Father Knows Best (Page 3)

The question of popular acquiescence in the Founders' achievement is, in some respects, the most baffling part of Wood's book. Although Wood keeps reassuring us that ordinary Americans will eventually wrest the Republic from the Revolutionary elite, there are few of these poorer sorts to balance the Revolutionary Characters featured in every chapter. Andrew Jackson, he rightly observes, was a very different product of the political process than Thomas Jefferson. But the contrast between the two men--between an era of elites and an age of democracy--is presented by Wood as another case of Great Men talking to other Great Men in the Founding period. There was a good deal of grassroots democracy in the 1780s and '90s, but local politicians and their engaged constituents struggle to make it past the red rope that Founderphiles like Wood have thrown around the Revolutionary generation. Ordinary Americans demanded a say in the political process before the Constitution was drafted; they mobilized societies, newspapers and candidates to take back control from the Federalists when, as many of them feared, the "miracle at Philadelphia" produced a government that was unresponsive to their concerns. Jefferson and Madison certainly encouraged this process from the federal capital of Philadelphia and from their country seats at Monticello and Montpelier, but the demand for popular participation in government and decision-making arose from below. Wood's notion--that the Founders used their superior vision and integrity to birth a hurly-burly politics that was vulgar but democratic--seems as backward as it is quaint.

Given the circumstances of the Constitutional Convention, in which fifty-five delegates were hastily assembled in Philadelphia to draft a completely new form of government without any public knowledge of what they were doing, we can reasonably argue that a Revolutionary elite seized control of America's destiny in 1787 and set the nation on a different course from the one its people would have liked. (The state conventions that narrowly ratified the Constitution in the following months were an unreliable guide to the feelings of most voters.) Can we also say that the participation of succeeding generations in that political system confirms the prescience and superior wisdom of the Revolutionary elite? If an uncouth soldier like Andrew Jackson could be elected to the White House in 1828, but would then willingly follow George Washington's example by retiring in 1837, does this prove that the Founders passed down a political system that made the United States safe for democracy?

I don't mean to be glib about this question, not least because the early American Republic did a better job of providing liberty and opportunity to white men than virtually any other government on the planet. But in answering it, we should consider the experience of those Americans who were excluded from political participation. The assumption of most books about the Founders is that they created a system that naturally expanded to encompass everyone. If you're a recent immigrant from Laos or Guatemala who has become an American citizen, the liberties and prerogatives enshrined in the Constitution belong to you in the same way that they belong to those Americans who can trace their families back to the Mayflower. You can't run for President--unless Orrin Hatch manages to change the rules for Arnold--but otherwise you're thoroughly equal under the law. This thinking about inclusion and equality isn't a modern invention: Go back to 1784, when Jefferson considered what to do with the boundless territory that covered the present-day Midwest, and you'll see an admirable desire to extend equal citizenship into these new areas. Jefferson believed that a settler who took up residence in Indiana or Wisconsin should, as quickly as possible, receive the same rights as a resident of Massachusetts or Virginia. British policy-makers had looked into the American West and imagined an empire of subjects and second-class citizens; Jefferson and the Founders, by contrast, envisaged an empire of liberty.

But this liberty came to depend on the denial of freedom to Native Americans, just as the liberties claimed by white Southerners before and after the Civil War were grounded in the subjugation of African-Americans. Wood touches on nonwhite people only briefly, insisting that the Founders would have liked to abolish slavery and to treat the Indians with respect. But one thing that the Revolutionary elite agreed upon was that the rights of white people should be privileged over those of nonwhites, from the formation of Indian policy in the old Northwest Territory to the protection of slavery in the Constitution. While it's true that many of the Founding generation hoped that slavery would eventually disappear, and that Jefferson paid lip service to the idea of assimilating Native Americans as full citizens, none of the Founders could muster the conviction and the consistency to promote a Republic of racial inclusion. As historian Anthony Wallace has shown, Jefferson gradually undermined the basis for Indian acculturation and channeled his enthusiasm into cultural nostalgia rather than the welfare of Indian nations. Madison, meanwhile, spent his last years as president of the American Colonization Society, a private organization that was committed to removing black Americans to the white-run colony of Liberia. Gordon Wood would probably say that the Virginian titans had simply lived too long, but the racial dilemmas that clouded their later years were the product of a system they had created.

More significant for Wood's bigger argument about a democratic legacy, racial exclusion played a critical role in securing popular support for the Constitution and federal power. For the white settlers of Ohio and Kentucky, the most appealing thing about a national government was its willingness to expedite Indian removal, either by providing the federal troops who would settle local disputes between settlers and Indians or by ensnaring Native leaders in traps of debt and commercial dependency, which facilitated the seizure of Indian land. The Federalists were already doing this in the 1790s, having eschewed the role of impartial umpire (with which the British briefly flirted). The Republican Party perfected this idea of the federal government as the guarantor of white expansion, under the uninterrupted leadership of Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. When Andrew Jackson won the White House in 1828, it was his reputation as an Indian killer that endeared him to many ordinary Americans. Indian killers also featured on the winning tickets in 1836 and 1840, bolstering the appeal of career politicians from New York (Martin Van Buren) and Virginia (John Tyler), respectively. Soon after his inauguration, Jackson rewarded his supporters by pursuing the most aggressive campaign of racial removal in American history, an effort all the more shocking since it targeted Cherokees, Creeks and other Indians in the Southeastern states who had made the most strenuous efforts to adopt white "civilization."

Democracy in the early Republic was a turbulent mix of popular participation and racial exclusion. The Constitution encouraged both, and we distort the achievements and limitations of the Founders by focusing on one aspect at the expense of the other. Unless we're willing to consider what Thomas Jefferson thought about Native Americans, or what Alexander Hamilton thought about immigration, or what James Madison thought about black people, we shouldn't spend our time trying to determine what the Founders would make of affirmative action or the war in Iraq. Alternatively, we could abandon the idea of a Revolutionary elite and create a new history of the Founding period in which the array of Americans who supported independence from Britain--which included blacks, women and unlettered white people, as well as Wood's aristocratic leadership--are recognized but not homogenized. Many historians are already at work on this project, though they're competing with Founderphiles who have transfixed the media and the publishing industry. Perhaps this revolution in the writing and teaching of American history will also come from the bottom up.

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