The Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans were certainly neither democrats nor liberals. John Winthrop declared that democracy was “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” The best part of the people he considered always the least, and of the best part the wiser again always the lesser. John Cotton was equally blunt: “Democracy, I do not conceyve that God did ever ordeyne as a fitt government either for the church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for the monarchy and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approved and directed in scripture.”
The Dutch establishment in New Amsterdam (New York) had no democratic character either. The Constitution of Pennsylvania (William Penn’s Concessions) had a somewhat democratic character, but freemen and proprietors alone could vote. On the other hand, only the Constitution of Pennsylvania could be called liberal, and it remained so. (Religious tolerance in Maryland, shaken in 1692, came to an end in 1715 when Catholics were disenfranchised.) Democracy certainly had no appeal south of the Potomac, and after Independence was achieved by the Thirteen Colonies there was only one state which had an egalitarian franchise—Vermont, a state admitted to the Union only in 1791.
And yet it is undoubtedly the American War of Independence (which was not a revolution!) that provided the main psychological momentum for the French Revolution. Of course there were also other intellectual and political currents contributing to the French Revolution. First of all, there was the “example” of England, frequently and tirelessly cited by Voltaire, who owed so much to this northern neighbor of France. Then there was the example of Switzerland, which fitted in so well with the romantic temper of the time: the beautiful, rustic, well-regulated, republican, progressive community on the doorstep of France. There were the Encyclopedists. There was Rousseau (from Geneva!), and last but not least, the Marquis de Sade, the Grandfather of modern democracy.
Yet we must remember that the picture of England, as seen and understood by Voltaire, and the sentimental portrait of Switzerland, had very little to do with the reality of these two countries. The Swiss Federation became a democracy only thanks to her Constitution of 1878, and it can be argued that certain Swiss cantons remained oligarchic-aristocratic units until the dawn of this century. No wonder, therefore, the third Image d’Epinal, the United States, is the most fascinating temptation of them all, because, due to its geographical remoteness, it is even more of a lure to the revolutionists than France’s immediate neighbors. The interpreting of a foreign country, a foreign culture and civilization, and, above all, of a foreign political movement, is always full of pitfalls.
In other words, the filiation between the American War of Independence and the French Revolution exists in a technical sense, but as far as ideas and content are concerned, we are faced with a tremendous and catastrophic misunderstanding.
The United States, it must be remembered, owes its political structure and its Constitution to the fact that it was the primary wish of the Thirteen Colonies to escape the tutelage and the domination of “London,” of two institutions in a remote city: Parliament and the Crown. At the time there was probably no practical possibility for a genuine representation in the “Mother of Parliaments.” The ruler (who happened to be intermittently insane) had obviously little sympathy for the just grievances of his subjects beyond the seas. As a matter of fact, the people of Britain as a whole, with the exception of certain radical Whigs and a few Irish (Burke among them), neither understood the Americans nor particularly cared for them. In their quarrel with the Colonies the British failed in public relations and did little to present their certainly not exaggerated financial claims in the light of reason and equity. The situation became really critical when the cry “No taxation without representation!” was raised. Both demands were probably just: the British desire to recover some of the expenses for the war which led to the annexation of Canada, and the insistence of the Americans on being full citizens of the realm. These conflicting wishes almost but not quite inevitably had to lead to secession. Yet, looking at the issue more closely, one discovers other factors as well. Naturally, one can argue that if an area wants to secede from another which happens to have monarchical rule and there is no local family to claim a not yet existent throne, the establishment of a republican government is the only solution.1 This seemingly stands to reason, but the history of the last 150 years teaches us that it is by no means necessarily the case. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the republican-democratic forms of government were generally considered to be so intrinsically inferior—the murder of Socrates and the chaotic end of the Roman Republic stood before the eyes of the classically educated Europeans as vividly as the horrors of the French Revolution and the sanguinary anarchy of Latin America!—that secessions ended in monarchical instaurations. When the Belgians broke away from the Dutch they called in a Lutheran prince of the Saxe-Coburg family (and this in spite of the fact that secession had been largely motivated by denominational animosities). This new king, Leopold I, played an important part in European politics. (All of which shows that the Christian monarchy is an international, interracial, “diversitarian” institution, not a national institution, as the republic is by its very nature.2 When the Norwegians terminated their “personal union” with Sweden in 1905, they called in the Danish Prince Charles who as Haakon VII ruled the country until 1957. Throwing off the Turkish yoke in the nineteenth century the Balkan countries in two cases established local dynasties (the Petrović-Njegoš in Montenegro and the Karagjorgjević in Serbia), but the Greeks, Bulgars, and Rumanians sent for foreign princes. The Rumanians tried it with a native at first but then imported the Catholic Hohenzollerns. As we said before, the dynasties of Serbia and Montenegro were the only sovereign native dynasties in Europe in 1910.3
