight and Increase Mather; their careers ran in similar lines; each was the unmitered pope of his generation, and each owed his extraordinary influence to the same sterling qualities. As ecclesiastical politicians they drew no line between religious and secular affairs, but were prompt with a hand in every affair of the commonwealth. They spoke and wrote with unquestioned authority. They regarded the minister as the responsible leader of society who must not suffer his flock to be led astray. The church was the guardian of morality, and the state was its secular arm. The true faith must not be put in jeopardy by unfaith. To Timothy Dwight infidelity and democracy went hand in hand, and to suffer the commonwealth to fall under the control of the godless meant the end of all morality and religion. To uphold the established order--of which he was a distinguished member--was for him the first of Christian duties. A stalwart Federalist, he was a good hater of all Jacobins. His detestation of Jefferson was virulent and he swallowed the nastiest tales about the great Virginian without a qualm, never doubting their authenticity. It was sometimes hinted that he was too much the aristocrat to feel the warmest sympathy for the unprosperous, and there seems to have been ground for the suspicion. The unprosperous were likely to be infected with Jeffersonian heresies, and as he watched them being drawn off to the York-state frontier, he rejoiced that their voting power was no longer to be feared. Such restless spirits, he pointed out, “are impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality; grumble about the taxes, by which Rulers, Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported.... We have many troubles even now; but we should have many more, if this body of foresters had remained at home.”[375] If the disaffected did not like the way the Congregational-Federalist party managed the good state of Connecticut, it were a godsend if they should remove beyond its boundaries.

But it is with the literary work of Timothy Dwight that we are more immediately concerned, and in all his abundant output, totaling fourteen volumes and perhaps as much more in manuscript, the same solid qualities are revealed. It is the occasional work of a man wanting humor, playfulness, grace, lacking subtlety and creative suggestiveness, but with a shrewd common sense, a great vigor, and a certain grandiose imagination. A sonorous declaimer, he dearly loved combat and the shock of marshaled argument. He went out of his way to invite majestic effects. In The Conquest of Canaan he described so many thunderstorms that Trumbull suggested he ought to furnish a lightning rod with the poem. Such a man could not move easily in narrow spaces. An epic was none too slight to contain his exuberant rhetoric. His ready versification, one often feels, runs like a water pipe with the faucet off; the words flow in an unbroken stream with never a pause to pick or choose. Yet even in his amazing copiousness there is vigor; a well-stocked mind is pouring out the gatherings of years. When he pauses to give advice--as he was fond of doing--his abundant sense is worth listening to; the homely wisdom of his talk to the farmers in the sixth part of Greenfield Hill is not unlike Franklin. As a satirist he belongs to the Churchill school; he is downright, abusive, often violent, quite lacking the lightness of touch and the easy gayety that runs so pleasantly through M’Fingal. His Triumph of Infidelity is solid old-fashioned pulpit-thumping. The spirit of toleration was withheld from him by his fairy godmother, and he knew no other way of dealing with those who persisted in disagreement after their mistakes had been pointed out, than the cudgel. In this tremendous poem he lays about him vigorously. On Hume and Voltaire and Priestley, and all their followers, his blows fall smartly. Bloody crowns ought to be plentiful, but--though he does not seem to know it--the blows fall on straw men and none proves mortal. On the whole one prefers him in the pastoral mood when he lays aside his ministerial gown, and Greenfield Hill, unless one excepts the Travels in New England and New York, remains his most attractive work. Yet even that is sadly in need of winnowing. A great college president Timothy Dwight may very well have been; he was worshiped by his admirers only this side idolatry; but a great thinker, a steadfast friend of truth in whatever garb it might appear, a generous kindly soul loving even publicans and sinners, regardful of others and forgetful of self, he assuredly was not.

2. “The Anarchiad”

Most of the political satire of the Wits was done in collaboration, and consists of occasional sketches contributed to newspapers--with explanatory comments and notes--dealing with matters of current interest. Of the major works thus produced, The Anarchiad, The Echo, and The Political Greenhouse, the first will suffice to reveal the political sympathies of the Hartford group. The Anarchiad is a mock epic designed to counteract the populistic tendencies of post-war times. It was published in The New Haven Gazette between October 26, 1786, and September 13, 1787. In 1861 it was resurrected from a long sleep by Luther G. Riggs, and reissued with an introduction and notes. “This fearless satire,” according to the editor, “is supposed to have exerted great and beneficial influence upon the public mind, and to have tended in no small degree to check the leaders of insubordination and infidel philosophy”; and it must be regarded as “a national Poem, battling nobly for the right universal, for the majesty of law, and for the Federal government.” The idea was got from a contemporary English screed entitled The Rolliad, one of the numerous political satires of which the late eighteenth century was so fond. Probably most of the members of the group had a hand in it, but the acrid quality of its comment owes more to Hopkins than to the others.

For such work the angular Connecticut physician was admirably fitted. The son of a Waterbury farmer. Dr. Lemuel Hopkins was the most picturesque member of the Hartford Wits, the most characteristically Yankee. Brought up at the plow-tail, he received nevertheless an excellent education, and because of a hereditary predisposition to consumption turned to the medical profession. After serving his apprenticeship at Wallingford he entered upon his practice at Litchfield in 1776. During the Revolution he served for a short time as a volunteer, but soon returned to his lancet and medicine case. In 1784 he removed to Hartford where he spent the remainder of his life. In person he was tall, lean, stooping, rawboned, with coarse features and large brilliant eyes. His uncouth appearance and eccentricity of manner made him a striking figure, and his caustic wit rendered him a redoubtable antagonist. As a physician he stood at the head of the Connecticut profession. He was one of the founders of the Medical Society of Connecticut, and as a frequent contributor to professional literature he exerted a wide influence on the current practice.

The eccentric doctor seems to have been as honest as he was outspoken. He was uncompromising in his warfare on all quacks, both medical and political. For a time as a young man he was a disciple of French infidel philosophy, but he cured his mental indisposition by a severe Biblical regimen, and having restored himself to the robust health of Calvinistic Christianity, he devoted himself to the work of curing others. He became in consequence a specialist in the treatment of the ravages caused by the bacillus gallicus. For every sort of humbug he had a hearty contempt, and any political nostrum not listed in the Federalistic materia medica he regarded as arrant quackery. He thought no better of old wives’ remedies in government than in medicine, and when the Rhode Island legislature passed its paper-money act in 1785, and six months later Shays’s Rebellion broke out, and mobs were besieging the legislature of New Hampshire, he proposed to speak plainly to the good people of Connecticut on the follies of popular delusions. This would seem to have been the origin of The Anarchiad. It sprang from the indignation of Dr. Hopkins, when, to quote from the poem,

In visions fair, the scenes of fate unroll, And Massachusetts opens on my soul. There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway, And mobs in myriads blacken all the way.

The sardonic temper of Dr. Hopkins fitted him for virulent satire, and in this bitterest of the productions of the Wits, the reins were on the neck of the muse. Scarcely another New England satire reflects so sharply the class consciousness that underlay the bitter struggle between agrarianism and capitalism. It is a slashing attack upon agrarian economics and democratic liberalism, a versified echo of the anger of creditors who were fighting the measures of populistic legislatures. The staple of the satire is the wickedness of all paper-money issues, with the State of Rhode Island as the chief of agrarian sinners. About this main theme is gathered a miscellany of Federalist shibboleths--the godlessness of Shays and his crew, the seditious spirit of all who oppose the new Constitution, the demagoguery of democratic politicians--and the satire rises to a patriotic crescendo in declaiming against the folly of the democratic ideal. So tremendous a work, however, cannot be adequately described; the lines must speak for themselves. The following bits may serve in lieu of the whole, the first of which is a comment on Rhode Island, the pariah of States:

Hail! realm of rogues, renown’d for fraud and guile, All hail! ye knav’ries of yon little isle. There prowls the rascal, cloth’d with legal pow’r, To snare the orphan, and the poor devour; The crafty knave his creditor besets And advertising paper pays his debts; Bankrupts their creditors with rage pursue, No stop, no mercy from the debtor crew. Arm’d with new tests, the licens’d villain bold, Presents his bills, and robs them of their gold; Their ears, though rogues and counterfeiters lose, No legal robber fears the gallows noose. Look through the State, the unhallow’d ground appears A pen of dragons, and a cave of bears; A nest of vipers, mix’d with adders foul; The screeching night-bird, and the greater owl: For now, unrighteousness, a deluge wide, Pours round the land an overwhelming tide; And dark injustice, wrapp’d in paper sheets, Rolls a dread torrent through the wasted streets; While net of law th’ unwary fry draws in To damning deeds, and scarce they know they sin. New paper struck, new tests, new tenders made, Insult mankind, and help the thriving trade. Each weekly print new lists of cheats proclaims, Proud to enroll their knav’ries and their names; The wiser race, the snares of law to shun, Like Lot from Sodom, from Rhode Island run....[376]

Nor less abhorr’d, the certain woe that waits The giddy rage of democratic States, Whose pop’lar breath, high-blown in restless tide, No laws can temper, and no reason guide: An equal sway, their mind indignant spurns; To wanton sway, the bliss of freedom turns; Led by wild demagogues, the factious crowd, Mean, fierce, imperious, insolent and loud, Nor fame, nor wealth, nor power, nor system draws-- They see no object, and perceive no cause; But feel, by turns, in one disastrous hour, Th’ extremes of license, and th’ extremes of power....

