The 18th century
In America in the early years of the 18th century,
some writers, such as Cotton Mather, carried on the
older traditions. His huge history and biography of
Puritan New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in
1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad Ministerium, or
introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses
of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards,
initiator of the Great Awakening, a religious
revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for many
years, eloquently defended his burning belief in
Calvinistic doctrine—of the concept that man, born
totally depraved, could attain virtue and salvation
only through God’s grace—in his powerful sermons and
most notably in the philosophical treatise Freedom
of Will (1754). He supported his claims by relating
them to a complex metaphysical system and by
reasoning brilliantly in clear and often beautiful
prose.
But Mather and
Edwards were defending a doomed
cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John
Wise and Jonathan Mayhew moved toward a less rigid
religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes in
his amusing Diary, covering the years 1673–1729.
Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily
records how commercial life in New England replaced
rigid Puritanism with more worldly attitudes. The
Journal of Mme Sara Kemble Knight comically detailed
a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She
wrote vividly of what she saw and commented upon it
from the standpoint of an orthodox believer, but a
quality of levity in her witty writings showed that
she was much less fervent than the Pilgrim founders
had been. In the South, William Byrd of Virginia, an
aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharply
with gloomier predecessors. His record of a
surveying trip in 1728, The History of the Dividing
Line, and his account of a visit to his frontier
properties in 1733, A Journey to the Land of Eden,
were his chief works. Years in England, on the
Continent, and among the gentry of the South had
created gaiety and grace of expression, and,
although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as
the Restoration wits whose works he clearly admired.
The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized
differences that had been growing between American
and British political concepts. As the colonists
moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable,
fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new
nation’s government, they were influenced by a
number of very effective political writers, such as
Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom
favoured the colonists, and loyalist Joseph
Galloway. But two figures loomed above
these—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.
Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish
his writings in his brother’s newspaper, the New
England Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper
championed the cause of the “Leather Apron” man and
the farmer and appealed by using easily understood
language and practical arguments. The idea that
common sense was a good guide was clear in both the
popular Poor Richard’s almanac, which Franklin
edited between 1732 and 1757 and filled with prudent
and witty aphorisms purportedly written by
uneducated but experienced Richard Saunders, and in
the author’s Autobiography, written between 1771 and
1788, a record of his rise from humble circumstances
that offered worldly wise suggestions for future
success.
Franklin’s self-attained culture, deep and wide,
gave substance and skill to varied articles,
pamphlets, and reports that he wrote concerning the
dispute with Great Britain, many of them extremely
effective in stating and shaping the colonists’
cause.
Thomas Paine went from his native England to
Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and then,
about 14 months later, the most effective
propagandist for the colonial cause. His pamphlet
Common Sense (January 1776) did much to influence
the colonists to declare their independence. The
American Crisis papers (December 1776–December 1783)
spurred Americans to fight on through the blackest
years of the war. Based upon Paine’s simple deistic
beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring
melodrama with the angelic colonists against the
forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were
highly effective propaganda. Another reason for
Paine’s success was his poetic fervour, which found
expression in impassioned words and phrases long to
be remembered and quoted.
Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather, (b. Feb. 12, 1663,
Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony
[U.S.]—d. Feb. 13, 1728, Boston),
American Congregational minister and
author, supporter of the old order of
the ruling clergy, who became the most
celebrated of all New England Puritans.
He combined a mystical strain (he
believed in the existence of witchcraft)
with a modern scientific interest (he
supported smallpox inoculation).
The son
of Increase Mather and the grandson of
John Cotton and Richard Mather, Cotton
Mather lived all his life in Boston. He
entered Harvard at the age of 12, easily
passing entrance requirements to read
and write Latin and to “decline the
Greek nouns and verbs.” He devoted
himself unremittingly to study and
prayer. At 18 he received his M.A.
degree from the hands of his father, who
was president of the college.
Mather
once noted that his life was “a
continual conversation with heaven,” but
he spent agonizing hours convinced that
he was damned and equal time in
ecstasies that he was not. For a while,
he feared he could not enter the
ministry because of a speech impediment,
and he considered becoming a physician;
the subject of medicine was of lifelong
interest to him. After a friend
persuaded him “to oblige himself to a
dilated Deliberation in speaking,” he
conquered his weakness and returned to
religious studies. He preached his first
sermon in his father’s church in August
1680 and in October another from his
grandfather John Cotton’s pulpit. He was
formally ordained in 1685 and became his
father’s colleague.
He
devoted his life to praying, preaching,
writing, and publishing and still
followed his main purpose in life of
doing good. His book, Bonifacius, or
Essays to Do Good (1710), instructs
others in humanitarian acts, some ideas
being far ahead of his time: the
schoolmaster to reward instead of punish
his students, the physician to study the
state of mind of his patient as a
probable cause of illness. He
established societies for community
projects.
He
joined his father in cautioning judges
against the use of “spectre evidence”
(testimony of a victim of witchcraft
that he had been attacked by a spectre
bearing the appearance of someone he
knew) in the witchcraft trials and in
working for the ouster of Sir Edmund
Andros as governor of Massachusetts. He
was also a leader in the fight for
inoculation against smallpox, incurring
popular disapproval. When Cotton
inoculated his own son, who almost died
from it, the whole community was
wrathful, and a bomb was thrown through
his chamber window. Satan seemed on the
side of his enemies; various members of
his family became ill, and some died.
Worst of all, his son Increase was
arrested for rioting.
Mather’s interest in science and
particularly in various American
phenomena—published in his Curiosa
Americana (1712–24)—won him membership
in the Royal Society of London. His
account of the inoculation episode was
published in the society’s transactions.
He corresponded extensively with notable
scientists, such as Robert Boyle. His
Christian Philosopher (1721) recognizes
God in the wonders of the earth and the
universe beyond; it is both
philosophical and scientific and,
ironically, anticipates 18th-century
Deism, despite his clinging to the old
order.
Cotton
Mather wrote and published more than 400
works. His magnum opus was Magnalia
Christi Americana (1702), an
ecclesiastical history of America from
the founding of New England to his own
time. His Manuductio ad Ministerium
(1726) was a handbook of advice for
young graduates to the ministry: on
doing good, on college love affairs, on
poetry and music, and on style. His
ambitious 20-year work on biblical
learning was interrupted by his death.
He died
only five years after his father, whose
colleague he had been for 40 years. Of
15 children by his three wives—Abigail
Phillips, Elizabeth (née Clark) Hubbard,
and Lydia (née Lee) George—only two
survived him.
Cotton
Mather’s heritage from his two
grandfathers, Richard Mather and John
Cotton, was both fortunate and
unfortunate. Like them, he had an active
mind and the will to use it. He lived in
the shadow of their greatness and
expected to carry on the tradition and
to assume their role in the Puritan
community. Unfortunately, he could not
see that the old order was passing. As
colonial communities became more secure
from earlier hardships of settlements,
they also became more complacent and
less in need of a confining spiritual
leadership. Cotton fought for the
continuance of the old order of the
ruling clergy, sometimes with
frustration, sometimes in anger. His
Diary was edited by W.C. Ford (1911–12).
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Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards, (b. Oct. 5, 1703, East
Windsor, Conn. [U.S.]—d. March 22, 1758,
Princeton, N.J.), greatest theologian
and philosopher of British American
Puritanism, stimulator of the religious
revival known as the “Great Awakening,”
and one of the forerunners of the age of
Protestant missionary expansion in the
19th century.
Early
life and ministry
Edwards’ father, Timothy, was pastor of
the church at East Windsor, Conn.; his
mother, Esther, was a daughter of
Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church
at Northampton, Mass. Jonathan was the
fifth child and only son among 11
children; he grew up in an atmosphere of
Puritan piety, affection, and learning.
After a rigorous schooling at home, he
entered Yale College in New Haven,
Conn., at the age of 13. He was
graduated in 1720 but remained at New
Haven for two years, studying divinity.
After a brief New York pastorate
(1722–23), he received the M.A. degree
in 1723; during most of 1724–26 he was a
tutor at Yale. In 1727 he became his
grandfather’s colleague at Northampton.
In the same year, he married Sarah
Pierrepont, who combined a deep, often
ecstatic, piety with personal
winsomeness and practical good sense. To
them were born 11 children.
The
manuscripts that survive from his
student days exhibit Edwards’ remarkable
powers of observation and analysis
(especially displayed in “Of Insects”),
the fascination that the English
scientist Isaac Newton’s optical
theories held for him (“Of the
Rainbow”), and his ambition to publish
scientific and philosophical works in
confutation of materialism and atheism
(“Natural Philosophy”). Throughout his
life he habitually studied with pen in
hand, recording his thoughts in numerous
hand-sewn notebooks; one of these, his
“Catalogue” of books, demonstrates the
wide variety of his interests.
Edwards
did not accept his theological
inheritance passively. In his “Personal
Narrative” he confesses that, from his
childhood on, his mind “had been full of
objections” against the doctrine of
predestination—i.e., that God
sovereignly chooses some to salvation
but rejects others to everlasting
torment; “it used to appear like a
horrible doctrine to me.” Though he
gradually worked through his
intellectual objections, it was only
with his conversion (early in 1721) that
he came to a “delightful conviction” of
divine sovereignty, to a “new sense” of
God’s glory revealed in Scripture and in
nature. This became the centre of
Edwards’ piety: a direct, intuitive
apprehension of God in all his glory, a
sight and taste of Christ’s majesty and
beauty far beyond all “notional”
understanding, immediately imparted to
the soul (as a 1734 sermon title puts
it) by “a divine and supernatural
light.” This alone confers worth on man,
and in this consists his salvation. What
such a God does must be right; hence,
Edwards’ cosmic optimism. The acceptance
and affirmation of God as he is and does
and the love of God simply because he is
God became central motifs in all of
Edwards’ preaching.
Under
the influence of Puritan and other
Reformed divines, the Cambridge
Platonists, and British
philosopher-scientists such as Newton
and Locke, Edwards began to sketch in
his manuscripts the outlines of a
“Rational Account” of the doctrines of
Christianity in terms of contemporary
philosophy. In the essay “Of Being,” he
argued from the inconceivability of
absolute Nothing to the existence of God
as the eternal omnipresent Being. It was
also inconceivable to him that anything
should exist (even universal Being)
apart from consciousness; hence,
material things exist only as ideas in
perceiving minds; the universe depends
for its being every moment on the
knowledge and creative will of God; and
“spirits only are properly substance.”
Further, if all knowledge is ultimately
from sensation (Locke) and if a sense
perception is merely God’s method of
communicating ideas to the mind, then
all knowledge is directly dependent on
the divine will to reveal; and a saving
knowledge of God and spiritual things is
possible only to those who have received
the gift of the “new sense.” This grace
is independent of human effort and is
“irresistible,” for the perception of
God’s beauty and goodness that it
confers is in its very nature a glad
“consent.” Nevertheless, God decrees
conversion and a holy life as well as
ultimate felicity; and he has so
constituted things that “means of grace”
(e.g., sermons, sacraments, even the
fear of hell) are employed by the Spirit
in conversion, though not as “proper
causes.” Thus, the predestinarian
preacher could appeal to the emotions
and wills of men.
Pastorate at Northampton
At Stoddard’s death in 1729, Edwards
became sole occupant of the Northampton
pulpit, the most important in
Massachusetts outside of Boston. In his
first published sermon, preached in 1731
to the Boston clergy and significantly
entitled God Glorifiedin the Work of
Redemption, by the Greatness of Man’s
Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It,
Edwards blamed New England’s moral ills
on its assumption of religious and moral
self-sufficiency. Because God is the
saints’ whole good, faith, which abases
man and exalts God, must be insisted on
as the only means of salvation. The
English colonists’ enterprising spirit
made them susceptible to a version of
Arminianism (deriving from the Dutch
theologian Jacobus Arminius), which was
popular in the Anglican Church and
spreading among dissenters; it minimized
the disabling effects of original sin,
stressed free will, and tended to make
morality the essence of religion.
Against
these ideas Edwards also delivered a
series of sermons on “Justification by
Faith Alone” in November 1734. The
result was a great revival in
Northampton and along the Connecticut
River Valley in the winter and spring of
1734–35, during which period more than
300 of Edwards’ people made professions
of faith. His subsequent report, A
Faithful Narrative of the Surprising
Work of God (1737), made a profound
impression in America and Europe,
particularly through his description of
the types and stages of conversion
experience.
In
1740–42 came the Great Awakening
throughout the colonies. George
Whitefield, a highly successful
evangelist in the English Methodist
movement, and Gilbert Tennent, a
Presbyterian minister from New Jersey,
drew huge crowds; their “pathetical”
(i.e., emotional) sermons resulted in
violent emotional response and mass
conversions. Edwards himself, though he
held his own congregation relatively
calm, employed the “preaching of terror”
on several occasions, as in the Enfield
sermon,“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God” (1741).
The
Awakening produced not only conversions
and changed lives but also excesses,
disorders, and ecclesiastical and civil
disruptions. Though increasingly
critical of attitudes and practices
associated with the revival, to the
extent of personally rebuking
Whitefield, Edwards maintained that it
was a genuine work of God, which needed
to be furthered and purified. In defense
and criticism of the Awakening he wrote
The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of
the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts
Concerning the Present Revival of
Religion in New England (1742), and A
Treatise Concerning Religious Affections
(1746).
In the
Affections, Edwards insisted, against
the revival critics’ ideal of sober,
“reasonable” religion, that “the essence
of all true religion lies in holy love,”
a love that proves its genuineness by
its inner quality and practical results.
In 1749 he edited, with “Reflections,”
the memoirs of David Brainerd, a young
New Light revivalist who became a
Presbyterian missionary to the Indians
and died in 1747. The volume became a
highly influential missionary biography.
Edwards’ Humble Attempt to Promote
Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of
God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer
(1747), written in support of a proposed
international “concert of prayer” for
“the Revival of Religion and the
Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on
Earth,” helped to remove a major
ideological barrier to missionary
activity by arguing that the worst of
the “great tribulations” (prophesied in
the book of Revelation to John as
preceding the millennium) were already
past and that the church could thus look
forward to an increasing success of the
gospel among men.
Dismissal from Northampton.
Meanwhile, Edwards’ relations with his
own congregation had become strained;
one reason for it was his changed views
on the requirements for admission to the
Lord’s Supper. In the Halfway Covenant,
baptized but unconverted children of
believers might have their own children
baptized by “owning the covenant”;
Stoddard had instituted the subsequently
widespread practice of admitting to the
Eucharist all who were thus “in the
covenant,” even if they knew themselves
to be unconverted. Edwards gradually
came to believe that the profession
required for admission to full communion
should be understood to imply genuine
faith, not merely doctrinal knowledge
and good moral behaviour.
