Fredy Perlman Archive
Written: 1961.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
On the American continent, on fresh ground unsoiled by the “fraud, deceit... malice” of Western Europe, independent farmers and left wing intellectuals dreamed of attempting a democratic experiment. They dreamed of a government in which every man, whether farmer, artisan or lawyer, would have a voice. It was to be a government where force or the threat of force would be replaced by rational discussion and decisions based on common consent. The decisions of the King’s Private Chamber were to be placed into the hands of the public who are affected by them. All men were to receive a thorough education which would familiarize them with the problems and projects of the world in which they live, of the past experience of mankind, of the laws of nature. They would be fully informed on all important social and political issues, for only thus could they participate intelligently in forming public policy, reaching decisions, interpreting criticism.
To gain their right to attempt the democratic experiment, the Americans dissolved their colonial relationship with the British.
We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They ... have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity....
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled ... do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.[20]
For the British, the function of colonies was to increase the privileges of England’s wealthiest men: “...not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure, nothing profiting, yea, much noying the weal public, leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all in pastures...”[21] and they establish colonies in all parts of the world to increase yet further their yearly revenues and profits. If as a result of this avaricious accumulation, the colonial subjects suffer misery and hardship, the wealthy Englishmen can hardly feel pity’, removed as they are from them by oceans.
In order to convince the British that they’d had enough of the oppression necessary to support a privileged class, the Americans fought a war with England, by means of passive resistance as well as by violence. The only goal the American revolutionaries had in common was to put an end to privilege and oppression. None fought to exchange foreign for domestic oppressors. No man risked his life to become once again a slave to someone else’s privilege. Most men took it for granted that there were none on the American continent w’ho would seek to reintroduce privilege misery. Had not Diderot said that such a man “should be locked up as an enemy of humanity and a dangerous lunatic!”[22] This was to be a society resting on “honesty, self- government, justice and knowledge.”[23]
Beyond the general aim of abolishing privilege and misery, the revolutionaries had little in common. Nor were they agreed on the precise nature of privilege or the cause of misery. However, none were so completely in the dark about the social effects of wealth and property’ as men of a later age were to become. Many had come to the new world because here was truly a “common treasury” to be shared by all the creatures who lived on it. Some, however, had come with British ideas of “ownership” and they claimed a right to collect debts and taxes from others. Shortly after the revolution, the antagonism between these two groups broke out in Shay’s rebellion—a rebellion which shook the security of the new land’s men of wealth and property, and brought into the open the conflict that was to divide into hostile camps “the good people of these colonies.” Neither conservatives nor radicals were in the dark about the source of the conflict, nor did anyone try to deny that there was a conflict. Half a century ago, the historian Charles Beard showed, in his excellent and highly documented studies,[24] that eighteenth century Americans were lucidly aware that the success of the democratic experiment depended on the type of economic structure developed on the American continent. That property was a source of faction as well as the origin of the division of classes was well known to James Madison. “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.”[25] And the conservative John Adams knew that wherever property exists, there will be a struggle between the rich and the poor, because “The gendemen are more intelligent and skillful, as well as generally richer and better connected, and therefore have more influence and power than an equal number of common people: there is a constant effort and energy in the minds of the former to increase the advantages they possess over the latter, and to augment their wealth and influence at their expense.”[26] Adams, in fact, interpreted Roman history in terms of a theory of class struggle. “In Roman history we see a constant struggle between the rich and the poor from Romulus to Cesar. The great division was not so much between patricians and plebians, as between debtor and creditor. Speculation and usury kept the state in perpetual broils. The patricians usurped the lands and tbe plebians demanded agrarian laws. The patricians lent money at exorbitant interest and the plebians were sometimes unable and always unwilling to pay it. These were the causes of dividing the people into two parties, as distinct and jealous, and almost as hostile to each other, as two nations.”[27] Nor did Adams have any doubt that such a division existed on the American continent. “We do possess one material which actually constitutes an aristocracy that governs the nation. That material is wealth.”[28]
John Adams, second president of the United States and successor of George Washington as head of the conservative Federalist Party, did not have the illusion that the rich govern in the best interests of the nation. “It is not true, in fact, that any people ever existed who loved the public better than themselves, their private friends, neighbors, etc...” What is more, since the rich “have most address and capacity, they gain more and more continually, until they become exorbitantly rich and the others miserably poor.”[29] The agrarian democrat lohn Taylor, outspoken opponent of Adams and his party, was painfully aware that the rich will govern in the interests of the rich. “If it is a moral truth, that mankind prefer themselves to others, then it is a moral certainty, that members, both of the government and of the corporation, will prefer the interest of the corporation to the interest of the nation.”[30] Taylor argued that a virtue that had not been supplied by religion in the feudal era could hardly be supplied by wealth. “If responsibility to God cannot cure priests of the vices which infect legislative parties of interest, what security lies in a responsibility to man? If the love of souls cannot awaken integrity, laid to sleep by this species of legislative patronage, will it be awakened by a love of wealth and power?”[31] If the rich are permitted to augment their wealth and influence constantly, then, according to Adams, “This effort produces resentments and jealousies, contempt, hatred, and fear between the one sort and the other.”[32] And according to Taylor, “Whatever destroys an unity of interest between a government and a nation, infallibly produces oppression and hatred.”[33] In sum, eighteenth century Americans of different political persuasions were not unaware of the observation Thomas More had made almost three centuries earlier, that “wheresoever possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may jusdy be governed and prosperously flourish.”[34]
By and large, American revolutionaries were quite lucidly aware, and generally agreed, that the success of the democratic experiment depended on the nature and purpose of the social and economic structure developed on the American continent. Where they differed was on the emphasis one gave to property and another to democracy. Hamilton, for example, feared democracy as if it were a plague, precisely because he was aware that democracy entailed the abolition of the privileged class of “the rich and well born.” Others, less committed to the old world’s aristocracies than Hamilton, but not overly enthusiastic about democracy, accepted the institutions of wealth and property, but wanted the government to be a neutral mediator between the classes, uncommitted to the minority of the rich as well as the majority of the poor. James Madison, for example, accepted private property and the consequent division into classes as a “necessity,” and urged a government that would “regulate” the different classes. “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.... interests grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modem legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”[35] The more conservative John Adams also accepted the “necessity” of classes and class parties, but he was just as aware as Madison about the need for government to mediate between the classes. “Two such parties ... always will exist, as they always have existed, in all nations, especially in such as have property, and most of all, in commercial countries. Each of these parties must be represented in the legislature, and the two must be checks on each other. But, without a mediator between them, they will oppose each other in all things and go to war till one subjugates the others.”[36] Adams, however, was no revolutionary, and no democrat. In spite of the fact that wealth and property represented the greatest threat to the well being of the nation, in spite of the fact that classes bred “resentments and jealousies, contempt, hatred, and fear,” Adams was not willing to discard the institutions of wealth, property, and privilege. “The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.” And Adams fearfully depicted some of die “catastrophes” which would accompany the abolition of private property. “The time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded and voted. What would be the consequence of this?”[37]
