The Beginning of Political Parties

Nothing in Federal Constitution anticipated the emergence of political parties. James Madison had hoped that one of the chief strengths of the Constitution would be its tendency to break and control the violence of factions. Jefferson, in one of his characteristic moments of rhetorical windiness, declared that allegiance to a party was the last degradation of a free and moral agent, and that “if I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all”. Hamilton said: “We are attempting by this Constitution to abolish factions and to unite all parties for the general welfare”. This might well have worked, but for the fact that the ideological division between Hamilton on the one side, and Jefferson on the other, quickly became so great; and the animosity between the two men so visible, that the new republic was less than a decade old before American politics had sorted itself out along two parties: the Hamiltonians or Federalists, and the Jeffersonian or Democratic Republicans, or simply Republican party.

Hamilton’s Energetic Federal Government

Federalists and Republican clubs and newspapers sprang up, candidates began presenting themselves to the voters as Federalists or Republicans. In 1804, in the most shocking demonstration of how deeply the idea of party had seized hold of political life, Alexander Hamilton was wounded and killed in a duel fought with one of Jefferson’s disciples, Aaron Burr. Everyone deplored parties, and everyone joined them. Each blaming the other for starting the process, each blaming the other for making their own party organization necessary.

Hamilton observed, during the Confederation, how easily the jealous interests of land-holders and land-speculators in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Connecticut could paralyze the very breath of the republic. Everywhere in the States Hamilton found provincialism, small-mindedness, bad habits and oligarchy. That could only be eliminated, in Hamilton’s mind, by ruthlessly subordinating the State governments to a strong central government, or even reducing the States to administrative units of the Federal government. And valorizing an economy in which the worth of an achievement could be measured in the form which is the most indifferent to hierarchies of color or inheritance: cash money.

This won, for Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the approval of city merchants, workers and most of New England. It also won him the vituperation of Jefferson and his Republican followers. It also got Hamilton a reputation for cold-blooded authoritarianism. Jefferson convinced himself that the Federalists were nothing but an alliance of the old Loyalist refugees and Tories, and American merchants who had sold their souls to the British. They wished for everything which would approach the new government to a monarchy, said Jefferson.

This was a strange set of accusations in the ears of the Federalists. Hamilton left the government in 1796, refusing to use his insider information to speculate in Western land, even mocking himself as one of those public fools who sacrifice his private interest to public interest, at the certainty of ingratitude. The major Federalist political voices were all those lawyers with no independent family wealth, who often ruined themselves financially in civil service. If the new republic had any likely candidate for being a member of an aristocracy, clearly the best offer was Thomas Jefferson.

The chief offence of Hamilton’s liberal economic program was that a debt-compelled government is no remedy to men who have lands and Negroes. As a result, Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans cried “Liberty!”, but mean, as all party leaders do, “Power”.

Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800

Power was what they got. In 1800, the Federalist John Adams run for reelection to Presidency, but lost to Jefferson. Running with Aaron Burr as his Vice-President, Jefferson beat Adams and the Federalists by 73 to 65 votes in the electoral college. Fifty-three of Jefferson’s votes came from the South, which hardly made Jefferson the uniform favorite of the nation. But that did nothing to discourage Jefferson from looking upon his election as the “revolution of 1800”, a mandate to undo everything Hamilton and the Federalists had accomplished.

He pledged in his inaugural to look above party: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Noble, generous sentiments, but privately Jefferson hoped to sink Federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection of it.

The Federalists’ economic policies that Hamilton had helped to cement into place were already too firm for Jefferson to dislodge them. The charter for Hamilton’s National Bank run until 1811, and Jefferson had to wait until the election of his hand-picked successor and Secretary of State, James Madison, for that charter to be cancelled. With the on-going war, as the French and the British threatened to put American shipping on the North Atlantic in the crosshairs of both warring navies, Jefferson thought he could solve the problem simply with an embargo of all American trade with them, and leaving off the products of virtuous American farmers.

Instead, Jefferson’s embargo triggered the first national economic collapse. Hamilton might have said “I told you so”. The Republicans blamed this on the evil machinations of Great Britain. There was just enough mean-spirited British encouragement given to British Canada to hostile Indian tribes on the frontier to give this a coating of credibility. Enough credibility, in fact, to send Jefferson’s successor, Madison, galloping after the British by declaring war in 1812, and expecting to annex Canada as a result.

The Disasters of the War

Without Hamilton’s National Bank, there was no money to fund an army or a navy, and so, the American army stumbled from one defeat to another, punctuated by a handful of victories in places where the victories got nothing. The American navy spent most of the war, apart from a few moral-lifting ship to ship combats, meekly bottled up in American ports by British ships-of-the-line. Without Federally funded manufacturing on the Hamiltonian model, there were no uniforms and weapons for the army, no national roads to assist them and get them from one place to another.

The war of 1812 cruelly revealed the inadequacies of Jeffersonian economic policy. “Our armies went to the frontier clothed in the fabrics of the enemy, ammunition of war was gathered as chance supplied them, and the whole struggle was marked by prodigality, waste and privation of a nation”, complained John Pendleton Kennedy.

It was this disaster of the war which Kennedy believed opened eyes to some important facts. Henry Clay, who represented Kentucky both in the House and the Senate, began his political life as an ardent Jeffersonian Democratic Republican. He helped engineer the defeat of the recharter of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States in 1811, and he was the most malevolent of the war hawks who agitated James Madison into declaring war on Britain in 1812.

Henry Clay’s Moderation and the Success of Andrew Jackson

The war left Clay a wiser Jeffersonian. In 1816, the repented Clay began singing a very different song, about the need for a National Bank, for government sponsored internal improvement projects, to build roads and canals, and for the erection of protective tariffs on imports in order to shield American manufacture from killer competition from abroad.