The
public announcement of his position in
1749 precipitated a violent controversy
that resulted in his dismissal. On July
1, 1750, Edwards preached his dignified
and restrained “Farewell-Sermon.” In the
course of this controversy he wrote two
books, Qualifications for Communion
(1749) and Misrepresentations Corrected,
and Truth Vindicated, in a Reply to the
Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams’s Book (1752),
one to convince his congregation, the
other to correct what he considered
misrepresentations of his views by a
kinsman, the pastor at Lebanon, Conn.
Though Edwards himself was defeated, his
position finally triumphed and provided
New England Congregationalism with a
doctrine of church membership more
appropriate to its situation after
disestablishment.
Pastorate at Stockbridge
In 1751 Edwards became pastor of the
frontier church at Stockbridge, Mass.,
and missionary to the Indians there.
Hampered by language difficulties,
illness, Indian wars, and conflicts with
powerful personal enemies, he
nevertheless discharged his pastoral
duties and found time to write his
famous work on the Freedom of Will
(1754). The will, said Edwards, is not a
separate, self-determining faculty with
power to act contrary to the strongest
motives, as he understood the Arminians
to teach. Rather, it is identical with
feelings or preference, and a volition
is simply the soul’s “prevailing
inclination” in action; the will “is as
the greatest apparent good.” Men are
free to do as they please, and God
therefore rightly holds them morally
responsible for the quality of their
volitions as expressions of their
desires and intentions.
By 1757
Edwards had finished his Great Christian
Doctrine of Original Sin Defended
(1758), which was mainly a reply to the
English divine John Taylor of Norwich,
whose works attacking Calvinism (based
on the thought of the 16th-century
Protestant Reformer John Calvin) had
“made a mighty noise in America.”
Edwards defended the doctrine not only
by citing biblical statements about the
corruption of man’s heart but also by
arguing that the empirical evidence of
men’s universal commission of sinful
acts points to a sinful predisposition
in every man. In answering Arminian
objections to the notion that God
“imputed” Adam’s guilt to his posterity,
Edwards proposed a novel theory of
identity by divine “constitution” to
account for men’s unity with Adam and
suggested that their innate corruption
is not a judicial punishment for Adam’s
guilt but is really their own because of
their participation (being one with him)
in the sinful inclination that preceded
Adam’s sinful act. Edwards’ was the
first major contribution to the long
debate about human nature in American
theology and helped set the terms of
that debate.
Edwards
perceived the threat in Taylor’s notion
of man’s innate goodness and autonomy;
the whole Christian conception of
supernatural redemption seemed to be at
stake. He therefore planned further
treatises, of which he completed two
posthumously published dissertations:
Concerning the End for Which God Created
the World and The Nature of True Virtue
(1765). God’s glory, not human
happiness, is his end in creation; but
this is because God in his
all-sufficient fullness must communicate
himself by the exercise of his
attributes. God can be said to aim at
the creature’s happiness, but it is a
happiness that consists in contemplating
and rejoicing in God’s glory manifested
in creation and redemption. Edwards
defines true virtue as disinterested
love (benevolence) toward God as Being
in general and toward all lesser beings
according to their degree of being. True
virtue, therefore, does not spring from
self-love or from any earthbound
altruism (two prime 18th-century views);
love to self, family, nation, or even
mankind is good only if these lesser
systems of being do not usurp the place
of highest regard that belongs to God
alone.
Edwards
also projected books on other subjects,
notably A History of the Work of
Redemption (he had preached a series of
sermons—posthumously published—on that
subject in 1739), which was to be a
complete theology combining biblical,
historical, and systematic materials “in
an entire new method.” Late in 1757,
however, he accepted the presidency of
the College of New Jersey (later
Princeton University) and arrived there
in January. He had hardly assumed his
duties when he contracted smallpox and
died.
Influence
Edwards’ immediate disciples, Joseph
Bellamy (pastor at Bethlehem, Conn.),
Samuel Hopkins (pastor at Great
Barrington, Mass., later at Newport,
R.I.,), and Jonathan Edwards, Jr.,
developed some of his “improvements”
into a distinct theological school; it
was first called “Hopkinsianism” and
later the “New England Theology.” These
men and their successors, in their
effort to defend Calvinism against
Arminians, Unitarians (those who denied
the doctrine of the Trinity), and
“infidels,” made important modifications
in some of its doctrines and thus
prepared the way for later 19th-century
evangelical liberalism.
Edwards’ influence on the intellectual
character of American Protestantism for
a century after his death was very
pronounced, and he was widely read in
the British Isles. In a general revolt
against Puritanism and Calvinism after
the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), Edwards’
prestige declined, and he was remembered
mainly as a hell-fire preacher or as an
abstruse, absent-minded metaphysician.
In the 1930s and after, he was
rediscovered by theologians reacting
against liberalism and by secular
scholars seeking to delineate the
“American mind.” Edwards’ ability to
combine religious intensity with
intellectual rigour and moral
earnestness, the cosmic sweep of his
theological vision, his emphasis on
faith as an “existential” response to
reality, his insistence that love is the
heart of religion, and his
uncompromising stand against all forms
of idolatry are some of the reasons his
life and writings are again being
seriously studied.
Thomas A. Schafer
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Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, also called Ben
Franklin, pseudonym Richard Saunders (b.
Jan. 17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706,
Boston, Mass. [U.S.]—d. April 17, 1790,
Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.), American
printer and publisher, author, inventor
and scientist, and diplomat. One of the
foremost of the Founding Fathers,
Franklin helped draft the Declaration of
Independence and was one of its signers,
represented the United States in France
during the American Revolution, and was
a delegate to the Constitutional
Convention. He made important
contributions to science, especially in
the understanding of electricity, and is
remembered for the wit, wisdom, and
elegance of his writing.
Early
life (1706–23)
Franklin was born the 10th son of the 17
children of a man who made soap and
candles, one of the lowliest of the
artisan crafts. In an age that
privileged the firstborn son, Franklin
was, as he tartly noted in his
Autobiography, “the youngest Son of the
youngest Son for five Generations back.”
He learned to read very early and had
one year in grammar school and another
under a private teacher, but his formal
education ended at age 10. At 12 he was
apprenticed to his brother James, a
printer. His mastery of the printer’s
trade, of which he was proud to the end
of his life, was achieved between 1718
and 1723. In the same period he read
tirelessly and taught himself to write
effectively.
His
first enthusiasm was for poetry, but,
discouraged with the quality of his own,
he gave it up. Prose was another matter.
Young Franklin discovered a volume of
The Spectator—featuring Joseph Addison
and Sir Richard Steele’s famous
periodical essays, which had appeared in
England in 1711–12—and saw in it a means
for improving his writing. He read these
Spectator papers over and over, copied
and recopied them, and then tried to
recall them from memory. He even turned
them into poetry and then back into
prose. Franklin realized, as all the
Founders did, that writing competently
was such a rare talent in the 18th
century that anyone who could do it well
immediately attracted attention. “Prose
writing” became, as he recalled in his
Autobiography, “of great Use to me in
the Course of my Life, and was a
principal Means of my Advancement.”
In 1721
James Franklin founded a weekly
newspaper, the New-England Courant, to
which readers were invited to
contribute. Benjamin, now 16, read and
perhaps set in type these contributions
and decided that he could do as well
himself. In 1722 he wrote a series of 14
essays signed “Silence Dogood” in which
he lampooned everything from funeral
eulogies to the students of Harvard
College. For one so young to assume the
persona of a middle-aged woman was a
remarkable feat, and Franklin took
“exquisite Pleasure” in the fact that
his brother and others became convinced
that only a learned and ingenious wit
could have written these essays.
Late in
1722 James Franklin got into trouble
with the provincial authorities and was
forbidden to print or publish the
Courant. To keep the paper going, he
discharged his younger brother from his
original apprenticeship and made him the
paper’s nominal publisher. New
indentures were drawn up but not made
public. Some months later, after a
bitter quarrel, Benjamin secretly left
home, sure that James would not “go to
law” and reveal the subterfuge he had
devised.
Youthful adventures (1723–26)
Failing to find work in New York City,
Franklin at age 17 went on to
Quaker-dominated Philadelphia, a much
more open and religiously tolerant place
than Puritan Boston. One of the most
memorable scenes of the Autobiography is
the description of his arrival on a
Sunday morning, tired and hungry.
Finding a bakery, he asked for three
pennies’ worth of bread and got “three
great Puffy Rolls.” Carrying one under
each arm and munching on the third, he
walked up Market Street past the door of
the Read family, where stood Deborah,
his future wife. She saw him and
“thought I made, as I certainly did, a
most awkward ridiculous Appearance.”
A few
weeks later he was rooming at the Reads’
and employed as a printer. By the spring
of 1724 he was enjoying the
companionship of other young men with a
taste for reading, and he was also being
urged to set up in business for himself
by the governor of Pennsylvania, Sir
William Keith. At Keith’s suggestion,
Franklin returned to Boston to try to
raise the necessary capital. His father
thought him too young for such a
venture, so Keith offered to foot the
bill himself and arranged Franklin’s
passage to England so that he could
choose his type and make connections
with London stationers and booksellers.
Franklin exchanged “some promises” about
marriage with Deborah Read and, with a
young friend, James Ralph, as his
companion, sailed for London in November
1724, just over a year after arriving in
Philadelphia. Not until his ship was
well out at sea did he realize that
Governor Keith had not delivered the
letters of credit and introduction he
had promised.
In
London Franklin quickly found employment
in his trade and was able to lend money
to Ralph, who was trying to establish
himself as a writer. The two young men
enjoyed the theatre and the other
pleasures of the city, including women.
While in London, Franklin wrote A
Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,
Pleasure and Pain (1725), a Deistical
pamphlet inspired by his having set type
for William Wollaston’s moral tract, The
Religion of Nature Delineated. Franklin
argued in his essay that since human
beings have no real freedom of choice,
they are not morally responsible for
their actions. This was perhaps a nice
justification for his self-indulgent
behaviour in London and his ignoring of
Deborah, to whom he had written only
once. He later repudiated the pamphlet,
burning all but one of the copies still
in his possession.
By 1726
Franklin was tiring of London. He
considered becoming an itinerant teacher
of swimming, but, when Thomas Denham, a
Quaker merchant, offered him a clerkship
in his store in Philadelphia with a
prospect of fat commissions in the West
Indian trade, he decided to return home.
Achievement of security and fame
(1726–53)
Denham died, however, a few months after
Franklin entered his store. The young
man, now 20, returned to the printing
trade and in 1728 was able to set up a
partnership with a friend. Two years
later he borrowed money to become sole
proprietor.
His
private life at this time was extremely
complicated. Deborah Read had married,
but her husband had deserted her and
disappeared. One matchmaking venture
failed because Franklin wanted a dowry
of £100 to pay off his business debt. A
strong sexual drive, “that
hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth,”
was sending him to “low Women,” and he
thought he very much needed to get
married. His affection for Deborah
having “revived,” he “took her to Wife”
on Sept. 1, 1730. At this point Deborah
may have been the only woman in
Philadelphia who would have him, for he
brought to the marriage an illegitimate
son, William, just borne of a woman who
has never been identified. Franklin’s
common-law marriage lasted until
Deborah’s death in 1774. They had a son,
Franky, who died at age four, and a
daughter, Sarah, who survived them both.
William was brought up in the household
and apparently did not get along well
with Deborah.
Franklin and his partner’s first coup
was securing the printing of
Pennsylvania’s paper currency. Franklin
helped get this business by writing A
Modest Enquiry into the Nature and
Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729),
and later he also became public printer
of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.
Other moneymaking ventures included the
Pennsylvania Gazette, published by
Franklin from 1729 and generally
acknowledged as among the best of the
colonial newspapers, and Poor Richard’s
almanac, printed annually from 1732 to
1757. Despite some failures, Franklin
prospered. Indeed, he made enough to
lend money with interest and to invest
in rental properties in Philadelphia and
many coastal towns. He had franchises or
partnerships with printers in the
Carolinas, New York, and the British
West Indies. By the late 1740s he had
become one of the wealthiest colonists
in the northern part of the North
American continent.
As he
made money, he concocted a variety of
projects for social improvement. In 1727
he organized the Junto, or Leather Apron
Club, to debate questions of morals,
politics, and natural philosophy and to
exchange knowledge of business affairs.
The need of Junto members for easier
access to books led in 1731 to the
organization of the Library Company of
Philadelphia. Through the Junto,
Franklin proposed a paid city watch, or
police force. A paper read to the same
group resulted in the organization of a
volunteer fire company. In 1743 he
sought an intercolonial version of the
Junto, which led to the formation of the
American Philosophical Society. In 1749
he published Proposals Relating to the
Education of Youth in Pennsilvania; in
1751 the Academy of Philadelphia, from
which grew the University of
Pennsylvania, was founded. He also
became an enthusiastic member of the
Freemasons and promoted their
“enlightened” causes.
Although still a tradesman, he was
picking up some political offices. He
became clerk of the Pennsylvania
legislature in 1736 and postmaster of
Philadelphia in 1737. Prior to 1748,
though, his most important political
service was his part in organizing a
militia for the defense of the colony
against possible invasion by the French
and the Spaniards, whose privateers were
operating in the Delaware River.
In 1748
Franklin, at age 42, had become wealthy
enough to retire from active business.
He took off his leather apron and became
a gentleman, a distinctive status in the
18th century. Since no busy artisan
could be a gentleman, Franklin never
again worked as a printer; instead, he
became a silent partner in the printing
firm of Franklin and Hall, realizing in
the next 18 years an average profit of
over £600 annually. He announced his new
status as a gentleman by having his
portrait painted in a velvet coat and a
brown wig; he also acquired a coat of
arms, bought several slaves, and moved
to a new and more spacious house in “a
more quiet Part of the Town.” Most
important, as a gentleman and “master of
[his] own time,” he decided to do what
other gentlemen did—engage in what he
termed “Philosophical Studies and
Amusements.”
In the
1740s electricity was one of these
curious amusements. It was introduced to
Philadelphians by an electrical machine
sent to the Library Company by one of
Franklin’s English correspondents. In
the winter of 1746–47, Franklin and
three of his friends began to
investigate electrical phenomena.
Franklin sent piecemeal reports of his
ideas and experiments to Peter Collinson,
his Quaker correspondent in London.
Since he did not know what European
scientists might have already
discovered, Franklin set forth his
findings timidly. In 1751 Collinson had
Franklin’s papers published in an
86-page book titled Experiments and
Observations on Electricity. In the 18th
century the book went through five
English editions, three in French, and
one each in Italian and German.