In other words, the establishment of an American republic (in fact, though not in name) was not inevitable. As late as 1787 Nathan Gorham, President of the Congress under the old Constitution, and Baron von Steuben “conspired” to persuade Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of Frederick II (the “Great”) to come to the United States to assume the office of “hereditary stadholder.” It is obvious that the Dutch Republic (officially transformed into a kingdom in 1815) served as a pattern. The stadhouders belonging to the House of Oranje-Nassau served in a hereditary capacity and had the title of “prince” . . . a true regimen mixtum. Prince Henry, however, declined: He probably feared that such an American “adventure” might prove to be abortive.4 When about forty years later General San Martín met Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil, the former beseeched El Libertador to find a European prince willing to become the ruler of Spanish America, but Bolivar flatly refused, San Martín went into exile with a broken heart. The Latin American tragedy that began then has not yet ended.5 Monarchical solutions after successful secession have not been rare or were, at least, attempted. The New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury wrote on April 23, 1770: “God forbid that we should ever be so miserable as to sink into a Republic.”6
One of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the most gifted of them all, regretted that the United States could not become a monarchy. Van Buren saw in Hamilton a monarchist,7 certainly a conviction well grounded in facts8 in view of Hamilton’s speeches at the Federal Convention in 1787 and 1788 in New York. And Francis Lieber very rightly pointed out that the Declaration of Independence is not really an antimonarchical document.9 The sentence, “A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people” merely condemns George III but, at the same time, voices great respect for the royal office. The average American today would be surprised to hear the term “ruler of a free people” in which he sees a contradictio in adjecto. But in formulations like these we perceive a few aspects of Jefferson’s highly contradictory character and mind. He does stand near the mainstream of American leftist thought and deserved Hamilton’s severe strictures.10 But then he was also the man who, in a letter to Mann Page, spoke about the “swinish multitudes.”11 And Gouverneur Morris, on the extreme right, wrote to Nathanael Green in 1781, “I will go farther, I have no hope that our Union can subsist except in the form of an absolute monarchy.”12
So far, so good. Yet we would delude ourselves if we were to assume that there existed no strong antimonarchical or even leftist sentiment in the Thirteen Colonies. Earlier we mentioned religious and political traditions in the colonies which clearly stem from British independentism. The civil war in Britain and the Jacobite-Hanoverian antagonism also left their imprint on North America. And so did the political crystallization of British parliamentary life with its two factions: the Tories and the Whigs. The term Whig had originally a Scottish and Presbyterian connotation with republican undertones and also implied toleration of the Dissenters. The word Tory was Irish and denoted loyalty to the Stuarts as well as “Popish” inclinations. These were originally nicknames and they underwent a certain evolution. The Whigs, moreover, were related to the Roundheads and the Tories to the Cavaliers.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, it was evident that the Tories were the party of royal privileges, of the small nobility with aulic leanings, of the clergy of the Established Church; while the Whigs stood for the big, independent-minded, rich, landed nobility. Thus the Whigs, not the Tories, represented the aristocratic spirit. The French Revolution has somewhat obscured the real state of affairs by creating a curious alliance between the Crown and the nobility, who were opponents and competitors throughout most of European history. It is evident that a genuine aristocracy is never in favor of an absolute or an excessively strong monarchy unless the monarch, as a primus inter pares, is merely the executor of the will of the nobility. Und der König àbsolut, wenn er unsren Willen tut!” (The king may be absolute as long as he does our will!) Aristocrats are often downright republican in spirit: In a monarchy the nobility can only play second fiddle to the king’s first, while republics often have been exclusively aristocratic in character. This is especially true of ancient Venice and Genoa as well as of a number of Swiss city-cantons. In this connection remember that monarchs, by their power to nobilitate, are (or rather were) constantly able to foster the process of social mobility and, in fact, were acting against aristocratic exclusiveness. The aristocratic republics (sometimes dominated by a patriciate without titles and even more exclusive than many a titled aristocracy!) were therefore often highly static and conservative states. Old Geneva was, needless to say, a far more hidebound city than, let us say, Munich, Berlin, or even St. Petersburg.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century we witness in Britain the split between the New Whigs and the Old Whigs, an evolution that did not take place in North America. It is obvious that in the Western Hemisphere the Whigs were the ones who were critical of the Crown and, therefore, of the tie with Britain. The Tories were again the “Loyalists” as they were in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ireland. The Whigs are those frequently inspired by certain republican notions: they felt that they were “just as good as the King” and they were the ones who made the War of Independence against Britain, against the Tories . . . against the Tories abroad and at home.