Will this vain scheme bid restless factions cease, Check foreign wars, or fix internal peace? Call public credit from her grave to rise, Or gain in grandeur what they lose in size?... But know, ye favor’d race, one potent head Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread. The finance regulate, the trade control, Live through the empire, and accord the whole. Ere death invades, the night’s deep curtain falls, Through ruin’d realms the voice of +UNION+ calls; ... On you she calls! attend the warning cry; +Ye live united, or divided die!+[377]

But chief the race allured by fleeting fame, Who seek on earth the politicians name; Auspicious race! whom folly joys to bless, And wealth and honor crown with glad success; Formed, like balloons, by emptiness to rise On pop’lar gales, to waft them through the skies ... See, from the shades, on tiny pinions swell And rise, the young +DEMOCRACY+ of hell! Before their face the powers of Congress fade, And public credit sinks, an empty shade; Wild severance rages, wars intestine spread, Their boasted +UNION+ hides her dying head; The forms of government in ruin hurl’d, Reluctant empire quits the western world.[378]

Amid such democratic welter and mortal confusion the sole hope of safety lies in Federalism, and the sapient leader who shall bring order out of the wild misrule is thus greeted:

Ardent and bold, the smiling land to save, In council sapient as in action brave, I fear’d young Hamilton’s unshaken soul, And saw his arm our wayward host control; ... Fire in his eye, and thunder on his tongue.[379]

Other work the Hartford Wits did, but none which need detain us. Soon changes and removals broke up the coterie, and they went diverse ways to diverse rewards: Timothy Dwight to safeguard Yale undergraduates in New Haven, Humphreys to the American legation at Paris, Trumbull to the Michigan frontier, and Barlow to his notable career in Europe. But happily not before they had contributed their portion of sweetness and light to the great debate. The Wits were no skulkers in presence of “insubordination and infidel philosophy,” when their economic interests were touched.

II • The French Group

The Wits were not devoid of cleverness, but they were wanting in ideas. They were partisans rather than intellectuals. In the rôle of self-appointed custodians of Federalist moralities they were rather tedious fellows, who substituted fustian for creative thought, and blew up their verses with flatulent rhetoric. They sealed the windows of their minds against the disturbing winds of doctrine that were blowing briskly; they inspected the family tree of every new idea to determine its respectability. An occasional fresh idea is necessary to keep one from falling into staleness and mediocrity; but the Wits chose to remain too ignorant to be interesting, and it is a relief to turn from them to the more stimulating company of the French partisans. Here at least there was intellectual sincerity: a genuine desire to understand what was going on in the larger world of thought; to use what brains God had given them to better the lot of the American people. Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge were not intellectual giants, but they represent the best intelligence then being devoted to literature in America, and their work retains a suggestiveness today far beyond that of the Hartford Wits.

1. Philip Freneau • Poet of Two Revolutions

It is fitting that our first outstanding poet should have been a liberal. The idealist has always seen deeper into the spirit of America than the realist, and been less complacent with halfway achievement. And it is equally fitting that his idealism should have got him into trouble with the dominant group of his generation. Philip Freneau was a volunteer in two revolutions, a color-sergeant carrying the newly unfurled flag of democracy in the thick of civil strife. He was a lifelong rebel, whose rebellions turned out to be patriotic or seditious as they went with or against the purpose of the victorious party. In the Revolution of ’76 he fought shoulder to shoulder with John Adams and Hamilton and Washington, and his services were accorded high praise. His poems inspired patriotic enthusiasm, greatly aided the national cause, and won wide approval. But in the Revolution of ’93 he parted company with Adams and Hamilton and Washington. When the old leaders turned back in fear at the unloosing of democratic aspirations, he went forward to new battles. He served the cause of ’93 with the same ardor that had inspired his pen in ’76. It was not a new cause in his eyes, but the old; not a different war, as Federalists asserted, but other battles of the same war--the never ceasing struggle for human freedom.

In thus breaking with the party of Federalism and casting his lot with the democratic Jacobins, Freneau contracted a serious mésalliance that destroyed his good name. Thereafter he was marked as a vulgar democrat, a disseminator of insubordination and infidelity, an evil influence among a respectable, God-fearing people. The further he went in his new crusade, the lower he sank in decent opinion, until the poet of the American Revolution came to be regarded as the hireling mouthpiece of Jefferson, a writer of wretched and insolent doggerel, an incendiary journalist--a mean and paltry figure beside the stately forms of the Fathers of the Constitution. Gentlemen exhausted the resources of ample vocabularies to express their detestation of his leveling ways. To Timothy Dwight he was “A mere incendiary, or rather ... a despicable tool of bigger incendiaries, and his paper ... a public nuisance.” To the gentle-natured Irving he was “A barking cur,” and to Washington, whose words were accorded a quasi-royal respect, he was “That rascal Freneau”: rather loose expressions, certainly, for cultivated gentlemen to apply to another cultivated gentleman, the friend of Madison and Brackenridge. It is evident that Freneau and the great Federalist leaders disagreed somewhat violently in their interpretations of the purpose and scope of the new venture in republicanism.

The source of their disagreement lay in divergencies of social philosophy too great to be bridged. In his republicanism Freneau had gone far in advance of the Federalists. He was a democrat while they remained aristocrats. He had rid himself of a host of outworn prejudices, the heritage of an obsolete past, which held them in bondage. He had read more clearly the meaning of the great movement of decentralization that was shaping a new psychology, and must lead eventually to democratic individualism. He had no wish to stay or thwart that development; he accepted it wholly with all its implications. He had freed his mind from the thralldom of caste; he was impelled by no egoistic desire to impose his will upon others; he was wholly free from the lust of economic aggression, either for himself or for his class. He was an idealist who cared only for the res publica, the common well-being, and he desired chiefly that the new American government should serve the needs of a free people. There was no envy in the soul of Freneau, and no self-seeking. He was the friend of civilization rather than the advocate of particular forms of government. He put his trust in local self-rule rather than in a coercive state. Like Paine he distrusted all centralizing power. Like Franklin he regarded the every-day world of business and politics as a preposterous arrangement, unconcerned with justice; and he took it on himself to do what he could to make it over. All his life he was an unmuzzled advocate of whatever new movements gave promise of lessening the old tyrannies. In championing the cause of democracy, he championed a score of lesser causes: Unitarianism, deism, antislavery, Americanism in education: thereby bringing down on his head the resentment of all the conservatisms, religious, political, economic, social, then prospering in America. Nevertheless he went his way through a sordid world of politicians and speculators, feeding upon whatever shreds of beauty he met with, a dreamer and an idealist sneered at by exploiters, a spirit touched to finer issues than his generation cared for.

The chief desire of Freneau’s life was to be a poet, and if the country had not been turmoiled by revolution, doubtless he would have been content to “live unpromoted and write poems.” But revolution and not poetry was the serious business of the age, and he chose to have a hand in that business. Many later critics have lamented his choice. They regret that he did not turn aside from the battle-ground to wander in pastoral fields; that he was not content with the noctes coenaeque deum where the minstrel’s song is sufficient passport to hospitality. It is a nice question of literary ethics. The raw material of poetry was in Philip Freneau; there was need only of calm years to master his art and clarify the vague romanticism of his nature. He had only to stand apart from the turmoil, refusing to soil his hands with politics, and cultivate his faculty for verse, to have made himself the indisputable founder of American poetry. He was endowed with a romantic imagination and love of natural beauty, a generation before the romantic revival, and he might well have become a notable contributor to that revival.

But he refused to stand apart. He would not hire a substitute to defend the cause of freedom. There was rough work to be done, and the democrats were too few to spare so competent a workman. So when poetry proved unequal to the task he turned journalist, and set to work in a field unclaimed by the muses. It was an immense sacrifice, bringing disaster to all hope of contemporary fame, and tarnishing his reputation in after years. His place in American letters was fixed by a Federalist verdict, and he has since remained obscure and neglected by all, save an occasional historian who dips into a few poems, regrets that the smell of revolution is so rank, and dismisses him with the comment that Campbell and Scott did him the honor to appropriate a figure of speech without acknowledgment. Only within recent years has a collected edition of his poems been accessible, and his prose writings still remain buried in newspaper files. In consequence the literary critics have echoed the political critics, and given new life to the old partisanship. Thus Professor Wendell remarks that “a considerable part of his poetry ... consists of rather reckless satire, not conspicuously better or worse than much other satire of the period.”[380] Even Professor Tyler, usually so generous in sympathy for our early writers, dismisses Freneau with these words:

The poor old man, thus found dead on the lonely New Jersey moor, had undoubtedly some sweetness in his heart; but he permitted very little of it to work its way down to the tip of his pen. With that pitiless pen of his he had fought many a fierce fight in his day.... He was the poet of hatred, rather than of love.... Among all his verses, the reader finds scarcely one lyric of patriotic enthusiasm, nor many lines to thrill the hearts of the Revolutionists by any touch of loving devotion to their cause, but everywhere lines hot and rank with sarcasm and invective against the enemy.... Like Odell, Freneau was a good hater; his was the wrathful muse; his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing, deadly. He was the satirical gladiator on behalf of the Revolution, even as Odell was the satirical gladiator in opposition to it.[381]

Such commentary is neither discriminating nor just. That the ways of Freneau were often ruthless it needs only a casual reading of his satire to perceive; that he was a good hater is quite as apparent; but that the deeper springs of his nature were bitter is not true. He was no satirist like Churchill to love filth and delight in venom. It was an age of partisan ruthlessness, and if Freneau was a fierce partisan it was because the new hope then whispering to liberals was in danger of being stifled by selfish men who feared it. The vision of a free republic arising on the ruins of colonial monarchy had taken possession of his imagination; a republic admirable in justice and righteous in all its ways. That vision, he believed, might be realized if the republicans stood firm in its defense. A thousand perils beset it. The lingering colonial traditions--the ties of old custom--were powerful advocates of the old inequality; the greed of profit and power--the ambitions of a monied aristocracy--were equally powerful advocates of new tyrannies. Not only must George III and his Tory supporters be driven from the land, but the work thus begun must be carried through. An army of domestic enemies must be dealt with--a formidable aristocracy of wealth and family. Naturally it would be no holiday task. The King had no mind to be driven out of his American dominions, and the Federalists had no mind to surrender control of the new American state. And so no choice remained to the republicans but to make the advocates of monarchy and aristocracy appear so hateful in the eyes of the people that they would rise and destroy them.