The embarrassments of the war of 1812 gave enough persuasiveness to this talk. Clay was able to navigate a bill for a second Bank of the United States through Congress. Madison’s successor in Presidency, James Monroe, gave a reluctant blessing to funding for a National Road, a federally financed highway. The result of this, however, was to split the old Democratic Republican party. A good deal of the split was related to the three-fifths clause.

Henry Clay himself was a slave owner. His State, Kentucky, legalized slavery. In the long run, Clay became, despite his slave holding, an ardent proponent of colonizing American slaves out of the United States, and gradually eliminating slavery from American law. Clay’s most famous disciple would be another Kentuckian who really did use the power of the national government to abolish slavery. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

For more than two decades after Jefferons’s “revolution of 1800”, the Constitution’s three-fifths clause guaranteed that the Presidency would go almost routinely to a Southerner, a Jeffersonian and a slave owner. By 1824, Jefferson’s old Democratic Republican party, with Clay at the head of one faction, had fractured so badly as a party that the presidential elections were no longer quite so predictable. John Quincy Adams, the Jeffersonian son of the last Federalist President, had served President James Monroe as Secretary of State, and that casted him as a presumptive to the Presidency in 1824.

Adams, however, was challenged by the ambitions of Henry Clay. In turn, Clay and Adams were challenged by a pure undiluted Jeffersonian, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, a slave owner and the commanding general in the most important victory the United States had won in the war of 1812 at New Orleans. Jackson rose from out of nowhere to win the popular vote, but he failed to capture a majority in the electoral college. So, under the rules laid down in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Henry Clay was the speaker of the House.

Unable to sum up enough votes to win the Presidency for himself, Clay at least preferred to stop Andrew Jackson. Clay, through his support in the House of Representatives, elected Quincy Adams President. Adams hoped to pull down the remaining resistance to what Clay was now calling his American system of banking, internal improvements and tariffs. But rumors that Quincy Adams had stroked a corrupt bargain with Henry Clay for the election robbed him of the political momentum he needed.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson was swept into the Presidency on a wave of national enthusiasm and by the united votes provided by the three-fifths clause of the South. The two terms that Andrew Jackson spent in the White House were much more successful as a revolution that Jefferson’s in 1800.

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Jefferson’s Separation Between Church and State

I’ve spent some time writing about Jonathan Edwards. I have to admit that I did live it dangling there, and you would be right to wonder what really happened to him after his self-exile to the Western Massachusetts Indian mission. Well, the answer is: not very much. Edwards hoped in his heart that the Great Awakening would lead to the Day of Judgement, and the thousand years reign of God directly on earth, when religion shall in every respect be uppermost in the world. But instead of the dawning of a general revival of the Christian Church, what Edwards got was the day to day routine of attending a mission to Indians whose language he did not speak, and an English congregation whose attention span was, in Edwards’ Judgement, not up to one of a kid.

His own attention soon went back to his early enchantment with philosophy. Between 1750 and 1757, he composed three great treatises in moral philosophy, on Original Sin, on Freedom of the Will, and the Nature of True Virtue; all awhile praying for a new Awakening, until the trustees of Princeton invited him to take up the presidency there in 1757. He goes there at the beginning of 1758, only to find that smallpox is in the neighborhood. He takes the inoculation, but the inoculation turns out to be more lethal than the smallpox. He dies of the complications.

What ultimately follows on the hills of the Great Awakening was not the new awakening Edwards hoped for, but a secular revolution. The leadership of the colonial Churches was not better prepared for the revolution than it had been for the Great Awakening. The vast majority of New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians supported the American cause. Even the Church of England, since it was legally a department of the English government, lost three quarters of its American clergy who exiled in England or Canada.

The Secular Revolution

For those Congregationalists and Presbyterians who joined the revolution, the war was seemed as a marvelous opportunity to condemn the corrupt commercialized society of Great Britain and any of its American partners and admirers. They also looked upon the Revolution as an opportunity to earn a special place of respect for Christianity in the construction of this new republic. This was, however, exactly what did not happen. The disruptions created by occupation, invasion and enlistments battered all of the Churches equally.

The Philadelphia's Baptist association saw its congregations decline from 42 to 26. Its membership dropped down by a fifth. Moreover, the revolutionary leadership was conformed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Hamilton, James Madison. These all were men with little interest in Christian theology, and whose case against the British was fed by secular political theory. Instead of leading the Revolution, the clergy of the American Churches found themselves being used by it. When the Revolution was over, instead of having a new public role for the Churches of American society, they found that they had lost almost all the vestige of the public roles they once had.

New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware eliminated all public funding for Churches in 1776. New York followed in 1777. In Massachusetts, the new revolutionary Constitution of 1780 kept public tax support for the Congregational Churches enforced, but it did not allow tax payers to send their tax money to Churches of their own choosing.

Virginia suspended taxation for the support of the Church of England in 1776, and in an effort to nail exclusion down more securely, Thomas Jefferson wrote a statute for religious freedom, adopted by the Virginia Assembly in 1786, with the support of Madison. It confirmed that “no man should be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever”. Jefferson statute for religious freedom was only the most famous of the efforts that Jefferson and Madison made to force religion off the public square.

The Wall of Separation

Sitting in the Confederation Congress in 1785, Madison actually opposed a plan to reserve public lands for the support of religion. Jefferson preferred putting the most useful facts from Greek, Roman, European and American history into the hands of children rather than the Bible. His 1817 plan for a system of public education in Virginia decreed that “no religious reading, instruction or exercise shall be prescribed or practiced”.