Franklin’s fame spread rapidly. The
experiment he suggested to prove the
identity of lightning and electricity
was apparently first made in France
before he tried the simpler but more
dangerous expedient of flying a kite in
a thunderstorm. But his other findings
were original. He created the
distinction between insulators and
conductors. He invented a battery for
storing electrical charges. He coined
new English words for the new science of
electricity—conductor, charge,
discharge, condense, armature,
electrify, and others. He showed that
electricity was a single “fluid” with
positive and negative or plus and minus
charges and not, as traditionally
thought, two kinds of fluids. And he
demonstrated that the plus and minus
charges, or states of electrification of
bodies, had to occur in exactly equal
amounts—a crucial scientific principle
known today as the law of conservation
of charge (see charge conservation).
Theodore Hornberger
Gordon S. Wood
Public service (1753–85)
Despite the success of his electrical
experiments, Franklin never thought
science was as important as public
service. As a leisured gentleman, he
soon became involved in more
high-powered public offices. He became a
member of the Philadelphia City Council
in 1748, justice of the peace in 1749,
and in 1751 a city alderman and a member
of the Pennsylvania Assembly. But he had
his sights on being part of a larger
arena, the British Empire, which he
regarded as “the greatest Political
Structure Human Wisdom ever yet
erected.” In 1753 Franklin became a
royal officeholder, deputy postmaster
general, in charge of mail in all the
northern colonies. Thereafter he began
to think in intercolonial terms. In 1754
his “Plan of Union” for the colonies was
adopted by the Albany Congress, which
was convened at the beginning of the
French and Indian War and included
representatives from the Iroquois
Confederacy. The plan called for the
establishment of a general council, with
representatives from the several
colonies, to organize a common defense
against the French. Neither the colonial
legislatures nor the king’s advisers
were ready for such union, however, and
the plan failed. But Franklin had become
acquainted with important imperial
officials, and his ambition to succeed
within the imperial hierarchy had been
whetted.
In 1757
he went to England as the agent of the
Pennsylvania Assembly in order to get
the family of William Penn, the
proprietors under the colony’s charter,
to allow the colonial legislature to tax
their ungranted lands. But Franklin and
some of his allies in the assembly had a
larger goal of persuading the British
government to oust the Penn family as
the proprietors of Pennsylvania and make
that colony a royal province. Except for
a two-year return to Philadelphia in
1762–64, Franklin spent the next 18
years living in London, most of the time
in the apartment of Margaret Stevenson,
a widow, and her daughter Polly at 36
Craven Street near Charing Cross. His
son, William, now age 27, and two slaves
accompanied him to London. Deborah and
their daughter, Sally, age 14, remained
in Philadelphia.
Before
he left for London, Franklin decided to
bring his Poor Richard’s almanac to an
end. While at sea in 1757, he completed
a 12-page preface for the final 1758
edition of the almanac titled “Father
Abraham’s Speech” and later known as the
The Way to Wealth. In this preface
Father Abraham cites only those proverbs
that concern hard work, thrift, and
financial prudence. The Way to Wealth
eventually became the most widely
reprinted of all Franklin’s works,
including the Autobiography.
This
time Franklin’s experience in London was
very different from his sojourn in
1724–26. London was the largest city in
Europe and the centre of the burgeoning
British Empire, and Franklin was famous;
consequently, he met everyone else who
was famous, including David Hume,
Captain James Cook, Joseph Priestley,
and John Pringle, who was physician to
Lord Bute, the king’s chief minister. In
1759 Franklin received an honorary
degree from the University of Saint
Andrews in Scotland, which led to his
thereafter being called “Dr. Franklin.”
Another honorary degree followed in 1762
from the University of Oxford. Everyone
wanted to paint his portrait and make
mezzotints for sale to the public.
Franklin fell in love with the
sophistication of London and England; by
contrast, he disparaged the
provinciality and vulgarity of America.
He was very much the royalist, and he
bragged of his connection with Lord Bute,
which enabled him in 1762 to get his
son, William, then age 31, appointed
royal governor of New Jersey.
Reluctantly, Franklin had to go back to
Pennsylvania in 1762 in order to look
after his post office, but he promised
his friends in London that he would soon
return and perhaps stay forever in
England. After touring the post offices
up and down North America, a trip of
1,780 miles (2,900 km), he had to deal
with an uprising of some Scotch-Irish
settlers in the Paxton region of western
Pennsylvania who were angry at the
Quaker assembly’s unwillingness to
finance military protection from the
Indians on the frontier. After losing an
election to the Pennsylvania Assembly in
1764, Franklin could hardly wait to get
back to London. Deborah stayed in
Philadelphia, and Franklin never saw her
again.
He soon
had to face the problems arising from
the Stamp Act of 1765, which created a
firestorm of opposition in America. Like
other colonial agents, Franklin opposed
Parliament’s stamp tax, asserting that
taxation ought to be the prerogative of
the colonial legislatures. But once he
saw that passage of the tax was
inevitable, he sought to make the best
of the situation. After all, he said,
empires cost money. He ordered stamps
for his printing firm in Philadelphia
and procured for his friend John Hughes
the stamp agency for Pennsylvania. In
the process, he almost ruined his
position in American public life and
nearly cost Hughes his life.
Franklin was shocked by the mobs that
effectively prevented enforcement of the
Stamp Act everywhere in North America.
He told Hughes to remain cool in the
face of the mob. “A firm Loyalty to the
Crown and faithful Adherence to the
Government of this Nation…,” he said,
“will always be the wisest Course for
you and I to take, whatever may be the
Madness of the Populace or their blind
Leaders.” Only Franklin’s four-hour
testimony before Parliament denouncing
the act in 1766 saved his reputation in
America. The experience shook Franklin,
and his earlier confidence in the wisdom
of British officials became punctuated
by doubts and resentments. He began to
feel what he called his “Americanness”
as never before.
During
the next four or five years Franklin
sought to bridge the growing gulf
between the colonies and the British
government. Between 1765 and 1775 he
wrote 126 newspaper pieces, most of
which tried to explain each side to the
other. But, as he said, the English
thought him too American, while the
Americans thought him too English. He
had not, however, given up his ambition
of acquiring a position in the imperial
hierarchy. But in 1771 opposition by
Lord Hillsborough, who had just been
appointed head of the new American
Department, left Franklin depressed and
dispirited; in a mood of frustration,
nostalgia, and defiance, he began
writing his Autobiography, which
eventually became one of the most widely
read autobiographies ever published.
In
recounting the first part of his life,
up to age 25—the best part of the
Autobiography, most critics
agree—Franklin sought to soothe his
wounds and justify his apparent failure
in British politics. Most important, in
this beginning part of his
Autobiography, he in effect was telling
the world (and his son) that, as a free
man who had established himself against
overwhelming odds as an independent and
industrious artisan, he did not have to
kowtow to some patronizing, privileged
aristocrat.
When
the signals from the British government
shifted and Hillsborough was dismissed
from the cabinet, Franklin dropped the
writing of the Autobiography, which he
would not resume until 1784 in France
following the successful negotiation of
the treaty establishing American
independence. Franklin still thought he
might be able to acquire an imperial
office and work to hold the empire
together. But he became involved in the
affair of the Hutchinson letters—an
affair that ultimately destroyed his
position in England. In 1772 Franklin
had sent back to Boston some letters
written in the 1760s by Thomas
Hutchinson, then lieutenant governor of
Massachusetts, in which Hutchinson had
made some indiscreet remarks about the
need to abridge American liberties.
Franklin naively thought that these
letters would somehow throw blame for
the imperial crisis on native officials
such as Hutchinson and thus absolve the
ministry in London of responsibility.
This, Franklin believed, would allow his
friends in the ministry, such as Lord
Dartmouth, to settle the differences
between the mother country and her
colonies, with Franklin’s help.
The
move backfired completely, and on Jan.
29, 1774, Franklin stood silent in an
amphitheatre near Whitehall while being
viciously attacked by the British
solicitor-general before the Privy
Council and the court, most of whom were
hooting and laughing. Two days later he
was fired as deputy postmaster. After
some futile efforts at reconciliation,
he sailed for America in March 1775.
Although upon his arrival in
Philadelphia Franklin was immediately
elected to the Second Continental
Congress, some Americans remained
suspicious of his real loyalties. He had
been so long abroad that some thought he
might be a British spy. He was delighted
that the Congress in 1776 sent him back
to Europe as the premier agent in a
commission seeking military aid and
diplomatic recognition from France. He
played on the French aristocracy’s
liberal sympathies for the oppressed
Americans and extracted not only
diplomatic recognition of the new
republic but also loan after loan from
an increasingly impoverished French
government. His image as the democratic
folk genius from the wilderness of
America preceded him, and he exploited
it brilliantly for the American cause.
His face appeared everywhere—on
medallions, on snuffboxes, on candy
boxes, in rings, in statues, in prints;
women even did their hair à la Franklin.
Franklin played his role to perfection.
In violation of all protocol, he dressed
in a simple brown-and-white linen suit
and wore a fur cap, no wig, and no sword
to the court of Versailles, the most
formal and elaborate court in all of
Europe. And the French aristocracy and
court loved it, caught up as they were
with the idea of America.
Beset
with the pain of gout and a kidney
stone, and surrounded by spies and his
sometimes clumsy fellow
commissioners—especially Arthur Lee of
Virginia and John Adams of
Massachusetts, who disliked and
mistrusted him—Franklin nonetheless
succeeded marvelously. He first secured
military and diplomatic alliances with
France in 1778 and then played a crucial
role in bringing about the final peace
treaty with Britain in 1783 (see Peace
of Paris). In violation of their
instructions and the French alliance,
the American peace commissioners signed
a separate peace with Britain. It was
left to Franklin to apologize to the
comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s chief
minister, which he did in a beautifully
wrought diplomatic letter.
No
wonder the eight years in France were
the happiest of Franklin’s life. He was
doing what he most yearned to do—shaping
events on a world stage. At this point,
in 1784, he resumed work on his
Autobiography, writing the second part
of it, which presumes human control over
one’s life.
Last years (1785–90)
In 1785 Franklin reluctantly had to come
to America to die, even though all his
friends were in France. Although he
feared he would be “a stranger in my own
country,” he now knew that his destiny
was linked to America.
His
reception was not entirely welcoming.
The family and friends of the Lees in
Virginia and the Adamses in
Massachusetts spread stories of his
overweening love of France and his
dissolute ways. The Congress treated him
shabbily, ignoring his requests for some
land in the West and a diplomatic
appointment for his grandson. In 1788 he
was reduced to petitioning the Congress
with a pathetic “Sketch of the Services
of B. Franklin to the United States,”
which the Congress never answered. Just
before his death in 1790, Franklin
retaliated by signing a memorial
requesting that the Congress abolish
slavery in the United States. This
memorandum provoked some congressmen
into angry defenses of slavery, which
Franklin exquisitely mocked in a
newspaper piece published a month before
he died.
Upon
his death the Senate refused to go along
with the House in declaring a month of
mourning for Franklin. In contrast to
the many expressions of French affection
for Franklin, his fellow Americans gave
him one public eulogy—and that was
delivered by his inveterate enemy the
Rev. William Smith, who passed over
Franklin’s youth because it seemed
embarrassing.
Following the publication of the
Autobiography in 1794, Franklin’s youth
was no longer embarrassing. In the
succeeding decades, he became the hero
of countless early 19th-century artisans
and self-made businessmen who were
seeking a justification of their rise
and their moneymaking. They were the
creators of the modern folksy image of
Franklin, the man who came to personify
the American dream.
Assessment
Franklin was not only the most famous
American in the 18th century but also
one of the most famous figures in the
Western world of the 18th century;
indeed, he is one of the most celebrated
and influential Americans who has ever
lived. Although one is apt to think of
Franklin exclusively as an inventor, as
an early version of Thomas Edison, which
he was, his 18th-century fame came not
simply from his many inventions but,
more important, from his fundamental
contributions to the science of
electricity. If there had been a Nobel
Prize for Physics in the 18th century,
Franklin would have been a contender.
Enhancing his fame was the fact that he
was an American, a simple man from an
obscure background who emerged from the
wilds of America to dazzle the entire
intellectual world. Most Europeans in
the 18th century thought of America as a
primitive, undeveloped place full of
forests and savages and scarcely capable
of producing enlightened thinkers. Yet
Franklin’s electrical discoveries in the
mid-18th century had surpassed the
achievements of the most sophisticated
scientists of Europe. Franklin became a
living example of the natural untutored
genius of the New World that was free
from the encumbrances of a decadent and
tired Old World—an image that he later
parlayed into French support for the
American Revolution.
Despite
his great scientific achievements,
however, Franklin always believed that
public service was more important than
science, and his political contributions
to the formation of the United States
were substantial. He had a hand in the
writing of the Declaration of
Independence, contributed to the
drafting of the Articles of
Confederation—America’s first national
constitution—and was the oldest member
of the Constitutional Convention of 1787
that wrote the Constitution of the
United States of America in
Philadelphia. More important, as
diplomatic representative of the new
American republic in France during the
Revolution, he secured both diplomatic
recognition and financial and military
aid from the government of Louis XVI and
was a crucial member of the commission
that negotiated the treaty by which
Great Britain recognized its former 13
colonies as a sovereign nation. Since no
one else could have accomplished all
that he did in France during the
Revolution, he can quite plausibly be
regarded as America’s greatest diplomat.
Equally
significant perhaps were Franklin’s many
contributions to the comfort and safety
of daily life, especially in his adopted
city of Philadelphia. No civic project
was too large or too small for his
interest. In addition to his lightning
rod and his Franklin stove (a
wood-burning stove that warmed American
homes for more than 200 years), he
invented bifocal glasses, the odometer,
and the glass harmonica (armonica). He
had ideas about everything—from the
nature of the Gulf Stream to the cause
of the common cold. He suggested the
notions of matching grants and Daylight
Saving Time. Almost single-handedly he
helped to create a civic society for the
inhabitants of Philadelphia. Moreover,
he helped to establish new institutions
that people now take for granted: a fire
company, a library, an insurance
company, an academy, and a hospital.
Probably Franklin’s most important
invention was himself. He created so
many personas in his newspaper writings
and almanac and in his posthumously
published Autobiography that it is
difficult to know who he really was.
Following his death in 1790, he became
so identified during the 19th century
with the persona of his Autobiography
and the Poor Richard maxims of his
almanac—e.g., “Early to bed, early to
rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and
wise”—that he acquired the image of the
self-made moralist obsessed with the
getting and saving of money.