In times of profound upheaval the demands of partisanship are stern and exacting. The gray-goose quill may serve the cause of peace, but the porcupine quill stings and rankles more; and if Freneau was given to using the latter it was because he cared greatly for the ends to be achieved. “How oft has rugged nature charged my pen with gall,” he lamented late in life as he contemplated the enemies he had made. Sensitive and proud, he had a Gallic impetuosity of onset. If he plundered the broadsides of their store of abuse and ransacked the dictionaries of their wealth of scurrility, it was not because he loved abuse and scurrilities. If like Sam Adams, he was given to robbing men of their characters, it was due to no personal or selfish motives; those great ones whom he lampooned so fiercely, he believed were enemies of the new order. If “his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing, deadly,” as Professor Tyler asserts, it was because he was fighting for a great ideal against men who were equally grim, unsparing, deadly. Unembittered laughter had little opportunity to try its sanative qualities in that long warfare of bushwhackers.

During the last quarter of the century the writings of Freneau in verse and prose constitute an abstract and brief chronicle of the times. If they seem old-fashioned to us today, they were quite new-fashioned to the men who first read them. The early satires, printed in 1775 must have fallen upon American ears with almost startling effect. A revolutionary change had come over Freneau; he had broken wholly with the colonial temper and turned nationalist a year before the Declaration of Independence. When he graduated from Princeton College in the summer of 1771, he wrote in collaboration with Hugh Henry Brackenridge a commencement poem entitled The Rising Glory of America, in which the youthful collegians, bred up in a hotbed of Whiggery, were as British as Pitt himself. The new English imperialism fairly rioted in the swelling couplets. The poem is a prophecy of the time when the British flag should wave from the Atlantic to the Pacific over a contented people, who “warm in liberty and freedom’s cause,” gloried in the name of Briton. Agriculture and commerce are duly celebrated as the twin pillars of American prosperity, and the pages of colonial history are combed for great names and heroic deeds. On the roll of American heroes Braddock, Sir William Johnson, and Whitefield are the most conspicuous. Oddly enough Washington’s valor at the time of Braddock’s defeat was unknown to these collegians in 1771, but was afterwards discovered and inserted in later editions. Following independence Freneau revised the poem and the changed circumstances played havoc with the colonial text. Braddock was silently expunged together with “Britannia’s warlike troops, Choice spirits of her isle.” “False Gallia’s sons” becomes “Gallia’s hostile sons.” A notable tribute to English generosity seemed incongruous to Freneau after his experience on the prison ship and was deleted. He no longer felt that

The British epithet is merciful, And we the sons of Britain learn like them To conquer and to spare.

What happened to Freneau during the years following his graduation is uncertain, but in July, 1775, he appeared in New York City with his pockets stuffed with another sort of verse, which he scattered among the print-shops, the rebellious spirit of which may be judged from the prayer,

Libera Nos, Domine.--Deliver us, O Lord, not only from British dependence, but

From the scoundrel, Lord North, who would bind us in chains, From a royal king Log, with his tooth-full of brains, Who dreams, and is certain (when taking a nap) He has conquered our lands, as they lay on his map.

From a kingdom that bullies, and hectors, and swears, We send up to heaven our wishes and prayers That we, disunited, may freemen be still, And Britain go on--to be damned if she will.[382]

The colonial slipped easily from Freneau and left him wholly American. And with the colonial psychology there slipped from him also the useless impedimenta of old-world social and political philosophies. How far he advanced towards the democratic conception of society, during those first rebellious years, is not clear; but he had set his foot on a path that must conduct him far if he did not turn back. And it is certain that he never turned back. His declaration of independence from King George was the first of many such declarations of independence--for himself and his fellow Americans. Thereafter his serious business was the work of stripping from the colonial every loyalty which still bound him to England. He supplemented the work of Paine in teaching men whose fathers were English that they were of another nation; that they could no longer remain both English and American, but must make choice between the two allegiances. Year after year he stirred the troubled waters, arousing the spirit of nationalism by attacking everything pro-British. His attacks on the English generals, the Tories, the royalist printers, were but means to the great end of uprooting the traditional dependence on England and quickening the new national psychology.

The second stimulus to Freneau’s revolutionary ardor came from the French uprising. Later in the summer of 1775 he had quitted New York and sailed for the West Indies. He spent two years on the Island of Santa Cruz, then and later engaging in sea voyages about the islands and along the American coast. They were creative years, when removed equally from the distractions of war and the utilitarianism of America, he was free to cultivate the romantic strain of poetry that was strong in him. Then followed unhappier days. A period of stagnation had come to him during the years of post-war reaction; and if fresh fuel had not been brought from overseas to kindle anew his social enthusiasms, it is likely that he would have drifted into a stale and unprofitable old age. The spirit of romantic poetry was deadened by an unsympathetic environment, but with the democratic hope rising in France came a fresh call to arms. He discovered a larger and nobler interpretation of his republican creed, that was to transform it into French Jacobinism and arm it for a new leveling crusade. If he could not be a poet to America he would enlist in the army of democracy. Not only must the new government be made French-democratic instead of English-Whig, but all distinctions of rank must be swept away, together with every tyrannical dogma of church and state. In short there must be a social house-cleaning, the limits of which were to be determined only by reason and the common democratic good. So Freneau enthusiastically joined with Paine and Jefferson in the partisan labor of spreading the new faith.

His literary activity during this second period was remarkable. Songs and odes and satires came from his ready pen in unending stream, eager, cutting, vibrant with feeling. It requires an intimate knowledge of the times to make out the identity of every figure at which he shoots his arrows, but it needs no very intimate knowledge to measure the intensity of his partisanship. The democratic hopes and fears of those vibrant days find reflection in many an acrid verse. He was at one with Jefferson in his concern at the monarchical reaction.

In ten short years, of freedom weary grown The State, Republic, sickens for a throne.

The man who attached to the pen name of Peter Slender the letters O. S. M.--One of the Swinish Multitude--would not fail to take the part of the private soldier neglected by the state:

Sold are those arms which once on Britons blazed, When, flushed with conquest, to the charge they came; That power repelled, and Freedom’s fabrick raised, She leaves her soldier--famine and a name![383]

Nor would he fail to capitalize the aristocratic contempt of the Federalists for that same swinish multitude.

Lodge where you must, drink small-beer where you can, But eat no roast pig, if no Federal man....

Your mouth was made for rye or barley bread; What claims have you to halls of state, Whose business is to stand and wait, Subservient to command? What right have you to white-bread, superfine, Who were by nature destin’d for “a swine”-- As said good Edmund Burke, The drudge of Britain’s dirty work, Whose mighty pamphlets rous’d the royal band![384]

During the tumultuous year of ’93 Freneau issued a series of Probationary Odes by Jonathan Pindar, Esq., which reflect sharply the partisan passions aroused by the French Revolution. They were lampoons directed at members of government who were in the democratic black-book, chiefly John Adams, Knox, and Hamilton. The introductory poem was addressed To all the Great Folks in a Lump; the second, To Atlas, was an attack on Hamilton; the third, To A Select Body of Great Men, was a lampoon of the Senate; and the fourth, To a Would Be Great Man, was addressed to Freneau’s particular bête noire, John Adams. This last, apropos of Davila, will serve to show the popular reception which that unfortunate work received.

Daddy Vice, Daddy Vice, One may see in a trice The drift of your fine publication. As sure as a gun The thing was just done To secure you a +PRETTY HIGH+ station.

When you tell us of kings And such pretty things Good mercy! how brilliant your page is! So bright is each line I vow you’ll shine Like--a glow worm to all future ages.

On Davila’s page Your discourses so sage Democratical numskulls bepuzzle, With arguments tough As white leather or buff, The republican Bull Dogs to muzzle.

’Tis labor in vain, Your senses to strain, Our brains any longer to muddle; Like Colossus you stride O’er our noddles so wide We look up like frogs in a puddle.

If Freneau’s hatred of the men who opposed the democratic movement was immeasurable, his enthusiasm for the new age of reason that he believed was rising was as boundless. His pages during those years of Jacobin radicalism are dotted thick with odes to liberty and addresses to republicans; probably more fully than any other pages they reflect the spirit that in England and America was forming Tom Paine clubs, and projecting innumerable programs of social reform. A new social conscience was stirring in Freneau, broadening immensely the horizon of his thought; and if he counted rather too confidently on the appeal to reason to bring the golden age, he proved himself thereby a true child of his generation. In such lines as these one discovers the spirit that moved Godwin to write Political Justice.

How can we call those systems just Which bid the few, the proud, the first, Possess all earthly good; While millions robbed of all that’s dear In silence shed the ceaseless tear, And leaches suck their blood....

Let laws revive, by heaven designed, To tame the tiger in the mind And drive from human hearts That love of wealth, that love of sway, Which leads the world too much astray, Which points envenomed darts:

And men will rise from what they are; Sublimer, and superior, far, Than Solon guessed, or Plato saw; All will be just, all will be good-- That harmony, “not understood,” Will reign the general law.

For, in our race, deranged, bereft, The parting god some vestige left Of worth before possessed; Which full, which fair, which perfect shone, When love and peace, in concord sown, Ruled, and inspired each breast.[385]

In quite another vein, that reveals Freneau’s unusual mastery of colloquial prose, is the following passage, impersonating Robert Slender, the country philosopher.