The involvement of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia’s dismantling of public religion gave the final blow to the hopes of the churches that the Revolution and the Millennium could be had for the same price. Congress stipulated that the first amendment shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting their free exercise thereof. Now, although technically this no-establishment clause only addressed the Federal government, and left states like Massachusetts free to establish state churches or state funding; it clearly set a direction to public policy that was not friendly towards an official seat for religion on the public square.

“Religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god”, Jefferson wrote sympathetically to a group of unhappy Connecticut Baptists, who had to put up with paying state taxes for religion until 1817. “I contemplate, said Jefferson, with sovereign reverence, those Americans who declare that their legislatures should make no law respecting and establishing religion, or prohibiting their free exercise thereof. Thus, building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

A wall of separation between Church and State was not what the righteous Presbyterians and Congregationalists of America had gone into the Revolution for. It became a very good question what they would propose to do about it. The first answer came from the disciples of Jonathan Edwards.

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Thomas Jefferson: The Indebted Yeoman Farmer

No other figure in American history, except Washington and Lincoln, stands closer to the heart of American national identity than Thomas Jefferson. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and in that Declaration he defined the spirit of the American Revolution as an experiment in Enlightenment politics and philosophy. He was the second American, after Washington, to ascend to the level of the symbol of American liberty. His home in Virginia exists today as a kind of temple for that symbol. Even Abraham Lincoln, who privately deplored Jefferson’s example as a slave owner, felt compelled to genuflect publicly before Jefferson’s example as the most distinguished politician of our history.

The Intellectual

Jefferson was, in addition to being a politician, a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts and tastes. A man who liked to think of himself as simply an American version of the Enlightenment’s rational elite. Almost his entire life was lived in politics, yet he had little love for the practical day to day grind of vote-getting and administration. “Science is my passion, he briefly remarked, politics my duty”. He served as the third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809, but he served for more than twice as long as the President of the American Philosophical Society. He claimed in 1812: “when I was young, mathematics was the passion of my life”. And even as President of the United States he dubbed industriously in anthropology, mineralogy, religion and history.

It was Jefferson who sponsored the first great scientific expedition of the New Republic: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s journey from 1804 to 1806 to map the North American continent from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean.

When he was asked in 1771 to compose a list of basic books, Jefferson came up with 28 titles which spanned poetry, fiction, politics, history, philosophy and the classics. He recommended Locke on the conduct of the mind and the search for truth, Montesquieu, Franklin of electricity, Seneca, a heavy dose of the Scots, and even a textbook on physics and surgery. Forty years and a lifetime of book-collecting later, Jefferson’s collection of 6000 books became the core around which the Library of Congress was built.

Jefferson even had the mannerisms commonly associated with an intellectual. “Jefferson is a slender man”, wrote William Mclays, who sat in the Federal Congress and who had many opportunities to observe Jefferson at a close range. “He has rather the air of stiffness in is manner. His clothes seem too small for him. He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and one of his shoulders elevated much more than the other. His face has a scroungy aspect. His whole figure has a shackling air.” He even added that Jefferson was a poor public speaker. His informal conversation was invariably a revelation. He scattered information wherever he went.

In the largest sense, although Jefferson wrote only one full-length book in 1781, his Notes on the State of Virginia, which appeared anonymously; Jefferson defined a Classical Republican political philosophy, which stood over against the Liberal Republicanism of Alexander Hamilton. It was a philosophy which defined the role of government in the Republic and addressed the question of religion in the Enlightenment political regime. Jefferson’s political philosophy was a force in his day and it remains one in ours.

The Practice of Law

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at the family plantation at Shadwell. Because a fire destroyed Shadwell in 1770 and most of the 27-years-old Jefferson’s papers lighted, painfully little survives of Jefferson’s intellectual coming of age. What we do know, however, is how much of that coming of age was connected to representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. His first tutor, a Church of England clergyman named William Douglas, was a Scot and a graduate of Glasgow and Edinburg. When Jefferson arrived at William and Mary to begin his collegiate studies in 1760, the college was in the hands of another Scot, William Small, whom Jefferson described as “a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners and an enlarged and liberal mind”.

The most immediate contribution Small made was not philosophical, but legal. He introduced Jefferson to George Wythe. Jefferson proceeded to study law under Wythe tutoring at Williamsburg until he was admitted to the bar in 1767. Two years later, Jefferson is elected to the House of Burgesses. He scored a minor sensation with the publication of a anti-imperial pamphlet in 1774: A Summary View of the Rights of British America. In 1775, he found himself sent to Philadelphia to serve in the Second Continental Congress, a colonial lawyer among other colonial lawyers.

Up until the 18th century, law was hardly a profession at all. Administration of the law was in the hands of appointed magistrates, who only rarely had any formal education in law. Lawyers were, in general, not much more than gentlemen who happened to have an education in law. In fact, in 17th century England, professional lawyering was actually prohibited by statute. However, as the British empire awoke throughout the 18th century for the need to establish new useful laws and practices in the colonies, so did the need for professional lawyers and judges.

Even so, by 1775, there were only 45 practicing attorneys in Massachusetts. One reason for the comparatively small number of lawyers was that law was not terribly lucrative by itself. People who hoped to make money from law hoped really to do it through the opening law gave them to politics, and through politics to patronage and influence.

Another reason why lawyering did not take all at once in popularity was that, in practice, criminal law was largely a matter of punishment for moral or religious offences against the community. It was not terribly involved with the protection of property. The notion of institutional imprisonment for criminal violators will not result in the construction of an American prison until the 1790’s.

