Pessimists, as the saying goes, see the glass half empty, optimists see the glass half full. John Ferling’s new book, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic, is definitely one for the half empty crowd. Midway through, after more than two hundred pages lurching from crisis to ever deeper crisis, faced with bumbling generals, mutinous soldiers, conniving junior officers, rapacious land speculators, war profiteering merchants, inept state legislators, and a shortsighted national leadership, the reader almost wishes that the British would just come back and rescue the whole doomed enterprise from itself. And Ferling is still talking about the Revolutionary War. He hasn’t even begun to tackle the horsetrading that surrounded the constitutional convention, much less the political ugliness of the late Federal period, a time that one shocked historian called “an age of passion” after he discovered Jeffersonians regularly toasting “a speedy death to General Washington.” The failure of the new nation to implode given this unrelentingly dismal parade of people and events gives new force to the old line that God takes care of drunks and the United States of America.
Professor Ferling derives an almost perverse delight in presenting the dark side of the nation’s early years, first in the struggle to separate from Great Britain, then in the effort to form a viable national union, and finally in the contest over the direction that the new government would take. His subject spans the period from the Albany Convention of 1754, at which colonial leaders (including Benjamin Franklin) met to consider a common defense during the French and Indian War, to the 1801 inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, which he portrays as a hopeful vindication of America’s egalitarian revolutionary potential. Along the way, he takes the time to debunk the historical reputation of everyone from Tom Paine to Benjamin Franklin.
Take, for example, the treatment of George Washington. Although to Colonel Henry Lee and generations to follow, Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” to Ferling, Washington was a blundering general whose military career began inauspiciously when, in 1754, he led the ambush of a French military party on a peaceful mission and, “unmanned” at the sight of blood, permitted his Indian allies to massacre the Frenchmen after they had surrendered. With a nice attention to detail, Ferling recounts that, while Washington stood by and watched, the Indian leader, Half King, scalped the French commander, scooped out his “still warm brain and squeezed it in his hands.” In Ferling’s telling, as the years unfold, Washington turns into an intellectually limited leader, a manipulative actor before his troops, the pawn of Hamilton, and a man of regal airs whose personal style undercut the egalitarian ideals of the revolution for which he fought. The unanswered question is why a man of such modest parts should have been the sole figure to whom everyone in the new nation turned to guide it through its perilous beginnings.
A Leap in the Dark embodies a style of epic political history that is increasingly rare in these days of cultural and thematic studies. It focuses primarily on great men (and with one or two exceptions, they were men) and on the great events in which they participated. In this narrative, forces such as religion and slavery receive short shrift; its economic analysis has hardly advanced beyond that of the late historian Charles Beard who argued that the delegates to the constitutional convention who held public securities all supported undemocratic positions in an effort, conscious or otherwise, to protect their investments. Ferling does update the story slightly: Borrowing from James Madison, he describes the delegates as “‘creditors … a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a moneyed interest,’” people drawn “overwhelmingly from the top rung” of colonial society. Sniffily, Ferling concludes, they “were not disinterested men.” With their ascendancy, the security of the federal union came at a “steep price;” the stifling “of other, more radical, sentiments that sprang from Whig ideology and the logic of the Revolution.”
As the foregoing shows, for an author dedicated to undercutting the hagiography of the founding, Professor Ferling is rather devoted to a few myths of his own. He stands unabashedly in the line of “Progressive” historians founded by Beard, writers who claimed that the federal constitution was both counterrevolutionary in intention and effect and who viewed the entire early national period as a manichean struggle between the advocates of property rights and the advocates of human rights. In Ferling’s modernized version, the founding decades were a tug of war between conservative nationalists, representing northern mercantile interests—read Alexander Hamilton and the eventual Federalist Party—and agrarian populists who favored state power and a weak national government—Thomas Jefferson and the nascent Republicans. Ferling admits that Hamilton’s economic policies were the way of the future, allowing the young nation to develop enough strength to withstand the incessant wranglings of the great powers of Europe. Yet he still seems to pine for that arcadian Jeffersonian utopia, led by a yeoman alliance of northern artisans and frontier farmers.