We owe it to the pen of Kenneth Roberts, who not only was a good novelist but also a first-rate amateur historian, that we have in his Oliver Wiswell a very “live” picture of the civil war aspect of the American War of Independence—a civil war between Whigs and Tories. This struggle as was to be expected, also had its analogies and repercussions in England where Whigs, quite unpatriotically, could not suppress a feeling of elation over the victory of their political coreligionists in America.
And since the Whig was the true aristocrat,13 the American War of Independence, which did not have the character of a real revolution, found a friendly if not enthusiastic echo among Europe’s noblemen. They soon flocked to North America as volunteers, among them primarily the French who had never forgotten the years of the Fronde and who were now imbued with liberal ideas. And, indeed, if one visits the capital of the United States one finds in the center of Jackson Square, right in front of the White House, the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory,” the first President of the United States who dared to call himself a democrat. In the four corners of the square, however, are four statues dedicated to European noblemen who had come to fight in America for freedom, but certainly not for democracy: Tadeusz Kośćiuszko, von Steuben, the Comte de Rochambeau, and the Marquis de Lafayette. The Polish nobleman Kazimierz Pulaski, the only General of the Union killed in action, has his monument in Savannah, Georgia, but the most valiant and characteristic of them all, Charles-Armand Tuffin, Marquis de la Rouërie, to whom we shall refer later, has not been commemorated in any way. Jean de Kalb (“Baron de Kalb”) has been honored in various parts of America, but his nobility is of rather spurious origin.14
Thus the foundations of the American republic are aristocratic and whiggish. As we have pointed out, this does not stand in contradiction to an antimonarchic sentiment, however. The antimonarchical tradition of the United States, moreover, has long roots. It has probably increased rather than decreased over the years and has affected American foreign policy in the most fatal way—fatal to those on the receiving end, fatal also for American self-interest. Antimonarchism, as we shall see, has cost untold billions of dollars and, what is far more depressing, thousands upon thousands of American lives, victims of a piece of American folklore activated and accentuated by leftist prejudices and propaganda.
Whiggery, nevertheless, has not been the only source of the republican sentiment in the Thirteen Colonies prior to 1776. We find it as a latent feeling nourished by religions other than the Church of England—especially among Congregationalists, Presbyterians, perhaps even the Dutch Reformed, the Quakers, the Unitarians. The whole tradition of the Independents (connected with the Cromwellian Commonwealth) was not only violently anti-Catholic (and moderately anti-Anglican) but antihierarchical and therefore also antimonarchical. John C. Miller has emphasized the effectiveness of this interconnected anti-Catholic-antimonarchical animosity which was particularly strong in New England in the years preceding the War of Independence,15 and even more interesting material can be culled from Ray Allen Billington’s The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860. Billington quotes Daniel Barber’s History of My Own Time on the anti-Catholic sentiment: “This feeling remained so strong through the early part of the Revolution that the President of Princetown University [John Witherspoon] believed the common hatred of Popery caused by the Quebec Act the only thing that cemented the divergent religious groups in the colonies together sufficiently to allow them to make war, an opinion which was shared by British observers.”16 As a matter of fact, the Quebec Act, granting religious tolerance to the French Canadians, by a curious twist of reasoning, was considered a major menace to freedom. As a result the following ditty was sung during the Revolution:
If Gallic Papists have the right
To worship their own way,
Then farewell to the liberties
Of poor Americay.
The suspicion arose that George III (who had so stoutly resisted the emancipation of Catholics) had secretly become a Catholic: kings, after all, must admire popes, and popes will support kings. John Trumbull in his satirical poem McFingal accused the King in these terms:
Struck bargains with the Romish churches
Infallibility to purchase.
Set wide for popery the door,
Made friends with Babel’s scarlet whore.