Civil law was not much more attractive as a pursuit, for it was preoccupied with matters of inheritance and debt, debt being the one thing which really could get you imprisoned. The laws these lawyers obeyed came from two sources. One was Statute Law, in other words, law created by the colonial legislatures. The other was British Common Law, that big mass of traditional procedure in British law, which judges and magistrates interpreted and applied by their own lights, without consultation with legislatures.

Up until the eve of the Revolution, it was Common Law procedures which governed most of colonial law. Judges and magistrates, not legislatures, decided what was law and what was punishment. The American Revolution changed this. Having thrown off British political rule, Americans wondered if their courts should continue to operate by British Common law or not. Revolutionaries saw no more wisdom in allowing a single man to rule by his own whim as king, than allowing magistrates and judges to rule by their whim in court. And it did not help the reputation of Common Law that the prevailing Common Law textbook of the day, Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which enjoyed a circulation of nearly 25000 copies in America by 1776; tried to base Common Law on the sovereignty of the king.

If in the new, revolutionary and republican climate, sovereignty resided in the people rather than in the king, then the place where law should be made was in the legislature, and casted in the form of legislative statutes. If Blackstone hoped to make old law into the king’s law, the Americans’ tendency was to limit all law to legislative statutes.

Jefferson never developed any significant law practice of his own. He was involved in only 941 cases over 7 years, and he stopped practicing law altogether by 1776. But the legal problems posed by Common Law, about sovereignty, inheritance, debt and slavery; became the central problems of his life. And no wonder. Jefferson was born into a well-to-do family, but his father died while he was in his teens. The terms of his father’s will put all the power of his inheritance into the hands of the will executors. Even permission to attend William and Mary had to be obtained from his guardian.

Migraines Caused by Debt

He married Martha Wayles in 1772, only to loose her to complications of child birth in 1782, and never remarry. Through his wife, Jefferson inherited some 11000 acres of land and 135 slaves, which added to the 5000 acres and 50 slaves that came to him after the death of his mother in 1773. This made Jefferson one of the biggest land owners in Virginia. By then, he was already well on his way to designing and building that great mountain top home that he dreamt off as his great sanctuary, Monticello.

The problem was that his father-in-law’s state had also arrived burdened with debt. The costs of building Monticello and the costs of the Virginia gentry lifestyle gradually turned from pleasures into inescapable burdens for Thomas Jefferson. Inflation during the Revolution rotted the value of his property. 22 of his slaves ran off to find freedom with the British. By the end of his life, he will be over 100000 dollars in debt.

Those debts enraged him. Indebtedness threatened him with loss of control, and fear of the loss of control triggered staggering bouts of migraine for Jefferson. He could not take the humiliation of constantly bowing the knee to creditors, to money lenders, to the merchants who supplied his books. In Jefferson’s mind, only a nation of those who own enough property to freely support themselves without dependence could create a Republic. When debt-ridden farmers in Western Massachusetts staged an uprising in 1786, Jefferson frankly sympathized with them. “Can history produce an instance where rebellion so honorably conducted?”, Jefferson asked. “God forbid, we should never be 20 years without such a rebellion. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Maybe also with the blood of creditors.

This resentment at the dependence imposed by debt took a more organized form in a letter Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789, where Jefferson was still serving as the American minister to France. Jefferson had enjoyed a front row seat in Paris that summer for the outbreak of the French Revolution. The prospect of the French Revolution excited and appalled him. Clearly, in Jefferson’s mind, the violence of the French Revolution was due entirely to the way an elite of aristocratic families had reduced most of France’s population to debt and loss of land.

In Jefferson’s thinking, creditors could just as easily be bankers and merchants as aristocrats. No creditor, he wrote, can by Natural Right oblige the lands someone occupies, or the person who succeeded in that occupation to the payment of debts contracted by him. By performing a series of calculations, he informed Madison that, by rights, 19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation nor even the whole nation itself assembled could stand a debt.

Perhaps it was only coincidental that the 19 years he allotted for the permissible run of debts was just one year shy at the 20 years he allotted for permissible revolutions and the bloody watering of the tree of liberty. It certainly blinded him to the follies of the French Revolution, as that revolution was blowing up around his ears in Paris in 1789.

What To Do With National Debt

The summer of the French Revolution began with Louis XVI yielding to the demand for calling of a national assembly, the Estates General. That in turn resulted in the swift capture of the Estates General’s leadership, by the seizure of the king and by the imposition of a somewhat constitutional monarchy. When the king attempted to escape, he was recaptured, and then trialled and executed. After his death, a reign of revolutionary terror, inspired by Maximilien Robespierre and his party, the Jacobins; swept over Paris and over France.

To all of the butcheries and the terrorism instituted by the Jacobins, Jefferson turned a resolutely blind eye. He praised the Jacobins for their resolution to set fire to the four corners of the kingdom and to perish rather than to relinquish from their plan of total change of government. When Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789 to became the first Secretary of State under President George Washington, his adulation for the French Revolution continued without pause. The Jacobins, he said, were the true revolution spirit of a whole nation. And he founded sickening that uncomprehending Americans, like Washington and Hamilton, called the French robbers and inhumans.

By 1793, Jefferson was compelled to admit a little bit more, that in the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the form of trial, and with them also many innocent ones. But this was simply the collateral damage of revolution. “My own affections had been deeply wounded by some of the murders of this cause, but rather than seeing it fail I would better see the earth desolated.”

What the Jacobins accomplished in France, Jefferson hoped that Statute Law might accomplish peacefully in the United States. His political philosophy seems to have nothing more substantial to it than an expectation that virtuous citizens, by reason of their virtue, could make government almost unnecessary. But instead of the new constitution rendering government unnecessary, Jefferson was infuriated to discover that the old fiscal policies of indebtedness and collection were being reimposed through Statute as designed by the new Secretary of of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

At the end of the Revolution, the United States was catastrophically in debt. First to the French and then to the Dutch, but also to a lot of people. Many of the fiscal crisis during the Revolution had been adverted by individuals stepping forward to lend money to the Continental Congress. One quick way for the new United States to deal with these debts was to repudiate them, and to wish good luck to the Congress’ creditors. But Hamilton was convinced that a repudiation of the revolutionary debts would be a terrible decision.