Consequently, many imaginative writers,
such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David
Thoreau, Herman Melville, Mark Twain,
and D.H. Lawrence, attacked Franklin as
a symbol of America’s middle-class
moneymaking business values. Indeed,
early in the 20th century the famous
German sociologist Max Weber found
Franklin to be the perfect exemplar of
the “Protestant ethic” and the modern
capitalistic spirit. Although Franklin
did indeed become a wealthy tradesman by
his early 40s, when he retired from his
business, during his lifetime in the
18th century he was not identified as a
self-made businessman or a budding
capitalist. That image was a creation of
the 19th century. But as long as America
continues to be pictured as the land of
enterprise and opportunity, where
striving and hard work can lead to
success, then that image of Franklin is
the one that is likely to endure.
Gordon S. Wood
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Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine, (b. January 29, 1737,
Thetford, Norfolk, England—d. June 8,
1809, New York, N.Y., U.S.),
English-American writer and political
pamphleteer whose “Common Sense” and
“Crisis” papers were important
influences on the American Revolution.
Other works that contributed to his
reputation as one of the greatest
political propagandists in history were
Rights of Man, a defense of the French
Revolution and of republican principles;
and The Age of Reason, an exposition of
the place of religion in society.
Life in
England and America
Paine was born of a Quaker father and an
Anglican mother. His formal education
was meagre, just enough to enable him to
master reading, writing, and arithmetic.
At 13 he began work with his father as a
corset maker and then tried various
other occupations unsuccessfully,
finally becoming an officer of the
excise. His duties were to hunt for
smugglers and collect the excise taxes
on liquor and tobacco. The pay was
insufficient to cover living costs, but
he used part of his earnings to purchase
books and scientific apparatus.
Paine’s
life in England was marked by repeated
failures. He had two brief marriages. He
was unsuccessful or unhappy in every job
he tried. He was dismissed from the
excise office after he published a
strong argument in 1772 for a raise in
pay as the only way to end corruption in
the service. Just when his situation
appeared hopeless, he met Benjamin
Franklin in London, who advised him to
seek his fortune in America and gave him
letters of introduction.
Paine
arrived in Philadelphia on Nov. 30,
1774. His first regular employment was
helping to edit the Pennsylvania
Magazine. In addition Paine published
numerous articles and some poetry,
anonymously or under pseudonyms. One
such article was “African Slavery in
America,” a scathing denunciation of the
African slave trade, which he signed
“Justice and Humanity.”
Paine
had arrived in America when the conflict
between the colonists and England was
reaching its height. After blood was
spilled at the Battle of Lexington and
Concord, April 19, 1775, Paine argued
that the cause of America should not be
just a revolt against taxation but a
demand for independence. He put this
idea into “Common Sense,” which came off
the press on Jan. 10, 1776. The 50-page
pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies
within a few months. More than any other
single publication, “Common Sense” paved
the way for the Declaration of
Independence, unanimously ratified July
4, 1776.
During
the war that followed, Paine served as
volunteer aide-de-camp to General
Nathanael Greene. His great contribution
to the patriot cause was the 16 “Crisis”
papers issued between 1776 and 1783,
each one signed “Common Sense.” “The
American Crisis. Number I,” published on
Dec. 19, 1776, when George Washington’s
army was on the verge of disintegration,
opened with the flaming words: “These
are the times that try men’s souls.”
Washington ordered the pamphlet read to
all the troops at Valley Forge.
In 1777
Congress appointed Paine secretary to
the Committee for Foreign Affairs. He
held the post until early in 1779, when
he became involved in a controversy with
Silas Deane, a member of the Continental
Congress, whom Paine accused of seeking
to profit personally from French aid to
the United States. But in revealing
Deane’s machinations, Paine was forced
to quote from secret documents to which
he had access as secretary of the
Committee for Foreign Affairs. As a
result, despite the truth of his
accusations, he was forced to resign his
post.
Paine’s
desperate need of employment was
relieved when he was appointed clerk of
the General Assembly of Pennsylvania on
Nov. 2, 1779. In this capacity he had
frequent opportunity to observe that
American troops were at the end of their
patience because of lack of pay and
scarcity of supplies. Paine took $500
from his salary and started a
subscription for the relief of the
soldiers. In 1781, pursuing the same
goal, he accompanied John Laurens to
France. The money, clothing, and
ammunition they brought back with them
were important to the final success of
the Revolution. Paine also appealed to
the separate states to cooperate for the
well-being of the entire nation. In
“Public Good” (1780) he included a call
for a national convention to remedy the
ineffectual Articles of Confederation
and establish a strong central
government under “a continental
constitution.”
At the
end of the American Revolution, Paine
again found himself poverty-stricken.
His patriotic writings had sold by the
hundreds of thousands, but he had
refused to accept any profits in order
that cheap editions might be widely
circulated. In a petition to Congress
endorsed by Washington, he pleaded for
financial assistance. It was buried by
Paine’s opponents in Congress, but
Pennsylvania gave him £500 and New York
a farm in New Rochelle. Here Paine
devoted his time to inventions,
concentrating on an iron bridge without
piers and a smokeless candle.
In Europe: “Rights of Man”
In April 1787 Paine left for Europe to
promote his plan to build a single-arch
bridge across the wide Schuylkill River
near Philadelphia. But in England he was
soon diverted from his engineering
project. In December 1789 he published
anonymously a warning against the
attempt of Prime Minister William Pitt
to involve England in a war with France
over Holland, reminding the British
people that war had “but one thing
certain and that is increase of taxes.”
But it was the French Revolution that
now filled Paine’s thoughts. He was
enraged by Edmund Burke’s attack on the
uprising of the French people in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
and, though Paine admired Burke’s stand
in favour of the American Revolution, he
rushed into print with his celebrated
answer, Rights of Man (March 13, 1791).
The book immediately created a
sensation. At least eight editions were
published in 1791, and the work was
quickly reprinted in the U.S., where it
was widely distributed by the
Jeffersonian societies. When Burke
replied, Paine came back with Rights of
Man, Part II, published on Feb. 17,
1792.
What
began as a defense of the French
Revolution evolved into an analysis of
the basic reasons for discontent in
European society and a remedy for the
evils of arbitrary government, poverty,
illiteracy, unemployment, and war. Paine
spoke out effectively in favour of
republicanism as against monarchy and
went on to outline a plan for popular
education, relief of the poor, pensions
for aged people, and public works for
the unemployed, all to be financed by
the levying of a progressive income tax.
To the ruling class Paine’s proposals
spelled “bloody revolution,” and the
government ordered the book banned and
the publisher jailed. Paine himself was
indicted for treason, and an order went
out for his arrest. But he was en route
to France, having been elected to a seat
in the National Convention, before the
order for his arrest could be delivered.
Paine was tried in absentia, found
guilty of seditious libel, and declared
an outlaw, and Rights of Man was ordered
permanently suppressed.
In
France Paine hailed the abolition of the
monarchy but deplored the terror against
the royalists and fought unsuccessfully
to save the life of King Louis XVI,
favouring banishment rather than
execution. He was to pay for his efforts
to save the King’s life when the
radicals under Robespierre took power.
Paine was imprisoned from Dec. 28, 1793,
to Nov. 4, 1794, when, with the fall of
Robespierre, he was released and, though
seriously ill, readmitted to the
National Convention.
While
in prison, the first part of Paine’s Age
of Reason was published (1794), and it
was followed by Part II after his
release (1796). Although Paine made it
clear that he believed in a Supreme
Being and as a deist opposed only
organized religion, the work won him a
reputation as an atheist among the
orthodox. The publication of his last
great pamphlet, “Agrarian Justice”
(1797), with its attack on inequalities
in property ownership, added to his many
enemies in establishment circles.
Paine
remained in France until Sept. 1, 1802,
when he sailed for the United States. He
quickly discovered that his services to
the country had been all but forgotten
and that he was widely regarded only as
the world’s greatest infidel. Despite
his poverty and his physical condition,
worsened by occasional drunkenness,
Paine continued his attacks on privilege
and religious superstitions. He died in
New York City in 1809 and was buried in
New Rochelle on the farm given to him by
the state of New York as a reward for
his Revolutionary writings. Ten years
later, William Cobbett, the political
journalist, exhumed the bones and took
them to England, where he hoped to give
Paine a funeral worthy of his great
contributions to humanity. But the plan
misfired, and the bones were lost, never
to be recovered.
Assessment
At Paine’s death most U.S. newspapers
reprinted the obituary notice from the
New York Citizen, which read in part:
“He had lived long, did some good and
much harm.” This remained the verdict of
history for more than a century
following his death, but in recent years
the tide has turned: on Jan. 30, 1937,
The Times of London referred to him as
“the English Voltaire,” and on May 18,
1952, Paine’s bust was placed in the New
York University Hall of Fame.
Philip S. Foner
|
The new nation
In the postwar period some of these
eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing.
Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams lacked the
constructive ideas that appealed to those interested
in forming a new government. Others fared better—for
example, Franklin, whose tolerance and sense showed
in addresses to the constitutional convention. A
different group of authors, however, became leaders
in the new period—Thomas Jefferson and the talented
writers of The Federalist papers, a series of 85
essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtues
of the proposed new constitution. They were written
by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and
John Jay.
More distinguished for insight into problems of
government and cool logic than for eloquence, these
works became a classic statement of American
governmental, and more generally of republican,
theory. At the time they were highly effective in
influencing legislators who voted on the new
constitution. Hamilton, who wrote perhaps 51 of the
Federalist papers, became a leader of the Federalist
Party and, as first secretary of the treasury
(1789–95), wrote messages that were influential in
increasing the power of national government at the
expense of the state governments.
Thomas Jefferson was an influential political
writer during and after the war. The merits of his
great summary, the Declaration of Independence,
consisted, as Madison pointed out, “in a lucid
communication of human rights … in a style and tone
appropriate to the great occasion, and to the spirit
of the American people.” After the war he formulated
the exact tenets of his faith in various papers but
most richly in his letters and inaugural addresses,
in which he urged individual freedom and local
autonomy—a theory of decentralization differing from
Hamilton’s belief in strong federal government.
Though he held that all men are created equal,
Jefferson thought that “a natural aristocracy” of
“virtues and talents” should hold high governmental
positions.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas
Jefferson, (b. April 2 [April 13, New
Style], 1743, Shadwell, Virginia
[U.S.]—d. July 4, 1826, Monticello,
Virginia, U.S.), draftsman of the
Declaration of Independence of the
United States and the nation’s first
secretary of state (1789–94), second
vice president (1797–1801), and, as the
third president (1801–09), the statesman
responsible for the Louisiana Purchase.
An early advocate of total separation of
church and state, he also was the
founder and architect of the University
of Virginia and the most eloquent
American proponent of individual freedom
as the core meaning of the American
Revolution. (For a discussion of the
history and nature of the presidency,
see presidency of the United States of
America.)
Long
regarded as America’s most distinguished
“apostle of liberty,” Jefferson has come
under increasingly critical scrutiny
within the scholarly world. At the
popular level, both in the United States
and abroad, he remains an incandescent
icon, an inspirational symbol for both
major U.S. political parties, as well as
for dissenters in communist China,
liberal reformers in central and eastern
Europe, and aspiring democrats in Africa
and Latin America. His image within
scholarly circles has suffered, however,
as the focus on racial equality has
prompted a more negative reappraisal of
his dependence upon slavery and his
conviction that American society remain
a white man’s domain. The huge gap
between his lyrical expression of
liberal ideals and the more attenuated
reality of his own life has transformed
Jefferson into America’s most
problematic and paradoxical hero. The
Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
was dedicated to him on April 13, 1943,
the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Early
years
Albermarle county, where he was born,
lay in the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Mountains in what was then regarded as a
western province of the Old Dominion.
His father, Peter Jefferson, was a
self-educated surveyor who amassed a
tidy estate that included 60 slaves.
According to family lore, Jefferson’s
earliest memory was as a three-year-old
boy “being carried on a pillow by a
mounted slave” when the family moved
from Shadwell to Tuckahoe. His mother,
Jane Randolph Jefferson, was descended
from one of the most prominent families
in Virginia. She raised two sons, of
whom Jefferson was the eldest, and six
daughters. There is reason to believe
that Jefferson’s relationship with his
mother was strained, especially after
his father died in 1757, because he did
everything he could to escape her
supervision and had almost nothing to
say about her in his memoirs. He boarded
with the local schoolmaster to learn his
Latin and Greek until 1760, when he
entered the College of William and Mary
in Williamsburg.
By all
accounts he was an obsessive student,
often spending 15 hours of the day with
his books, 3 hours practicing his
violin, and the remaining 6 hours eating
and sleeping. The two chief influences
on his learning were William Small, a
Scottish-born teacher of mathematics and
science, and George Wythe, the leading
legal scholar in Virginia. From them
Jefferson learned a keen appreciation of
supportive mentors, a concept he later
institutionalized at the University of
Virginia. He read law with Wythe from
1762 to 1767, then left Williamsburg to
practice, mostly representing
small-scale planters from the western
counties in cases involving land claims
and titles. Although he handled no
landmark cases and came across as a
nervous and somewhat indifferent speaker
before the bench, he earned a reputation
as a formidable legal scholar. He was a
shy and extremely serious young man.
In 1768
he made two important decisions: first,
to build his own home atop an 867-foot-
(264-metre-) high mountain near Shadwell
that he eventually named Monticello and,
second, to stand as a candidate for the
House of Burgesses. These decisions
nicely embodied the two competing
impulses that would persist throughout
his life—namely, to combine an active
career in politics with periodic
seclusion in his own private haven. His
political timing was also impeccable,
for he entered the Virginia legislature
just as opposition to the taxation
policies of the British Parliament was
congealing. Although he made few
speeches and tended to follow the lead
of the Tidewater elite, his support for
resolutions opposing Parliament’s
authority over the colonies was
resolute.
In the
early 1770s his own character was also
congealing. In 1772 he married Martha
Wayles Skelton (Martha Jefferson), an
attractive and delicate young widow
whose dowry more than doubled his
holdings in land and slaves. In 1774 he
wrote A Summary View of the Rights of
British America, which was quickly
published, though without his
permission, and catapulted him into
visibility beyond Virginia as an early
advocate of American independence from
Parliament’s authority; the American
colonies were tied to Great Britain, he
believed, only by wholly voluntary bonds
of loyalty to the king.
His
reputation thus enhanced, the Virginia
legislature appointed him a delegate to
the Second Continental Congress in the
spring of 1775. He rode into
Philadelphia—and into American
history—on June 20, 1775, a tall
(slightly above 6 feet 2 inches [1.88
metres]) and gangly young man with
reddish blond hair, hazel eyes, a
burnished complexion, and rock-ribbed
certainty about the American cause. In
retrospect, the central paradox of his
life was also on display, for the man
who the following year was to craft the
most famous manifesto for human equality
in world history arrived in an ornate
carriage drawn by four handsome horses
and accompanied by three slaves.
