Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Adams knew where they could be found. They existed all over America, especially in his own state; indeed, he declared that Massachusetts possessed as many aristocratic families as any place on earth, and these social inequalities were impossible to eradicate.78 In his stubborn, perverse way, Adams was defying the egalitarian assumptions of Jefferson shared by most Americans. By positing the inevitable presence of aristocracy, he confronted American culture head-on.

  By 1789 almost no political figure was willing to admit publicly that he was a member of an American aristocracy. Even Alexander Hamilton, when accused by the sharp-witted anti-Federalist Melancton Smith in the New York ratifying convention of being an aristocrat, felt compelled to deny the charge vehemently. Smith, Hamilton contended, would certainly never admit that he was demagogically accusing men of being aristocrats simply to arouse passions and create prejudices. “Why then are we told so often of an aristocracy? For my part,” said Hamilton, “I hardly know the meaning of the word as it is applied.” There was no aristocracy in America, said Hamilton, or else “every distinguished man is an aristocrat,” which, if that was what Smith meant, he said, rendered the term meaningless.79 But that was pretty close to what Adams eventually came to mean by an aristocrat.80

  However confused his critics were by Adams’s discussions of aristocracy, they were basically correct in claiming that he wanted to change the state constitutions and the federal Constitution. In 1789 only Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the new federal government gave even a limited veto power to their executives; no government in America yet possessed the absolute executive veto power that Adams thought essential for a properly balanced constitution.

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH ADAMS PROTESTED that he was “as much a republican as I was in 1775,” many of his ideas seemed out of place in the America of 1789–1790.81 Since most of his fellow Americans had abandoned or never clearly held Adams’s traditional conception of a mixed republic, with its balance of the social orders of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, his talk of “monarchical republics” and “republican monarchies” was bound to confuse people and raise suspicions. Couldn’t his countrymen follow what he was saying? “How is it possible,” he said, in frustration, “that whole nations should be made to comprehend the principles and rules of government, until they shall learn to understand one another’s meaning by words?”82

  Roger Sherman of Connecticut, for example, could not grasp Adams’s unusual definition of a republic as “government where sovereignty is vested in more than one person.” Adams actually celebrated the fact that this strange definition of republican government made England as much of a republic as America, “a monarchical republic, it is true,” Adams admitted, “but a republic still.” England was a republic, he said, to Sherman’s bewilderment, because “the sovereignty, which is the legislative power . . . is equally divided between the one, the few, and the many, or in other words, between the natural division of mankind in society,—the monarchical, the aristocratical, and democratical.”

  For Sherman this made no sense at all. For him a republic was the opposite of a monarchy, “a commonwealth without a king,” a government in which all parts, executives as well as the two branches of the legislature, were elected agents of the people. What especially made a state “a republic,” said Sherman, was “its dependence on the public or people at large, without any hereditary powers.”83

  To Adams, Sherman’s definition was just another example of the “peculiar sense to which the words republic, commonwealth, popular state” were being used by people “who mean by them a democracy, or rather a representative democracy.” But for most Americans by 1789 that was precisely what the United States had become—a representative democracy, even though it contained single executives and bicameral legislatures at both the state and federal levels. For Sherman and most other Americans, all these various parts of their governments had become different kinds of representatives of the people—at least that was what they were calling them in public.

  Captivated as he was by the historical meaning of mixed government as a balancing of social estates and lacking any sense of political correctness, Adams could not understand what Sherman and others were talking about. For him a democracy or a representative democracy was simply “a government in a single assembly, chosen at stated periods by the people, and invested with the whole sovereignty.” If the government contained a single executive and a senate, Adams believed that it necessarily had to be something other than a democracy, or even a representative democracy; indeed, it had to be a “limited monarchy” or “a monarchical republic.” That gap in understanding between him and his countrymen was never closed.

  Because America to Adams was a monarchical republic, its president being a kind of elective king and an embodiment of the order of the “one” in the society, “it is essential to a monarchial republic,” he declared, “that the supreme executive should be a branch of the legislature, and have a negative on all the laws.” Without a full and proper share in the legislature by the monarchical order, he told Sherman, the desired balance of the state “between the one, the few, and the many” could not be preserved.84

  By 1789 this justification for the executive veto was peculiar to Adams and was not at all shared by Sherman and most other Americans. An absolute veto, said Sherman, may have made sense in England where the rights of the people and the rights of the nobility had to be offset by the Crown’s possessing a complete negative power over all laws. But the American republics, “wherein is no higher rank than that of common citizens,” had no such social orders to balance. The qualified veto power given to executives in America, said Sherman, had nothing to do with embodying a monarchical social order in the government; it was designed “only to produce a revision” of the laws and to prevent hastily drawn legislation.