For one thing, many of the Congress’ creditors were ordinary pensioners, they were patriot souls who now will be ruined if the government repudiated its debts. But at a largest scale, repudiation would be a signal to foreign nations that the United States was an unworthy debtor, and in that case, supplies of foreign credit would dry up. Without that foreign credit, it would be impossible for Americans to overcome a hundred years of economic restriction by the British that had prevented them from developing a commercial manufacturing base.

In a series of three great reports to Congress, Hamilton recommended, with as much persuasive power as he could muster, a commitment by Congress to pay off its revolutionary debts, to build up American manufacture, to establish a national bank to fund commercial development and, in a display of his belief that only the Federal Government could hold all of this off, the assumption by the Federal Government of all of the States’ Revolutionary War’s debts as well. All of this by statute.

Hamilton’s plan captured everything. It was likely to bring one of Jefferson’s famous migraines. It made debt untouchable. It put manufacturing and the money lending that manufacturing required in the driver’s seat of the American economy. It guaranteed that independent farmers would increasingly find themselves forced to bear the burdens, not only of indebtedness enforced by statute, but of the taxes the Federal Government would levee to fund its own debts.

Jefferson and Slavery

Although Jefferson was anything but a typical yeoman farmer, he increasingly spoke as though he was one, and as though Hamilton was trying to create a cash-robbing aristocracy to bring back the British Empire. “Now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and corporations under the guides of their favorite branches of manufacturers, commerce and navigation; ruling over the beggared yeomanry.“

This mistrust led to a massive fracture of the Revolutionary generation into two hostile political parties: the Federalists, who enlisted Washington, Hamilton and John Adams as their figure heads; and the Democratic Republicans, led by Jefferson and Madison. In time, this fracture would be more than political, it would come to violence. In 1804, one of Jefferson’s most prominent disciples, Aaron Burr Jr., would maneuver Hamilton into fighting in a duel and kill him.

Thomas Jefferson was elected President in 1800, partly because the Federalists had quarrelled and divided, but also partly because of slavery. Slavery has always been the dog in Thomas Jefferson’s manger, principally because the author of the proposition that all men are created equal held over human beings in a very unequal state of bondage. But also because, on closer inspection, he actually sold slaves to pay off debts, and conducted a long-term liaison with a female slave, Sally Hemings, who was herself the offspring of an illicit master-slave union, in this case Jefferson’s father-in-law. This actually means that Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s half-sister by blood. He never pretended that he had an excuse for keeping black slaves. In his Notes on the State of Virginia , in the 1780’s, Jefferson admitted that slaves were as fully entitled to liberty as anyone else. But at the same time, Jefferson’s own fragile independence rested squarely on the shoulders of his slaves.

They represented the capital he could liquidate when the creditors came knocking. And they produced the goods that paid the creditors at all other times. Nor, as it turned out, could he had been President without them either. In order to placate the Southern States, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 allowed the seven states to count three fifths of their slaves to work the calculation of their electoral votes. Without those extra electoral votes, Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800. With it, he not only won the Presidency, but installed a democratic Jeffersonian ascendancy which would dominate the American Presidency for the next 60 years.

Had he been more of a practical politician than a political philosopher, Jefferson might had been more successful in dismantling the structures of finance and manufacture created by Hamilton in the 1790’s. Well, it was not for lack of trying, but Hamilton had cannier political instincts, and he had built better than Jefferson could dismantle. Hamilton had as his great second the man who would become Jefferson’s next nemesis, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshal. The manufacturing economy Hamilton constructed was defended by Marshal with a series of major pro-commercial judicial decisions.

After Jefferson’s death, that occurred on the 4th of July 1826, fifty years from the adoption of his Declaration of Independence; Monticello was seized and sold to pay the debts that only Thomas Jefferson’s last breath released him from.

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The American Republic of Virtue

Looked up from a distance, the success of the American Revolution in throwing off the yoke of British rule must have seemed miraculous. So miraculous, in fact, that forever afterward, the leaders of the revolution, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin; were all seemed like demigods walking on water in the promised land of American Independence. Looked up more closely, what stands out about the revolution is how much of its success was lost in its failures.

As general and chief of the revolutionary army, Washington actually stumbled from one defeat to another from 1775 to 1780. His little army was often on the point of mutiny and disintegration. Even in victory, only his own personal example prevented his officers and men from attempting a coup d'état against their provisional and incompetent government, the Continental Congress. Had the French not intervened, first with financial credits and supplies, and then with troops and ships, it is entirely likely that the whole revolutionary affair would have gone up in smoke.

On the other hand, it was precisely the Continental Army’s multiple failures which robbed it of the confidence and prestige necessary to make a coup into a real threat. The Continental Congress may not have liked the prospect of its army, but those loses kept it too feeble to gather the strength it needed to turn and destroy its creator.

The Weak United Government

There were other failures, however, which did not have such silver linings. First, the independent mind and habits of the colonies, which led them to fight against imperial rule by Britain, also led them to fight against each other. Few of them had ever engaged as colonies in anything that looked like cooperation. If anything, by maintaining allegiance in London for lobby in their interests, the colonies had always seemed themselves in competition with each other for imperial favors.