Declaring independence
Jefferson’s inveterate shyness prevented
him from playing a significant role in
the debates within the Congress. John
Adams, a leader in those debates,
remembered that Jefferson was silent
even in committee meetings, though
consistently staunch in his support for
independence. His chief role was as a
draftsman of resolutions. In that
capacity, on June 11, 1776, he was
appointed to a five-person committee,
which also included Adams and Benjamin
Franklin, to draft a formal statement of
the reasons why a break with Great
Britain was justified. Adams asked him
to prepare the first draft, which he did
within a few days. He later claimed that
he was not striving for “originality of
principle or sentiment,” only seeking to
provide “an expression of the American
mind”; that is, putting into words those
ideas already accepted by a majority of
Americans. This accurately describes the
longest section of the Declaration of
Independence, which lists the grievances
against George III. It does not,
however, describe the following 55
words, which are generally regarded as
the seminal statement of American
political culture:
We hold
these truths to be self-evident; that
all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness; that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed.
On July
3–4 the Congress debated and edited
Jefferson’s draft, deleting and revising
fully one-fifth of the text. But they
made no changes whatsoever in this
passage, which over succeeding
generations became the lyrical sanction
for every liberal movement in American
history. At the time, Jefferson himself
was disconsolate that the Congress had
seen fit to make any changes in his
language. Nevertheless, he was not
regarded by his contemporaries as the
author of the Declaration, which was
seen as a collective effort by the
entire Congress. Indeed, he was not
known by most Americans as the principal
author until the 1790s. (See primary
source document: Declaration of
Independence.)
He
returned to Virginia in October 1776 and
immediately launched an extensive
project for the reform of the state’s
legal code to bring it in line with the
principles of the American Revolution.
Three areas of reform suggest the arc of
his political vision: first, he sought
and secured abolition of primogeniture,
entail, and all those remnants of
feudalism that discouraged a broad
distribution of property; second, he
proposed a comprehensive plan of
educational reform designed to assure
access at the lowest level for all
citizens and state support at the higher
levels for the most talented; third, he
advocated a law prohibiting any
religious establishment and requiring
complete separation of church and state.
The last two proposals were bitterly
contested, especially the statute for
religious freedom, which was not enacted
until 1786. (See primary source
documents: An American Education for
American Youth, The Education of Women,
and The Sphere of Religion.)
Taken
together, these legal reforms capture
the essence of Jefferson’s political
philosophy, which was less a
comprehensive body of thought than a
visionary prescription. He regarded the
past as a “dead hand” of encrusted
privileges and impediments that must be
cast off to permit the natural energies
of individual citizens to flow freely.
The American Revolution, as he saw it,
was the first shot in what would
eventually became a global battle for
human liberation from despotic
institutions and all coercive versions
of government.
At the
end of what was probably the most
creative phase of his public career,
personal misfortune struck in two
successive episodes. Elected governor of
Virginia in 1779, he was caught
off-guard by a surprise British invasion
in 1780 against which the state was
defenseless. His flight from approaching
British troops was described in the
local press, somewhat unfairly, as a
cowardly act of abdication. (Critics
would recall this awkward moment
throughout the remainder of his long
career.) Then, in September 1782, his
wife died after a difficult delivery in
May of their third daughter. These two
disasters caused him to vow that he
would never again desert his family for
his country.
American in Paris
The vow was sincere but short-lived.
Jefferson agreed, albeit reluctantly, to
serve as a delegate to the Continental
Congress in December 1782, where his
major contribution was to set forth the
principle that territories in the West
should not be treated as colonies but
rather should enter the Union with
status equal to the original states once
certain conditions were met. Then, in
1784, recognizing the need to escape the
memories of Martha that haunted the
hallways at Monticello, he agreed to
replace Franklin as American minister to
France; or, as legend tells the story,
he agreed to succeed Franklin, noting
that no one could replace him.
During
his five-year sojourn in Paris,
Jefferson accomplished very little in
any official sense. Several intractable
conditions rendered his best diplomatic
efforts futile: the United States was
heavily in debt owing to the recent war,
so few European nations were interested
in signing treaties of amity and
commerce with the infant American
republic; the federal government created
under the Articles of Confederation was
notoriously weak, so clear foreign
policy directives proved impossible;
Great Britain already enjoyed a
monopoly, controlling more than 80
percent of America’s foreign trade, so
it had no incentive to negotiate
commercial treaties on less favourable
terms; and France was drifting toward a
cataclysmic political crisis of its own,
so relations with the upstart new nation
across the Atlantic were hardly a high
priority.
As a
result, Jefferson’s diplomatic overtures
to establish a market for American
tobacco and to reopen French ports to
whale oil produced meagre results, his
efforts to create an alliance of
American and European powers to contest
the terrorism of the Barbary pirates
proved stillborn, and his vision of open
markets for all nations, a world without
tariffs, seemed excessively visionary.
His only significant achievement was the
negotiation of a $400,000 loan from
Dutch bankers that allowed the American
government to consolidate its European
debts, but even that piece of diplomacy
was conducted primarily by John Adams,
then serving as American minister to the
Court of St. James’s in London.
But the
Paris years were important to Jefferson
for personal reasons and are important
to biographers and historians for the
new light they shed on his famously
elusive personality. The dominant
pattern would seem to be the capacity to
live comfortably with contradiction. For
example, he immersed himself
wholeheartedly in the art, architecture,
wine, and food of Parisian society but
warned all prospective American tourists
to remain in America so as to avoid the
avarice, luxury, and sheer sinfulness of
European fleshpots. He made a point of
bringing along his elder daughter,
Martha (called Patsy as a girl), and
later sent for his younger daughter,
Maria (called Polly), all as part of his
genuine devotion as a single parent. But
he then placed both daughters in a
convent, wrote them stern lecturelike
letters about proper female etiquette,
and enforced a patriarchal distance that
was in practice completely at odds with
his theoretical commitment to intimacy.
With
women in general his letters convey a
message of conspicuous gallantry,
playfully flirtatious in the manner of a
male coquette. The most self-revealing
letter he ever wrote, “a dialogue
between the head and the heart,” was
sent to Maria Cosway, an Anglo-Italian
beauty who left him utterly infatuated.
Jefferson and Cosway, who was married to
a prominent if somewhat degenerate
English miniaturist, spent several
months in a romantic haze, touring
Parisian gardens, museums, and art shows
together, but whether Jefferson’s head
or heart prevailed, either in the letter
or in life, is impossible to know.
Meanwhile, there is considerable
evidence to suggest, but not to prove
conclusively, that Jefferson initiated a
sexual liaison with his attractive young
mulatto slave Sally Hemings in 1788,
about the time his torrid affair with
Cosway cooled down—this despite his
public statements denouncing blacks as
biologically inferior and sexual
relations between the races as taboo.
(See Sidebar: “Tom and Sally”: the
Jefferson-Hemings paternity debate.)
During
the latter stages of Jefferson’s stay in
Paris, Louis XVI, the French king, was
forced to convene the Assembly of
Notables in Versailles to deal with
France’s deep financial crisis.
Jefferson initially regarded the
assembly as a French version of the
Constitutional Convention, then meeting
in Philadelphia. Much influenced by
moderate leaders such as the Marquis de
Lafayette, he expected the French
Revolution to remain a bloodless affair
that would culminate in a revised French
government, probably a constitutional
monarchy along English lines. He
remained oblivious to the resentments
and volatile energies pent up within
French society that were about to
explode in the Reign of Terror, mostly
because he thought the French Revolution
would follow the American model. He was
fortunate to depart France late in 1789,
just at the onset of mob violence.
Slavery and racism
Even before his departure from France,
Jefferson had overseen the publication
of Notes on the State of Virginia. This
book, the only one Jefferson ever
published, was part travel guide, part
scientific treatise, and part
philosophical meditation. Jefferson had
written it in the fall of 1781 and had
agreed to a French edition only after
learning that an unauthorized version
was already in press. Notes contained an
extensive discussion of slavery,
including a graphic description of its
horrific effects on both blacks and
whites, a strong assertion that it
violated the principles on which the
American Revolution was based, and an
apocalyptic prediction that failure to
end slavery would lead to “convulsions
which will probably never end but in the
extermination of one or the other race.”
It also contained the most explicit
assessment that Jefferson ever wrote of
what he believed were the biological
differences between blacks and whites,
an assessment that exposed the
deep-rooted racism that he, like most
Americans and almost all Virginians of
his day, harboured throughout his life.
To his
critics in later generations,
Jefferson’s views on race seemed
particularly virulent because of his
purported relationship with Sally
Hemings, who bore several children
obviously fathered by a white man and
some of whom had features resembling
those of Jefferson. The public assertion
of this relationship was originally made
in 1802 by a disreputable journalist
interested in injuring Jefferson’s
political career. His claim was
corroborated, however, by one of
Hemings’s children in an 1873 newspaper
interview and then again in a 1968 book
by Winthrop Jordan revealing that
Hemings became pregnant only when
Jefferson was present at Monticello.
Finally, in 1998, DNA samples were
gathered from living descendants of
Jefferson and Hemings. Tests revealed
that Jefferson was almost certainly the
father of some of Hemings’s children.
What remained unclear was the character
of the relationship—consensual or
coercive, a matter of love or rape, or a
mutually satisfactory arrangement.
Jefferson’s admirers preferred to
consider it a love affair and to see
Jefferson and Hemings as America’s
preeminent biracial couple. His critics,
on the other hand, considered Jefferson
a sexual predator whose eloquent
statements about human freedom and
equality were hypocritical.
In any
case, coming as it did at the midpoint
of Jefferson’s career, the publication
of Notes affords the opportunity to
review Jefferson’s previous and
subsequent positions on the most
volatile and therefore most forbidden
topic in the revolutionary era (see
primary source document: On
Accommodating African Americans). Early
in his career Jefferson had taken a
leadership role in pushing slavery onto
the political agenda in the Virginia
assembly and the federal Congress. In
the 1760s and ’70s, like most Virginia
planters, he endorsed the end of the
slave trade. (Virginia’s plantations
were already well stocked with slaves,
so ending the slave trade posed no
economic threat and even enhanced the
value of the existent slave population.)
In his original draft of the Declaration
of Independence, he included a passage,
subsequently deleted by the Continental
Congress, blaming both the slave trade
and slavery itself on George III. Unlike
most of his fellow Virginians, Jefferson
was prepared to acknowledge that slavery
was an anomaly in the American republic
established in 1776. His two most
practical proposals came in the early
1780s: a gradual emancipation scheme by
which all slaves born after 1800 would
be freed and their owners compensated,
and a prohibition of slavery in all the
territories of the West as a condition
for admission to the Union. By the time
of the publication of Notes, then,
Jefferson’s record on slavery placed him
among the most progressive elements of
southern society. Rather than ask how he
could possibly tolerate the persistence
of slavery, it is more historically
correct to wonder how this member of
Virginia’s planter class had managed to
develop such liberal convictions.
Dating
the onset of a long silence is
inevitably an imprecise business, but by
the time of his return to the United
States in 1789 Jefferson had backed away
from a leadership position on slavery.
The ringing denunciations of slavery
presented in Notes had generated
controversy, especially within the
planter class of Virginia, and
Jefferson’s deep aversion to controversy
made him withdraw from the cutting edge
of the antislavery movement once he
experienced the sharp feelings it
aroused. Moreover, the very logic of his
argument in Notes exposed the inherent
intractability of his position. Although
he believed that slavery was a gross
violation of the principles celebrated
in the Declaration of Independence, he
also believed that people of African
descent were biologically inferior to
whites and could never live alongside
whites in peace and harmony. They would
have to be transported elsewhere, back
to Africa or perhaps the Caribbean,
after emancipation. Because such a
massive deportation was a logistical and
economic impossibility, the unavoidable
conclusion was that, though slavery was
wrong, ending it, at least at present,
was inconceivable. That became
Jefferson’s public position throughout
the remainder of his life.
It also
shaped his personal posture as a slave
owner. Jefferson owned, on average,
about 200 slaves at any point in time,
and slightly over 600 over his lifetime.
To protect himself from facing the
reality of his problematic status as
plantation master, he constructed a
paternalistic self-image as a benevolent
father caring for what he called “my
family.” Believing that he and his
slaves were the victims of history’s
failure to proceed along the enlightened
path, he saw himself as the steward for
those entrusted to his care until a
better future arrived for them all. In
the meantime, his own lavish lifestyle
and all the incessant and expensive
renovations of his Monticello mansion
were wholly dependent on slave labour.
Whatever silent thoughts he might have
harboured about freeing his slaves never
found their way into the record. (He
freed only five slaves, all members of
the Hemings family.) His mounting
indebtedness rendered all such thoughts
superfluous toward the end, because his
slaves, like all his possessions, were
mortgaged to his creditors and therefore
not really his to free.
Party politics
Jefferson returned to the United States
in 1789 to serve as the first secretary
of state under President George
Washington. He was entering the most
uncharted waters in American history.
There had never been an enduring
republican government in a nation as
large as the United States, and no one
was sure if it was possible or how it
would work. The Constitution ratified in
1788 was still a work-in-progress, less
a blueprint that provided answers than a
framework for arguing about the salient
questions. And because Jefferson had
been serving in France when the
constitutional battles of 1787–88 were
waged in Philadelphia and then in the
state ratifying conventions, he entered
the volatile debates of the 1790s
without a clear track record of his
constitutional convictions. In truth,
unlike his friend and disciple James
Madison, Jefferson did not think
primarily in constitutional categories.
His major concern about the new
Constitution was the absence of any bill
of rights. He was less interested in
defining the powers of government than
in identifying those regions where
government could not intrude (see
primary source documents: On the New
Constitution and On the Omission of a
Bill of Rights).
During
his tenure as secretary of state
(1790–93), foreign policy was his chief
responsibility. Within the cabinet a
three-pronged division soon emerged over
American policy toward the European
powers. While all parties embraced some
version of the neutrality doctrine, the
specific choices posed by the ongoing
competition for supremacy in Europe
between England and France produced a
bitter conflict. Washington and Adams,
who was serving as vice president,
insisted on complete neutrality, which
in practice meant tacking back and forth
between the two dominant world powers of
the moment. Alexander Hamilton pushed
for a pro-English version of
neutrality—chiefly commercial ties with
the most potent mercantile power in the
world. Jefferson favoured a pro-French
version of neutrality, arguing that the
Franco-American treaty of 1778 obliged
the United States to honour past French
support during the war for independence,
and that the French Revolution embodied
the “spirit of ’76” on European soil.
Even when the French Revolution spun out
of control and began to devour its own
partisans, Jefferson insisted that these
bloody convulsions were only temporary
excesses justified by the larger
ideological issues at stake.