The agrarian democrat John Taylor carried the logic of Madison and Adams to its conclusions, and he attacked Adams for assuming that the shortcomings of other social systems must necessarily be transported to the United States. “Mr. Adams’s system promises nothing. It tells us that human nature is always the same: that the art of government can never change; that it is contracted into three simple principles; and that mankind must either suffer the evils of one of these simple principles; as at Athens, Venice, or Constantinople; or those same principles compounded, as at London, Rome or Lacedemon.... Such a computation is a specter, calculated “to arrest our efforts, and appall our hopes, in pursuit of political good. If it be correct, what motives of preference between forms of government remain? On one hand, Air. Adams calls our attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous patricians, mangled and bleeding victims of popular fury; on the other, he might have exhibited millions sacrificed to the pride, folly and ambition of monarchy and aristocracy; and, to complete the picture, he ought to have placed right before us, the effects of these three principles commixed, in the wars, rebellions, persecutions and oppressions of the English form, celebrated by Mr. Adams as the most perfect of the mixed class of governments. Is it possible to convince us, that we are compelled to elect one of these evils? ... But if the moral qualities of human nature are not always the same, but are different both in nations and individuals; and if government ought to be constructed in relation to these moral qualities, and not in relation to factitious orders; these authorities do not produce a conclusion so deplorable. The variety in the kinds and degrees of political misery, is alone conclusive evidence of distinct degrees of moral character, capable of unknown moral efforts.”[38] Taylor concluded, if the monopoly of privilege and power begets faction and misery, then the function of government must be to prevent such a monopoly. And since vested military, religious, or moneyed interests inevitably acquire a monopoly of wealth and power, because “[s]uch interests are incapable ... of including the majority of a nation, or of a general division among its members,” then such interests must be abolished, and the function of law must be the constant redistribution of land, which cannot be a “purely factitious” interest. “Land is not created by law; therefore it is under no apprehension of its death stroke from law. It does not subsist upon other interests; therefore it is not beset by an host of enemies, whose vengeance it is conscious of deserving. By the operation of laws adverse to its monopoly, it quickly adjusts itself to the interest of a majority of a nation; thenceforward it is incapable of the avarice and injustice of a factitious legal interest because no temptation to seduce it into either, exists. To this point of improvement, a landed interest will invariably be brought, by laws for dividing lands; nor can it be corrupted, except by laws which confine lands to a minority. Then it becomes in a degree a factitious legal monopoly, capable of being favored by law, and infected with a portion of that malignity, which constitutes the entire essence of a minor separate interest purely factitious.”[39]
Thus the “Fathers” of the American revolution were lucidly aware that the success, or failure, of the democratic experiment depended on how men lived and what men did. They were perfectly aware that democracy was incompatible with a social structure in which a monopoly of wealth, power, and privilege was lodged in one class of men. And their acceptance or rejection of democratic ideals cannot be understood except in that context. If wealth, power and influence were not equally distributed among all men, there could be no democratic institutions.
***
Once a democratic society is established, how does it remain democratic? It was this question that guided the search for “democratic institutions.” Such institutions are democratic only if they maintain equality; clearly an institution that can serve as well for the maintenance of privilege and oppression is not, in itself, a democratic institution. American democrats were concerned with finding institutions that would function on a vast scale not only to maintain, but also to advance, the democratic experiment once established. One such institution was the New England Town Meeting, where all citizens participated, discussed important issues, and reached public decisions. But the Town Meeting could only be practiced effectively on a small scale. For all the citizens of the United States to gather in one place and discuss all public questions would have been impractical. American democrats rejected this type of “village democracy,” perhaps without having explored its possibilities adequately. And if V democracy” is abandoned, “representatives” are apparently the only alternative. Whether or not a peaceful confederation of self- governing villages is possible has never been answered. It has never been tried on a significant scale. But be that as it may, in America the small governing villages were abandoned. “Representatives” were accepted as a substitute.
Yet whether “representatives” are, or can be, a democratic institution is still an open question. If a man truly “represents” the ideas and wishes of thousands of men, he thereby ceases to be an individual with ideas and wishes of his own; he becomes the embodiment of a Social Conscience, a General Will. This was Rousseau’s version of Representative Democracy. In Rousseau’s model, the Representative acts for thousands of men on the basis of their consent. But acquiescence often takes the appearance of consent, and in human society there are no impartial judges who can effectively distinguish between the two. Yet if a man is not the embodiment of the General Will, if he is merely one among thousands and has no special qualification except his desire to “represent” the rest, then what is his justification for “representing” thousands of men? Since he is not the embodiment of the wishes and ideals of other men, what is to keep him from using his position for the irresponsible fulfillment of purely personal desires? According to Jefferson, a representative can be made responsible if the people are educated and fully informed, if they exert control over and directly participate in the reaching of public decisions. “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.... The influence over government must be shared among all the people. If every individual ... participates of the ultimate authority, the government will be safe.”[40] However, if ignorance is maintained and information suppressed, the government will inevitably degenerate into oppressive tyranny. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information.”[41] Thus, there must be education that gives to all inhabitants an understanding of social problems and ideals, and there must be media of communication that are controlled by no interest and are responsible to inform, not defraud, the public. However, if “the weight of talents will follow leisure and wealth,”[42] if wealth acquires a monopoly of education as well as communication, then the public will be educated as well as informed by the very group whose interest it is to defraud them. “A government, a section of it, or a measure founded in an evil moral principle, such as fraud, ambition, avarice or superstition, must produce correspondent effects, and defeat the end of government.”[43]
Thus the eighteenth century democratic ideal may be divided into four indispensable parts, without which it cannot be realized. The first is that all men have equal wealth, power, and influence, and that this equality be maintained by some form of agrarian reform law. Then, to ensure equality, and to develop the talents and minds of citizens, there must be universal education, there must be untrammeled communication, and there must be participation by every individual in the important affairs of society. Without these four requirements, equality, education, communication, and participation, applied in the spirit in which they were conceived, there can be no democratic society.
***
One must assume that the great majority of people who fought and killed in the American revolution did so to put a permanent end to oppression and exploitation. Members of a military society will murder merely because they’ve been trained to do so. But in the eighteenth century the United States was a civilian society, and nonmilitary men will rarely risk their own or others’ lives merely to exchange one form of oppression for another. Most Americans were then agreed that privilege must be abolished; that property generates a privileged class and thus brings faction and misery; that wealth cannot justly govern a nation because it will inevitably govern in its own interest. But they did not agree on the best means of ensuring that wealth should not again give birth to a tyrannical aristocracy, thus re-converting the United States into a nation of masters and servants. As we have seen, Madison wanted a modified aristocracy restrained by a government of detached men devoted to the best interests of the nation, presumably a government of Madisonian philosophers. Adams wanted a neutral government which would mediate between the interests of the rich and poor, would guard the rich from the poor and the poor from the rich, but especially it would protect the rich from the poor. (Adams apparently could not remember that the rich, with their wealth, could buy their own protection without state aid, whereas the poor could not.) From the democratic camp, John Taylor argued that a modified aristocracy would quickly degenerate into an unlimited and repressive aristocracy, and that a government seeking to mediate between those who possess a monopoly of wealth and power, and those who lack it, would quickly become an instrument used by wealth and power to subjugate the rest. And there were others, more numerous but less influential, who followed to the conclusion that private wealth and property should be altogether abolished, thus preventing once and for all the monopoly of power and privilege, and, as Winstanley had urged, converting the earth into a “common treasury” which is “free for every son and daughter of mankind to live free upon.”
