Nothing could be a more blatant challenge to Jefferson’s vision of what America ought to be: an agricultural society supported by yeoman farmers growing staple crops for overseas export—whether tobacco, rice, or cotton. Because, like southerners in general, Jefferson thought of markets for these agricultural staples as mainly existing abroad, he attached a special importance to overseas commerce. Indeed, he defined the word “commerce” in traditional terms, as Montesquieu had: “the exportation and importation of merchandise with a view to the advantage of the state.”15 And for him and other southerners, exports were especially valuable. “The commodities we offer are either necessities of life, or materials for manufacture, or convenient Subjects of Revenue,” he wrote in his “Report on Commerce” in 1793; “and we take in exchange, either manufactures, when they have received the last finish of Art and Industry; or mere luxuries.”16
Because Americans exported necessities and imported mere luxuries, Jefferson and other southern leaders came to believe that the United States was in a strong position to use its trade as a weapon in international conflicts. As Jefferson told Madison in 1793, this ability to withhold America’s international trade was an alternative to war; it gave America “a happy opportunity of setting another example to the world, by shewing that nations may be brought to do justice by appeals to their interests as well as by appeals to arms.”17 These were the assumptions behind Jefferson’s and Madison’s experiments with nonimportation legislation and embargoes.
Since America had land enough to last for generations to come, Jefferson thought he could freeze time and simply expand the agricultural stage of society in space. Because yeoman farmers, his “chosen people of God,” were the only ones who could prevent the nation from becoming corrupt, they must continue to dominate American society. “While we have land to labour then,” he wrote, “let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twilling a distaff.” As manufacturing cities were sores on the body politic, “let our work shops remain in Europe.” If Americans should ever “get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,” he said, “they will become as corrupt as in Europe.” To be sure, cities, he admitted, did “nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere” than in cities. Better, he said, to have fewer of the fine arts if it meant “more health virtue & freedom”—an extraordinary concession to his vision of an agricultural America.18
As much as Jefferson had loved Paris and its art, he could not help viewing “great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”19 By seeking to stymie social development and preserve farming in America and prevent the emergence of cities, Jefferson knew that he was defying the trajectory of progress as understood by the best social science of the day. Whether consciously or not, he was protecting the agricultural slave society of the South as he knew it.
Both Jefferson and Adams, each in his own way, had a foreboding of America’s future. Jefferson wanted to hold back social maturation and halt America at the agricultural stage of development, or the society would become irreversibly corrupted and lose its capacity for republicanism. Adams thought that America was already well along in corruption and was wallowing in such luxury and inequality that it needed to adopt some monarchical elements in its governments if it were to maintain some modicum of freedom. Neither one predicted the future accurately.
Hamilton was more accurate, at least in the long run: the United States in time did become a great fiscal-military state. The secretary of the treasury’s program involved the federal government assuming the Revolutionary War debts of the states, combining them with the federal debts, and funding them—that is, issuing new bonds paying interest on a regular basis—in order to put the nation’s finances on a firm footing and turn the United States into an attractive place for investment by moneyed people both abroad and at home. His program also included an experiment for developing manufacturing in the country. To cap his plans Hamilton created a national bank, the Bank of the United States, to handle the federal government’s finances and to issue paper money. It was an extraordinary program, and it established Hamilton’s reputation as one of the great statesmen of modern Western history.
Since Hamilton’s program was modeled on the early-eighteenth-century experience of Great Britain, which had enabled it to become the greatest power in the world, it was bound to raise fears among those who were already anxious about all the talk of monarchy and titles and admiration for the English constitution. Since the only alternative to the new national government seemed to be disunity and anarchy, opposition to the administration developed slowly, especially because of the confidence everyone had in President Washington. Besides, no one as yet could conceive of a legitimate opposition in a republican government. Most people condemned parties as symptoms of disease in the body politic and signs that partiality and selfishness were replacing devotion to the public good, the res publica.
• • •
AT FIRST JEFFERSON DID NOT FULLY GRASP the implications of Hamilton’s program. He had been away, he later explained, and had “lost all familiarity” with what had been going on. To his subsequent embarrassment, he actually arranged the dinner party at which the compromise of 1790 was worked out between Hamilton and Madison. This compromise, which located the national capital on the Potomac in return for allowing the federal assumption of state debts, showed that most congressmen were still willing to bargain for the sake of union. But the chartering of the Bank of the United States in February 1791 in emulation of the Bank of England seemed a step too far and alarmed many Americans, especially southern aristocrats like Madison and Jefferson.
