Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  “Two distinct and different orders of men,” Lincoln had written, “seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a “spirit of jealousy and distrust,” would always be in dispute with each other. “Whether the parties to the contests style themselves the Rich and the Poor, the Great and the Small, the High and the Low, the Elders and People, Patricians and Plebeians, Nobility and Commons, still,” Lincoln had claimed, “the source and effects of the dispute are the same.” This continual struggle between these two social interests—the many and the few—had “occasioned the greater part of those civil wars, with the sad relation of which the histories of the antient and modern nations of the world so generally abound.”53

  The common people or the many, wrote Lincoln, were those who possessed only the rights of persons; their “subsistence is derived from their bodily labours.” The gentlemen or the few, on the other hand, were those who obtained “their riches and support, not from their own, but the labours of others.” These men of property, wrote Lincoln, who certainly saw himself as one of this group, were “the merchant, the physician, the lawyer and the divine, and in a word, all of every kind whose subsistence is not derived from the labours of their body.” Because the few gentry derived their support from the same source—that is, the labor of others—they collaborated and supported one another. “As a union of interests is the strongest cement of friendship, we find them, not only united in publick life, but associating together in private.” Since these gentlemen possessed a sense of superiority and seldom stooped except with reluctance, they rarely associated with the laboring many and inevitably courted the society of their own genteel kind.54

  Although these two social contestants had different names at different times, “with us,” said Lincoln, “they are described by the gentlemen and the common people.” Adams in his Defence agreed. All societies, Adams said, were “naturally divided into two sorts, the gentlemen and the simplemen, a word here chosen to signify the common people.”55 Both Adams and Lincoln included the middling sort among the common people.

  To us today, the designation of gentleman scarcely seems to represent anything similar to an aristocracy, let alone a separate social order. But for that very different eighteenth century the title of gentleman was very meaningful and even carried legal significance. For Adams and for young Lincoln, the distinction of being a gentleman was not just a convenient social label as it was for some. They saw it as something central to the organization of society; the aristocracy was a republican-style estate that required representation in a separate branch of the legislatures.56

  This American aristocracy, however, was very different from that of Europe. European nobles, said Adams, had more pride, “that kind of pride which looks down on commerce and manufacturing as degrading.” Perhaps this contempt for commerce, he said, played a useful role in Europe. Maybe it helped prevent the European nobility from becoming too rich and inhibited its acquiring too large a proportion of landed property. Or the aristocracy’s valuing honor over money might have saved the European nations from being completely consumed by avarice. But in America such pretensions, such disdain for the making of money, said Adams, not only would be “mischievous” but would expose the aristocrats “to universal ridicule and contempt.” The American aristocracy’s preoccupation with money distinguished it from the European aristocracy and was one of its weaknesses.

  Other European “hauteurs,” such as “keeping the commons at a distance and distaining to converse with any but a few” of their own aristocratic kind, while impossible to pull off in America, survived in the Old World because they relieved the common people of a multitude of humiliating and troublesome compliances. This distance between the nobility and commoners in Europe may have helped prevent the aristocrats there from caballing with the people and influencing elections. But in America such a separation between gentry and commoners, such expressions of aristocratic snobbery, said Adams, “would justly excite universal indignation. . . . No such airs will ever be endured.”

  Despite America’s aristocrats being less arrogant than their European counterparts, however, they turned out to be more sly and devious. By downplaying their distinctiveness and pretending that they were no different from the common people, the American gentry, said Adams, actually exerted more influence over their society than did the European aristocrats.57

  Despite these differences between the European and American aristocracies, both Lincoln and Adams believed that American society, like that of Europe, was basically divided between two coherent social orders of gentlemen and commoners and that these two orders were in constant conflict with each other. Both writers offered the same solution to the conflict: each of the contending social interests had to be embodied in a separate house of the legislature, with the executive granted an unqualified negative over all legislation in order to preserve a balance between the two houses.

  “A balance,” wrote Lincoln, “supposes three things, the two scales, and the hand that holds it.” Adams could not have put it better; indeed, he used the same image in the Defence, both he and Lincoln borrowing the figure directly from a 1701 piece by Jonathan Swift.58 Only “three different orders of men,” watching and balancing one another, said Adams, could preserve the constitution. Every legislature had to have separate chambers, one for the few on the top and another for the many on the bottom of the society, an organizing, segregating, and balancing of the two basic social estates, mediated by a third estate, an independent executive who shared in the lawmaking—that is, who possessed an absolute veto over all legislation. The perfect constitution, said Adams, was “the tripartite balance, the political trinity in unity, trinity of legislative, and unity of executive power, which in politics is no mystery.”59

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  SINCE BENJAMIN LINCOLN JR.’S description of a constant struggle between the many and few in all societies was so close to Adams’s later account in his Defence, and since there is no evidence that Adams ever read Lincoln—he certainly never mentioned “The Free Republican” in his papers—both political analyses had to have come from a common source, a common Massachusetts experience.60 Both young Lincoln and Adams were clearly privy to the conversations and opinions of the eastern creditors who were involved in creating the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 and its aristocratic senate designed to protect eastern gentry-property against the radicalism of the western debtor farmers.