However divergent the solutions, however clashing the views, they were to be resolved experimentally; decisions were to be, above all, tentative. Many problems had been solved, many were in the process of solution, but the experimental search for a democratic society would be the work of generations. “We have chanced to live in an age which will probably be distinguished in history for its experiments in government on a larger scale than has yet taken place. But we shall not live to see the result. The grosser absurdities, such as hereditary magistracies, we shall see exploded in our day, long experience having already pronounced condemnation against them. But what is to be the substitute? This our children and grandchildren will answer. We may be satisfied with the certain knowledge that none can ever be tried, so stupid, so unrighteous, so oppressive, so destructive of every end for which honest men enter into government, as that which their forefathers had established, and their fathers alone venture to tumble headlong.”[44] The experiment was to fulfill the needs and ideals of living men. The mistakes, the blunders, the institutions of one generation could not, in an experimental democracy, be binding on another generation. “The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead,” wrote Jefferson. “We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generations, more than the inhabitants of another country.”[45]
Thus despite the divergent views of the revolutionaries as to the division, control, or mediation of property, as to the responsibility of representatives, democratic solutions could endlessly be sought and tried so long as the experiment continued. But if the experiment was limited or curbed, oppression and bloodshed would return. “Each generation ... has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes the most promotive of its own happiness,” wrote Jefferson. “A solemn opportunity of doing this every 19 or 20 years should be provided by the constitution.... This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belongs to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone.... If this avenue be shut..., it will make itself heard through that of force, and we shall go on, as other nations are doing, in the endless circle of oppressions, rebellions, reformations; and oppression, rebellion, reformation, again; and so on forever.”[46] This much was known to eighteenth century Americans, for they had written into their Declaration of Independence “that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its formation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
***
However, for a small number of men, the revolution was not the beginning of a vast experiment in social organization; it did not promise the possibility for a better society; it represented nothing more than an opening for large-scale economic speculation. As in all wars, some men did not light with their bodies but with their money, and not for ideals but for personal profit. The American revolution was not exempted from such men, and in a frightfully short time these men undermined the ideals for which the revolution had been fought.
When the colonies went to war with England, the American economy was disrupted, and the value of money deteriorated. The Revolutionary Government of the United States needed funds to carry on the war— especially to support and equip the revolutionary armies. When these funds were provided, the men who contributed received securities for the amount they loaned. The securities were made out in the nominal amount of money given, although the real value of the money had fallen to a fraction of the nominal amount. A large number of the contributors must have been poor, because most of them seem to have sold the securities, generally for an even smaller amount than they had paid for them—sometimes at one tenth their original value.[47] In any case, by 1787 a good part of the securities were in the hands, not of the men who had lent money to the revolutionary government, but of capitalist speculators who had not lent anything but had monopolized securities by buying them cheaply from original holders. These early capitalists were to become the gravediggers of every democatic ideal that had been brought to the American continent.
Professor Charles A. Beard brilliantly analyzed this most crucial chapter of American history in his An Economic Interpretation of the Consitntion of the United States, and further elaborated his conclusions in Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. {1} Beard’s study of the Constitution became a classic in American history, and, as often happens to classics, the book was revered, and its conclusions were conveniently forgotten.
In May 1787, a convention to draft a constitution for the United States assembled in Philadelphia. Fifty-five men representing twelve states attended the convention. “Forty of the members held public securities, fourteen were land speculators, eleven were interested in mercantile, manufacturing and shipping activities, and fifteen were slaveholders. The small farmer and debtor classes were virtually without representation.”[48] The men who participated in this convention were not “representatives” in Rousseau’s sense. They did not embody a General Will. Nor were they “representatives” in Jefferson’s sense of having been chosen, after careful consideration, by an educated and well informed public. “No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on the proposition to call the Convention which drafted the constitution.”[49] These men were not even representatives in the sense of Adams and Madison—in being disinterested mediators between different factions, concerned with the good of the nation as a whole. “The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately, directly, and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system.”[50]
The chairman of this convention was George Washington, popular hero of the revolutionary war and Father of his Country. The chairman’s qualifications especially suited him to head such a convention, for “Washington, of Virginia, was probably the richest man in the United States in his time, and his financial ability was not surpassed among his countrymen anywhere.”[51] The unacknowledged leader of the convention, and the most eloquent defender of the document that emerged, was Alexander Hamilton, probably the cleverest man in the history of American politics. Hamilton did not share the democratic ideals of Thomas More, Cervantes, Gracchus Babeuf, or Thomas Jefferson. He did not even share the mild hopes expressed by Adams and Madison, that if an aristocracy of wealth was necessary, it should at least be curbed and made to serve the public good. According to Hamilton, “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.... “It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan.”[52] Hamilton, unlike his less candid descendants, did not deem it necessary to give lip-service to democracy while defending the rich and well born. He knew what democracy meant, and he devoted his life to the task of suppressing it. He was a brilliant man, and he accomplished his task with tremendous success. Hamilton’s greatest fear, before, during, and after the revolution, was that the revolution would spread. He knew that the majority of his countrymen were not members of his own class, the class of “the rich and well born.” He knew that the majority of his countrymen did not share his admiration for a government of “the rich and well born.” In 1795 he wrote, “ There are too many proofs that a considerable party among us is deeply proceed infected with those horrid principles of Jacobinism which, proceeding from one excess to another, have made France a theater of blood.”[53] He was also aware that the men who had participated in Shay’s rebellion in New England shordy before the Constitutional Convention were not willing to be duped into believing that their hopes for a better life would be realized in the grave. They demanded that the world be shared among the living. “The consequences of this, even in imagination, are such as to make any virtuous man shudder.”[54] Alexander Hamilton was, above all else, a virtuous man.
The other members of the Convention were as unrepresentative of America’s democratic revolution as Hamilton. Most of them shared Hamilton’s political philosophy. Some had no philosophy whatever: they attended the Convention merely for the financial promises and personal gain they could derive from it. Among them, the philosophic aristocrat Madison was a radical. And Madison did, in fact, join the opposition years later—but not before the Convention’s and, especially Hamilton’s, program had been fully carried out. A few Democrats did attend the Convention,[55] but they opposed its proceedings, as well as the document that emerged. Thomas Jefferson did not attend the Convention; he was in France.