In 1791 most Americans were not all that familiar with banks. A decade earlier, the Continental Congress had set up the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, and by 1790 there were three more banks established in New York, Boston, and Baltimore. Yet compared with England, with its dozens upon dozens of private and county banks all regulated by the Bank of England, banking in America was new and undeveloped. When the Bank of North America was first opened in 1781, it was “a novelty,” said its president, Thomas Willing. Banking in America, he said, was “a pathless wilderness ground but little known to this side of the Atlantic.” English rules, arrangements, and bank bills were then unknown. “All was to us a mystery.”20
Banking was certainly a mystery to both Jefferson and Adams, and it remained a mystery for the rest of their lives. Neither understood how banks worked. Jefferson hated the Bank of the United States not only because it was a bank, but also because he considered that Congress’s chartering of it was unconstitutional. Anyone acknowledging the legitimacy of the Bank of the United States was committing “an act of treason” against the states, he told Madison in 1792; those who tried to “act under colour of the authority of a foreign legislature” (that is, the federal Congress) and issue and pass notes ought to be “adjudged guilty of high treason and suffer death accordingly, by the judgment of the state courts.” Calling the new federal Congress “a foreign legislature” revealed just how much of an anti-Federalist Jefferson really was, and his outrageous remark about treason suggested just how passionate he could get, at least in private letters.21
It wasn’t just the Bank of the United States that Jefferson hated; he hated all banks—“banking establishments,” he said, “are more dangerous than standing armies.” He especially hated the paper money they issued, which, he said, was designed “to enrich swindlers at the expense of the honest and industrious part of the nation.” He never understood how “legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce but nothing.” Jefferson thus saw little of value in Hamilton’s program. The buying and selling of stock and the raising of capital were simply licentious speculations and wild gambling, all symptoms of commercial avarice and corruption. Like most Virginians, he thought the only real wealth lay i
n land, not money.22
• • •
ALTHOUGH ADAMS AS VICE PRESIDENT was presumably a member of the administration, he had nothing to do with Hamilton’s program. He did cast twenty-eight tie-breaking votes in the Senate during his eight years as vice president, most of which strengthened the national government, but he was rarely ever consulted on the administration’s policies.23 By the summer of 1790, the French chargé d’affaires reported to his government that “the popularity of Mr. Adams . . . is falling lower and lower.” As far as his relationship with the president was concerned, “the influence of Mr. Adams was almost nil.” The French chargé concluded that “he will never be President.”24
Of course, it didn’t help matters that Adams soon began spending nearly three-quarters of each year at his farm in Quincy, especially after Abigail decided she no longer wanted to stay in Philadelphia, which in 1790 had replaced New York as the capital of the country. Apparently, the couple decided in 1792 that they could cut expenses if Abigail remained in Quincy, though publicly they claimed it was for reasons of health.
In Philadelphia, Adams sorely missed Abigail, complaining often of his “tedious days! and lonesome nights!”25 Unlike his tours in Europe, when he went weeks without writing, he now sent to her a steady stream of letters, at least one each week and sometimes more frequently. Abigail reciprocated. She lamented that “we are grown too old to live separate,” but she added that “our present seperation is much mitigated by the frequent intercourse we are enabled to hold by Letter.”26 Indeed, during the eighteen months spanning January 1794 through June 1795, the couple exchanged 145 letters.
It was not just his frequent absences in Quincy, however, that contributed to the administration’s neglect of him. Hamilton and Washington surely realized that he had little to offer them, for Adams was as innocent of banking and finance as Jefferson. To the end of his life he was convinced that “every dollar of a bank bill that is issued beyond the quantity of gold and silver in the vaults, represents nothing and is therefore a cheat upon somebody.”27 Of course, the only way a bank could earn any money for its investors was to issue more paper than it had gold or silver in its vaults.
These banks issuing notes were the means by which the states got around article I, section 10, of the Constitution, which prohibited the states from issuing paper money, one of the most notorious vices Madison had been concerned about in 1787. The states simply chartered banks, which then issued the paper money that everyone needed to carry on business with one another. Without that paper money, the economy would have been stifled. But some banks did sometimes get overextended. In 1808 the Farmers’ Exchange Bank of Gloucester (now Glocester), Rhode Island, emitted over $600,000 of paper notes, but had only $86.45 in gold and silver to support these notes; it went bankrupt and became the first bank to fail in United States history.28
That was the kind of incident that convinced Adams that banking was some sort of fraud. Because most gentry, especially those in the North, tended to live on rents, interest from money out on loan, official salaries, and other forms of fixed income, they feared inflation—that is, depreciated currency—above all. Adams was no different. He hated the paper money favored by debtors, most of whom were entrepreneurial-minded farmers and artisans borrowing money in order to carry on and enhance their commercial activities. “The Cry for Paper Money,” Adams said, “is downright Wickedness and Dishonesty. Every Man must see that it is the worst Engine of Knavery that ever was invented.”29
This dislike of paper money issued by the state-chartered banks alone made him a good Federalist. But his credentials as a Federalist were reinforced by his suspicion of France, his admiration of the English constitution, his dread of popular disorder, and his desire that due respect be paid to public officials. But because, like Jefferson, he had little understanding of banking and high finance, he was not quite Hamilton’s kind of Federalist. In fact, at times he could talk about the Federalists as if he were not one of them. “They are Seeking Popularity and Loaves and Fishes as well as the Anti’s,” he told Abigail in 1794, “and find it inconvenient to act a decided open Part in any Thing.” What he wanted above all was to “keep himself forever independent of the Smiles or Frowns of political Parties.”30
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THE INITIAL ESTABLISHMENT of the new federal government did not allay Adams’s fears for the country, and the continued American enthusiasm for the rampaging French Revolution was deeply alarming. His three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America had not been enough to persuade his countrymen to reform their governments and prepare for a violent and disorderly future. In 1790 he concluded that he had to take up his pen once again in order to further educate his fellow Americans on the dangers they faced, this time more from the populace than from the aristocracy. Reading the work of the seventeenth-century Italian historian Enrico Caterino Davila, Adams was provoked into writing thirty-two essays called Discourses on Davila that were serially published anonymously over the period 1790–1791 in John Fenno’s Federalist New York Gazette of the United States. (Adams later claimed that his Davila essays were the fourth volume of his Defence).