This
remained his unwavering position
throughout the decade. Even after he
retired from office late in 1793, he
issued directives from Monticello
opposing the Neutrality Act (1793) and
the Jay Treaty (1795) as pacts with the
British harlot and betrayals of our
French brethren. Serving as vice
president during the Adams presidency
(1797–1801), Jefferson worked behind the
scenes to undermine Adams’s efforts to
sustain strict neutrality and blamed the
outbreak of the “quasi-war” with France
in 1797–98 on what he called “our
American Anglophiles” rather than the
French Directory. His foreign-policy
vision was resolutely moralistic and
highly ideological, dominated by a
dichotomous view of England as a corrupt
and degenerate engine of despotism and
France as the enlightened wave of the
future.
Jefferson’s position on domestic policy
during the 1790s was a variation on the
same ideological dichotomy. As Hamilton
began to construct his extensive
financial program—to include funding the
national debt, assuming the state debts,
and creating a national bank—Jefferson
came to regard the consolidation of
power at the federal level as a
diabolical plot to subvert the true
meaning of the American Revolution. As
Jefferson saw it, the entire Federalist
commitment to an energetic central
government with broad powers over the
domestic economy replicated the
arbitrary policies of Parliament and
George III, which the American
Revolution had supposedly repudiated as
monarchical and aristocratic practices,
incompatible with the principles of
republicanism. Jefferson sincerely
believed that the “principles of ’76”
were being betrayed by a Federalist
version of the “court party,” whose
covert scheme was to install monarchy
and a pseudo-aristocracy of bankers and
“monocrats” to rule over the American
yeomanry.
All the
major events of the decade—the creation
of a national bank, the debate over the
location of a national capital, the
suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in
western Pennsylvania, the passage of the
Jay Treaty, and, most notoriously, the
enforcement of the Alien and Sedition
Acts—were viewed through this
ideological lens. By the middle years of
the decade two distinctive political
camps had emerged, calling themselves
Federalists and Republicans (later
Democratic-Republicans). Not that
modern-day political parties, with their
mechanisms for raising money, selecting
candidates, and waging election
campaigns, were fully formed at this
stage. (Full-blooded political parties
date from the 1830s and ’40s.) But an
embryonic version of the party structure
was congealing, and Jefferson, assisted
and advised by Madison, established the
rudiments of the first opposition party
in American politics under the
Republican banner.
The
partnership between Jefferson and
Madison, labeled by subsequent
historians as “the great collaboration,”
deserves special attention. John Quincy
Adams put it nicely when he observed
that “the mutual influence of these two
mighty minds on each other is a
phenomenon, like the invisible and
mysterious movements of the magnet in
the physical world.” Because the notion
of a legitimate opposition to the
elected government did not yet exist,
and because the term party remained an
epithet that was synonymous with
faction, meaning an organized effort to
undermine the public interest, Jefferson
and Madison were labeled as traitors by
the Federalist press. They were, in
effect, inventing a modern form of
political behaviour before there was any
neutral vocabulary for talking about it.
Jefferson’s own capacity to live
comfortably with contradictions served
him well in this context, since he was
creating and leading a political party
while insisting that parties were evil
agents. In 1796 he ran for the
presidency against Adams, all the while
claiming not to know that he was even a
candidate. Most negative assessments of
Jefferson’s character date from this
period, especially the charge of
hypocrisy and duplicity.
The
highly combustible political culture of
the early republic reached a crescendo
in the election of 1800, one of the most
fiercely contested campaigns in American
history. (See primary source document:
Jefferson and Liberty.) The Federalist
press described Jefferson as a pagan and
atheist, a treasonable conspirator
against the duly elected administrations
of Washington and Adams, a utopian
dreamer with anarchistic tendencies
toward the role of government, and a
cunning behind-the-scenes manipulator of
Republican propaganda. All these charges
were gross exaggerations, save the last.
Always operating through intermediaries,
Jefferson paid several journalists to
libel Adams, his old friend but current
political enemy, and offered the vice
presidency to Aaron Burr in return for
delivering the electoral votes of New
York. In the final tally the 12 New York
votes made the difference, with the
tandem of Jefferson and Burr winning 73
to 65. A quirk in the Constitution,
subsequently corrected in the Twelfth
Amendment, prevented electors from
distinguishing between their choice of
president and vice president, so
Jefferson and Burr tied for the top
spot, even though voter preference for
Jefferson was incontestable. The
decision was thrown into the House of
Representatives where, after several
weeks of debate and backroom wheeling
and dealing, Jefferson was elected on
the 36th ballot.
Presidency
There was a good deal of nervous
speculation whether the new American
nation could survive a Jefferson
presidency. The entire thrust of
Jefferson’s political position
throughout the 1790s had been defiantly
negative, rejecting as excessive the
powers vested in the national government
by the Federalists. In his Virginia
Resolutions of 1798, written in protest
of the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had
described any projection of federal
authority over the domestic policy of
the states as a violation of “the spirit
of ’76” and therefore a justification
for secession from the Union. (This
became the position of the Confederacy
in 1861.) His Federalist critics
wondered how he could take an oath to
preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution of the United States if his
primary goal as president was to
dismantle the federal institutions
created by that very document. As he
rose to deliver his inaugural address on
March 4, 1801, in the still-unfinished
Capitol of the equally unfinished
national capital on the Potomac, the
mood was apprehensive. The most rabid
alarmists had already been proved wrong,
since the first transfer of power from
one political regime to another had
occurred peacefully, even routinely. But
it was still very much an open question
whether, as Lincoln later put it, “any
nation so conceived and so dedicated
could long endure” in the absence of a
central government along Federalist
lines.
The
major message of Jefferson’s inaugural
address was conciliatory. Its most
famous line (“We are all republicans—we
are all federalists”) suggested that the
scatological party battles of the
previous decade must cease. He described
his election as a recovery of the
original intentions of the American
Revolution, this after the hostile
takeover of those “ancient and sacred
truths” by the Federalists, who had
erroneously assumed that a stable
American nation required a powerful
central government. In Jefferson’s truly
distinctive and original formulation,
the coherence of the American republic
did not require the mechanisms of a
powerful state to survive or flourish.
Indeed, the health of the emerging
American nation was inversely
proportional to the power of the federal
government, for in the end the sovereign
source of republican government was
voluntary popular opinion, “the people,”
and the latent energies these liberated
individuals released when unburdened by
government restrictions.
In 1804
Jefferson was easily reelected over
Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney,
winning 162 electoral votes to
Pinckney’s 14. Initially, at least, his
policies as president reflected his
desire for decentralization, which meant
dismantling the embryonic federal
government, the army and navy, and all
federal taxation programs, as well as
placing the national debt, which stood
at $112 million, on the road to
extinction. These reforms enjoyed
considerable success for two reasons.
First, the temporary cessation of the
war between England and France for
European supremacy permitted American
merchants to trade with both sides and
produced unprecedented national
prosperity. Second, in selecting Albert
Gallatin as secretary of the Treasury,
Jefferson placed one of the most capable
managers of fiscal policy in the most
strategic location. Gallatin, a
Swiss-born prodigy with impeccable
Republican credentials, dominated the
cabinet discussions alongside Madison,
the ever-loyal Jefferson disciple who
served as secretary of state.
Actually there were very few cabinet
discussions because Jefferson preferred
to do the bulk of business within the
executive branch in writing. Crafting
language on the page was his most
obvious talent, and he required all
cabinet officers to submit drafts of
their recommendations, which he then
edited and returned for their comments.
The same textual approach applied to his
dealings with Congress. All of his
annual messages were delivered in
writing rather than in person. Indeed,
apart from his two inaugural addresses
(see primary source documents: First
Inaugural Address and Second Inaugural
Address), there is no record of
Jefferson delivering any public speeches
whatsoever. In part this was a function
of his notoriously inadequate abilities
as an orator, but it also reflected his
desire to make the office of the
presidency almost invisible. His one
gesture at visibility was to schedule
weekly dinners when Congress was in
session, which became famous for the
quality of the wine, the pell-mell
seating arrangements, and informal
approach to etiquette—a clear defiance
of European-style decorum.
The
major achievement of his first term was
also an act of defiance, though this
time it involved defying his own
principles. In 1803 Napoleon decided to
consolidate his resources for a new
round of the conflict with England by
selling the vast Louisiana region, which
stretched from the Mississippi Valley to
the Rocky Mountains. Although the asking
price, $15 million, was a stupendous
bargain, assuming the cost meant
substantially increasing the national
debt. More significantly, what became
known as the Louisiana Purchase violated
Jefferson’s constitutional scruples.
Indeed, many historians regard it as the
boldest executive action in American
history. But Jefferson never wavered,
reasoning that the opportunity to double
the national domain was too good to
miss. The American West always triggered
Jefferson’s most visionary energies,
seeing it, as he did, as America’s
future, the place where the simple
republican principles could be
constantly renewed. In one fell swoop he
removed the threat of a major European
power from America’s borders and
extended the life span of the
uncluttered agrarian values he so
cherished. Even before news that the
purchase was approved reached the United
States in July 1803, Jefferson
dispatched his private secretary,
Meriwether Lewis, to lead an expedition
to explore the new acquisition and the
lands beyond, all the way to the
Pacific.
If the
Louisiana Purchase was the crowning
achievement of Jefferson’s presidency,
it also proved to be the high point from
which events moved steadily in the other
direction. Although the Federalist Party
was dead as a national force, pockets of
Federalist opposition still survived,
especially in New England. Despite his
eloquent testimonials to the need for a
free press, Jefferson was outraged by
the persistent attacks on his policies
and character from those quarters, and
he instructed the attorneys general in
the recalcitrant states to seek
indictments, in clear violation of his
principled commitment to freedom of
expression (see primary source document:
On Misreporting by the Press). He was
equally heavy-handed in his treatment of
Aaron Burr, who was tried for treason
after leading a mysterious expedition
into the American Southwest allegedly
designed to detach that region from the
United States with Burr crowned as its
benevolent dictator. The charges were
never proved, but Jefferson demanded
Burr’s conviction despite the lack of
evidence. He was overruled in the end by
Chief Justice John Marshall, who sat as
the judge in the trial.
But
Jefferson’s major disappointment had its
origins in Europe with the resumption of
the Napoleonic Wars, which resulted in
naval blockades in the Atlantic and
Caribbean that severely curtailed
American trade and pressured the U.S.
government to take sides in the
conflict. Jefferson’s response was the
Embargo Act (1807), which essentially
closed American ports to all foreign
imports and American exports. The
embargo assumed that the loss of
American trade would force England and
France to alter their policies, but this
fond hope was always an illusion, since
the embryonic American economy lacked
the size to generate such influence and
was itself wrecked by Jefferson’s
action. Moreover, the enforcement of the
Embargo Act required the exercise of
precisely those coercive powers by the
federal government that Jefferson had
previously opposed. By the time he left
office in March 1809, Jefferson was a
tired and beaten man, anxious to escape
the consequences of his futile efforts
to preserve American neutrality and
eager to embrace the two-term precedent
established by Washington.
Retirement
During the last 17 years of his life
Jefferson maintained a crowded and
active schedule. He rose with the dawn
each day, bathed his feet in cold water,
then spent the morning on his
correspondence (one year he counted
writing 1,268 letters) and working in
his garden. Each afternoon he took a
two-hour ride around his grounds.
Dinner, served in the late afternoon,
was usually an occasion to gather his
daughter Martha and her 12 children,
along with the inevitable visitors.
Monticello became a veritable hotel
during these years, on occasion housing
50 guests. The lack of privacy caused
Jefferson to build a separate house on
his Bedford estate about 90 miles (140
km) from Monticello, where he
periodically fled for seclusion.
Three
architectural projects claimed a
considerable share of his attention.
Throughout his life Monticello remained
a work-in-progress that had the
appearance of a construction site. Even
during his retirement years, Jefferson’s
intensive efforts at completing the
renovations never quite produced the
masterpiece of neoclassical design he
wanted to achieve and that modern-day
visitors to Monticello find so
compelling. A smaller but more
architecturally distinctive mansion at
Bedford, called Poplar Forest, was
completed on schedule. It too embodied
neoclassical principles but was shaped
as a perfect octagon. Finally there was
the campus of the University of Virginia
at Charlottesville, which Jefferson
called his “academical village.”
Jefferson surveyed the site, which he
could view in the distance from his
mountaintop, and chose the Pantheon of
Rome as the model for the rotunda, the
centrepiece flanked by two rows of
living quarters for students and
faculty. In 1976 the American Institute
of Architects voted it “the proudest
achievement of American architecture in
the past 200 years.” Even the “interior”
design of the University of Virginia
embodied Jeffersonian principles, in
that he selected all the books for the
library, defined the curriculum, picked
the faculty, and chaired the Board of
Visitors. Unlike every other American
college at the time, “Mr. Jefferson’s
university” had no religious affiliation
and imposed no religious requirement on
its students. As befitted an institution
shaped by a believer in wholly voluntary
and consensual networks of governance,
there were no curricular requirements,
no mandatory code of conduct except the
self-enforced honour system, no
president or administration. Every
aspect of life at the University of
Virginia reflected Jefferson’s belief
that the only legitimate form of
governance was self-governance.
In 1812
his vast correspondence began to include
an exchange with his former friend and
more recent rival John Adams. The
reconciliation between the two
patriarchs was arranged by their mutual
friend Benjamin Rush, who described them
as “the North and South poles of the
American Revolution.” That description
suggested more than merely geographic
symbolism, since Adams and Jefferson
effectively, even dramatically, embodied
the twin impulses of the revolutionary
generation. As the “Sage of Monticello,”
Jefferson represented the Revolution as
a clean break with the past, the
rejection of all European versions of
political discipline as feudal vestiges,
the ingrained hostility toward all
mechanisms of governmental authority
that originated in faraway places. As
the “Sage of Quincy (Massachusetts),”
Adams resembled an American version of
Edmund Burke, which meant that he
attributed the success of the American
Revolution to its linkage with past
practices, most especially the tradition
of representative government established
in the colonial assemblies. He regarded
the constitutional settlement of 1787–88
as a shrewd compromise with the
political necessities of a nation-state
exercising jurisdiction over an
extensive, eventually continental,
empire, not as a betrayal of the
American Revolution but an evolutionary
fulfillment of its promise.
These
genuine differences of opinion made
Adams and Jefferson the odd couple of
the American Revolution and were the
primary reasons why they had drifted to
different sides of the divide during the
party wars of the 1790s. The exchange of
158 letters between 1812 and 1826
permitted the two sages to pose as
philosopher-kings and create what is
arguably the most intellectually
impressive correspondence between
statesmen in all of American history.