As a result of their deliberations, the security-holding majority at the Convention, who constituted a fraction of the American population, drafted a document which gave a legal basis to their effort to put an end to the democratic experiment. As Beard pointed out, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”[56] But the drafting of the Constitution was only the first great step of the capitalist coup d’etat. The feast of the security-holders, this orgy of “paper and patronage,” as John Taylor described capitalism, had only begun. The Constitution had yet to be made acceptable to the States, and then had to be put into practice, before the labor and ingenuity of the capitalists were rewarded. A Massachusetts newspaper published an eloquent enumeration of the virtues of the Constitution. The grounds on which the document is here defended have little to do with More’s Utopia, Winstanley’s “common treasury” or Babeuf’s Society of Equals or Jefferson’s democratic experiment. “It is in the interest of the merchants to encourage the new constitution, because commerce may then be a national object, and nations will form treaties with us.... It is the interest of all gentlemen and men of property, because they will see many low demagogues reduced to their tools, whose upstart dominion insults their feelings, and whose passions for popularity will dictate laws, which ruin the minority of creditors and please the majority of debtors. It is the interest of the American soldier as the military profession will then be respectable and Florida may be conquered in a campaign. The spoils of the West-Indies and South America may enrich the next generation of Cincinnati.”[57]
When the Constitution was ratified, it was not by “The People.” According to the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, a firm supporter of the document, “even after the subject had been discussed for a considerable time, the fate of the constitution could scarcely be conjectured; and so small in many instances, was the majority in its favor, as to afford strong ground for the opinion that, had the influence of character been removed, the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured its adoption. Indeed it is scarcely to be doubted that in some of the adopting states a majority of the people were in the opposition. In of all of them, the numerous amendments which were proposed demonstrate the reluctance with which the new government was accepted; and that a dread of dismemberment, not an approbation of the particular system under consideration, had induced an acquiescence in it.... North Carolina and Rhode Island did not at first accept the constitution, and New York was apparently dragged into it by a repugnance of being excluded from the confederacy.”[58] Beard concluded his carefully documented study of the Constitution with a denial that “we the people of the United States” had ever given their “unanimous consent” to the document which was henceforth to safeguard the rights of property from the intrusion of human life. “In the ratification of the Constitution, about three-fourths of the adult males failed to vote on the question, having abstained from the elections at which delegates to the state conventions were chosen, either on account of their indifference or their disfranchisement by property qualifications.” There is even doubt that a majority of the few who voted were, in all states, in favor of the Constitution. “It is questionable whether a majority of the voters participating in the elections for the state conventions in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia, and South Carolina, actually approved the ratification of the Constitution.” But there’s no doubt as to which interests gave their unwavering support to the document. “The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention; and in a large number of instances they were also directly and personally interested in the outcome of their efforts.”[59]
So the Constitution of the United States was drafted and ratified. The third and last step of the Fathers of the American Way of Life was to adopt and put into effect Hamilton’s economic plan. With the adoption of this program the democratic experiment would end, and not even Jefferson would be able, even if willing, to continue it.
In the first government under the Constitution, Washington was President and Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. The legislature was composed, by and large, of the same men who had drafted and supported the Constitution. From his post in the Treasury, Hamilton perpetrated the greatest sequence of frauds recorded in history. Hamilton’s program consisted of nothing less than a capitalist coup d’etat which, at one blow, created a powerful capitalist class in America and insured its perpetual and uninterrupted growth short of a social upheaval. The class that was to take up the cry of Laissez Faire was created by the government, maintained by the government, and protected by the government.
Hamilton’s first fiscal measure under the new government was to have the public debt funded at face value. The foreign debt amounted to $13 million, owed mostly to British capitalists, and the domestic debt amounted to $40 million, owed to the security-holders. The securities had been bought for less than face value because the dollar had deteriorated. When the dollar deteriorated even further, the men who had originally lent money to the government sold the securities for even less. Hamilton planned nothing short of paying the speculators for the face value of the securities they had bought for next to nothing. In the eighteenth century, $40 million was not the trifling sum expendable on military bungling it has since become in the United States. According to Beard, “The amount gained by public security holders through the adoption of the new system was roughly equivalent to the value of all the lands as listed for taxation in Connecticut. It was but little less than the value of the lands in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island. It was about equivalent to one-half the value of the lands in New York and two-thirds the value of the lands in Massachusetts.
It amounted to at least ten dollars for every man, woman, and child in the whole United States from New Hampshire to Georgia.”[60] The distribution of that much money among a small group of men meant the creation, at one stroke, of an aristocracy of great wealth which had not previously existed.
Many felt that the only just solution to the problem would have been to seek a discrimination between original holders and present holders of securities, and to pay the original holders at face value, but to pay the present holders (the speculators who had not originally lent money but had bought up securities) at the depreciated value, if at all. But the Congressmen voted against such a discrimination, and none was made; and it will probably never be known how many members of the First Administration were original holders, and how many speculators. In other words, the Hamiltonian funding bill was to commit the American government to pay the holders of public securities, the majority of whom had not lent anything to the revolutionary effort, a sum far greater than had been loaned by the more numerous original holders of the securities. As Beard pointed out, “It requires no very subtle analysis to discover that the immediate beneficiaries of these various proposals by the Secretary of the Treasury were the holders of public securities and capitalists generally. A study of the Treasury Books and the records of finance of the period indicates that the great capitalists were also large holders of public securities.... The immediate beneficiaries of Hamilton’s plans were quite generally merchants, traders, shippers, and manufacturers.”[61] In short, a tremendously wealthy and powerful class of capitalists would be created by government fiat.
Moreover, in the Congress which approved this measure, “Of the thirty-five, twenty-one were stockholders or dealers in the funds, and three of these latter bank directors and whose degree of zeal was obviously in the ratio above stated, as their relative profits; the bank directors being considerably more active and zealous than the other members of the corps.”[62] Such a Congress could hardly take issue with so ambitious a program as this. Hamilton knew exactly which members of Congress held public securities, since the lists were kept in the Treasury Department. He was offering these security-holders a plan which, if they approved it, would make them and their kind extremely rich and powerful. Could they refuse? “Being on the great theater of speculation and gain and possessed of more correct information, with the means of turning it to better account, will they abandon their occupation and slight the opportunity offered of becoming thrifty?”[63] As Beard pointed out, they thereby ceased to act as “representatives of the people” and became representatives of nothing but their own lust for gain. But could they be called dishonorable? Hardly. Hamilton was an extremely honorable man. They were all honorable men. Their honor left them no other course of action. They were all honorable men. Their honor left them no other course of action. They were all undoubtedly imbued with the “due sense of the sacred obligation of a just debt” which Hamilton described on a different occasion. Jackson, of Georgia, appealed to his fellow Congressmen. “Let us not rear a monument to mankind of the impossibility of preserving republican manners, by aping European nations and laying the foundation of our government in immense debts. Sir, our terms of service, happily I believe for the country, are near expiring. We shall return to the mass of the people, and participate in the burdens we impose. When the cool hour of investigation arrives, happy indeed will it be for us if, amid the murmurs of an oppressed people, we have not to say, in self- condemnation, I too have been guilty of bringing this load of fetters on the people. America, sir, will not always think as is the fashion of the present day; and when the iron hand of tyranny is felt, denunciations will fall on those who, by imposing this enormous and iniquitous debt, will beggar the people and bind them in chains.”[64] But the call went unheeded, the monument was reared, and the iron hand fell. The bill was passed, and with its passage the nation of men with approximately equal wealth, power, voice and control was extinguished from the American continent. “Alas! is it true, that ages are necessary to understand, whilst a moment will suffice to invent, an imposture?”[65]
Perhaps the greatest irony related to the funding bill was the role Jefferson played in its passage. Jefferson had been in France studying the makings of the French revolution. He was appointed Secretary of State of the first administration, partly because the extent and depth of his democratic leanings was not known, and partly because he had expressed no opinion of the Constitution. When he had returned to the United States, he was ignorant of the economic implications of the funding bill. When the Secretary of the Treasury told Jefferson that the funding bill was designed “for the national good,” Jefferson believed it. When Hamilton told him that certain Southern Congressmen were opposed to the bill and thus threatened the unity of the nation, Jefferson was impressed. When Hamilton suggested that Jefferson’s influence, if exerted in the proper manner, could change the votes of these Southern Congressmen, Jefferson listened. When Hamilton proposed that the Southerners would vote in favor of the funding bill if they were promised, in exchange, that the United States capital- city would be located in the South, on the Potomac, Jefferson agreed. Without Jefferson’s influence, the funding bill might not have passed. But Jefferson talked to the Southerners, bargained with them, and the capital of the United States is still today situated on the Potomac.