Mr. Editor,

Having heard that there was a tavern at about the distance of a mile or so from my favorite country spot, where now and then a few neighbors meet to spit, smoke segars, drink apple whiskey, cider or cider-royal, and read the news--a few evenings ago, I put on my best coat, combed out my wig, put my spectacles in my pocket, and a quarter dollar--This I thought was right; for although Mrs. Slender told me eleven-pence was enough, says I, I’ll e’en take the quarter dollar, for a man always feels himself of more consequence when he has got good money in his pocket--so out I walks with a good stout stick in my hand, which I always make a point to carry with me, lest the dogs should make rather freer with my legs than I could wish. But I had not gone more than half the way, when, by making a false step, I splash’d my stocking from the knee to the ancle. Odds my heart, said I, see what a hand I have made of my stocking; I’ll be bail, added I, I’ll hear of this in both sides of my head--but it can’t now be helped--this, and a thousand worse accidents, which daily happen, are all occasioned by public neglect, and the misapplication of the public’s money--Had I, said I, (talking to myself all the while) the disposal of but half the income of the United States, I could at least so order matters, that a man might walk to his next neighbor’s without splashing his stockings or being in danger of breaking his legs in ruts, holes, gutts, and gullies. I do not know, says I to myself, as I moralized on my splash’d stocking, but money might with more profit be laid out in repairing the roads, than in marine establishments, supporting a standing army, useless embassies, exorbitant salaries, given to many flashy fellows that are no honor to us, or to themselves, and chartering whole ships to carry a single man to another nation--Odds my life, continued I, what a number of difficulties a man labors under, who has never read further than Lilly’s grammar, and has but a poor brain--had I been favored with a good education, I could no doubt readily see the great usefulness of all these measures of government, that now appear to me so unaccountable--I could then, said I, still talking to myself, see the reason why the old patriots, whose blood flowed so freely in purchasing our independence, are cast aside, like a broken pitcher, (as the Scripture says) and why the old tories and active refugees are advanced to places of power, honor and trust.[386]

In another writer so whimsical a note would have no other purpose than to fill a Spectator paper. But the garrulous Robert Slender is Freneau in quieter vein, pursuing his old purpose. As a social philosopher his opinions are oddly like those of Tom Paine. In commenting on the government’s use of the people’s money he was seeking to awaken interest in the social possibilities of government: that government would better serve the res publica through internal improvements, than by creating armies and navies and providing posts and pensions for great men. This was a fashion of thought which Paine had done much to spread, and in the midst of a pompous Federalism, when gentlemen professed to believe that government could acquire reverence in the people’s eyes only by being hedged about with ceremonial, Robert Slender’s cogitations were very much to the point. If government were truly democratized, if it concerned itself with realities, serving the people in the homely affairs and common needs of everyday life, there would be no need of aristocratic ceremonial. Like Paine, Freneau was an idealist, with his head full of ideas which to practical men were only silly French notions; and yet the idealist, in this matter of the res publica, was the true realist.

For all his Jacobinism Freneau might have been spared some of the odium that gathered about his head if he had not turned partisan journalist and put himself in the thick of the fight. In the eighteenth century the newspaper editor had not yet wholly risen from the rank of mechanic; he was still a master-printer, with hands much too ink-stained to pass himself off as a gentleman, and with financial resources too limited to be intellectually independent. If his paper were largely literary he made no powerful enemies, but let him enter politics or seek to mold public opinion on important matters, and he was likely to meet the fate of John Mein, outspoken editor of the Boston Chronicle, who was destroyed for exposing the weakness of the merchants’ non-importation policy.[387] Freneau had had considerable experience in newspaper work at times when his sea life had grown irksome, but he took no active part in politics until the fall of 1791, when he set up the National Gazette in Philadelphia, and began that tumultuous career lasting two years which brought so much abuse upon him.

The detailed story of his connection with the Gazette is given in an admirable study,[388] and need not be recounted further than to bring into relief the bare essentials. Soon after the formation of the new government Hamilton had provided himself with a newspaper, The United States Gazette, that was an effective advocate of all Hamiltonian policies. The editor, John Fenno, seems to have been a vigorous fellow, into whose hands Hamilton threw much of the public printing, and whose debts he paid when they became pressing. Alarmed at the influence wielded by the newspaper, Jefferson and Madison approached Freneau, who had been contemplating a new venture, with the suggestion that he set up a rival democratic paper. To encourage him Jefferson gave Freneau a small post as translator in the State Department, worth $250 a year. The National Gazette was thereupon established, and for two years a war between the hostile papers went on fiercely. If the United States Gazette lauded the virtues of the English government, extolled the wisdom of Hamilton and abhorred all Jacobins, the National Gazette retorted in kind, attacking the Secretary of the Treasury and applauding the growing Jacobite spirit that struck at every form of aristocracy. It became the common clearing house for democratic propaganda, and Freneau’s influence spread so widely that he may justly be regarded as “the leading editor in America” during those critical years.

It is quite evident today that “the chief business of the Gazette was to destroy Hamilton.” Probably more largely than any other writer, Freneau awakened a popular distrust of Federalist men and measures, which a few years later was to break the party. Jefferson’s often-quoted remark, “His paper has saved our Constitution which was fast galloping into monarchy, and has been checked by no one means so powerfully as by that paper,” is somewhat extravagant; nevertheless the universal detestation in which Freneau was held by all Federalists is sufficient testimony to his influence. Washington was greatly ruffled and wanted to remove him from his petty post in the State Department, but Jefferson would not consent. It seems that Washington felt no ill-will toward John Fenno, who drew six times the sum from the public treasury that Freneau received. But Fenno was no democrat, “hostile to garter, ribbon, crown, and star;” Fenno was no unsparing critic who would attack even Washington if he lent himself to undemocratic ends; whereas Freneau was plain-spoken, and no gentleman likes plain speaking from subordinates.

All this was a hundred years ago and more. The inditers of those partisan scurrilities, Democrat and Federalist alike, have long since ceased their bickerings. Words which once stung like a whiplash have become only echoes of dead passions. As the struggles of those tumultuous years fall into truer perspective, the figure of Philip Freneau takes on larger and nobler proportions. The cloud of calumny that long obscured his virtues is dissipating, and we discover in him an eager child of an age of democratic aspiration, the friend and advocate of social justice. Like Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, he was a notable American, who gave himself unselfishly to the work of furthering the common well-being. “It was a long and stormy life,” says Forman, “and it was lived for human rights and human freedom”--

Still on the people’s, still on Freedom’s side; Still in the cause of man severely true.

After all, the poet in Freneau was deeper than the partisan. Despite his conviction that a sordid America cared nothing for poetry--that “an age employed in edging steel can no poetic raptures feel”--his love of beauty was never killed nor the spring of poetic creation dried up. In moments of release from cares he found solace in the poetry that welled up from the unembittered depths of a rich and generous nature. The portrait drawn by Professor Tyler depicts one side of Freneau; the following lines, from a very late poem, reveal another:

The world has wrangled half an age, And we again in war engage, While this sweet, sequestr’d rill Murmurs through the valley still....

But, with all your quiet flow, Do you not some quarrels know! Lately, angry, how you ran! All at war--and much like man.

When the shower of waters fell, How you raged, and what a swell! All your banks you overflow’d, Scarcely knew your own abode!

How you battled with the rock! Gave my willows such a shock As to menace, by its fall, Underwood and bushes, all:

Now you are again at peace: Time will come when that will cease; Such the human passions are; --You again will war declare.

Emblem, thou, of restless man; What a sketch of nature’s plan! Now at peace, and now at war, Now you murmur, now you roar;

Muddy now, and limpid next, Now with icy shackles vext-- What a likeness here we find! What a picture of mankind![389]

This was the valedictory of Philip Freneau. His life was bitter and turbulent, cast in a bitter and turbulent age; yet he found some grains of comfort in the contemplation of nature and the exercise of the poet’s craft. Through it all his heart remained clean and his hands unstained. If he was not a great poet whom all the critics praise, he loved beauty and served it in a careless world among an indifferent people, and it ill becomes America to forget his contribution or deny him some portion of the honor that has fallen generously to others no more deserving.

2. Joel Barlow • Jacobin

That he should have long associated with the Hartford Wits and collaborated with them in defense of Connecticut Federalism must have seemed to Joel Barlow in after years the choicest bit of comedy in his varied career. His subsequent adventures led him far from the strait path of Yale orthodoxy. In those ripe later years life had pretty well emptied him of all dogmatisms and taught him the virtue of catholic sympathies. He had become acquainted with diverse philosophies and had observed the ways of alien societies, and from such contacts the horizons of his mind had broadened and his character mellowed. It was a long road that he traveled from New Haven to his Washington salon. Born a Connecticut Yankee, he accepted in his youth all the Connecticut conventions, and graduated from Yale with as complete a stock of respectable opinions as his classmate Noah Webster. An energetic capable fellow, he wanted to get on in life. He wanted to be rich and famous, and he tried many roads that promised to lead to that desirable goal--law, politics, journalism, poetry, psalmody, speculation. Needing a job he volunteered soon after graduation as chaplain in the army. He had not prepared for the ministry and while preaching somewhat indifferently to ragged soldiers he dreamed of poetic fame, and devoted more time to his couplets than to pious meditation. His abilities discovering no more profitable field for exercise than writing verse, he was pretty much at a stand till chance sent him abroad as agent for one of the speculative land-companies that were springing up like mushrooms in post-war America. There he found his opportunity. In France, where he established his headquarters, he entered a world of thought vastly different from that of prim little Hartford. It was an extraordinarily stimulating experience into which he threw himself with zest. Seventeen years, from 1788 to 1805, he spent abroad on that first visit, and those years changed the provincial Yankee into one of the most cosmopolitan Americans of his generation. From a member of the Hartford Wits, ardent in defense of the traditional Connecticut order, he had become a citizen of the world, outspoken in defense of the rights of man.