Beyond the elegiac tone and almost
sculpted serenity of the letters, the
correspondence exposed the fundamental
contradictions that the American
Revolution managed to contain. As Adams
so poignantly put it, “You and I ought
not to die before we have explained
ourselves to each other.” And because of
Adams’s incessant prodding, Jefferson
was frequently forced to clarify his
mature position on the most salient
issues of the era.
One
issue that even Adams and Jefferson
could not discuss candidly was slavery.
Jefferson’s mature position on that
forbidden subject represented a further
retreat from any leadership role in
ending the “peculiar institution.” In
1819, during the debate in Congress over
the Missouri Compromise, he endorsed the
expansion of slavery into all the
western territories, precisely the
opposite of the position he had taken in
the 1780s. Though he continued to insist
that slavery was a massive anomaly, he
insisted even more strongly that it was
wrong for the federal government to
attempt any effort at emancipation. In
fact he described any federal intrusion
in the matter as a despotic act
analogous to George III’s imperial
interference in colonial affairs or
Hamilton’s corrupt scheme to establish a
disguised form of monarchy in the early
republic. His letters to fellow
Virginians during his last years reflect
a conspiratorial mentality toward the
national government and a clear
preference for secession if threatened
with any mandatory plan for abolition.
Apart
from slavery, the other shadow that
darkened Monticello during Jefferson’s
twilight years was debt. Jefferson was
chronically in debt throughout most of
his life, in part because of obligations
inherited from his father-in-law in his
wife’s dowry, mostly because of his own
lavish lifestyle, which never came to
terms with the proverbial bottom line
despite careful entries in his account
books that provided him with only the
illusion of control. In truth, by the
1820s the interest on his debt was
compounding at a faster rate than any
repayment schedule could meet. By the
end, he was more than $100,000—in modern
terms several million dollars—in debt.
An exception was made in Virginia law to
permit a lottery that Jefferson hoped
would allow his heirs to retain at least
a portion of his property. But the
massiveness of his debt overwhelmed all
such hopes. Monticello, including land,
mansion, furnishings, and the vast bulk
of the slave population, was auctioned
off the year after his death, and his
surviving daughter, Martha, was forced
to accept charitable contributions to
sustain her family.
Before
that ignominious end, which Jefferson
never lived to see, he managed to sound
one last triumphant note that projected
his most enduring and attractive message
to posterity. In late June 1826
Jefferson was asked to join the
Independence Day celebrations in
Washington, D.C., on the 50th
anniversary of the defining event in his
and the nation’s life. He declined,
explaining that he was in no condition
to leave his mountaintop. But he
mustered up one final surge of energy to
draft a statement that would be read in
his absence at the ceremony. He clearly
intended it as his final testament.
Though some of the language, like the
language of the Declaration itself, was
borrowed from others, here was the
vintage Jeffersonian vision:
May it
be to the world, what I believe it will
be, (to some parts sooner, to others
later, but finally to all,) the signal
of arousing men to burst the chains
under which monkish ignorance and
superstition had persuaded them to bind
themselves, and to assume the blessings
and security of self-government.… All
eyes are opened or opening to the rights
of men. The general spread of the light
of science has already laid open to
every view the palpable truth, that the
mass of mankind has not been born with
saddles on their backs, nor a favored
few, booted and spurred, ready to ride
them legitimately by the grace of God.
These are grounds of hope for others;
for ourselves, let the annual return of
this day forever refresh our
recollections of these rights, and an
undiminished devotion to them.
Even as
these words were being read in
Washington, Jefferson went to his maker
in his bed at Monticello at about half
past noon on July 4, 1826. His last
conscious words, uttered the preceding
evening, were “Is it the Fourth?” Always
a man given to Herculean feats of
self-control, he somehow managed to time
his own death to coincide with history.
More remarkably, up in Quincy on that
same day his old rival and friend also
managed to die on schedule. John Adams
passed away later in the afternoon. His
last words—“Thomas Jefferson still
lives”—were wrong at the moment but
right for the future, since Jefferson’s
complex legacy was destined to become
the most resonant and controversial
touchstone in all of American history.
(For
additional writings by Jefferson, see
Debates on Independence; On the Need for
a Little Rebellion Now and Then; A
Firebell in the Night; On Civil and
Natural Rights; A Simple and Inexpensive
Government; On Republican Government;
The Rulers and the Ruled; On the
Censorship of Religious Books; On the
Civil and Religious Powers of
Government; and On Science and the
Perfectibility of Man.)
Joseph J. Ellis
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Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton, (b. January 11,
1755/57, Nevis, British West Indies—d.
July 12, 1804, New York, New York,
U.S.), New York delegate to the
Constitutional Convention (1787), major
author of the Federalist papers, and
first secretary of the Treasury of the
United States (1789–95), who was the
foremost champion of a strong central
government for the new United States. He
was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr.
Early
life
Hamilton’s father was James Hamilton, a
drifting trader and son of Alexander
Hamilton, the laird of Cambuskeith,
Ayrshire, Scotland; his mother was
Rachel Fawcett Lavine, the daughter of a
French Huguenot physician and the wife
of John Michael Lavine, a German or
Danish merchant who had settled on the
island of St. Croix in the Danish West
Indies. Rachel probably began living
with James Hamilton in 1752, but Lavine
did not divorce her until 1758.
In 1765
James Hamilton abandoned his family.
Destitute, Rachel set up a small shop,
and at the age of 11 Alexander went to
work, becoming a clerk in the
countinghouse of two New York merchants
who had recently established themselves
at St. Croix. When Rachel died in 1768,
Alexander became a ward of his mother’s
relatives, and in 1772 his ability,
industry, and engaging manners won him
advancement from bookkeeper to manager.
Later, friends sent him to a preparatory
school in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and
in the autumn of 1773 he entered King’s
College (later Columbia) in New York.
Intensely ambitious, he became a serious
and successful student, but his studies
were interrupted by the brewing revolt
against Great Britain. He publicly
defended the Boston Tea Party, in which
Boston colonists destroyed several tea
cargoes in defiance of the tea tax. In
1774–75 he wrote three influential
pamphlets, which upheld the agreements
of the Continental Congress on the
nonimportation, nonconsumption, and
nonexportation of British products and
attacked British policy in Quebec. Those
anonymous publications—one of them
attributed to John Jay and John Adams,
two of the ablest of American
propagandists—gave the first solid
evidence of Hamilton’s precocity.
American Revolution
In March 1776, through the influence of
friends in the New York legislature,
Hamilton was commissioned a captain in
the provincial artillery. He organized
his own company and at the Battle of
Trenton, when he and his men prevented
the British under Lord Cornwallis from
crossing the Raritan River and attacking
George Washington’s main army, showed
conspicuous bravery. In February 1777
Washington invited him to become an
aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant
colonel. In his four years on
Washington’s staff he grew close to the
general and was entrusted with his
correspondence. He was sent on important
military missions and, thanks to his
fluent command of French, became liaison
officer between Washington and the
French generals and admirals.
Eager
to connect himself with wealth and
influence, Hamilton married Elizabeth,
the daughter of General Philip Schuyler,
the head of one of New York’s most
distinguished families. Meantime, having
tired of the routine duties at
headquarters and yearning for glory, he
pressed Washington for an active command
in the field. Washington refused, and in
early 1781 Hamilton seized upon a
trivial quarrel to break with the
general and leave his staff.
Fortunately, he had not forfeited the
general’s friendship, for in July
Washington gave him command of a
battalion. At the siege of Cornwallis’s
army at Yorktown in October, Hamilton
led an assault on a British stronghold.
Early political activities
In letters to a member of Congress and
to Robert Morris, the superintendent of
finance, Hamilton analyzed the financial
and political weaknesses of the
government. In November 1781, with the
war virtually over, he moved to Albany,
where he studied law and was admitted to
practice in July 1782. A few months
later the New York legislature elected
him to the Continental Congress. He
continued to argue in essays for a
strong central government, and in
Congress from November 1782 to July 1783
he worked for the same end, being
convinced that the Articles of
Confederation were the source of the
country’s weakness and disunion.
In 1783
Hamilton began to practice law in New
York City. He defended unpopular
loyalists who had remained faithful to
the British during the Revolution in
suits brought against them under a state
law called the Trespass Act. Partly as a
result of his efforts, state acts
disbarring loyalist lawyers and
disfranchising loyalist voters were
repealed. In that year he also won
election to the lower house of the New
York legislature, taking his seat in
January 1787. Meanwhile, the legislature
had appointed him a delegate to the
convention in Annapolis, Maryland, that
met in September 1786 to consider the
commercial plight of the Union. Hamilton
suggested that the convention exceed its
delegated powers and call for another
meeting of representatives from all the
states to discuss various problems
confronting the nation. He drew up the
draft of the address to the states from
which emerged the Constitutional
Convention that met in Philadelphia in
May 1787. After persuading New York to
send a delegation, Hamilton obtained a
place for himself on the delegation.
Hamilton went to Philadelphia as an
uncompromising nationalist who wished to
replace the Articles of Confederation
with a strong centralized government,
but he did not take much part in the
debates. He served on two important
committees, one on rules in the
beginning of the convention and the
other on style at the end of the
convention. In a long speech on June 18,
he presented his own idea of what the
national government should be. Under his
plan, the national government would have
had unlimited power over the states.
Hamilton’s plan had little impact on the
convention; the delegates went ahead to
frame a constitution that, while it gave
strong power to a federal government,
stood some chance of being accepted by
the people. Since the other two
delegates from New York, who were strong
opponents of a Federalist constitution,
had withdrawn from the convention, New
York was not officially represented, and
Hamilton had no power to sign for his
state. Nonetheless, even though he knew
that his state wished to go no further
than a revision of the Articles of
Confederation, he signed the new
constitution as an individual.
Opponents in New York quickly attacked
the Constitution, and Hamilton answered
them in the newspapers under the
signature Caesar. Since the Caesar
letters seemed not influential, Hamilton
turned to another classical pseudonym,
Publius, and to two collaborators, James
Madison, the delegate from Virginia, and
John Jay, the secretary of foreign
affairs, to write The Federalist, a
series of 85 essays in defense of the
Constitution and republican government
that appeared in newspapers between
October 1787 and May 1788. Hamilton
wrote at least two-thirds of the essays,
including some of the most important
ones that interpreted the Constitution,
explained the powers of the executive,
the senate, and the judiciary, and
expounded the theory of judicial review
(i.e., the power of the Supreme Court to
declare legislative acts
unconstitutional and, thus, void).
Although written and published in haste,
The Federalist was widely read, had a
great influence on contemporaries,
became one of the classics of political
literature, and helped shape American
political institutions. In 1788 Hamilton
was reappointed a delegate to the
Continental Congress from New York. At
the ratifying convention in June, he
became the chief champion of the
Constitution and, against strong
opposition, won approval for it.
Hamilton’s financial program
When President Washington in 1789
appointed Hamilton the first secretary
of the Treasury, Congress asked him to
draw up a plan for the “adequate support
of the public credit.” Envisaging
himself as something of a prime minister
in Washington’s official family,
Hamilton developed a bold and masterly
program designed to build a strong
union, one that would weave his
political philosophy into the
government. His immediate objectives
were to establish credit at home and
abroad and to strengthen the national
government at the expense of the states.
He outlined his program in four notable
reports to Congress (1790–91).
In the
first two, Reports on the Public Credit,
which he submitted on January 14, 1790,
and December 13, 1790, he urged the
funding of the national debt at full
value, the assumption in full by the
federal government of debts incurred by
the states during the Revolution, and a
system of taxation to pay for the
assumed debts. His motive was as much
political as economic. Through payment
by the central government of the states’
debts, he hoped to bind the men of
wealth and influence, who had acquired
most of the domestically held bonds, to
the national government. But such
powerful opposition arose to the funding
and assumption scheme that Hamilton was
able to push it through Congress only
after he had made a bargain with Thomas
Jefferson, who was then secretary of
state, whereby he gained Southern votes
in Congress for it in exchange for his
own support in locating the future
national capital on the banks of the
Potomac.
Hamilton’s third report, the Report on a
National Bank, which he submitted on
December 14, 1790, advocated a national
bank called the Bank of the United
States and modeled after the Bank of
England. With the bank, he wished to
solidify the partnership between the
government and the business classes who
would benefit most from it and further
advance his program to strengthen the
national government. After Congress
passed the bank charter, Hamilton
persuaded Washington to sign it into
law. He advanced the argument that the
Constitution was the source of implied
as well as enumerated powers and that
through implication the government had
the right to charter a national bank as
a proper means of regulating the
currency. This doctrine of implied
powers became the basis for interpreting
and expanding the Constitution in later
years. In the Report on Manufactures,
the fourth, the longest, the most
complex, and the most farsighted of his
reports, submitted on December 5, 1791,
he proposed to aid the growth of infant
industries through various protective
laws. Basic to it was his idea that the
general welfare required the
encouragement of manufacturers and that
the federal government was obligated to
direct the economy to that end. In
writing his report, Hamilton had leaned
heavily on The Wealth of Nations,
written in 1776 by the Scottish
political economist Adam Smith, but he
revolted against Smith’s laissez-faire
idea that the state must keep hands off
the economic processes, which meant that
it could provide no bounties, tariffs,
or other aid. The report had greater
appeal to posterity than to Hamilton’s
contemporaries, for Congress did nothing
with it.
Establishment of political parties
A result of the struggle over Hamilton’s
program and over issues of foreign
policy was the emergence of national
political parties. Like Washington,
Hamilton had deplored parties, equating
them with disorder and instability. He
had hoped to establish a government of
superior persons who would be above
party. Yet he became the leader of the
Federalist Party, a political
organization in large part dedicated to
the support of his policies. Hamilton
placed himself at the head of that party
because he needed organized political
support and strong leadership in the
executive branch to get his program
through Congress. The political
organization that challenged the
Hamiltonians was the Republican Party
(later Democratic-Republican Party)
created by James Madison, a member of
the House of Representatives, and
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. In
foreign affairs the Federalists favoured
close ties with England, whereas the
Republicans preferred to strengthen the
old attachment to France. In attempting
to carry out his program, Hamilton
interfered in Jefferson’s domain of
foreign affairs. Detesting the French
Revolution and the egalitarian doctrines
it spawned, he tried to thwart
Jefferson’s policies that might aid
France or injure England and to induce
Washington to follow his own ideas in
foreign policy. Hamilton went so far as
to warn British officials of Jefferson’s
attachment to France and to suggest that
they bypass the secretary of state and
instead work through himself and the
president in matters of foreign policy.
This and other parts of Hamilton’s
program led to a feud with Jefferson in
which the two men attempted to drive
each other from the cabinet.
When
war broke out between France and England
in February 1793, Hamilton wished to use
the war as an excuse for jettisoning the
French alliance of 1778 and steering the
United States closer to England, whereas
Jefferson insisted that the alliance was
still binding. Washington essentially
accepted Hamilton’s advice and in April
issued a proclamation of neutrality that
was generally interpreted as
pro-British.
