Father Knows Best (Page 2)

What's wrong with this picture? Wood refers without any apparent irony to the "Revolutionary elite" who led the struggle against Britain, but the idea of a founding pantheon seems odd, for a couple of reasons. First, the Founders were remarkably disputatious. Although they supported the Patriot cause during the Revolution, they were soon at one another's throats. Not even Washington was immune. During the turbulent 1790s, Thomas Paine wrote an especially biting pamphlet attacking the Father of the Nation, and Jefferson and Madison whispered about Washington's senility and his deference to Hamilton from across the Cabinet table. Wood's portrayal of Aaron Burr as the runt of the litter is understandable. In spite of his distinguished lineage (his father and his grandfather were Princeton presidents), Burr created mayhem by trying to snatch the election of 1800 from Jefferson, his running mate; then he courted infamy in 1804 by killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. But Burr's flashy malfeasance should not obscure the fact that, after the British withdrawal in 1783, the other Founders were more often upbraiding one another than speaking with a single voice about the future of the nation.

We might also ask who qualifies as a Founder. In his introduction, Wood bestows Founding status upon some interesting characters: financier Robert Morris and Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, both of whom enjoyed prodigious careers and yet found themselves in debtors' prison in 1798. But these intriguing men all but disappear from the main chapters of the book, leaving the predictable gallery of Jefferson, Adams and the rest. If the definition of a Founder is a person who played a role in winning the American Revolution and establishing American independence, could we count Boston shoemaker George Hewes among their ranks? Hewes helped to pour the East India Company's precious tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773, and during the Revolution he served on an American privateer, a commercial vessel empowered by the Continental Congress to attack British ships. Or could we nominate Lemuel Haynes, a black minuteman who served in the Continental army during the early part of the war and then became a staunch Federalist in the 1790s? Or Mercy Otis Warren, who wrote Patriot propaganda during the war and later crafted one of the earliest histories of the Revolution to remind her fellow Americans of what they had achieved?

Hewes didn't leave much of a paper trail from the Revolutionary period, but Haynes and Warren did. Again, one wonders about Wood's criteria for admission into the Founding club, and about what made his Founders different from these other participants in the Revolution. Although Wood implies that the Revolutionary elite shared a vision of themselves and of America's future, we know that their arguments weren't cosmetic but fundamental to the nation's prospects. Hamilton admired the commercial transformation of Britain in the eighteenth century, and he marveled at Britain's extraordinary and apparently spontaneous ability to bully the rest of Europe. After 1783 he reasoned that the United States could follow the British example by adopting a strong federal government. Jefferson and Madison were wary of the influence of a new financial class over the highest departments of government; they envisaged a smaller federal bureaucracy and the expansion of agriculture into the Western Territory. Neither the Federalists--Hamilton's party--nor Jefferson's Republicans triumphed in this battle, and the hybrid commercial/agricultural nation that emerged from their tussle hardly proves the Goldilocks argument that America was just right in its nineteenth-century development. (The Civil War, or the serial tragedies of Indian removal, should be enough to spoil your porridge.) So why should we assume a common identity that bound together the various proponents of the United States after 1776, or downplay the Founders' divergent philosophies and heated arguments?

Wood sidesteps these problems by suggesting that the Founders were united by a benign elitism: They rose from relatively humble origins on the fringes of Britain's vast empire and made strenuous efforts to become "natural" aristocrats. Wood assures us that this process of self-fashioning was driven by disinterestedness and a sense of duty rather than by ambition. Jefferson may have known more about wine than anyone else in America, but he cultivated this knowledge because he believed that refined tastes were essential to public morality. Hamilton was eager to strengthen the executive, and he held some troubling views about America's military potential, but he also looked to the populace to return natural aristocrats to office at election time. Another shared experience that defined the Founders was their surrender of power in the nineteenth century. As the American people elected ordinary men to public office, showing they had little faith in the idea of a disinterested elite, the selfless aristocracy of the Revolutionary generation fell by the wayside. Madison and Jefferson lived long enough to see the rise of Andrew Jackson, the earthy Tennessean who claimed to embody, rather than to manage, the desires of ordinary Americans. The Founders had not envisaged this kind of politics, and survivors like Jefferson and Madison were appalled by Jackson's ascent in the early 1820s. But they'd built a government that allowed for a true democracy and that was brilliantly equipped to curb its excesses.

Again, this vision of a selfless, heroic elite makes less sense if we broaden our definition of who qualifies as a Founder. Consider Wood's discussion of how Madison came to support a strong federal government by 1787. According to Wood, Madison became disillusioned with state politicians and local power when he was forced (by term limits in the Confederation Congress) to spend four sessions in the Virginia legislature. Between 1784 and 1787, as the nation labored under the loose Articles of Confederation, which had been drafted during the Revolution, Madison witnessed firsthand the selfishness of ordinary politicians. Wood sees these state representatives through Madison's eyes: They were "clods" who "had no regard for public honor or honesty," and they passed bills that advanced their own interests rather than the greater good of the state or the nation. But when you examine this episode more carefully, you begin to realize that Madison was upset not by the personal selfishness of these representatives but by their commitment to their poorer constituents.

The Virginia Assembly, like many other state legislatures, spent the 1780s responding to the financial crisis that followed the Revolutionary War. The national government was broke; so were the states, which struggled to pay back the debts they'd incurred fighting the war. Ordinary Americans had initially financed this debt with war bonds, but the prolonged conflict and worsening financial climate had forced many poorer farmers and workers to sell their bonds at a fraction of the original value. By the 1780s the Revolutionary debt had been largely transferred out of the hands of ordinary people and into the portfolios of wealthy investors; the states were therefore obliged to pay interest on these debts to speculators, and to tax ordinary people to pay for this. The landscape of state politics in the 1780s was dominated by populist economics: Representatives were encouraged by their constituents (often in person) to pass debt relief, to curb the tax burden and to increase the supply of credit and paper money. State representatives were also pressured by ordinary people to cancel the Revolutionary debt, since it was now held not by the original Patriots who'd funded it but by an opportunistic class of financiers and investors.

Wood seems to agree with Madison that these representatives were clods for complying with the requests of the voters. In a revealing passage, he upbraids populist legislators for fueling inflation and "victimizing creditor minorities." But it seems churlish to present these locally minded politicians as derelict or to suggest that their vision for America was less legitimate than that of the Revolutionary elite. Wood takes the longer view here. Madison and especially Hamilton believed that the American Republic would never succeed unless it was fortified against this excess of democracy. Although poorer Americans could lament that they'd sold their war bonds at such a loss and that their taxes were giving wealthy speculators an annual return of perhaps 30 percent on their investment, struggling farmers had not actually been compelled to part with the debt certificates. Nothing illegal had taken place. Madison grappled with the morality of all this in a way that Hamilton never did; when Hamilton proposed in 1790 that the federal government should assume all these state debts and guarantee huge profits to the speculators, Madison fretted about the appearance of unfairness that might easily turn voters against the new Constitution. But Wood is surely right to argue that both Madison and Hamilton wanted to build a United States from the top down, rather than the bottom up: They looked to wealthy individuals as the most important supporters (and sponsors) of the government and expected that the population at large would defer to their broader vision of federal power.

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