  As a final blow to Adams’s conception of government and society, Sherman claimed that there were “no principles in our constitution that have any tendency to aristocracy.” Since “both branches of Congress are eligible from the citizens at large, and wealth is not a requisite qualification, both will commonly be composed of members of similar circumstances in life.” Thus there could be no social struggle between the several branches of government; all were equal agents of the people, “directed to one end, the advancement of the public good.”85

  In his conventional republican rhetoric, Sherman may have understood correctly how Americans had come to conceive of their government, but by so casually and mindlessly denying the existence of any aristocracy in America, he, like other Americans, did not do justice to the power and complexity of Adams’s analysis of their society. Adams may have misunderstood the rationale Americans now gave for the structure of their balanced governments, but he realized better than most of his countrymen the inherent inequality of their society and the inevitability of elites.

  In the face of this kind of mounting criticism, Adams clung to his unorthodox views of government only more firmly. He published two more volumes of his Defence in which he laid out even more fully his pessimistic but realistic analysis of American society. He realized that his critics conceived of aristocracy in formal legal terms, but they were letting their predilections get in the way of the truth; their ideology was obscuring social realities. “Perhaps it may be said,” Adams declared, “that in America we have no distinctions of ranks, and therefore shall not be liable to those divisions and discords which spring from them.” But this was just wishful thinking. “All we can say in America is, that legal distinctions, titles, powers, and privileges, are not hereditary.” The craving for distinction—basic to human nature—was as strong in America as anywhere. Weren’t the slightest differences of rank and position, between laborers, yeomen, and gentlemen, “as earnestly desired and sought, as titles, garters, and ribbons are in any nation of Europe”?86

  In fact, said Adams, almost a half century before Tocqueville made the same penetrating o
bservation, the desire for distinction was even stronger in egalitarian America than elsewhere. Aristocrats, of course, had to keep up their distinctiveness, “or fall into contempt and ridicule.” But in America “the lowest and the middling people,” despite their continual declamations against the rich and the great, were really no different. They were as much addicted to buying superfluities as the aristocracy. Indeed, “a free people,” said Adams, “are the most addicted to luxury of any.” Their republican emphasis on equality hurried them into buying more than they needed. A man would see his neighbor “whom he holds his equal” with a better coat, hat, house, or horse. “He cannot bear it; he must and will be on a level with him.” In the 1780s, said Adams, the American people “rushed headlong into a greater degree of luxury than ought to have crept in for a hundred years.” Indeed, he told Benjamin Rush, because America was “more Avaricious than any other Nation that ever existed,” it would be foolish to expect the country to free itself from the passion for distinctions.87

  In April 1790 Rush told Adams that he and Jefferson in the previous month had had a conversation about Adams. “We both deplored your attachment to monarchy and both agreed that you had changed your principles since the year 1776.” Adams replied to Rush immediately and vehemently denied both charges. So by the time Jefferson joined the administration in the spring of 1790, he had at least an inkling of his friend’s strange monarchical thinking. But as yet the two had not directly confronted each other over their differences. That was soon to change.88

  EIGHT

  FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS

  WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON arrived in New York in the spring of 1790 to take up his post as secretary of state in the Washington administration, he realized, as his conversation with Benjamin Rush indicated, that his friend John Adams was contributing to the surprising prevalence of monarchical sentiments in the city. Many people were claiming that “the glare of royalty and nobility, during his mission to England, had made him believe their fascination a necessary ingredient in government.” Adams, it appeared, had become a crypto-monarchist, very much in love with the English constitution.1

  Adams’s initial behavior as vice president certainly helped convince many people that he had indeed been too long at the Court of St. James’s. Worried about too much democracy, Adams, like many other conservatives, assumed that the new national government needed a certain amount of monarchical ceremony and ritual to offset the populism of the country. He advised President Washington that his office required a “large and ample” household and an entourage of chamberlains, aides-de-camp, and masters of ceremonies to conduct the formalities of the office and give it a necessary show of “Splendor and Majesty.”2

  • • •

  ADAMS TOOK HIS OWN position in the government quite seriously, not as vice president (in which “I am nothing, but I may be everything”), but as president of the Senate.3 He rode to the Senate each day in an elaborate carriage with six horses, attended by four servants, “two Gentlemen before him,” and a driver in livery—“no more state,” said Abigail, “than is perfectly consistent with his station.”4 And then, dressed in European-court style with a powdered wig and small sword, he presided over all the Senate’s meetings and engaged fully in its debates—contrary to what subsequent vice presidents have done.