Jefferson quickly became aware of the monstrous implications of Hamilton’s program, but his revelation arrived too late. He resigned from his post as Secretary of State. He wrote an angry letter to President Washington. “I was duped ... by the Secretary of the Treasury, and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret.”’[66] Jefferson denounced Hamilton, and he denounced the capitalist economic program. “His system flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the Republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the Legislature. I saw this influence actually produced, and its first fruits to be the establishment of the great outlines of his project by the votes of the very persons who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves out to profit by his plans; and that had these persons withdrawn, as those interested in a question ever should, the vote of the disinterested majority was clearly the reverse of what they made it. These were no longer the votes then of the representatives of the people, but of deserters from the rights and interests of the people; and it was impossible to consider their decisions, which had nothing in view but to enrich themselves, as the measures of the fair majority, which ought always to be respected.”[67] But neither Jefferson’s eloquence nor his indignation could abolish an entire class of newly created capitalists. Henceforth, nothing short of a social revolution would undo Hamilton’s ingenious achievement.
The next great measure of Hamilton’s scheme concerned the method of distributing the funds to the security-holding capitalists. For this purpose he proposed that Congress should authorize the establishment of a national bank. The bank would have the right to issue paper money in exchange for the public securities. All the funds of the United States government would go into the bank. The agrarian Congressman Jackson, of Georgia, who did not himself hold securities, probably did not know that he was addressing the bill’s direct beneficiaries when he denounced the Bank Bill and told his fellow Congressmen that it was designed to tax the nation’s poor in order to support the rich. The Annals of Congress reports Jackson’s message to the “representatives of the people” in Congress assembled. “This plan of a National Bank is calculated to benefit a small part of the United States, the mercantile interest only; the farmers, the yeomanry, will derive no advantage from it; as the bank bills will not circulate to the extremities of the Union. He said, he had never seen a bank bill in the state of Georgia, nor will they ever benefit the farmers of that state, or of New Hampshire.... He urged the unconstitutionality of the plan; called it a monopoly, such a one as contravenes the spirit of the Constitution; a monopoly of a very extraordinary nature; a monopoly of the public moneys for the benefit of the corporation to be created.”[68] James Madison, probably through a leak from the Treasury Department, had by this time become aware that the United States was being governed by a legislature of security-holders, and not by man interested in “the regulation of ... interfering interests.” Consequently Madison was able to interpret the enthusiasm of his colleagues for the Bank Bill, and he opposed its adoption. Yet his main argument against the bill was the same as Jackson’s: that it was unconstitutional. But surely Madison, whose Journal of the Constitutional Convention’s proceedings is the fullest account extant, must have remembered that the same men had expressed the same vehemence during the Convention. Was Madison suggesting that the men at the Constitutional Convention had drafted a document which might be used against their interests?
The Bank Bill was passed. The security-holders who had voted themselves and the rest of their class such a large amount of wealth were not, at this point, to prevent themselves from collecting their prize. They had, after all, worked long and hard. But now that they had come this far, where was the United States government to get the money with which to pay the newly enriched capitalists? The amount, after all, was greater than all the lands in some states. At this point, the Constitution came to the aid of its authors. Under the Articles of the Confederation, the United States government did not have the power to collect taxes. This power had been reserved to the states. Each state, if the majority of its citizens desired, could cancel a debt incurred under difficult circumstances, especially if the original lenders had ceased to expect reimbursement and had sold or thrown away their security- notes. Such a cancellation would be injurious only to those speculators who had bought a monopoly of such notes, whereas the assumption of such a debt would mean hardship to a large sector of the population. The principle of such a cancellation is that the wellbeing of people is far more important than the inviolability of contractual obligations. The drafters of the Constitution, however, had a great deal of foresight. In the mists of all the Legislative, Executive and Judicial matter, they had written the following provisions into their document, provisions which became the law of the land.
“AJ1 debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.” (Article VI, 1.)
“The Congress shall have the power
To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises,
to pay the debts and provide for the common
defense and general welfare of the United States; …
To coin money, regulate the value thereof...
To raise and support armies ...
To provide and maintain a navy ...
To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the
laws of the Union, suppress insurrections…”
(Article I, Sec. 8)
The debt had already been rendered “valid.” The bank to “coin money, regulate the value thereof” had been created. The time had come to collect the money with which to pay the security-holders, and Hamilton suggested an excise tax on whiskey. Since whiskey was made and consumed predominantly by poor farmers, this tax meant that poor fanners would be taxed to support the speculators. “These taxes will bear heavily both on agriculture and commerce. It will be charging the active and industrious citizen, who pays his share of the taxes, to pay the indolent and idle creditor who receives them ... Thus the honest, hard working part of the community will promote the ease and luxury of men of wealth; such a system may benefit large cities, like Philadelphia and New York, but the remote parts of the continent will not feel the invigorating warmth of the American treasury; in the proportion that it benefits one, it will depress another.”[69]
But now, after seven years of uninterrupted feast, the security-hold- ing Federalists in Congress ran into their first serious difficulties. The trouble shocked many, but had long been anticipated by Hamilton. The indignation expressed by Jefferson’s cry, “I was duped ... by the Secretary of the Treasury,” spread to the hearts of his countrymen. But since they were not Secretaries of State, they could not resign; and since they had slowly become aware that George Washington was the living monument behind which Hamiltonian capitalism functioned, they did not think writing Washington a letter would be very effective. In 1794, a group of disaffected citizens met in Alleghany County, Pennsylvania. They passed a resolution, in which they declared: “We have observed with great pain, that our councils want the integrity or spirit of Republicans. This we attribute to the pernicious influence of the stock-holders or their subordinates; and our minds feel this with so much indignacy, that we are almost ready to wish for a state of revolution, and the guillotine of France for a short space, in order to inflict punishment on the miscreants that enervate and disgrace our Government.”[70] A revolt broke out. And the Pennsylvanians found out, to their great amazement, that the highly praised Constitution had not been drafted “for the people.” In fact, the Constitution’s military provisions seemed to leave open the absurd possibility that the army of the United States could be turned against the people of the United States. A textbook on American history gives a brief description of die outcome of the “Whiskey Rebellion.” “[Hamilton] was willing to see the tax collected by force so that the opponents of the government could be taught that they must obey the nation’s laws whether they liked them or not.... ‘I’he attempt to enforce the excise tax soon brought on the trouble that Hamilton had foreseen. The chief center of opposition lay in the Pittsburgh area, where bands of ‘Whiskey Boys’ raided stills that paid the tax, handled roughly the tax collectors, and successfully nullified the law in a number of western counties.... Washington now called out fifteen thousand state militia from the states of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, and ordered them to march to the scene of the trouble. As the troops approached their destination, the enthusiasm of the rebels abated ... but the residents of western Pennsylvania and many other frontier areas were aghast at the pow er the Federalists in control of the central government had chosen to wield...”