These accusations, though unfounded, were psychologically not baseless since the Catholic tradition is one of mixed government with a monarchical head. Yet even today, in spite of the fact that the majority of “Protestant” nations are at least symbolically ruled by monarchs, the Catholic-monarchic equation continues to survive magically in the United States. It is an argument used by professional anti-Catholics, very much to the annoyance of certain American Catholics who, wanting to be taken for 200 percent Americans,17 are determined to prove that every good Catholic ought to be a democratic republican.18 Rarely do they realize that these desperate efforts earn them little intellectual respect from intelligent people. Those engaged in “political theology” almost always try to prove too much.19
While we have to bear in mind that there existed in the Thirteen Colonies an antimonarchical sentiment and occasionally feelings which even might be styled egalitarian, we have to see in the young American Republic a polity which was deeply whiggish or, in other words, aristocratic in character. One should never forget the term “democratic” appears neither in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution, and that even the noun “republic” can be found in neither of these two documents. The Constitution merely insists that the member states of the Union should have a “republican” form of government. And actually, if we analyze the Constitution of the United States, we find that, in its original form, it can be considered a serious attempt to establish a mixed government with democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical elements, a government of checks and balances. If these three elements would derive their power from different sources, the attempt could be called successful. As it was, the Constitution provided for a republic (polity) rather than for a regimen mixtum, but ever since its inception the American Republic has been exposed constitutionally to democratizing influences, the dependence of the electors upon the voters, the direct election of senators, even the two-term amendment, the impending direct election of the President, etc. The older republican (and more strongly democratic) constitutions do not provide for a president—neither for a head of state nor for a head of the government. The Swiss “President,” for instance, is merely the chairman of the council of cabinet ministers, (the seven Federal Councillors) elected by both Houses of Parliament. He is elected for one year only. His portrait is not found in public buildings, but that of the commanding colonel’s. (Only in times of mobilization does Switzerland have a general).
The Founding Fathers, as educated men of their period, rejected democracy outright and this even more intensely when totalitarian repression became the dominating feature of the French Revolution. (Modern Americans also forget too easily that the French Revolution, and later the Napoleonic regime, murdered or exiled the three godfathers of the American republic—the kings of France and Spain and the Stadhouder of the Netherlands.20 George Washington, the Master of Mount Vernon, was anything but a democrat.21 And John Adams, the second President of the United States, though he formulated democracy rather strictly, had nothing but hatred and contempt for this form of government. Only remotely related to Samuel Adams of Boston who had been a bit of a rabble rouser if not an early leftist, John Adams was a real patrician with a strongly aristocratic outlook. The near mystical fascination exercized by royal blood he saw founded on the general attention it drew. “Noble blood,” he wrote in his Discourses on Davila which created an enormous outcry in the budding American left, “whether the nobility be hereditary or elective, and indeed, more in republican governments than in monarchies, least of all in despotisms, is held in estimation for the same reason.22 (Italics mine.) As a matter of fact, he considered a democratic conviction with egalitarian undertones a sign of immaturity. Jefferson tells us about a conversation between Dr. Ewen and John Adams during which the doctor informed the President that he had a younger son who was a “democrat” and an older one who was an “aristocrat.” “Well,” said the President, “a boy of fifteen who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at twenty.”23 Yet when John Adams came to judge democracy as such, his criticism became much stronger.
In a letter to John Taylor, Adams insisted that democracy would inevitably evolve into oligarchy and oligarchy into despotism248a notion he obviously shared with Plato and Aristotle. He flatly equated democracy with ignorance and maintained that “the moment you give knowledge to a democrat, you make him an aristocrat.”25 In his A Defence of the Constitution of the Government of the United States he said, “Democracy, simple democracy, never had a patron among men of letters. The people have almost always expected to be served gratis, and to be paid for the honor of serving them, and their applause and adoration are bestowed too often on artifice and tricks, on hypocrisy and superstition, on flattery, bribes and largesses.”
In the same work he wrote that “we may appeal to every page of history . . . for proofs irrefragable that the people, when they have been unchecked have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any king or senate possessed by an uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally and without any one exception usurped over the rights of the minority.” And he added in another passage, “All projects of government formed upon a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, virtue, and firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions.” This tallies with his remark, “The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all: they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body. Individuals have conquered themselves: nations and large bodies never.” Adams fired his heaviest artillery at democracy in the same work when he advanced twelve points, of which we quote only a few:
1. No democracy ever did or ever can exist. . . .26
4. That no love of equality, at least since Adam’s fall, ever existed.
5. That no love of frugality ever existed as a passion, but always as a virtue.
6. That therefore the democracy of Montesquieu . . . [is] all mere fragments of the brain, a delusive imagination.
7. That his passion of love for democracy would be in the members of the majority only a love of the majority. . . .
11. That in reality, the word democracy signifies nothing more nor less than a nation or people without any government at all. . . .