The Continental Congress had been called into being in 1774 to act as a common front for the colonies’ grievances, but its effectiveness at getting them to work together was small. A number of the North American colonies, despite sharing those grievances, refused to sent any representatives at all to the Continental Congress. This at first included Georgia, but also and permanently, included the French-speaking Canadian provinces and the West Indian island colonies.

They would never had created a united government at all if the French had not refused to deal with the revolutionary movement that had no central government. The government that revolutionaries did create by adopting the articles of the Confederation in 1781 made the word “United” in United States sound hollow. Even then, the representatives of the States of the Confederation Congress frequently behaved as though Congress existed only for the promotion of their own interests, and wanted to make sure that the Confederation could never invade the sovereignty of the States the way British imperials did. The Confederation Congress had no power to impose national taxes or even to create a unified currency.

The Loyalists

Another failure that was not so thick with silver lining concerned the colonial Loyalists. Although Americans dearly prised the image of Washington’s Continentals suffering nobly, almost as many Americans took up arms in defence of the Crown; either in regiments of Loyalist organized by the British army or in Loyalist militias in the South. And they, not Washington’s Continentals, were the big losers at the end of the revolution. Their properties were confiscated, their leaders banished, and between 60 and 80 thousand of them actually left America entirely, starting their lives over again in Canada, the West Indies or Britain.

What this did in political terms was to dump the beginnings of an Anglicised elite in America and open up political leadership to what one unhappy Boston Loyalist described as “fellow who would had clean my shoes five years ago”. In New York, the proportion of farmers settling in State Legislature rose from 25% before the revolution to 42% afterwards. In Massachusetts, the percentage rose to 47%. In Georgia, voting rights were opened to all tax payers, not just, as had been the case in every colony, only those who own certain levels of property.

Americans, who had formerly based their claims to leadership on wealth or status, now either left America entirely or changed their tunes, and preferred to emphasize how humble their birth had been; a prime case of which was Benjamin Franklin, who was a social and intellectual climber par excellence. Franklin had been a Loyalist right up until 1775, at that point he prudently switched sides to join the revolutionaries. Afterwards, he composed an autobiography that relentlessly reminded his readers that he was, after all, a self-made man.

College education in the new United States also ceased to be the private privilege of gentlemen. Between 1776 and 1800, sixteen new colleges were founded, to exhibit to the world the perfection which the mind of man is capable of receiving from the combined operation of liberty and learning. Well, this satisfied those who thought it was fair that they should now claim the power to govern. It also meant the power now fell into the hands of people who had little experience at using it. And that was about to bring a surprise to those revolutionaries who supposed, on the basis of Whig political theory and on the example of Classical Republicanism, that once the rubbish of corrupt imperial rule has been swept aside a natural and virtuous leadership will step into place and rule the new republic as the ancient Roman Republic had been ruled by its noble and virtuous senate.

That, of course, was not what happened. The restless new state legislatures, complained New Jersey’s governor William Livingston, do not exhibit the virtue that is necessary to support the Republican government. Indeed they did not. They stripped Churches of public tax support and took over the powers which had once belonged to governors and judges for themselves; and these legislatures quarreled remorselessly with each other and within themselves.

Meanwhile, as a protest of the treatment given to loyalists, the British refused to send diplomatic representatives to the Confederation, and they privately financed the Indians of the North West to raid American settlements along the frontier. The Spanish closed the Mississippi river to American trade in an effort to strong-line the frontier counties of Kentucky and Tennessee. If the Confederation and the State legislatures insisted on the steady habit of fighting between each other, then the whole notion of an American republic might fall in on itself. That in turn would be a setback of colossal proportion, not only for the idea of Whig Republicanism, but for the Enlightenment’s fundamental notions about human nature.

The Virtuous Republic of Jefferson

Perhaps the great problem here was not that the Republican ideology had been overconfident about the possibilities of success of America, but that the wrong version of Republicanism had held the upper hand ideologically for so long. All English-speaking Whig Republicans in the 18th century shared certain Whig essentials. First of all, they repudiated tradition, hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as unnatural and unreasonable. Also, they were all suspicious of power, seeing it as the enemy of liberty. Third, all of these Whig Republicans believed fervently in the supremacy of reason, and within the realm of politics, the chief job of reason was the discernment of natural law.

In some cases, like the Deists, natural law was almost a replacement for religion, and not only natural law but the pursuit of natural rights, natural rights which they held to be fundamental and universal for all of humanity.

Then, lastly, all of these Whig Republicans found their chief inspiration in the example of Republican Rome. What divided them, however, was the split in Republican thinking between Classical and Liberal Republicans. Although that split was neither so wide or so absolute as it has sometimes been portrayed, it at least represented a profound difference of attitude between American Republicans. We can understand how this worked out in practical terms after the Revolution by considering the position of three of those American Republicans: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

Jefferson can be described very much as a classical Republican. For Jefferson, the necessary glue of a republican society was virtue, and virtue was related with the ownership of land. Land represented real wealth. Land was the place where work and soil combined produced tangible prosperity. The discipline required to create that prosperity, to work that land, was itself the best reinforcement of virtue.

“Those who work in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people”, Jefferson wrote in the 1780’s. Protecting the independence of land owners, of those who labored the earth, was, consequently, paramount to Jefferson. Dependence produces banality, suffocates virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. Only those who own land, only those who work land could really escape the bonds of dependence, could only be genuinely independent.

Now, this dependence could take one of two forms. It could come as it had in 1776, from a corrupt government which levees taxes on virtuous farmers, and with those taxes force farmers into debt. Debt implied dependence. Or, dependence could come from a corrupt elite, who tempted the virtuous farmers to spend themselves into debt. Or they could come from an unholy alliance of both, to shift the centers of the Republic’s economy into manufacturing bubbles, therefore drawing farmers off the land and into the cities, and reducing them to cash robbers wagers who will be as dependent to their employers as the tax payers were to corrupt officials.