[71] Twenty years later, the agrarian philosopher John Taylor summarized the Hamiltonian sequence. “A legislature, in a nation where the system of paper and patronage prevails, will be governed by that interest, and legislate in its favor. It is impossible to do this, without legislating to the injury of the other interest, that is, the great mass of the nation. Such a legislature will create unnecessary offices, that themselves or their relations may be endowed with them. They will lavish the revenue, to enrich themselves. They will borrow for the nation, that they may lend. They will offer lenders great profits, that they may share in them. As grievances gradually excite national discontent, they will fix the yoke more securely, by making it gradually heavier. And they will finally avow and maintain their corruption, by establishing an irresistible standing army, not to defend the nation, but to defend a system for plundering the nation.”[72]
***
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Charles Beard’s study of this turning point in American history, which historians have tried so hard to forget, was published in 1913. A century before Beard, however, a much more immediate and painful analysis of the period was undertaken. This was An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States by John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia. According to Beard, this book “deserves to rank among the two or three really historic contributions to political science which have been produced in the United States.”[73] John Taylor had fought in the revolution and had shared its democratic ideals; he had served in the Virginia legislature as well as the United States Congress; and he had painfully watched Hamilton and his beneficiaries inscribe the revolution’s ideal on a gravestone. Taylor was a personal friend of James Madison as well as Thomas Jefferson. The political, social and economic theories of Jefferson are known only from fragments and letters, since Jefferson never wrote a systematic treatise which expressed his views. However, Jefferson considered Taylor’s work to be an expression of his own views, and said that “Taylor and he had never differed on any political principle of importance.”[74] Thus Taylor has been called “the Philosopher of Jeffersonian Democracy.”[75]
Though Taylor was a democrat in his theory, he was not one in his practice. He married into wealth and was, like Jefferson, one of the large plantation owners of Virginia. He did not, however, claim that his ideals described his own way of life. In the eighteenth century, Americans were much more reluctant than they are today to publish rationalizations of their privileges and fears. Taylor was well aware of the incompatibility between his habits and his beliefs. But the fact that he did not adjust the two should be held against his person and not against his theory. One should perhaps not judge Taylor too harshly for this incompatibility: if men commonly adjusted their worldly situations to their moral ideals, Buddha and Gandhi would not be as well known as they are. However, if a general writes a burning critique of military dictatorship, the fact that the author is a general should not deter one from reading the work, though one would be well-advised to be wary of a general’s promise to prevent military dictatorship. And surely it could not be argued that because Engels was a capitalist, he therefore expressed the aspirations of capitalists. As Taylor himself said, “A despot may condemn tyranny; a soldier may condemn standing armies; and a stock-jobber may condemn paper systems. In reasoning boldly against the system of paper and patronage, no private reputation is attacked, more than that of Marcus Aurelius would be, by reasoning against despotism; or Washington’s, by reasoning against standing armies.... Veracity in terms cannot be censurable, if veracity in matter is entitled to approbation. The discharge of a duty, cannot require an apology, and without making one, I will proceed.”[76] Perhaps only an unprivileged, propertyless observer could write a truly sincere critique of privilege and property, but such a man would hardly write, and if he did write, his work could only too easily be dismissed as the rant of an envious lunatic. Taylor cannot be so easily dismissed; since he was himself a member of the privileged class, he is certainly well informed on the subject of privilege, and can hardly be called envious.
For Taylor, the greatest tragedy of the Constitutional Convention and its capitalist aftermath was that the Americans, who were so perceptive, so adept at unveiling the deceptions of the feudal aristocracy, should so meekly have submitted to the deceptions of the capitalist aristocracy. “We pity the ancients for their dullness in discovering oppressions, so clearly seen by ourselves now that they are exploded. We moderns; we enlightened Americans; we who have abolished hierarchy and title; and we who are submitting to be taxed and enslaved by patronage and paper, without being deluded or terrified by the promise of heaven, the denunciation of hell, the penalties of law, the brilliancy and generosity of nobility, or the pageantry and charity of superstition.
“A spell is put upon our understandings by the words ‘publick faith and national credit,’ which fascinates us into an opinion, that fraud, corruption and oppression, constitute national credit; and debt and slavery, publick faith. This delusion of the aristocracy of the present age, is not less apparent, than the ancient divinity of kings, and yet it required the labors of Locke and Sydney to detect that ridiculous imposture.”[77]
Yet the Americans, with their widespread education, their knowledge of nature, their secular outlook, had far less ground to be deceived than the ancients. “Let us moderns cease to boast of our victory over superstition and the feudal system, and our advancement in knowledge. Let us neither pity, ridicule or despise the ancients, as dupes of frauds and tricks, which we can so easily discern; lest some ancient sage should rise from his grave, and answer. ‘You moderns are duped by arts more obviously fraudulent, than those which deceived us. The agency of the Gods was less discernible, than the effects of paper and patronage. We could not see, that the temporal and eternal pains and pleasures, threatened and promised by our aristocracy, could not be inflicted or bestowed by it; you see throughout Europe the effects of your aristocracy. Without your light, oracles were necessary to deceive us; with the help of printing, and two detections, you are deceived by aristocracy in a third form, although it pretends neither to the divinity nor heroism claimed by its two first forms. And under these disadvantages, the impositions of our aristocracy were restrained within narrower bounds than those of yours. Did any aristocracy of the first age, extend its annual spoilation from one to thirty-five millions of pounds sterling, in less than a century?’”[78]
The Americans were not only better equipped than the ancients to unveil deception and recognize oppression. Only a few years before they submitted to the system of “paper and patronage,” they had fought a war to abolish that very oppression when it was imposed on them at the hand of British capitalists. “It is strange, that it is so difficult to distinguish between honest and fraudulent taxes, imposed by a minor interest on the publick interest, and so easy to discern the real design of taxes imposed by one nation upon another. In the latter case, monopoly is clearly understood to be an indirect mode of taxation. The United States know, that the monopoly of their commerce by the English, was a tribute; but they refuse to know, that the monopoly of a circulating medium by banking, is also a tribute. Useless offices, established here by the English government, were clearly perceived to be a tribute; but useless offices established by our own government are denied to be so. Pretexts for taxation invented by England, were detected by dullness herself; but pretexts invented at home, seem to deceive the keenest penetration.