It was this later Barlow, completely new-outfitted by French romantic tailors, that after years remember and that early friends could not forgive. In adopting the Jacobin mode and setting himself to the serious business of political thinking, he invited the caustic criticism of his former associates; yet nothing in his life was more creditable or marks him more definitely as an open-minded, intelligent man. He was as receptive to new ideas as Timothy Dwight was impervious. He plunged boldly into the maelstrom of speculation then boiling in Europe. He moved in the society of the intellectuals, inquired into the latest political and social theories, turned humanitarian, reëxamined his Calvinistic theology in the light of current deism, and became one of the free democratic thinkers swarming in every European capital. He was equally at home in London and Paris, passing long periods of time in both cities. An active member of the Constitutional Society of London, he was intimate with Joseph Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Tom Paine, sympathized with every liberal movement, and offered his pen to the cause of a freer England. His Advice to the Privileged Orders was eulogized by Fox on the floor of Commons, and the Pitt ministry was moved to suppress the work and proscribe the author. Thereupon Barlow went into hiding. There seems to have been considerable provocation for the government’s action. “It is safe to say,” remarks his biographer, “that no political work of the day created so wide an interest or was so extensively read.” With Paine and Barlow both loose in England there was need of the government looking to its fences.

In 1793 he was made a citizen of France. His French career was not unlike Paine’s, whom he resembled in many ways. He had much of the latter’s genius for publicity and skill in propaganda, and his career was a great stimulus to radicals at home. He was not too busy to serve his country in a diplomatic way. He risked his life to aid American prisoners in Africa and by his skill and address eventually freed them--an achievement that few men could have gone through with successfully. In the meantime he had not neglected his private affairs. He made a fortune in the French funds, which he increased by able merchandising. He had come to his goal by distant roads, and on his return to America in 1805 he took up his abode at Washington, creating a delightful countryseat on the outskirts of the raw little capital where he maintained a salon for American liberals. He seems to have felt no inclinations towards Connecticut; the old ties were broken now for good, the French Jacobin could not fit into the rigid grooves of Hartford Federalism. Six years later he was impressed a second time into the diplomatic service, was sent to France on a difficult mission, followed Napoleon, then on the Russian campaign, was caught in the break-up of the grand army, suffered exposure, contracted pneumonia, and died in a village near Cracow in Poland--a fate which many honest Federalists regarded as amply merited by his vicious principles.

The later reputation of Barlow has been far less than his services warranted or his solid merits deserved. His admirable prose writings have been forgotten and the Columbiad returns always to plague him. The common detraction of all Jacobins and democrats fell heavily on so conspicuous a head. “It is simply impossible,” says his biographer, “for the historian of Federal proclivities and environment to do justice to the great leaders of Republicanism in America.” Barlow was forced to pay a heavy price for his intellectual independence. Detraction was always lying in wait for him. John Adams, who had suffered many a sharp thrust from him, wrote to Washington, “Tom Paine is not a more worthless fellow.” Of the Yale dislike Barlow was well aware, for he once confessed that he would have presented the school with some needed chemical apparatus but he “supposed that, coming from him, the college authorities would make a bonfire of them in the college yard.”[390] Yet it is hard for a later generation to discover wherein lay the viciousness of his life or principles. A warm-hearted humanitarian, he was concerned always for the common well-being. The two major passions of his life were freedom and education. During the last years at Washington he was ardently promoting a plan for a great national university at the seat of government, and had he lived ten years longer his wide influence would probably have accomplished it. His sins would seem to have been no other than an open break with the Calvinism and Federalism of the Connecticut oligarchy--somewhat slender grounds on which to pillory him as an infidel and a scalawag.

The social foundation of Barlow’s political philosophy is lucidly presented in the Advice to the Privileged Orders, a work that deserves a place beside Paine’s Rights of Man as a great document of the times. It does too much credit to American letters to be suffered to lie buried with a dead partisanship. It is warm with the humanitarian enthusiasm that had come down as a rich heritage from the Physiocratic school of social thinkers. Two suggestive ideas lie at the base of his speculations: the doctrine of the res publica, and the doctrine of social responsibility for individual well-being. The former, given wide currency by the Rights of Man, resulted from the imposition of social conscience on abstract political theory, out of which was derived a new conception of the duties and functions of the political state--the conception that the state must be the responsible agent of society as a whole rather than the tool of a class, and that its true concern is the public thing, safeguarding the social heritage as a common asset held in trust for succeeding generations; the latter resulted from the inquiry into the relations of the political state to the individual citizen--its responsibility as the social agent, for the social waste of wrecked lives and thwarted happiness, a waste that a rational social order would greatly lessen if not eradicate. Barlow flatly denied that the primary function of the state is the protection of property interests; its true end lies in securing justice. But justice without equal opportunity is a mockery; and equal opportunity is impossible unless the individual citizen shall be equipped to live on equal terms with his fellows. Hence the fine flower of political justice is discovered in education; in that generous provision for the young and the weak that shall equip them to become free members of the commonwealth. Like Paine’s Agrarian Justice, the Advice to the Privileged Orders is an extraordinarily modern work, far more comprehensible today than when it was written. That the “State has no right to punish a man, to whom it has given no previous instruction,” and that “She ought not only to instruct him in the artificial laws by which property is secured, but in the artificial industry by which it is obtained,” are doctrines that seem far less preposterous to us than they seemed to Timothy Dwight. The president of Yale College was greatly troubled over Calvinistic sin; Joel Barlow was greatly troubled over social injustice; in that difference is measured the distance the latter had traveled in company with the French Jacobins.

The root of his political thinking is the doctrine of equalitarianism. “Only admit,” he says, “the original, unalterable truth, that all men are equal in their rights, and the foundation of everything is laid.” Accepting the romantic doctrine that human nature is excellent in its plastic state, and capable of infinite development, he is untroubled by the fact of human selfishness. He sees no bogey in democracy to frighten timid souls, no specter of anarchy in the rule of the people.

They say mankind are wicked and rapacious, and “it must be that offences will come.” This reason applies to individuals; but not to nations deliberately speaking a national voice. I hope I shall not be understood to mean, that the nature of man is totally changed by living in a free republic. I allow that it is still interested men and passionate men, that direct the affairs of the world. But in national assemblies, passion is lost in deliberation, and interest balances interest; till the good of the whole community combines the general will.

If government be founded on the vices of mankind, its business is to restrain those vices in all, rather than to foster them in a few.[391]

It was his sensitive social conscience that brought him to revolt against all class government. He had seen the naked sordidness of such governments in Europe, and he watched with concern the beginnings of like government in America. The significance of the Hamiltonian program could not escape so shrewd an observer as Barlow; he was too much a realist to take political professions at face value. “I see,” he wrote, “immense fortunes made by our funding legislators out of the public funds which they funded for themselves.” Politics for profit was a sorry spectacle to him, and he occupied his mind much with the problem of erecting the machinery of an adequate democratic state that should be faithful to its stewardship as agent of the whole.

It was this difficult problem with which he dealt in his Letter to the National Convention of France. In this suggestive work two ideas determined his thinking: the doctrine of the sovereignty of the majority will, and the doctrine of government as a social agent. In both he returned to the position of Roger Williams a hundred and fifty years before. The sovereignty of the majority will he conceives to be continuous and immediately effective; it cannot be held in check by a rigid constitutionalism, for as Paine had pointed out, such constitutionalism is no other than government from the grave. He proposed therefore, that the fundamental law be amendable by legislative enactment, one legislative body proposing and the next determining, under full publicity. As a guarantee that such action should express the popular will, that love of power on the part of the agent should not defeat the purpose of society, he held that there must be annual elections. Representatives should be periodically excluded from candidacy, and other representatives fresh from the people sent up, for “power always was and always must be a dangerous thing.” The principle of recall he regarded as indispensable in a democratic government, for it “will tend to maintain a proper relation between the representatives and the people, and a due dependence of the former upon the latter. Besides, when a man has lost the confidence of his fellow citizens ... he is no longer their representative; and when he ceases to be their’s, he cannot in any sense be the representative of the nation.” The fundamental principle of state-craft Barlow states thus: “Every individual ought to be rendered as independent of every other individual as possible; and at the same time as dependent as possible on the whole community.” The familiar romantic doctrine of the diminished state is implicit in all his reasoning. Like Paine he would do away utterly with the old mystery of government under which ambitious men cloak their will to power; “for whatever there is in the art of government, whether legislative or executive, above the capacities of the ordinary class of what are called well-informed men, is superfluous and destructive and ought to be laid aside.”

A thoroughgoing radical in economics and politics, Barlow was no innovator in polite literature. He had pulled himself out of many a Connecticut provincialism, but he stuck fast in the bog of provincial poetry. It has long been the fashion to make merry over The Columbiad, and there is only too patent a reason for it. To criticize it is a work of supererogation. The appeal of “the grand style” seems to have been too much for him. Some explanation doubtless is to be found in the fact that he was working over an earlier poem done in the days of an ebullient patriotism. It was a mistake to return to it, for the heroic note in the vein of a political pamphleteer must play havoc with it. What he now attempted, in the light of his long European experience, was to embody in the narrative suitable political ideas, transforming The Vision of Columbus into an epic glorifying the great republican experiment. His purpose is set forth in the preface.