  When some senators resisted his initial efforts to inject into the Senate some ceremonial practices borrowed from the British government—charging that such rituals represented “the first Step of the Ladder in the Assent to royalty”—Adams declared that as colonists Americans had been happy using those practices and that all he wanted was a respectable government. He went on to suggest that perhaps he had indeed been abroad too long and the temper of the American people had changed. At any rate, he said, if he had known in 1775 that it would come to this, that the American people would not accept a dignified government, “he never would have drawn his Sword.”5 Such an astonishing statement revealed the extent of his growing frustration with his countrymen’s unwillingness to recognize the social chaos they faced.

  Such an exaggerated remark came from a real anxiety that the authority of the new government might not be properly “supported with dignity and Splendor.” It was “not to gratify individuals that public Titles are annexed to offices,” he said. “It is to make offices and laws respected,” especially among “the Profligate,” who had “little reverence for Reason, Right or Law divine or human.”6 As vice president, Adams became obsessed with titles for governmental officials, especially for the president, and this at a time, as some opponents noted, when revolutionary France was busy abolishing titles and all traces of feudalism.

  The Senate took up the issue of titles and debated it for a month, with Adams constantly haranguing the senators from the chair. The president’s title, he told his friend William Tudor, could not be simply “His Excellency,” which was what governors of states were called. Only something like “His Highness, or, if you will, His Most Benign Highness” would do. If the governors of the states got to thinking that they were superior to the president, “they will infallibly undermine and overturn the whole system”—a not unfounded fear.7

  It was obvious to Adams that the chief executive had to be addressed as something other than mere “President.” After all, he informed the Senate, there were “Presidents of Fire Companies & of a Cricket Club.” Finally, under Adams’s prodding the Senate agreed on the title “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of Their Liberties.” But because Adams’s “grasping after Titles has been observed by every body,” he hurt himself with Washington and some of his colleagues. During the debate, some senators, especially from the South, began mocking him and calling him “His Rotundity.”8

  Meanwhile, under James Madison’s leadership, the House of Representatives rejected the Senate’s suggestion and prevailed with the simple title of “Mr. President”—which worked because Washington’s inherent authority gave it weight. When Jefferson learned of Adams’s preoccupation with titles, he could only shake his head in wonderment and remind Madison of Benjamin Franklin’s characterization of Adams as someone who was “always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”9

  Jefferson soon had firsthand evidence of his friend’s admiration for the English constitution. Before leaving for a tour of the southern states in the spring of 1791, President Washington asked the cabinet to meet and discuss what should be done in his absence; he suggested that Vice President Adams also be present, “the only occasion,” said Jefferson, “on which that officer was ever requested to take part in a Cabinet question.” Jefferson offered to host a dinner party for the discussion. After business was done, the conversation turned to other matters, including the English constitution. Jefferson was stunned to hear the English constitution extolled by his guests and he wrote up what was said as soon as his guests had left.10 “Purge that constitution of it’s corruption,” he reported Adams saying, “and give to it’s popular branch equality of representation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” What Adams meant by corruption was the members of Parliament being simultaneously ministers of the Crown, by American standards a clear violation of separation of powers. As if to twist the knife that Adams had planted in Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton went on to say, following a suggestion of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, that he preferred the English constitution with its corruption. Corruption, said Hamilton, was precisely what made the English constitution workable, for it allowed for ministerial responsibility to Parliament. And, of course, that is precisely how the British parliamentary system of cabinet government has worked right up to today.11

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  HAMILTON’S REMARK ONLY REINFORCED Jefferson’s suspicion of what the secretary of the treasury was up to. With the support of President Washington, Hamilton had set forth in 1790–1791 an ambitious program designed
to turn the United States into a fiscal-military state that in time—perhaps three or four decades—would be able to take on any of the great European powers on their own terms. Hamilton and other Federalists wanted the United States to move as rapidly as possible into the final stage of commercial and industrial development. “Notions of equality,” he told Washington, were as “yet . . . too general and too strong” for the distinctions and hierarchy appropriate to a mature, advanced nation.12 But with his program America in time would develop all the elements of the modern society of Great Britain—banks, stock markets, stock companies, and manufacturing firms. If the United States remained the predominantly agricultural society that Jefferson preferred, then Hamilton and the other Federalists believed that America would remain a rude and stagnant society.

  Although Adams, like Hamilton, certainly thought that the nation would mature and would need hereditary institutions in order to maintain social stability, and “that in no very distant Period of time,” he was a moderate on the issue of commercial development.13 He was less confident than Hamilton on the wisdom of the Federalist program, believing that “the Science of political Economy is but a late Study and is not generally understood among Us.” Nevertheless, he agreed that “a discreet and judicious Encouragement of Manufactures” was essential for the good of the nation. Other Federalists were bolder. “An agricultural nation which exports its raw materials and imports its manufactures,” declared a New Englander in 1789, could never become either “opulent” or “powerful.”14