Commerce and manufacture, in Jefferson’s mind, dealt in treason, stratagems and spoils. It dealt in illusory forms of wealth; not land, but loans, interest, mortgages, credits, stock, cash; all of them unsubstantial, mere empty signs of wealth rather than the real thing, which was land.

So, said Jefferson, while we have land to labor then let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work bench. For those kinds of manufactured goods, let American exchange their agricultural abundance with Europe, and whatever was lost by the balance of trade will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. And let cities be merely the depot for those agricultural goods, rather than seeing cities turn into manufacture ant hills where wage laborers do as their masters tell them. When we get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, we should become corrupt as in Europe, then go eating one another as they do there.

However, this agricultural paradise of Jefferson had a dark side. It was this dark side which bothered Alexander Hamilton.

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The American Revolution

More than merely signaling America’s political dissolution from the British empire, the Revolution pegged the republic Americans would create to the expectations and principles of the Enlightenment: to Locke, to the classical and liberal republicans, to Harrington and others. Thus Americans dissolved not only their political ties to Britain, but their intellectual ties to the long train of the traditional European past.

In this series of articles we are going to try to understand the intellectual background and the ideas behind the Revolution:

• Common Sense and the American Mind: From the synthesis of Scottish common sense philosophy and moderate Calvinism would flower the first creative era of the American conversation about ideas between religion and the Enlightenment, between God and nature. A conversation that in many ways we still participate in.
  

• The Beginnings of American Liberalism: By a process that few people in London understood, the rowdy lowlife who departed for the colonies a century before, had turned into competitors for economic dominance within the Empire. They had developed an anglicised elite who thought of themselves as the equals of their English cousins. And they created domestic legislatures exercising powers that were technically illegal, and elected by farmers who had an unpleasantly passion for independence. All the Americans lacked was a political philosophy to give it all coherence. In the 1760’s, the imperial government unwillingly provided them with it.

• John Locke’s Political Theory and Its Influence on American Thinking: Locke is what we might call the prophet of Liberalism. I don’t mean liberal or liberalism in the party politics sense that we use it today. What I’m talking about is the classical Liberalism of the Enlightenment, which was concerned with abolishing the monarchy, making reason rather than tradition the guide of political life, and downplaying the role of inherited and non-rational factors like race, religion or language; and to look expectantly to the future for progress. It is in this sense that virtually all Americans, no matter what political party identification they might have, are classical Lockean liberals. This is because we identify ourselves as Americans by a loyalty to a series of what Abraham Lincoln called “propositions”. We identify ourselves by allegiance to these propositions, not by our identification with a certain ethnic group or religious denomination. We identify ourselves by certain propositions about liberty. We are, in that sense, all liberals; and America is the perfect example of a classic liberal regime.
  

• Religious Radicalism as a Factor of the American Revolution: Even in laying the very foundations of the American republic, Puritanism and the Enlightenment, far from being at each other’s throats, were already stirring the American soup together.

• A Close Look at the American Revolution: It only remained for Thomas Paine, in the revolution’s most sensational pamphlet, “Common Sense”, to conclude that a King had little more to do than to wage war and give away places, which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. However, old habits and sentimental attachments to the old country did not die quickly. It took ten years, from 1764 to 1774, for the mounting cycle of accusation and confrontation to turn into violent resistance on the part of the colonials in the infamous Boston tea party of December 1774. After that, though, the trajectory of violence turned sharply upwards.

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A Close Look at the American Revolution

When in the 1660’s, the English Parliament began its first halting attempts at regulating the external commercial traffic of the colonies across the Atlantic, regulation of external commerce was not a new idea. Europeans governments had always kept a mistrustful grip on business. In societies where monarchs and land-owning noblemen were understood to have a heaven right to rule, merchants and entrepreneurs were regarded as a pretty suspicious, maybe even subversive lot. After all, the profit of merchants and entrepreneurs and businessmen were not based on land. They did not rise or fall according to the nobility or their forbears. In a world that praised stability, commerce and enterprise meant instability. So, kings regularly shackled it by handing out monopoly charters over large stretches of their economies.

But the Enlightenment put its faith in measurable realities. The most obvious measurable reality was that commerce could do the empire a whole lot more good if it was directed intelligently and with the due respect for the numbers rather than for some chicken-brained duke or earl. So, hand in hand with Isaac Newton’s effort to reduce motion in the universe to equations, Enlightenment’s imperial planners in London began fashioning regulatory legislation over the colonies and their transatlantic commerce, which would reap profits in taxes and duties for the empire. They were not particularly successful, at least at first. Regulation may generate revenue, but it also costs money to enforce. The Crown was pathologically reluctant to pay the kinds of troops and ships it needed for the proper enforcement of the regulation of transatlantic commerce.

The Cost of War and the New Taxation

Then began the great imperial wars with France, during seven years from 1755 to 1763. Britain emerged from those imperial wars as the victor over France and the world’s first super-power, but at a hideous cost in public borrowing to finance the wars. In casting its eyes around for potential sources of servicing its war-time debts, Parliament’s eyes fell on the American colonies. Regulation, up to this point, has after all only taxed the colonies’ external trade across the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing had been done about extending the hand of the taxman into the internal economies of the colonies to raise taxes, because taxation of the colonies’ domestic economies was something which was done by the colonial legislators. However, the Parliament was the legislature of the Empire, and the colonies were technically simply plantations. If Parliament had needed to raise funds to meet the costs it incurred defending those plantations, why not exercise Parliament’s lawful right to tax the internal colonial economies as well as their commerce over the high seas.