[The] real object of the poem is to inculcate the love of national liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence and war; to show that on the basis of republican principle all good morals, as well as good government and hopes of permanent peace, must be founded; and to convince the student in political science, that the theoretical question of the future advancement of human society, till states as well as individuals arrive at universal civilization, is held in dispute and still unsettled only because we have had too little experience of organized liberty in the government of nations, to have well considered its effects.

The humanitarian note is strong. War, slavery, monarchy, injustice, the tyranny resulting from political inequality, and a host of other evils, social and political, are assailed in vigorous declamation. It may not be good poetry but the sentiments are those of an enlightened and generous man. The conclusion rises to a vision of a golden age of international commerce and universal peace, when “earth, garden’d all, a tenfold burden brings,” and the sundered nations shall draw together, and--

... cloth’d majestic in the robes of state, Moved by one voice, in general congress meet The legates of all empires.

In that future time science will have learned “with her own glance to ken the total God,” and philosophy will “expand the selfish to the social flame.” Of the political ideas incorporated in the massive work some suggestion may be got from the following lines:

Ah, would you not be slaves, with lords and kings, Then be not Masters; there the danger springs. The whole crude system that torments this earth, Of rank, privation, privilege of birth, False honor, fraud, corruption, civil jars, The rage of conquest and the curse of wars, Pandora’s total shower, all ills combined That erst o’erwhelmed and still distress mankind, Boxt up secure in your deliberate hand, Wait your behest to fix or fly this land.

Equality of right is nature’s plan; And following nature is the march of man. Whene’er he deviates in the least degree, When, free himself, he would be more than free, The baseless column, rear’d to bear his trust, Falls as he mounts and whelms him in the dust....

Too much of Europe, here transplanted o’er, Nursed feudal feelings on your tented shore, Brought sable sires from Afric, call’d it gain, And urged your sires to forge the fatal chain.... Restore their souls to men, give earth repose, And save your sons from slavery, wars and woes.

Based on its rock of right your empire lies, On walls of wisdom let the fabric rise; Preserve your principles, their force unfold, Let nations prove them and let kings behold. +Equality+, your first firm-grounded stand; Then +FREE ELECTION+; then your +FEDERAL BAND+: This holy Triad should forever shine The great compendium of all rights divine, Creed of all schools, whence youths by millions draw Their themes of right, their decalogues of law; Till men shall wonder (in these codes inured) How wars were made, how tyrants were endured.[392]

Diverse politics incline to diverse literary judgments, and the critics are not yet done with Joel Barlow. If he was not a great poet or a great political thinker, he was at least capable, open-minded, generous, with a sensitive social conscience--certainly the most stimulating and original of the literary group that foregathered in Hartford. Injustice has long been done him by overlooking his picturesque career, and his services to America, and restricting his introduction to posterity to a few lines from Hasty Pudding. To make a mush of so honest a thinker, to ignore his very considerable contributions to the cause of democracy, is to impose too heavy a penalty for his defection from Connecticut respectability. He suffered quite enough in his lifetime. In the thick of his revolutionary struggles abroad his wife begged him “to go home and be respectable”; but it was not in the ardent nature of Joel Barlow to listen to such counsel of timidity. He was in too deep to go back, and so while Timothy Dwight was gathering laurels from every bush in Connecticut, this apostle of humanitarianism, this apostate from Calvinistic Federalism, was content to remain a byword and a shaking of the head in the villages of his native commonwealth. For all which, perhaps, the Washington salon and the intimate association with Jefferson may have served as recompense. Better society could not be found even in Hartford.

3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge • Free-Lance Democrat

In taking leave of this disturbant time when new social theories were bringing confusion to weak understandings, one cannot do better than to dip into the wittiest and most readable sketch produced by that vigorous generation, as well as one of the sanest. Modern Chivalry was the single noteworthy contribution to American letters by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a western Pennsylvanian of Scotch birth, and a graduate of Princeton in the class with Freneau and Madison. With the former he had practised his couplets, collaborating in writing the commencement poem, The Rising Glory of America. After leaving college he tried his hand at the usual things open to young graduates, was tutor in the college, taught in an academy, studied divinity, served as chaplain in the Revolutionary army, and later read law. He removed eventually to the frontier town of Pittsburgh, was active in Republican politics, became an ardent pro-French sympathizer, and finally went upon the supreme bench of Pennsylvania. He wrote for his own amusement and tried his hand at various kinds of polite literature, producing a masque, a poetic drama on Bunker Hill, prose essays, some sermons, and turned at last to satire. For this he was admirably equipped; he possessed a keen, well-balanced mind, a prose style delightfully colloquial and a wit pleasantly caustic.

Brackenridge is a refreshing person to come upon after one is satiated with the heroic. A free-lance critic, independent in thought and act, he was no vociferous party or class advocate given to enlisting God on his side. Federalist and Republican alike might lose their heads and indulge in unseemly clamor, but Brackenridge with good Scotch judgment refused to howl with the pack. A stout and unrepentant democrat, he was no visionary to shut his eyes to unpleasant facts lest they disturb his faith. As he considered the turbulent confusions of an America in rough process of democratization, he saw the evils as clearly as the hope, and it amused him to satirize those evils after the manner of Don Quixote. Modern Chivalry has proved somewhat of a puzzle to later critics who have not cleared their minds of the old cobwebs of Federalist criticism. Thus a literary historian has suggested that it is “a half-hidden satire on democracy”[393] and he inclines to number it among the literary ram’s horns that were blown against the walls of the democratic Jericho. But such an interpretation certainly misses the point. Brackenridge had become a thorough Westerner with a fresh point of view. Among the stump fields of his Pennsylvania circuit he was equally removed from the cynicism of Hamilton and the romanticism of Barlow. He saw all about him a rough and tumble democracy, living a vigorous and capable if not lovely life. As a democrat he accepted the fact of political equality and approved of it; the thing was there and needed no justification or defense. Some of its ways were foolish, many of its purposes were shortsighted; it amused him therefore to sharpen his pen against certain of its absurdities and essay the remedial effects of unembittered laughter. He was a realist concerned with realities.

Modern Chivalry is our first backcountry book. It is redolent of stump-lands and their rude leveling ways, and for years it was immensely popular along the western frontier. It is a satire aimed primarily at backwoods shortcomings, but with an eye that kept turning towards the older settlements to scrutinize their equal shortcomings. Its main theme is concerned with certain weaknesses of popular sovereignty already unpleasantly evident as a result of the extension of suffrage; and in particular with the unseemly office-hunting zeal of coonskin candidates. The preposterous spectacle of a pushing fellow with no qualifications setting himself up for high office was to become more frequent with the later rise of Jacksonian democracy; but already there was abundant justification for the satire of Brackenridge. The records of the time are loud in criticism of the demagoguery that resulted from the sudden shift of leadership in consequence of the social upheaval following the Revolutionary War. The old leaders of the aristocratic tradition had fled or had fallen into disfavor, and new men, too often of small capacity and less breeding, had pushed into the seats of authority. With the triumph of Jefferson this transfer of power went forward briskly to the scandal of all aristocrats. The lust of office spread like the plague, and demagogues caught the popular ear, none too nice to distinguish between sense and fustian. Irving brushed against the democratic weakness in his brief venture into politics, and vented his spleen in Rip Van Winkle. It is this which Brackenridge deals with primarily in Modern Chivalry, the first part of which was published in 1792 and the second in 1805. The general leveling of offices, he pointed out, was not democracy, but the abuse and ruin of democracy. America was engaged in a great and noble experiment; the success of that experiment depended upon an honest and intelligent electorate; it must not be brought to failure by demagogues through the incapacity of the voter.

Brackenridge had come in later years to be a pacifist. He had had his fill of revolutions and armed revolts. As a principal arbitrator during the tumult of the Whisky Insurrection, he had come to fear popular lawlessness; and as a friend of the French Revolution he was concerned at the methods of the Jacobin leaders. Commenting on the Whisky Insurrection he said in later years:

I saw before me anarchy, a shock to the government, a revolution impregnated with the Jacobin principles of France.... Let no man suppose I coveted a revolution; I had seen the evils of one already in the American; and I had read the evils of another, the French. My imagination presented the evils of the last strongly to my view, and brought them so close to a possible experience at home, that during the whole period of the insurrection, I could scarcely bear to cast my eye on a paragraph of French news.[394]

A reasonable and intelligent democracy, holding steadily to the purpose of the common good, was his cherished ideal. He was not a political philosopher interested in general principles. His purpose was to satirize manners, not to speculate on causes; and in the days of triumphant republicanism the most conspicuous target was offered by the tousled head of the demagogue, “the courtier of democracy.” In the preface to the 1846 edition, the editor thus summarizes the political views of Brackenridge:

An enlightened democracy was looked upon by him as the true nobility. He considered the true democrat as the true gentleman, who ought to feel a stain on his fair reputation, “as a wound.” He maintained “that democracy is not in its nature coarse, and vulgar, or destitute of high integrity and honor.” The aim and end of his writings was to raise the standard of democracy, and to elevate “the noble of nature” to the same level with any other noble, in those qualities which constitute true nobility. The noble of nature, in his opinion, ought not to yield to the noble of aristocracy or monarchy, in strict integrity, in liberal and benevolent feelings, in propriety of manners and general intelligence.