Davila’s Historia della guerre civili de Francia, originally published in 1630, described the intrigues, battles, and assassinations that occurred in France in the last half of the sixteenth century, in Adams’s mind a portent of the disasters that were currently afflicting revolutionary France. Most of Adams’s essays were straight translations of the first five books of Davila’s history. But fourteen of them had nothing to do with Davila, and instead contained Adams’s “useful reflections” on ambition, emulation, envy, and fame, what he called “the constitution of the human mind.”31
Apparently, Adams had been reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and a particular chapter in that work entitled “The Origins of Ambition and the Distinction of Ranks” struck a chord with him. When Smith in this chapter emphasized people’s powerful desire for reputation—men striving to have the eyes of the whole world gazing at them in admiration—Adams realized at once whom the author might have been talking about. When Adams, in effect responding to Smith’s interpretation of human psychology, wrote that nature had wrought the passion for distinction “into the texture and essence of the soul,” he knew only too keenly what soul he meant.32
More fearful now of the social war raging in revolutionary France, which Adams thought America might eventually duplicate, he became even more eager to emphasize the power of the passion for superiority and reputation that he believed lay behind what was happening in France and, indeed, behind all social upheavals. That passion for distinction, which, he said, was “the great spring of social activity,” existed in everyone in all societies. Every individual, no matter how lowly, wanted to be approved, talked about, and respected by those about him. If society was to avoid all the evils that overweening ambition and the desire for dominance created—the family rivalries, the mobs and seditions, and the “hissing snakes, burning torches, and haggard horrors” that came from civil war—it had to control and manage these passions.
Ultimately, said Adams in his extraordinary final discourse—one that appeared in Fenno’s paper but was never reprinted in the subsequent 1805 volume of the collected essays—the best means of regulation was to make the offices of government hereditary. History demonstrated this, said Adams. Nearly all the nations of the earth had eventually given all power over to hereditary monarchs, and they had done so after they had tried “all possible experiments of elections of Governors and Senates.” They had found “so much emulation in every heart, so many rivalries among the principal men, such divisions, confusions and miseries” that they concluded that “hereditary succession was attended with fewer evils than frequent elections.” Adams agreed with that perspective, saying emphatically that this was “the true answer and the only one.”33
• • •
WITH SUC
H VIEWS, it was not surprising that Adams’s Discourses on Davila aroused a storm of controversy and eventually turned Jefferson and others against Fenno’s paper. Jefferson had been following the Davila essays from their beginning in April 1790 and had actually tried to counter them by inserting into Fenno’s Gazette translated pro-republican pieces from a Dutch paper in Leyden; he saw these insertions as “an Antidote” to Adams’s quasi-monarchical views.34 The insertions came to an end in July 1790, when Fenno’s paper turned decisively against the French Revolution and its “barbarous spirit of democracy.”35 Instead of simply defending the federal Constitution, the Gazette, in Jefferson’s opinion, had become a mouthpiece for the Federalist program, spouting antirepublican sentiments. With the change in Fenno’s paper, Jefferson became convinced that he should create a newspaper that supported pure republicanism.
Adams remained extraordinarily naïve. He seemed to have little awareness of the effect his statements and writings had on people. When his longtime friend Mercy Otis Warren asked him to find positions for her husband and son in the new government, instead of simply telling her that he had no control over patronage and leaving it at that, he went on to proclaim his virtue in never allowing his personal attachment to family or friends to interfere with his public duties. And if that weren’t enough, he then proceeded to criticize her husband, General James Warren, for his support of the Shaysite rebels. Their long friendship began to unravel. He was irritated by the Warrens’ more radical politics, and they in turn were angered by his manner. When Adams as minster to the Court of St. James’s was unable to get Mrs. Warren’s history play The Sack of Rome published in England, telling her “nothing American sells here,” she was offended. Although she had originally dedicated the play to Adams, when it was finally published in America in 1790, she changed the dedication to George Washington.36
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