  Adams certainly favored a strong senate, but his idea of what the senate was supposed to stand for was broader than simply protecting the property of the creditors against the rapaciousness of the people. Although Lincoln admitted that the few rich should never be in a position to deprive the commoners of their share in government and he voiced some concern over the power of the few over the many, he generally had a more generous attitude toward the aristocracy than Adams. Lincoln identified with the east-coast creditor-elites, and like them he was far more obsessed with property than Adams. He maintained that the security of property must “be ranked among the first objects of civil society” and that “men possessed of property are entitled to a greater share of political authority than those who are destitute of it.”61

  Adams never made claims for property in this blunt and barefaced manner, and he never said the rich deserved a greater share of political authority than the common people. Instead, more often than not, he repeatedly voiced apprehensions over the overweening power and influence of the aristocracy. “The great and perpetual distinction in civilized societies,” he said over and over, “has been between the rich who are few, and the poor who are many.” The struggle between the patricians and the plebeians was constant. But ultimately the few patricians generally outmaneuvered and outwitted the many plebeians. “The few have had most art and union, and therefore have generally prevailed in the end.”62

  He said in 1787 that he no longer shared Jefferson’s conventional Whig fear of where the majo
r threat to liberty lay. “You,” he told Jefferson, “are afraid of the one—I, of the few. . . . You are apprehensive of Monarchy, I, of Aristocracy.” Both of us, he said, “agreed perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect Representation” in the various houses of representation. Unlike the ancients, Adams had no desire whatsoever to exclude ordinary working people from citizenship. But Adams knew that he and Jefferson differed over the power to be granted the other two elements in the government. Whereas Jefferson wanted to reduce the power of executives, Adams said he would enhance the power of the executives and reduce that of the senates. For Adams it was the few, “the rich, the well-born, and the able,” who, with their heightened sense of avarice and ambition, were the social order most dangerous to liberty and the stability of the society.63

  Adams’s fear that aristocrats were more threatening to society than kings came from his previous experience with the rich, the wellborn, and the able, reinforced by his extensive reading in history. As someone of middling origins who had made it to the top of the society, he necessarily had an ambivalent view of aristocracy. He certainly realized these gentlemen-aristocrats—2 to 12 percent of American society, with fewer in the South than in the North—generally represented the best the society could offer in honor and wisdom.

  These few gentry may have been wealthy, but if they were to be ideal aristocrats Adams knew that they should not be preoccupied with work and the making of money. A thoroughly commercial people like the Dutch, he said, were not really aristocratic. They lacked the aristocratic passions—“the Love of Fame, the Desire for Glory, the Love of Country, the regard for Posterity, in short, all the brilliant and sublime Passions”—and they were therefore uninspiring and dull and interested in “nothing but the Love of Ease and Money.” The problem with the Dutch, said Adams in a revealing remark, was that they were “not Ambitious, and therefore happy.”64 Happiness, Adams realized, was never to be his lot in life.

  It was precisely because he himself was so possessed by those aristocratic passions, especially ambition and the love of fame, that he feared aristocrats. The aristocrats, he said, were so driven and were so powerful that they “acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.” How then, Adams asked, “shall the legislator avail himself of their influence for the equal benefit of the public? And how, on the other hand, shall he prevent them from disturbing the public happiness?” Only by taking “the most illustrious” of these rich and wellborn aristocrats and separating them “from the mass” and placing them by themselves in a senate, only then could the nation “have the benefit of their wisdom, without fear of their passions.” This was to all intents and purposes, said Adams, “an ostracism.”65

  • • •

  ADAMS WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE whose presumed fear of the aristocracy led to a desire to have the aristocrats isolated in a separate branch of the legislature. In 1787 Gouverneur Morris, the wealthy New Yorker representing Pennsylvania, made the same argument in the Constitutional Convention. Morris wanted an upper house that would exclusively represent property holders, but, he declared, placing the property-holding aristocrats in a separate house was not to protect them but only to limit their power. The rich, said Morris, would always “strive to establish their dominion & enslave the rest.” If they mixed with “the poor” in a single house, they would overawe the commoners and “establish an Oligarchy.” Yet if the “aristocratic interest” could be secluded in a separate branch of the legislature, “the popular interest will be combined against it.” There would then be “a mutual check and mutual security.”66

  An ingenious argument, but for Morris, an aristocrat to his core, it was no doubt a disingenuous one. Later in the Convention Morris revealed his concerns more clearly. He invoked the fear of aristocracy once again but now as a means of justifying limitations on who could vote. He suggested that giving the suffrage to all freemen, including people who had no property, would only contribute to the aristocracy’s domination of the government. Those voters without property, he said, will sell their votes “to the rich who will be able to buy them.”67