This soft spot leads Ferling to place his thumb on the scale of history, reflexively presenting the conventional picture of Jeffersonian Republicans as egalitarian progressives and Hamiltonian Federalists as, at best, elitist reactionaries. On the one hand, he goes rather lightly on Jefferson, avoiding his well-known personal foibles altogether and writing off much of Jefferson’s acknowledged political duplicity as prescience regarding the future direction of American party politics, a direction he did much to shape. The rough and tumble of party loyalties notwithstanding, how many Secretaries of State have funded an opposition newspaper and fed it tidbits of useful information as Jefferson did with Philip Freneau’s National Gazette? And then denied his conduct boldfaced when confronted by Washington? Or for that matter, maintained a private foreign policy at odds with that of the administration, as Jefferson did in his back channel contacts with the French?
On the other hand, Hamilton and his followers are given no quarter. Described as Anglomanic cryptomonarchists, they were “committed to rigidly maintaining the traditional hierarchical society, and to wishfully dreaming of every American ‘learning his proper place in society and keeping to it.’” (The double split infinitive is all that needs be said about the author’s stylistic propensities.) It must be admitted that John Adams’s suggestion that the president be addressed as “His High Mightiness” betrays one of the great political tin ears of all time, a lack of judgment that eventually played itself out in the disastrous Alien and Sedition Acts. Like Adams and Hamilton, many of the Federalists were self-made men, coming from families of the middling sort who had emerged in the social vacuum that followed the Revolution. But Ferling sees no virtue in this demonstration of upward mobility. Rather, he asserts, “more than a whiff of hypocrisy” characterized their attachment to the stability that they hoped would arise from a government of “the wise, the good, and the well-to-do.” From Ferling’s perspective, they were simply traitors to their class.
Who were these greedy elitists who supposedly did their best to hijack the revolution and who certainly managed to get some of the most enduring bad press in American history for their cause and beliefs? As personalities, Ferling hardly does them justice. Fisher Ames—a leader of the Hamiltonian party and Boston’s representative in the first four Congresses—is archly described as spending the revolutionary war “luxuriating in a life of self-indulgence until at age twenty-one he undertook law studies.” What Ferling neglects to say is that it was hardly a luxurious life; Ames’s mother ran a tavern in Dedham where the family lived; his father had been an almanac maker and he was supported through Harvard by his cranky doctor brother—who later became a Jeffersonian. Although no egalitarian, Ames once admonished his son for making light of the local Baptists: “Be careful how you show scorn and contempt for these poor people, and indeed for anybody as long as you live. In the course of our lives we can hardly avoid making too many enemies, and contempt is bitterly remembered when real injuries are forgotten.” Similarly, Ames distanced himself from the opposition to building a theater in Boston, “Whether the stage is a friend or foe to taste and morals is possibly not capable of very full proof; nor does it seem to me necessary to decide the point… . For as people earn their own money, it seems reasonable that they should spend it.”
Theodore Sedgwick, another self-made lawyer who hailed from the Berkshires and represented Massachusetts in both House and Senate, fares even worse in Ferling’s account. He is depicted at length as having more sympathy for the Tories whose land was confiscated by the Commonwealth government during the war than for his western neighbors whose overtaxation led to Shays’s Rebellion. Yet Sedgwick’s attachment to the hierarchical nature of society had certain interesting limits; as a lawyer in 1781, he represented pro bono a slave named Elizabeth Freeman, better known as Mumbet, in her suit for freedom against her abusive master, one Colonel Ashley. Basing his argument on the newly adopted Massachusetts constitution, which guaranteed equal rights to all, Sedgwick convinced a Great Barrington jury to set Mumbet free and to order her master to pay thirty shillings and costs. It was Mumbet—now the Sedgwick family’s paid housekeeper—who famously saved the Sedgwick house from foraging Shaysite rebels by hiding the family silver under her bed.