“And yet correct reasoning must conclude, that if one nation, by means of a monopoly, can impoverish another; a combination or corporate body, may also impoverish the rest of a nation, by the same means. That a monopoly which enriches, will correspondently impoverish, unless it produces or creates; that if Britain possessed the privilege of furnishing America with bank paper, at the annual profit of eight per centum, it would have constituted a tax, enriching Britain and impoverishing America—co-extensively with her former commercial monopoly; that if this privilege would have enriched the English at our expense, it must also equally enrich stockholders, at the expense of those who are not stockholders; that if national indigence is gradually produced by a subjection to a foreign monopoly, the indigence of the mass of the nation, will be produced by a domestick monopoly, profitable, but unproductive; and that if a nation has a moral right to liberate itself from an indirect tribute to another nation, it has also a moral right to liberate itself from a similar tribute to a domestick combination; unless it is a moral duty heroically to withstand evils imposed by foreigners, for the purpose of penitentially embracing them when imposed by natives.”[79]
Perhaps the Americans would not have been so easily duped if the new aristocracy had avowed its true purpose from the very beginning, had admitted to the nation that it intended to consolidate into one class not only all the privileges heretofore enjoyed by kings and noblemen, priests and conquerors, but also an added flourish of never-ending accumulation of wealth. “Sincerity demanded ... the following confession: ‘Our purpose is to settle wealth and power upon a minority. It will be accomplished by national debt, paper corporations, and offices, civil and military. These will condense king, lords and commons, a moneyed faction, and an armed faction, in one interest. This interest must subsist upon another, or perish. The other interest is national, to govern and pilfer which, is our object; and its accomplishment consists in getting the utmost a nation can pay. Such a state of success can only be maintained by armies, to be paid by the nation, and commanded by this minority; by corrupting talents and courage; by terrifying timidity; by inflicting penalties on the weak and friendless, and by distracting the majority with deceitful professions. That with which our project commences, is invariably a promise to get a nation out of debt; but the invariable effect of it is, to plunge it irretrievably into debt.’”[80] But such a confession was hardly to be expected. “All political oppressors deceive, in order to succeed. When did an aristocracy avow its purpose?”[81]
Men were overwhelmed by the unimagined wealth of the “undiscovered continent,” and spent their time and energy accumulating it and killing the continent’s previous inhabitants. And the institutions of “paper and patronage,” of landlords and creditors and rich capitalists, were neither curbed nor outlawed; instead they were allowed to spread and to infest with a new master-slave arrangement the society in which democracy was to be created. A quickly shifting social context, coupled with the determined opposition of men who had privileges to lose and wealth to gain, was not such an ideal workshop for the Great Experiment after all. Harried theorists and ambitious politicians gave up the democratic ideal before it had even acquired a history. The Americans have always been a very busy people. In Taylor’s time they were so busy concentrating their efforts on the abolition of real and imaginary tyrannies that they overlooked the one tyranny which was to enthralled them and rob them of the one task whose fulfillment might have earned them a place of honor in human history. “The Americans devoted their effectual precautions to the obsolete modes of title and hierarchy, erected several barriers against the army mode, and utterly disregarded the mode of paper and patronage.”[82] Such an utter disregard, wrote Taylor, was completely unwarranted. “This jealousy of armies, and confidence in paper systems, can only be justified if the following argument in its defense is correct.
‘“An army of soldiers have a separate interest from the nation, because they draw their subsistence from it, and therefore they will combine for their own interest against the national interest; but an army of stockjobbers have no such separate interest, and will not combine. Soldiers admitted into the legislature, would legislate in favor of soldiers; but stockjobbers will not legislate in favor of stockjobbers. Soldiers may use our arms to take our money; but stockjobbers cannot use our money to take our arms. Soldiers may adhere to a chief in preference to the nation, as an instrument for gratifying their avarice and ambition upon the nation; but stockjobbers have no avarice nor ambition to be gratified, and will not therefore adhere to a chief for that purpose. Soldiers are dangerous, because they assail the liberty of a nation by open force; stockjobbers harmless, because they do it by secret fraud. All are jealous of soldiers, and therefore they will not be watched; few are jealous of stockjobbers, and therefore they will be watched. Many instances have occurred of the oppressions by the army system; one instance only of a perfect capacity in the paper system for oppression can be adduced; and as that has lasted only a single century, it would be precipitate to detect and destroy the aristocracy of paper and patronage, in less time than was requisite to detect and destroy those of superstition and the feudal system.’”[83] If the “paper system” was a century old when Taylor wrote, it is now two and a half centuries old. Taylor would not be very happy if he knew that the Americans have still not destroyed the “aristocracy of paper and patronage”; he would be even less happy if he knew that their adherence to the “mode of paper and patronage” has caused Americans to destroy the “several barriers against the army mode and even to resurrect “the obsolete modes of title and hierarchy.”
***
Another man whose theories repudiated the re-introduction of privilege to the American continent, whose position made him the symbol and spokesman of a widespread democratic social movement, whose name was synonymous with democracy among his countrymen, was elected third president of the United States. He believed that “No government can continue good, but under the control of the people.”[84] He expressed great hopes for the American experiment. “We have chanced to live in an age which will probably be distinguished in history, for its experiments in government on a larger scale than has yet taken place.”[85] He had observed and studied thirteen years of unbroken betrayal of the revolution’s aims. Yet when he was elected by men who still took his ideals seriously, when he was charged with undoing the crime of self- seeking men, his goals became pitifully limited, his dreams diminished. “When this government was first established, it was possible to have kept it going on true principles, but the contracted, English, half-lettered ideas of Hamilton, destroyed that hope in the bud. We can pay off his debts in 15 years: but we can never get rid of his financial system. It mortifies me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious, but this vice is entailed on us by the first error. In other parts of our government I hope we shall be able by degrees to introduce sound principles and make them habitual. What is practicable must often control what is pure theory.”[86]
Thomas Jefferson was what has come to be known as a Liberal. He believed religiously in a nation of small farmers. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.”[87] But he was himself a slave- holding plantation owner. He believed that each man should have as much power and control over his own affairs as other men, but his own wealth and power greatly exceeded that of his countrymen. He wrote for the poor and for democrats, but his own friends were the rich, and mostly aristocrats. He wrote that slavery was an aberration and a crime. “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery, than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”[88] Yet he held slaves. Long before Jefferson’s time, Quakers who had inherited or acquired slaves freed them and moved to states where slavery wasn’t practiced. Jefferson wrote eloquent denunciations of slavery, but he did not follow the Quaker example, nor did he set an example of his own. His democratic professions were doubtless sincere, as they are more numerous in his private correspondence than in his public addresses. However, like his friend John Taylor, also a wealthy Virginia planter, Thomas Jefferson apparently did not experience the tension between his precept and his practice. His ideal was lofty, but alongside of his ideal his life was disappointingly ordinary.
During the Constitutional Convention, Jefferson was in France. His knowledge of the Convention’s proceedings was supplied by his friend James Madison. At that time neither Madison nor Jefferson knew the economic interests of the Constitution’s drafters, and neither the philosophic Madison nor the idealistic Jefferson could have suspected that economic interests were motivating men to gather for such a momentous occasion. When the document was finished, Jefferson not comforted by its similarity to English law, as he knew that England was no democracy, and that Americans had fled from England for that very reason. However, the document did embody many of the intellectually respectable eighteenth century theories of government, and Jefferson was duly impressed. In his correspondence with Madison, he limited his criticism to die lack of a bill of rights which would clearly delimit the powers of the rulers over the people. “I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury...”[89] When such a bill was adopted in the form of the first ten amendments, Jefferson was apparently content with the document.
When Jefferson returned to the United States, he must have been completely ignorant of the Constitution’s capitalistic implications or of Hamilton’s enormous program for the creation of a privileged class, for otherwise he could not have been “duped ... by the Secretary of the Treasury.” After his awakening, he became a bitter antagonist of those who had legislated with “nothing in view but to enrich themselves.” Nevertheless through the years he apparently forgot that these same men had written their program into the Constitution, because while denouncing the restoration of privilege, he defended the Constitution. In fact, he even tried to level at the security-holders the same accusation Madison had aimed at them. He tried to argue that the program of the security-holders violated their own Constitution.