At the
same time, British seizure of U.S. ships
trading with the French West Indies and
other grievances led to popular demands
for war against Great Britain, which
Hamilton opposed. He believed that such
a war would be national suicide, for his
program was anchored on trade with
Britain and on the import duties that
supported his funding system. Usurping
the power of the State Department,
Hamilton persuaded the president to send
John Jay to London to negotiate a
treaty. Hamilton wrote Jay’s
instructions, manipulated the
negotiations, and defended the unpopular
treaty Jay brought back in 1795, notably
in a series of newspaper essays he wrote
under the signature Camillus; the treaty
kept the peace and saved his system.
Out of the cabinet
Lashed by criticism, tired and anxious
to repair his private fortune, Hamilton
left the cabinet on January 31, 1795.
His influence, as an unofficial adviser,
however, continued as strong as ever.
Washington and his cabinet consulted him
on almost all matters of policy. When
Washington decided to retire, he turned
to Hamilton, asking his opinion as to
the best time to publish his farewell.
With his eye on the coming presidential
election, Hamilton advised withholding
the announcement until a few months
before the meeting of the presidential
electors. Following that advice,
Washington gave his Farewell Address in
September 1796. Hamilton drafted most of
the address, and some of his ideas were
prominent in it. In the election,
Federalist leaders passed over
Hamilton’s claims and nominated John
Adams for the presidency and Thomas
Pinckney for the vice presidency.
Because Adams did not appear devoted to
Hamiltonian principles, Hamilton tried
to manipulate the electoral college so
as to make Pinckney president. Adams won
the election, and Hamilton’s intrigue
succeeded only in sowing distrust within
his own party. Hamilton’s influence in
the government continued, however, for
Adams retained Washington’s cabinet, and
its members consulted Hamilton on all
matters of policy, gave him confidential
information, and in effect urged his
policies on the president.
When
France broke relations with the United
States, Hamilton stood for firmness,
though not immediate war; however, after
the failure of a peace mission that
President Adams had sent to Paris in
1798, followed by the publication of
dispatches insulting to U.S.
sovereignty, Hamilton wanted to place
the country under arms. He even believed
that the French, with whom the United
States now became engaged in an
undeclared naval war, might attempt to
invade the country. Hamilton sought
command of the new army, though
Washington would be its titular head.
Adams resisted Hamilton’s desires, but
in September 1798 Washington forced him
to make Hamilton second in command of
the army, the inspector general, with
the rank of major general. Adams never
forgave Hamilton for this humiliation.
Hamilton wanted to lead his army into
Spain’s Louisiana and the Floridas and
other points south but never did.
Through independent diplomacy, Adams
kept the quarrel from spreading and at
the order of Congress disbanded the
provisional army. Hamilton resigned his
commission in June 1800. Meantime Adams
had purged his cabinet of those he
regarded as “Hamilton’s spies.”
In
retaliation, Hamilton tried to prevent
Adams’s reelection. In October 1800 he
privately circulated a personal attack
on Adams, The Public Conduct and
Character of John Adams, Esq., President
of the United States. Aaron Burr of New
York, the Republican candidate for vice
president and Hamilton’s political
enemy, obtained a copy and had it
published. Hamilton was then compelled
to acknowledge his authorship and to
bring his quarrel with Adams into the
open, a feud that revealed an
irreparable schism in the Federalist
Party. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr
won the election, but, because both had
received the same number of electoral
votes, the choice between them for
president was cast into the House of
Representatives. Hating Jefferson, the
Federalists wanted to throw the election
to Burr. Hamilton helped to persuade
them to select Jefferson instead. By
supporting his old Republican enemy, who
won the presidency, Hamilton lost
prestige within his own party and
virtually ended his public career.
The Burr quarrel
In 1801 Hamilton built a country house
called the Grange on Manhattan island
and helped found a Federalist newspaper,
the New York Evening Post, the policies
of which reflected his ideas. Through
the Post he hailed the purchase of
Louisiana in 1803, even though New
England Federalists had opposed it. Some
of them talked of secession and in 1804
began to negotiate with Burr for his
support. Almost all the Federalists but
Hamilton favoured Burr’s candidacy for
the governorship of New York state.
Hamilton urged the election of Burr’s
Republican opponent, who won by a close
margin, but it is doubtful that
Hamilton’s influence decided the
outcome. In any event, Hamilton and Burr
had long been enemies, and Hamilton had
several times thwarted Burr’s ambitions.
In June 1804, after the election, Burr
demanded satisfaction for remarks
Hamilton had allegedly made at a dinner
party in April in which he said he held
a “despicable opinion” of Burr. Hamilton
held an aversion to dueling, but as a
man of honour he felt compelled to
accept Burr’s challenge. The two
antagonists met early in the morning of
July 11 on the heights of Weehawken, New
Jersey, where Hamilton’s eldest son,
Philip, had died in a duel three years
before. Burr’s bullet found its mark,
and Hamilton fell. Hamilton left his
wife and seven children heavily in debt,
which friends helped to pay off.
Assessment
Hamilton was a man both of action and of
ideas, but all his ideas involved action
and were directed toward some specific
goal in statecraft. Unlike Benjamin
Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, he did not
have a broad inquisitive mind, nor was
he speculative in his thinking in the
philosophical sense of seeking
intangible truths. He was ambitious,
purposeful, a hard worker, and one of
America’s administrative geniuses. In
foreign policy he was a realist,
believing that self-interest should be
the nation’s polestar; questions of
gratitude, benevolence, and moral
principle, he held, were irrelevant.
What
renders him fascinating to biographers
are the streaks of ambition, jealousy,
and impulsiveness that led him into
disastrous personal clashes—the rupture
with Washington in 1781, which luckily
did him no harm; an adulterous affair in
1791, which laid him open to blackmail;
the assault on Adams that doomed
Federalist prospects in 1800; and
perhaps even the duel in which he died.
The union of a mind brilliantly tuned to
the economic future with the temperament
of a Hotspur is rare.
Most of
all, Hamilton was one of America’s first
great nationalists. He believed in an
indivisible nation where the people
would give their loyalty not to any
state but to the nation. Although a
conservative, he did not fear change or
experimentation. The conservatism that
led him to denounce democracy as hostile
to liberty stemmed from his fear that
democracy tended to invade the rights of
property, which he held sacred. His
concern for property was a means to an
end. He wished to make private property
sacred because upon it he planned to
build a strong central government, one
capable of suppressing internal
disorders and assuring tranquillity. His
economic, political, military, and
diplomatic schemes were all directed
toward making the Union strong.
Hamilton’s most enduring monument was
the Union, for much of it rested on his
ideas.
Alexander DeConde
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Notable works of the periodPoets and poetry
Poetry became a weapon during the American
Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals
urging their forces on, stating their arguments, and
celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as
Yankee Doodle, Nathan Hale, and The Epilogue, mostly
set to popular British melodies and in manner
resembling other British poems of the period.
The most memorable American poet of the period
was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems,
Revolutionary War satires, served as effective
propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of
the American scene. Although he wrote much in the
stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, such poems as
The Indian Burying Ground, The Wild Honey Suckle, To
a Caty-did, and On a Honey Bee were romantic lyrics
of real grace and feeling that were forerunners of a
literary movement destined to be important in the
19th century.
Philip Freneau
Philip Freneau, in full Philip Morin
Freneau (b. Jan. 2, 1752, New York, N.Y.
[U.S.]—d. Dec. 18, 1832, Monmouth
county, N.J., U.S.), American poet,
essayist, and editor, known as the “poet
of the American Revolution.”
After
graduating from Princeton University in
1771, Freneau taught school and studied
for the ministry until the outbreak of
the American Revolution, when he began
to write vitriolic satire against the
British and Tories. Not until his return
from two years in the Caribbean islands,
where he produced two of his most
ambitious poems, “The Beauties of Santa
Cruz” and “The House of Night,” did he
become an active participant in the war,
joining the New Jersey militia in 1778
and sailing through the British blockade
as a privateer to the West Indies.
Captured and imprisoned by the British
in 1780, Freneau wrote in verse
bitterly, on his release, The British
Prison-Ship (1781).
During
the next several years he contributed to
the Freeman’s Journal in Philadelphia.
Freneau became a sea captain until 1790,
when he again entered partisan
journalism, ultimately as editor from
1791 to 1793 of the strongly Republican
National Gazette in Philadelphia.
Freneau alternated quiet periods at sea
with periods of active newspaper work,
until he retired early in the 19th
century to his farm in Monmouth county.
Well
schooled in the classics and in the
Neoclassical English poetry of the
period, Freneau strove for a fresh idiom
that would be unmistakably American,
but, except in a few poems, he failed to
achieve it.
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Drama and the novel
In the years toward the close of the 18th century,
both dramas and novels of some historical importance
were produced. Though theatrical groups had long
been active in America, the first American comedy
presented professionally was Royall Tyler’s Contrast
(1787). This drama was full of echoes of Goldsmith
and Sheridan, but it contained a Yankee character
(the predecessor of many such in years to follow)
who brought something native to the stage.
William Hill Brown wrote the first American
novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which showed
authors how to overcome ancient prejudices against
this form by following the sentimental novel form
invented by
Samuel Richardson. A flood of
sentimental novels followed to the end of the 19th
century. Hugh Henry Brackenridge succeeded
Cervantes’s Don Quixote and
Henry Fielding with some
popular success in Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), an
amusing satire on democracy and an interesting
portrayal of frontier life. Gothic thrillers were to
some extent nationalized in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), and
Edgar Huntly (1799).
Royall Tyler
Royall
Tyler, original name William Clark Tyler
(b. July 18, 1757, Boston—d. Aug. 26,
1826, Brattleboro, Vt., U.S.), U.S.
lawyer, teacher, and dramatist, author
of the first American comedy, The
Contrast (1787).
After
graduating from Harvard University,
Tyler served in the U.S. Army and later
became a lawyer. A meeting with Thomas
Wignell, the star comedian of the
American Company, in New York City, led
him to write The Contrast, which
premiered in 1787 at the John Street
Theatre. A light comedy echoing the
English playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and
Richard Sheridan (especially The School
for Scandal), The Contrast contains a
Yankee character, the predecessor of
many such in years to follow, that
brought something native to the stage.
His other plays, some no longer extant,
did not equal The Contrast.
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William Hill Brown
William
Hill Brown, (b. November 1765, Boston—d.
Sept. 2, 1793, Murfreesboro, N.C.,
U.S.), novelist and dramatist whose
anonymously published The Power of
Sympathy, or the Triumph of Nature
Founded in Truth (1789) is considered
the first American novel. An epistolary
novel about tragic, incestuous love, it
followed the sentimental style developed
by Samuel Richardson; its popularity
began a flood of sentimental novels.
The son
of the Boston clockmaker who made the
timepiece in Old South Church, Boston,
Brown wrote the romantic tale “Harriot,
or the Domestic Reconciliation” (1789),
which was published in the first issue
of Massachusetts Magazine, and the play
West Point Preserved (1797), a tragedy
about the death of a Revolutionary spy.
He also wrote a series of verse fables,
a comedy in West Indies style
(Penelope), essays, and a short second
novel about incest and seduction, Ira
and Isabella (published posthumously,
1807). Brown went south to study law and
died shortly thereafter.
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Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Hugh Henry Brackenridge, (b. 1748,
Kintyre, near Campbeltown, Argyll,
Scot.—d. June 25, 1816, Carlisle, Pa.,
U.S.), American author of the first
novel portraying frontier life in the
United States after the Revolutionary
War, Modern Chivalry (1792–1805; final
revision 1819).
At five
Brackenridge was taken by his
impoverished family from Scotland to a
farm in York county in Pennsylvania.
After a local minister taught him Latin
and Greek, he became a teacher and
worked his way through the College of
New Jersey (now Princeton University),
receiving his B.A. in 1771. For the
commencement exercises he recited “The
Rising Glory of America,” a patriotic
poem that he had written with a
classmate, Philip Freneau, who also was
to make his name in American letters.
Brackenridge went on to get his M.A. in
theology at Princeton in 1774. An
enthusiast for the Revolution, he joined
George Washington’s army as chaplain. He
published two verse dramas on
Revolutionary themes, The Battle of
Bunkers-Hill (1776) and The Death of
General Montgomery at the Siege of
Quebec (1777), and Six Political
Discourses Founded on the Scripture
(1778). In an attempt to promote native
American literature, he established and
edited The United States Magazine in
1779, but it failed within the year.
Brackenridge became a lawyer and settled
in the frontier village of Pittsburgh in
1781, where he helped start The
Pittsburgh Gazette, the first newspaper
in what was then the Far West. After he
was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly
in 1786, he obtained funds to found the
academy that became the University of
Pittsburgh. As mediator in 1794 during
the Whiskey Rebellion, he lost favour
with both sides but wrote Incidents of
the Insurrection in the Western Parts of
Pennsylvania in the Year 1794 (1795).
His leadership of Thomas Jefferson’s
Republican Party won him, in 1799,
appointment as a judge of the Supreme
Court of Pennsylvania, a post he held
until his death. He settled permanently
in Carlisle in 1801.
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Charles Brockden Brown
Charles Brockden Brown, (b. Jan. 17,
1771, Philadelphia—d. Feb. 22, 1810,
Philadelphia), writer known as the
“father of the American novel.” His
gothic romances in American settings
were the first in a tradition adapted by
two of the greatest early American
authors, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Brown called himself a
“story-telling moralist.” Although his
writings exploit horror and terror, they
reflect a thoughtful liberalism.
The son
of Quaker parents, Brown was of delicate
constitution, and he early devoted
himself to study. He was apprenticed to
a Philadelphia lawyer in 1787, but he
had a strong interest in writing that
led him to help found a literary
society. In 1793 he gave up the law
entirely to pursue a literary career in
Philadelphia and New York City.
His
first novel, Wieland (1798), a minor
masterpiece in American fiction, shows
the ease with which mental balance is
lost when the test of common sense is
not applied to strange experiences. The
story concerns Theodore Wieland, whose
father died by spontaneous combustion
apparently for violating a vow to God.
The younger Wieland, also a religious
enthusiast seeking direct communication
with divinity, misguidedly assumes that
a ventriloquist’s utterances are
supernatural in origin; driven insane,
he acts upon the prompting of this
“inner voice” and murders his wife and
children. When apprised of his error, he
kills himself. Brown also wrote Ormond
(1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), and Arthur
Mervyn (1799–1800), as well as a number
of less well known novels and a book on
the rights of women. Despite this
literary output, Brown engaged in trade
throughout his life to support his
family.
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