So, there is more to this elitism than meets the eye. Ferling is right that, as a group, the conservatives were skeptical of broad popular participation in government—a not unattractive position in light of the recent electoral silly season in California. Instead, they associated what they called “democracy”—as opposed to “republicanism,” to which they devoted their lives in public service, a distinction that eludes Ferling—with mob rule and believed their fears vindicated by the eventual excesses of the French Revolution. Lacking any models more recent than Periclean Athens or the Swiss cantons to go on, they were obsessed with controlling the insatiable human desire for power and believed that unfettered popular rule would inevitably pave the way for the insinuating flattery of a demagogue and a descent into the arbitrary power of despotism. After more than two hundred years of stable republican government, it is easy to belittle their fears; at the time, the Terror and the Bonapartist coup bore them out only too well.
But if they had fears, they also had a positive vision, one which accounted for talent as well as for order. Recognizing the natural inequalities of men, Theophilus Parsons explained, “In the political ship, there must be common seamen as well as pilots; and a mutiny of the crew may as effectually destroy her as a division among the officers.” Society was an organism, a “moral whole,” and it was the obligation of those who were among the wise, the good, and the wealthy to govern in the “interest of the whole.” What, then, of their much scorned elevation of property rights over human rights? It is true that Ames summed up their view neatly when he opined that, “The essence, and almost the quintessence, of a good government is, to protect property and its rights.” Yet, even the great Hamilton recognized that, in the unlikely event, certain property rights proved “contrary to the social order and to the permanent welfare of society,” they ought to be abolished—with compensation, if possible. But, if compensation were not possible, that “ought not to be an obstacle to a clearly essential reform.”
The problem is that most Americans of the founding generation did not see the same dichotomy between rights and property that modern Progressives do. As the historian Edmund Morgan observed, “For eighteenth century Americans, property and liberty were one and inseparable, because property was the only foundation yet conceived for security of life and liberty: without security for his property, it was thought, no man could live or be free except at the mercy of another.” Their revolutionary rallying cry was “Liberty and Property” not “Liberty and Democracy.” The purpose of a strong central government was to safeguard the very interests that kept its powers ultimately in check.
Of course, not all forms of property were equal to the Federalists. Most of them, like Sedgwick and John Jay, not to mention Franklin and Hamilton, were early opponents of slavery. In fact, the issue of slavery provides a good window onto Ferling’s oversimplified vision of both parties, and, in particular, his romantic idealization of Republicanism. Despite their “radical dreams,” both Jefferson and Madison were slaveholders and, in many of their policies, apologists for the peculiar institution and the southern aristocracy that depended upon it. Astonishingly, Ferling’s treatment of the role of slavery in the formation of the constitution takes less than three pages, because, he suggests, slavery was not an important issue to the Framers. Yet it certainly played a crucial role in the political transition from Federalism to Republicanism, irretrievably tainting the first Jefferson administration in the eyes of much of New England. Even with all the blunders of the Adams administration, Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800 only because of the extra representation given the south in the electoral college through the constitutional provision that treated slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportionment. Without the three-fifths clause, Adams would have squeaked by with an electoral college vote of sixty-three to sixty-one and gone on to a second term.
Speaking of elections, Ferling frequently remarks that blacks, women, and men who could not meet the property requirement were all disenfranchised during the early years of the republic, implicitly blaming the forces of hierarchy and property. Yet recent studies have shown that women, although legally disenfranchised, were far more welcome among Federalists than among Republicans. And as for free blacks, the picture is even more confounding to the conventional wisdom. Pace Ferling, free black men were able to vote in a number of northern states during the early republic, including New York and Massachusetts. Their disenfranchisement came not at the hands of Federalists, but through the workings of Republicans who discovered that blacks overwhelmingly voted Federalist out of distaste for the pro-slavery policies of Jefferson. And in this, they were not wrong. For, in a final anecdote, while egalitarian Jefferson’s slaves were sold at his death to clear the debts of his bankrupt estate, that canny aristocratic land speculator George Washington never allowed slave labor to appear at a public function of the United States during his presidency; by his will, Washington freed all his slaves upon the death of his wife, Martha. Recognizing an incentive when she saw one, Martha freed them immediately.
If, as Voltaire once said, history is a pack of tricks that the present plays on the past, then those first American conservatives have been playing against a stacked deck for a very long time. Taking a hard look at the facts, it may be about time to rethink that hand.