  Benjamin Lincoln Jr., in his “Free Republican” essays of 1785–1786, had made similar arguments. The few rich, he said, were dangerous because they could never be kept down. “Power, or the ability of controlling others, ever has been, and ever will be attached to property. . . . The glare of wealth, and the splendor of its favours” created an influence which was almost impossible to control. “Let us therefore,” Lincoln concluded, “regulate an evil we cannot prevent.” Segregate the few in a separate house of the legislature.68

  Both Morris and young Lincoln were wellborn aristocrats whose arguments for ostracizing the wealthy in upper houses seem more self-serving than Adams’s. They didn’t really fear the aristocracy the way Adams did; they were much more interested than Adams in protecting their property from rapacious commoners.

  Adams’s difference from Morris, who was a scion of one of the wealthiest and most distinguished families in New York, probably goes without saying. But even in the case of young Lincoln, Adams’s social status was different. Adams’s view of the Massachusetts senate differed from Lincoln’s because he had a different relationship to the eastern gentry-elites of the state than Lincoln did.

  As the son of a prominent Revolutionary War general, Lincoln was born a full-fledged member of the eastern aristocracy; Adams was not. Shortly before his untimely death at thirty-one, Lincoln had married Mary Otis, youngest daughter of the revolutionary patriot James Otis, and was moving in genteel circles with many powerful political and judicial figures, including Francis Dana, Edmund Trowbridge, and other members of what the followers of Thomas Jefferson later called the “Essex Junto.” Young Lincoln had become a Freemason in one of the most prestigious lodges in Massachusetts; Adams never became a Mason. Adams never liked such aristocratic fraternities; he believed that the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of former revolutionary army officers whose Massachusetts chapter was headed by Lincoln’s father, was “against the Spirit of our Government and the Genius of our People.”69

  Adams never felt fully at ease with the Cabots and Lowells, and he never shared Lincoln’s confidence in these eastern gentry. The intermarrying aristocrats from Essex County were generally far richer and better born than he, and their often arrogant manner put him off. While he was away serving his country, they were amassing wealth from their mercantile and legal practices and from interest on their money out on loan.

  Although Adams counted many of these aristocrats as friends and acquaintances, he was troubled by their blatant self-interestedness and their preoccupation with their prosperity and property. His relationship with these Massachusetts gentry became much worse after he became president and especially after he retired and began supporting some Jeffersonian policies that these aristocratic conservatives bitterly opposed. This Massachusetts experience—what Abigail called “the insolence of wealth” in the state—was a principal source of his mistrust of the few.70

  • • •

  AS SUCCESSFUL AS HE WAS, Adams never entirely shed his middling origins and he never accepted the aristocratic sense that those who were rich and wellborn were naturally entitled to high political office. In the traditional society of prerevolutionary America, wealth and social distinction generally had been prerequisites to holding superior political offices. Consequently, access to government had often come quickly and easily to those who had the necessary social credentials. So wealthy Thomas Hutchinson became a Boston selectman and a member of the General Court at age twenty-six and began at once to amass political offices. That was just as true of Jefferson. Following his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson emerged as one of the wealthiest planters in colonial Virginia. Whatever Jefferson’s considerable talents may have been, his wealth and social rank alone entitled him to a prominent position in V
irginia’s government.

  Adams was different. His family connections were meager, and he deeply resented the veneration for family that he saw all around him. “Go into every village in New England,” he said, “and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most.”71 Unlike Jefferson, Adams was a “new man”; he was completely a product of the Revolution in a way that Jefferson was not. Adams in his rise to public office dramatically reversed the relationship between social and political authority that existed in the traditional prerevolutionary society. In his case, his positions in government were the principal source of his social rank, not the other way around, as was the case with Jefferson, Washington, and many other leaders. For them their preexisting social preeminence and wealth gave them their claim, their entitlement, to high political office.

  Precisely because Adams was not rich and did not possess outside sources of income from rents, interest, or slaves, he emphatically rejected the two-thousand-year-old classical tradition of aristocratic public service. In an ideal republican world, it was assumed that government officeholders would transcend economic interests and would serve without salary.

  Washington was always concerned with his reputation for disinterestedness and had determined not to be paid a salary as commander in chief. Benjamin Franklin in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed that all members of the executive branch, from the president on down, should serve without pay. Jefferson was also committed to a classical republican view of office holding, which should be, he said, in accord with what he called “the Roman principle.” “In a virtuous government,” he claimed, “public offices are, what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss.” Public employment contributed “neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one’s family and affairs.” In fact, the very drudgery of office and the bare “subsistence” provided for officeholders in a republic were, said Jefferson, “a wise & necessary precaution against the degeneracy of the public servants.”72