And so, in 1764 began that long and dreary procession of confrontations over tax bills; between the Parliament on one hand, which could not comprehend through its fury why the colonials thought they enjoyed some sort of immunity from taxation of their economies; and the colonies, who could not comprehend through their even greater fury why Parliament would think it could simply take the rights that their legislators had built up without any serious questioning over the course of more than a century.

To the party of the King in Parliament, the Tories, the answer to this conundrum was a simple, traditional and pre-Newtonian one: Americans were rebels by nature and needed to be subordinated to the will of their God-given master, the King. To the colonies, the answer was equally simple, a good deal of it was found in John Locke: societies emerge from the State of Nature, as individuals agree to sacrifice a part of their natural liberty in order to protect the remainder of their liberty and property, a process more than confirmed by the experience of their own settlements. They had never been plantations, for the very obvious reason that Britain had never treated them that way, or at least never bothered to offer the funding and support which would had made the claim that the colonies were only Parliamentary plantations believable.

So, the colonial legislators were in the mind of the colonists the one true creation of the people of the colonies for their own government. In the first great revolutionary tract, James Otis’ “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” in 1764, Otis insisted that these supreme powers of legislation should be free and sacred in the hands where the community has once rightfully placed them. That meant the colonial legislators, and not Parliament.

All of this, as the Scottish common sense realist would have said, was open and self-evident to anyone with an unperverted moral sense. But the moral sense can, of course, become perverted if, as John Locke warned, sufficient corruption and degradation occur on the part of the government. Americans who read Whigs satire, or who had long-time beliefs that Anglican bishops were the emissaries of the Antichrist, or that who had to put up with snobs of blue-blood English officers and tax officials, not to mention those who knew the behavior of the average English soldier during his posting in the colonies during the French and Indian wars; did not require much convincing that the mother country was swiftly descending into the mother of whores, and that the whole controversy over taxation was a plot by what Mercy Otis Warren called the “intrigues of artful and ambitious men”.

The Beginnings of the Revolution

It only remained for Thomas Paine, in the revolution’s most sensational pamphlet, “Common Sense”, to conclude that a King had little more to do than to wage war and give away places, which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. However, old habits and sentimental attachments to the old country did not die quickly. It took ten years, from 1764 to 1774, for the mounting cycle of accusation and confrontation to turn into violent resistance on the part of the colonials in the infamous Boston tea party of December 1774. After that, though, the trajectory of violence turned sharply upwards.

In April, British troops stationed in Boston tried to seize arms and ammunition stored by the colonial militia at Lexington and Concord. They found themselves trapped in a full-scale firefight that became the first battle of the revolution against British authority. In July 1776, the representatives of 13 of the British North American colonies, called together as the Continental Congress, announced that their allegiance to Great Britain was at an end, and declared the formation of an independent league, known as the United States of America.

The American Revolution managed to carry along with it almost all the desperate streams of intellectual resistance that set the stage for it, whether or not those streams were like oil and water. Presbyterian preachers, who saw in the new imperial taxation schemes the entering path for an American-Anglican episcopate, turned out in such numbers for the continental army that the Chief Justice of Massachusetts referred to the dissenting clergy who took so active a part in the rebellion as Mr. Otis’ black regiment walking straight out of the days of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan hosts.

Out of the other stream, John Adams, the most talented theorist of what are called Revolution Principles, rejoiced to see in the Revolution the dawning of Enlightenment politics.

The Secular Principles of America

For the time being, the principles of nature and eternal reason, not Puritanism, would have the upper hand in the shaping of the new American order. When the Continental Congress finally casted its vote for independence, it delegated the writing of a legal declaration to preface the independence motion. The independence motion read “that these united colonies are and ought to be free and independent states”. Congress delegated the writing of that declaration to Thomas Jefferson, who in less than two days produced a draft declaration which is one of the most memorable political documents in the English language and a monument of Lockean simplicity and Scottish moral sense philosophy.

One reason why Thomas Jefferson was delegated to write that declaration was that in one sense he had already done so. In 1774, Jefferson had made his first public mark in defense of American rights with a summary view of the rights of British America, which listed in detail the offences of which the imperial government was guilty. To compose a declaration for the independence motion really required little more of Jefferson than the crafting of a series of statements of those offences which justified independence. In fact, a list of 21 such offences forms the bulk of Jefferson’s declaration. The really memorable part of the declaration grew out of Jefferson’s decision to write a preamble to the list. That lifted this otherwise pedestrian document into the realm of Enlightenment political philosophy.

In one long sentence, Jefferson captured the core of the Lockean and Scottish critique of tradition and hierarchy, and made it the nuclear core of the American Revolution.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, self evident at least to anyone, as the Scots insisted, possessing an uncorrupted moral sense.

“That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. These, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are what we find in the State of Nature, that is what people are born with naturally.

“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”. In other words, in an environment of scarcity with lack of security, to preserve these rights, people create governments. Now, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. They don’t come from God and heaven, they don’t come from history and tradition, they don’t come from the nobility or whoever your parents might have been. They come from the consent of the governed.

“That whenever any form of government becomes disruptive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

These words of Jefferson are so familiar that we are no longer shocked by their frankly secular tone, or by the ease with which Jefferson folded so much of the territory of Enlightenment and Whig thinking into one single sentence. Nor are we shocked any longer at the sheer audacity with which the Declaration of Independence propelled American revolutionaries into the front rank of the Enlightenment’s experiment in rewriting the foundations of human society. More than merely signaling America’s political dissolution from the British empire, these words pegged the republic Americans would create to the expectations and principles of the Enlightenment: to Locke, to the classical and liberal republicans, to Harrington and others. Thus Americans dissolved not only their political ties to Britain, but their intellectual ties to the long train of the traditional European past.

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