The work is a string of adventures, interspersed with miscellaneous discussion, of Captain John Farrago--who is evidently Brackenridge himself--and his bog-trotting servant Teague O’Regan. The Captain is an intelligent person, well read in the literature of the times, and “a good deal disposed to subscribe to the elementary principles” of Paine’s Rights of Man. He can summarize neatly the arguments on both sides of the political questions of the day, but he retains the open mind and cautious judgment of the independent. He is a free-lance critic, democratic in sympathies but unsparing in exposure of absurdity. His hits fall right and left, on the country yokel, the city speculator, members of Congress, the institution of slavery. He is greatly concerned to preserve his servant from the temptations of ambition which assail him in the backwoods as well as in Philadelphia. The career of Teague O’Regan is a broad satire on the mounting ambition of old-world peasants to push their way up. That the underling should rise in a democratic country was well; but that he should be in unseemly haste to scramble into positions beyond his capacities, that in pushing his private fortunes he should bring ridicule upon the democratic experiment, was not well. Teague O’Regan’s desire to scramble discovered quite too fertile a field for his own or the country’s good. He is nearly sent to Congress by a backwoods constituency, listens to other seductive appeals, and in the end is sent by President Washington to the West as a revenue officer, where he falls into the untender hands of the whisky rioters, and finds his Irish beauty marred by a coat of tar and feathers.

It is in his burlesque of electorate methods that Brackenridge hits most sharply at the current tendencies of republicanism. The ways of the backwoods he caricatures by describing a contest between an honest deacon and an ignorant Scotch-Irishman, which he came upon in his peregrinations.

When they looked upon the one, they felt an inclination to promote him. But when, again, on the other hand, they saw two kegs which they knew to be replenished with a very cheering liquor, they seemed to be inclined in favor of the other. The candidates were called upon to address the people, and the grave person mounted the stump of a tree, many of them standing round, as the place was a new clearing. His harangue was listened to by some of the older and more sedate, and one man, hard of hearing, seemed to make great effort to catch the sounds. As soon as the man of the two kegs took a stump, he was surrounded by an eager crowd.--“Frinds,” said he, in the native Scotch-Irish, “I’m a good dimicrat, and hates the Brattish--I’m an elder of the meetin’, forby, and has been overseer of the roads for three years:--An’ ye all know, that my mammy was kilt o’ the Ingens--now all ye that’s in my favor, come forit an’ drenk.” Appetite, or rather thirst, prevailed, and the voters gave their votes to the man with the two kegs.[395]

If whisky decided elections in the backcountry, business controlled them in the city. The following is almost modern in its caricature:

The candidates were all remarkably pot-bellied; and waddled in their gait. The captain inquiring what were the pretensions of these men to be elected; he was told, that they had all stock in the funds, and lived in brick buildings; and some of them entertained fifty people at a time, and ate and drank abundantly; and living an easy life, and pampering their appetites, they had swollen to this size.

“It is a strange thing,” said the captain, “that in the country, in my route, they would elect no one but a weaver or a whisky-distiller; and here none but fat squabs, that guzzle wine, and smoke segars.”... “No, faith” (said his friend), “there is na danger of Teague here, unless he had his scores o’ shares in the bank, and was in league with the brokers, and had a brick house at his hurdies, or a ship or twa on the stocks ... all is now lost in substantial interest, and the funds command everything.”[396]

That there might be no mistake as to the meaning of his satire Brackenridge set down at the end an explicit statement of his purpose.

As already hinted by some things put into the mouth of the captain, I could make it a principal matter to form the heart of a republican government. And in order to this, keep out all that nourishes ambition, the poison of public virtue.... In the American republics, we retain yet a great deal of the spirit of monarchy. The people are not aware of the phraseology itself, in some instances.... The first lesson I would give to a son of mine would be to have nothing to do with public business, but as a duty to his country. To consider service in civil life, no more to be desired than service in the military.... Those who say to them, vox populi vox dei, offer up an incense to flattery, as impious as the worshippers of the Caesars. They should be warned to beware of flatterers, whose object is not to serve them, but themselves. The demagogue in a democracy, and the courtier in a monarchy, are identical. They are the same, plying the same arts in different situations.... I shall have accomplished something by this book, if it shall keep some honest man from lessening his respectability by pushing himself into public trusts for which he is not qualified; or when pushed into public station, if it shall contribute to keep him honest by teaching him the folly of ambition, and farther advancement.... This is in great part, the moral of this book; if it should be at all necessary to give a hint of it.

One may do a worse service to democracy than to point out its faults. Brackenridge was no truckler either to King George or to his neighbors. Living in the midst of a coonskin democracy, he refused to believe that there was any particular virtue in coonskin. It is not the cap but what is under it that signifies. He was a vigorous individualist, a confirmed democrat, a friend of all honest liberalisms, a man who honored his own counsels and went his own way. We could better spare more pretentious books from the library of our early literature than these clever satires that preserve for us some of the homely ways of a time when American institutions were still in the making.

Footnotes

[374] Quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison in Harrison Gray Otis, Vol. I, p. 107.Return to passage

[375] Travels, Vol. II, p. 458.Return to passage

[376] Number III.Return to passage

[377] Number X.Return to passage

[378] Number XI.Return to passage

[379] Number IX.Return to passage

[380] Literary History of America, p. 300.Return to passage

[381] Literary History of the American Revolution, Vol. I, p. 172.Return to passage

[382] Poems, Pattee edition, Vol. I, p. 141.Return to passage

[383] The American Soldier.Return to passage

[384] To Duncan Doolittle.Return to passage

[385] On False Systems of Government.Return to passage

[386] Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects, etc., by Robert Slender, 1799; quoted by Pattee, Introduction to Poems of Philip Freneau.Return to passage

[387] See A. M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, Chapter IV.Return to passage

[388] Forman, “The Political Activities of Philip Freneau,” in Johns Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science, Vol. XX.Return to passage

[389] The Brook of the Valley.Return to passage

[390] Purcell, Connecticut in Transition, p. 27.Return to passage

[391] Advice to the Privileged Orders, pp. 66, 70.Return to passage

[392] Book VIII.Return to passage

[393] Cairns, History of American Literature, p. 147.Return to passage

[394] Modern Chivalry, edition of 1846, p. 170.Return to passage

[395] Ibid., p. 105.Return to passage

[396] Ibid., pp. 127-128.Return to passage

Conclusion

With the triumph of Jefferson in the great struggle of 1800, the first democratic battle had been won at the polls, but victory remained still in doubt. The new liberalism was in the saddle, but how long it would keep its seat, or whither it would drive, no one could foresee. The aristocratic eighteenth century was still in secure possession of all the vantage points of polite culture. It still held the positions of honor and emolument and dictated the ways of society. The tie-wig and smallclothes had not yet been put to rout by homespun and coonskin, and were laying plans to make good the first defeat. Polite letters were still content with the old wit ideal, still enamored of the couplet, still in love with caustic satire, still transfixing democracy with its sharp quills. The nineteenth century with its cargo of romanticisms had not yet crossed the Atlantic, and while Napoleon was strewing Europe with the wrecks of old empires, America was still dwelling in the twilight of a century that was loath to be gone.

The account in the American ledger was complex and not easily cast up, yet Jefferson might well have regarded with satisfaction the results of two hundred years of new-world experience. The drift was all in the direction he was facing. The age of theology was gone, the age of political speculation was passing, the age of constitution building was over. Disintegration had come upon every system of caste brought hither from the old world; the free economics of a decentralized society had proved a sufficient solvent to destroy the principle of monarchy and of aristocracy, and prepare the American mind for a venture in republicanism. Overseas liberalisms had flourished in the soil that proved inhospitable to overseas conservatisms; and it was these European liberalisms that provided the mold into which ran the fluid experience of America to assume substantial form. That the venture in republicanism would inure to the benefit of agrarian America--to the producers on their scattered farms--Jefferson seems never to have doubted; and the ready naturalization of the philosophy of equalitarianism in the backwoods settlements might well have seemed to justify his hopes. Nevertheless new forces were preparing that were to bring about momentous changes in nineteenth-century America. Capitalism with its banks and credit and elastic currency and its psychology of speculation, and industrialism with its technique of factory production, were already at work preparing a different pattern of life for America, a pattern wholly unlike that of the simpler agrarianism with its domestic economy, which Jefferson represented. A new romanticism of the middle class was eventually to shoulder aside the aspirations of gentleman and farmer alike, and refashion America after its own ideal. What was implied in that momentous change provides the theme for another study, and cannot be entered upon here.

Bibliography

Only the more important titles dealt with in the present study are listed hereunder, together with selected biographical and critical material. The invaluable bibliographies in the Cambridge History of American Literature, four vols., New York, 1917-22, cover most of the writers considered, and the reader is referred to them for detailed material.

I. Part I

I. English Backgrounds: For the broader European movements, see Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation (New York, 1920). For English movements, see David Masson, Life of Milton (6 vols., London, 1859-80). The important ideas of Luther will be found in An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian State (1520); The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520); A Treatise on Christian Liberty (1520). For discussion, see L. H. Waring, The Political Theories of Martin Luther (New York and London, 1910). For Calvin, see Williston Walker, John Calvin, The Organiser of Reformed Protestantism (New York and London, 1906; with bibliographical note).

II. The Transplanting of Ideas: For political history see James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston, 1921). For literary history consult the invaluable work of Moses Coit Tyler, A History of American Literature, 1607-1765 (2 vols., New York, 1878). Histories of Congregationalism will be found in Henry M. Dexter, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years as Seen in Its Literature (New York, 1880; with full bibliography); Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States (New York, 1900); also W. Walker, Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893).

III. John Cotton: Little of Cotton’s work has been reprinted. A Reply to Mr. Williams His Examination was reissued in Narragansett Club Pub., Vol. II, pp. 1-240. His most important work is The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648).

No life has been written. See Cotton Mather’s Magnalia; W. Walker’s Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901); A. Young, John Cotton’s Life and Letters. Chronicles of the First Planters, etc. (Boston, 1846).

John Winthrop: Journal ... (Hartford, 1790); as The History of New England ... edited by J. Savage (2 vols., Boston, 1825-26, 1853); edited by J. K. Hosmer (2 vols., New York, 1908).