Jefferson’s term of office was not extraordinarily impressive. It was not the revolution he prescribed for every generation. It was not even a palace revolt. John Taylor bitterly summarized the hopes and expectations his democratic friend left unfulfilled. “The history of man proves that all will often avail themselves of the precedents established by their predecessors, and reprobated by themselves. Every precedent, however clearly demonstrated to be unconstitutional and tending ‘towards monarchy and an iron government’ by a party out of power, will be held sacred by the same party in it; and those who clearly discerned the injustice and impolicy of enriching and strengthening federalists by bank or debt stock, at the publick expense, will seldom refuse to receive a similar sinecure. In short, a power in the individuals who compose legislatures, to fish up wealth from the people, by nets of their own weaving, whatever be the names of such nets, will corrupt legislative, executive and judicial publick servants, by whatever system constituted; and convert patriots from the best friends, into the most dangerous foes of free, equal and just principles of civil liberty.”[90]
Like all liberals, Jefferson turned his energy and enthusiasm to smaller issues when the larger issues had become too unwieldy. He never abandoned his democratic ideals, he did not forget that democratic hopes had filled a nation of men with revolutionary ardor. He hoped that America would be a democratic beacon to oppressed men everywhere, but after “the contracted, English, half-lettered ideas of Hamilton, destroyed that hope in the bud,”[91] he turned his attention elsewhere. Certainly his role in repealing the Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams Administration was nothing less than admirable; those Acts threatened to bury, so soon after its adoption, the entire Bill of Rights Jefferson had so greatly desired. But he made no attempt whatever to restore equality, justice, participation, he did not abolish privilege, he did not repeal the capitalists. Though his religion was an anti-theological humanism, he nevertheless accepted the Hamiltonian coup d’etat on the basis of the doctrine of original sin: “this vice is entailed on us by the first error.” With such an explanation, there was nothing to do but make the best of a bad world. “In other parts of our government I hope we shall be able by degrees to introduce sound principles and make them habitual.” While denouncing the capitalist economy superimposed on the United States by government fiat (“It mortifies me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious...”), Jefferson nevertheless went on strengthening the “radically vicious” principles. “What is practicable must often control what is pure theory.”
While Jeffersonian theory became the subject of scholarly admiration, Jeffersonian practice became the model for American politics. And as Beard pointed out, “Jeffersonian Democracy” as practiced was no more democratic than “Hamiltonian Democracy” or “Elizabethan Democracy” or “Napoleonic Democracy.” Jeffersonian democracy did not imply any abandonment of the property, and particularly the landed, qualifications on the suffrage or office-holding; it did not involve any fundamental alterations in the national Constitution which the Federalists had designed as a foil to the leveling propensides of the masses; it did not propose any new devices for a more immediate and direct control of the voters over the instrumentalities of government. Jeffersonian Democracy simply meant the possession of the federal government by the agrarian masses led by an aristocracy of slave-owning planters, and the theoretical repudiation of the right to use the Government for the benefit of any capitalistic groups, fiscal, banking, or manufacturing.”[92] What differentiates Jefferson from the successors is that he never claimed that his mediocre, un-democratic practice lived up to his lofty democratic ideals.
One of the strangest episodes at the origin of Jeffersonian Democracy was the role Hamilton played in Jefferson’s election. In the election of 1800, Jefferson ran as the presidential and Aaron Burr as the vice- presidential candidate of the opposition Republican Party (a party which has no links with the later “Republican Party”). Jefferson and Burr both received the same number of votes, and the votes of each surpassed those of the Federalist candidate John Adams. The drafters of electoral procedure had not foreseen such a possibility, and had not specified that a vice-presidential candidate could not assume the presidency even if he received as many (or more) votes than the winning presidential candidate. Consequently, unless Burr withdrew, the outcome of the “tie” would have to be decided in the House of Representatives. Burr did not withdraw—a fact for which Jefferson was never to forgive him. Thus the House of Representatives was to decide between Jefferson and Burr. Since the House was stacked with Hamiltonian Federalists who feared they’d be undone by the outspoken democrat Jefferson, the absurd outcome of this “election” might have been that Aaron Burr would be the third president of the United States—the man who, instead, appears in the storybooks of American history as a Traitor. But the absurdity did not take place, for the balance was shifted in Jefferson’s favor by Jefferson’s bitterest opponent, Alexander Hamilton. Perhaps this was Hamilton’s mode of repaying the debt he owed the one-time Secretary of State, for having “duped” him. The Father of American Capitalism did not suddenly become a champion of Jefferson. Far from it. “Perhaps myself the first, at some expense of popularity, to unfold the true character of Jefferson, it is too late for me to become his apologist; nor can I have any disposition to it. I admit that his politics are tinctured with fanaticism; that he is too much in earnest with his democracy...”[93] But Hamilton was a shrewd observer, and he knew that Burr might just as readily proclaim himself king as carry through a radical program of reform—and Hamilton feared the second possibility most. Burr’s political and social views were not known, but it was known that he acted with ruthless determination. On the hand, Jefferson’s democratic theories were widely known, and greatly feared by the capitalists. But Jefferson’s practice was known too well by Hamilton. “I have more than once made the reflection that, viewing himself as the reversioner, he was solicitous to come into the possession of a good estate.”[94] Hamilton, who had for so many years so effectively manipulated the security-holders in Congress, was above all a brilliant psychologist. He knew the precise relation between Jefferson’s professed ideals and his actions. “Nor is it true that Jefferson is zealot enough to do anything in pursuance of his principles which will contravene his popularity or his interest. He is as likely as any man I know to temporize—to calculate what will he likely to promote his own reputation and advantage; and the probable result of such a temper is the preservation of systems, though originally opposed, which, being once established, could not be overturned without danger to the person who did it. To my mind a true estimate of Mr. Jefferson’s character warrants the expectation of a temporizing rather than a violent system. That Jefferson has manifested a culpable predilection for France is certainly true; but I think it is a question whether it did not proceed quite as much from her popularity among us as from sentiment and, in proportion as that popularity is diminished, his zeal will cool.”[95] The Congressmen, who by then owed their power, fame and fortune to Hamilton, could not help but follow their leader another time. And the leader proved right once more. The great theorist of Democracy made no great effort to revive the democratic experiment on American soil.[96]
Jefferson had expressed great hopes for the “experiments in government” which America was to offer humanity. But, he said, “the contracted, English, half-lettered ideas of Hamilton, destroyed that hope in the bud.”[97] His friend John Taylor added, in the workjefferson so heartily endorsed, that “A government, a section of it, or a measure, founded in an evil moral principle, such as fraud, ambition, avarice or superstition, must produce correspondent effects, and defeat the end of government...”[98] Jefferson, however, did not commit himself as definitely as Taylor. He claimed that “we shall not live to see the result” of the experiment. “The grosser absurdities, such as hereditary magistracies, we shall see exploded in our day, long experience having already pronounced condemnation against them. But what is to be the substitute? This our children grandchildren will answer.”[99] He did not display the perception of his political opponent John Adams, who had warned “We do possess one material which actually constitutes an aristocracy that governs the nation. That material is wealth.”[100] Perhaps, by saying that his “grandchildren will answer,” Jefferson was suggesting that “it would be precipitate to detect and destroy the aristocracy of paper and patronage, in less time than was requisite to detect and destroy those of superstition and the feudal syetem.”[101] In any case, it would have been difficult for Jefferson to take the position that America’s democratic ideals had been betrayed, for then he would have had to confront his own statements in the Declaration of Independence, “that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”