And in a letter to Jefferson he stated that “Democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all, and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand for a short time, it will be revengeful, bloody and cruel.”27 John Adams saw clearly that private property was basically endangered by democracy which would almost always be in the hands of the lower and far more numerous part of the social pyramid. In his letter to John Taylor he added, “If you give more than a share in the sovereignty to the democrats, that is, if you give them the command or the preponderance in the sovereignty, that is, the legislature, they will vote all property out of the hands of you aristocrats, and it will let you escape with your lives, it will be more humanity, consideration and generosity than any triumphant democracy ever displayed since the creation.”28
Madison, fourth President of the United States, had the same fears concerning democracy, which is evident in his letter to Jared Sparks where he says that laws must be “capable of protecting the rights of property against the spirit of democracy.”29 Of course, Madison distinguished between pure democracy and the spirit of democracy. Pure democracy to him was direct democracy, as can be gleaned from his definitions in the Federalist, No. 10 and No. 14. Yet E. M. Burns is right when he says that “instead of defending the absolute sovereignty of the majority, Madison detested it so strongly that he sought in almost every conceivable way to prevent its exercise.”30 Nor was Madison an egalitarian. In a letter to Edmund Randolph he admitted that “there are subjects to which the capacity of the bulk of mankind are unequal and on which they must and will be governed by those with whom they happen to have acquaintance and confidence.”31 This is a far cry from the views of Andrew Jackson who said in his first annual message that “the duties of all public offices are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.”32
Until the end of the nineteenth century an American Republican (with a capital “R”) would never have termed his country a “Democracy” but rather a “representative republic.”33 Madison, however, in his basic political views seems to have been more influenced by Jefferson than by Hamilton. Yet if we take into account the way in which Madison refers to Hamilton’s monarchical views and the latter’s reservation concerning the republic during the Philadelphia Convention, we might suspect that Madison had certain sympathies for them.34
Frequently one hears Americans comparing “Jeffersonian democracy” with “Jacksonian democracy.” But the question remains as to whether the third President of the United States was actually a convinced democrat. Dr. Mortimer Adler is more right than wrong when he says that “the dawn of American democracy really begins with Jackson.”35 And, perusing carefully the Washington and Ford editions of Jefferson’s Works, one finds only one positive allusion to the terms “democrat” and “democracy.”36 Actually, in a letter written to Lafayette, Jefferson insisted that the Constitution of 1791 would work out in France, provided it was kept within the framework of a constitutional monarchy.37 Still, Jefferson had an exaggerated notion of the qualities of the American people (only somewhat modified in his declining years) when he wrote that “if all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and prejudice . . . a thousand years would not place them on that high ground on which our people are now setting out.”38
But in order to understand Jefferson more fully—by no means an easy task—we have to remember that he was an agrarian romantic who believed in the high virtues and qualities of a free yeomanry. The language of one of his relatives, John Randolph of Roanoke (who told the Virginia Constitutional Convention, “I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.”) certainly was not Jefferson’s.39
“Those who labor in the earth,” Jefferson wrote, “are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people.”40 To Madison he wrote, “I think that our government will remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as they are chiefly agricultural, and this will be as long as there are vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another as in the large cities of Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”41 Since Jefferson figures in the folklore of the American left—in the 1930s and 1940s there was a Jefferson School run by Communists in New York—it is rather interesting to remember what the slave-owning master of Monticello thought about the urban working class. “The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body,” he wrote to John Jay in 1785.42 And then he confessed, “I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of the country are generally perverted.”43 In a letter to John Adams, speaking about the United States and using the same “reactionary” language, he insisted that “everyone by his property, or by his satisfactory situation is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public.”44
What then did he hope for? Who really should govern? In the same letter Jefferson proves himself a true timocrat: “The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts and governments of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed men for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best, which provides most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?”45
As we can see quite clearly, the Founding Fathers of the United States were not professed democrats, and the United States was not established as a “democracy.” Albert Jay Nock wrote: “One sometimes wonders how our Revolutionary forefathers would take it if they could hear some flatulent political thimblerigger charge them with having founded ‘the great and glorious democracy of the West.’ ”46 Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg once remarked that “the government of the United States is a representative republic and not a pure democracy. The difference is as profound today as it was when the foundations of the Constitution were set in the ages. . . . We are a representative republic. We are not a pure democracy. . . . Yet we are constantly trying to graft the latter on the former, and every effort we make in this direction, with but few exceptions, is a blow aimed at the heart of the Constitution.”47
So much about the alleged intrinsically leftist nature of nascent America.