See R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (2 vols., Boston, 1863, 1866, 1869, 1895). J. Twitchell, John Winthrop, First Governor of Massachusetts (New York, 1892).

IV. Thomas Hooker: His works have not been reprinted. The Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline ... was published in London in 1648. Contemporary notes of his Sermon before the General Court on May 31, 1638, were printed with comment by J. Hammond Trumbull, in Conn. Hist. Soc. Col., Vol. I, No. 19.

For his life, see G. L. Walker, Thomas Hooker, Preacher, Founder, Democrat (New York, 1891; with bibliography by J. H. Trumbull).

Roger Williams: The Works of Roger Williams. Edited by members of the Narragansett Club (6 vols., Providence, 1866-1874).

No satisfactory life has been written. The best is Oscar S. Straus, Roger Williams, the Pioneer of Religious Liberty (New York, 1894). See also Edmund J. Carpenter, _Roger Williams: A Study of the Life, Times and Character of a Political Pioneer_ (New York, 1909; Grafton Hist. Series).

I. Part II

I. Samuel Sewall: Diary (printed in Mass. Hist. Soc. Col., Series 5, Vols. 5-7). No life has been written.

II. Increase Mather: The extensive bibliography is confused, and a definitive list is being prepared by T. J. Holmes and G. P. Winship. Few works have been reprinted, and about the only available title is Illustrious Providences (Boston and London, 1684; London, 1687); under title of Remarkable Providences (London, 18561, 1890).

The authoritative life is by Kenneth B. Murdock, Increase Mather, The Foremost American Puritan (Harvard University Press. 1925; with bibliography). See also Williston Walker, Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901).

Cotton Mather: The bibliography is enormous, but few titles are available. The Wonders of the Invisible World (Boston, 1693) has been twice reprinted: with title, Salem Witchcraft ... and notes by S. P. Fowler (Cambridge, 1861); and with I. Mather’s Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches (Library of Old Authors, London, 1862). The Bostonian Ebenezer, Boston, 1698, was reprinted in Old South Leaflets, Boston, 1896. The Magnalia Christi Americana, London, 1702, was reissued (2 vols., Hartford and New Haven, 1820); and the same with notes by T. Robbins, and translations of foreign quotations by L. F. Robinson, and a life by S. G. Drake (Hartford, 1853). The Essays to Do Good has been reprinted ten times, the latest editions London, 1842, and Boston, 1845. The most available text is Selections from Cotton Mather, edited with introduction, by K. B. Murdock (New York, 1926; American Authors Series).

The best life is by Barrett Wendell, Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest (New York, 1891; Harvard University Press, 1925). See also A. P. Marvin, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (Boston, 1892).

III. John Wise: The Churches Quarrel Espoused ... (Boston, 1710, 1715, 1745, 1772); reissued with the Vindication, with introduction by J. S. Clark (Boston, 1860). A Vindication of the Government of the New-England Churches. Drawn from Antiquity; the Light of Nature; Holy Scripture ... (Boston, 1717, 1772); reissued with the preceding title (Boston, 1860).

No life of Wise has been written.

II. Part I

I. Colonial Backgrounds: See Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., New York, 1924).

New Stock: See John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York, 1902, 1920). F. R. Diffenderfer, The German Immigrants into Pennsylvania ... (New York, 1900). The Diary of John Harrower (Amer. Hist. Review, Vol. VI, p. 65).

The Frontier--Lubberland: The Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight (New York, 1825; Albany, 1865; Norwich, Conn., 1901).

William Byrd: Westover Manuscripts: containing the History of the Dividing Line ... A Journey to the Land of Eden ... (Petersburg, Va., 1841); reissued under title, The History of the Dividing Line (edited by T. H. Wynne; 2 vols., Richmond, 1866). Also The Writings of “Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esq.” Edited by J. S. Bassett (New York, 1901).

The Frontier--Land of Promise: Letters from an American Farmer ... (London, 1782; with note by W. P. Trent and introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn, New York, 1904). More “Letters from an American Farmer,” edited with introductions by H. L. Bourdin, R. G. Gabriel, and S. T. Williams, and issued under the title, Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (New Haven, 1925).

For the life of Crèvecœur, see Julia Post Mitchell, St. Jean de Crèvecœur (Col. Univ. Studies in English and Comp. Lit., New York, 1916).

II. Jonathan Edwards: Works (8 vols., Leeds, 1806-11). Works, edited by S. E. Dwight (10 vols., New York, 1829, 1830). Works (10 vols., Edinburgh, 1847). Numerous other editions and many reprints.

The best life is by V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1889, 1890; with bibliography). See also Woodbridge Riley, American Thought (New York, 1915).

III. Benjamin Franklin: The best edition of his works is that edited by J. Bigelow (10 vols., New York, 1889). The Autobiography was first printed complete by J. Bigelow, New York, 1874. The latest reprint is in the American Authors Series, edited with introduction by Percy H. Boynton (New York, 1926).

Of the several lives, see James Parton, Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2 vols., New York, 1864); J. B. McMaster, Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters (Boston, 1887); J. T. Morse, Benjamin Franklin (American Statesmen Series, Boston, 1889). See also W. A. Wetzel, Benjamin Franklin as an Economist (Johns Hopkins Studies in Hist. and Pol. Science, Thirteenth Series, Vol. IX, pp. 421-476). A recent life: Phillips Russell, Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American (New York, 1926).

II. Part II

I. Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule: For the literature of the Revolutionary period, see the invaluable Literary History of the American Revolution, by Moses Coit Tyler (2 vols., New York, 1897; with annotated bibliography). For the political phases, see C. H. Van Tyne, The Causes of the War of Independence ... (Boston and New York, 1922); A. M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (New York, 1918); J. T. Adams, Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776 (Boston, 1923).

II. Thomas Hutchinson: The History of Massachusetts (3 vols., Boston and London, 1764-1767-1828; Vols. I and II, Boston, 1795). Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson ..., edited by P. O. Hutchinson (2 vols., Boston, 1884-1886). J. K. Hosmer, Life of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1896).

Daniel Leonard: Massachusettensis (London, 1776); reissued with Novanglus by John Adams, and ascribed on the title page to Jonathan Sewall (Boston, 1819).

Jonathan Boucher: A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797).

III. John Dickinson: Political Writings (2 vols., Wilmington, 1801). Writings, edited by P. L. Ford (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1895).

See C. J. Stillé, The Life and Times of John Dickinson (Philadelphia, 1891).

IV. Samuel Adams: Writings, edited by H. A. Cushing (4 vols., New York, 1904-08).

See J. K. Hosmer, Samuel Adams (Boston, 1884); revised edition (1898, American Statesmen Series). W. V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams (3 vols., Boston, 1865).

V. John Trumbull: Poetical Works (2 vols., Hartford, 1820). The Progress of Dulness (New Haven, 1772-73). An Elegy on the Times (Boston, 1774; New Haven, 1775). M’Fingal (printed in parts from 1775 to 1782, and much revised; first published entire, Hartford, 1782; numerous contemporary editions). The Progress of Dulness and M’Fingal are reprinted in The Connecticut Wits, edited with introduction and bibliography by Vernon L. Parrington (New York, 1926, American Authors Series).

No life of Trumbull has been written.

Francis Hopkinson: Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1792). George Hastings, Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson (University of Chicago Press, 1926).

Jonathan Odell: The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell, edited by Winthrop Sargent (Albany, 1860).

Samuel Peters: A General History of Connecticut ... to which is added an Appendix, wherein New and True Sources of the Present Rebellion are pointed out ... By a Gentleman of the Province (London, 1781; New Haven, 1829; New York, 1877).

III. Part I

I. Agrarianism and Capitalism: A vivid account of the party struggles of the time is given in Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton (Boston, 1925), with full bibliography. For political theory, see Harold J. Laski, Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham (New York, 1920). Charles E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (New York, 1903). A dramatic account of Shays’s Rebellion is given in Edward Bellamy, The Duke of Stockbridge (New York, 1901).

II. The Great Debate: The bibliography is extensive. See J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution ... (4 vols., Washington, 1827, 1836; 5 vols., Philadelphia, 1906). Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (3 vols., New Haven, 1911). S. B. Harding, The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts (New York, 1896). Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913). The Federalist, numerous editions; the best are those edited by H. C. Lodge (New York, 1886) and by P. L. Ford (New York, 1898). Richard Henry Lee, Observations leading to a fair examination of the system of government ... In a number of Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican (reprinted in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, 1787-1788, edited by P. L. Ford, Brooklyn, 1888).

III. Alexander Hamilton: Works, Comprising his Correspondence, edited by J. C. Hamilton (7 vols., New York, 1850-51). Works, edited by H. C. Lodge (10 vols., New York, 1885).

There are numerous lives. See J. C. Hamilton, The Life of Alexander Hamilton (2 vols., New York, 1834). H. C. Lodge, Alexander Hamilton (Boston, 1882, 1898). J. T. Morse, The Life of Alexander Hamilton (2 vols., Boston, 1876). See also Gertrude Atherton, The Conqueror (New York and London, 1902). A. H. Vanderberg, The Greatest American, Alexander Hamilton ... with a Symposium of Opinions by Distinguished Americans (New York and London, 1922). F. S. Oliver, Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on the American Union (New York, 1907)--an English view.

John Adams: Works ... with a Life of the Author, edited by C. F. Adams (10 vols., Boston, 1850-56).

See J. Q. Adams and C. F. Adams, The Life of John Adams (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1871). J. T. Morse, Jr., John Adams (Boston, 1884, 1898). Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, edited by C. F. Adams (2 vols., Boston, 1840). C. M. Walsh, _The Political Science of John Adams_ (New York, 1915).