The Genius of America (3 page)

But the fault, to paraphrase Cassius, is not in the government (or at least not only in the government). The government is doing what the framers designed it to do when a divided country “accepts no compromise.” It is waiting for compromise to seem more palatable than political warfare.

Americans are always free to reject what their forefathers bequeathed them. The South tried that once. The Constitution ingeniously includes a process for its own amendment, which could even include its own undoing if enough Americans agree.

Many Americans talk as if they want that now.
Power to the people
, a term coined by the left during the 1960s, has now become a slogan for disaffected groups of all political stripes. Their question is why should we have a government that frustrates the demands of so many people?

America's greatest strength and greatest weakness are the same thing. We are not burdened by a sense of history, our own or anyone else's. Our sense of the past is, to be polite, thin and growing thinner. The evidence for this is all around us. We opened this introduction with the third stanza of “America, the Beautiful” to make the point. Everyone knows the first stanza, with its appeal for God's grace and brotherhood. But virtually no one knows this later stanza, which honors the core idea of our Constitution. Our detachment from history has liberated us as Americans to focus forward. We look to the future in a way that many other societies envy. But it can also disconnect us, as is the case now, from an understanding that would comfort and guide us.

The framers did what they did for carefully thought out reasons. Their choices made sense then. We think understanding them better would help us understand our present predicament better. To do that, we need to revisit the most important eleven years in American history. Those are the years from 1776, when the colonies declared themselves free and independent, to 1787, when a group of men gathered in Philadelphia and, as William Bennett summed it up, “devised the most miraculous political document in history just as the young nation seemed to be falling apart.”

An extraordinary intellectual revolution took place in the minds of America's leaders during those years. In 1776, most of them believed that self-interest was a threat to democracy, but that Americans, free of England, would rise above their self-interests to create the new nation. By 1787, they had changed both ideas. They recognized that while America was a special land, Americans were like everyone else, motivated by their own interests. But they could still make their new nation work by reinventing democratic government to channel those self-interests into the larger good.

It is to the saga of those eleven years that we first turn.

Part One

THE INVENTION

It is evident that no other form [of government other than a Republic] would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolutions; or with that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom.

—J
AMES
M
ADISON
, 1788

1

THE MORE FATAL PROBLEM LIES
AMONG THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES

A
people
is traveling fast to destruction, when
individuals
consider
their
interests as distinct from those of the public. Such notions are fatal to their country, and themselves.

—J
OHN
D
ICKINSON
, A
MERICAN PATRIOT
, 1768

Experience has taught us, that men will not adopt & carry into execution, measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power.

—G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON
, A
MERICAN PATRIOT,
EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER

O
NE OF THE ENDURING
lessons of our own age is that what happens in men's minds can be more powerful and lasting than what happens on the field of battle. No event in history illustrates this any more clearly than the American Revolution. What we think of as the Revolution actually occurred in two parts, as one of the nation's founders, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, pointed out in 1787. The first was a military rebellion in which King George III lost control of part of his North American empire. It was a remarkable event, the first time in many years that a British army had been defeated. But for all that sense of a world turned upside down, this war might well have become a footnote to world history (if perhaps not British history) were it not for the second, intellectual, revolution that took place among the colonists between 1776 and 1787. Those eleven years are the most important in the history of the invention of the United States and quite possibly the most important in the history of the idea of democracy. Because during those years the framers of the Constitution redefined what it meant to be a democracy and what it would take to stay a democracy. They established something totally new. To understand the government they gave us, we need to understand the experience that caused them to create it.

Americans declared their independence from England in 1776, of course, and eleven years later, in 1787, wrote our Constitution. The two documents they produced are the touchstones of American democracy. Both are dedicated to the preservation of liberty. But the two documents enshrine remarkably different notions of how to do that. In 1776, the founders were focused on throwing off bonds and giving the people (at least white males with property) the right to participate in the political system. By 1787, the framers understood that liberty could not survive unless joined to a system that could balance one group's self-interests against another's.

Events changed the framers' minds. Human nature wasn't quite what they had thought and hoped. In 1776, on the eve of independence and war, Americans viewed themselves as capable of suppressing their individual self-interest for the public good, in the conduct of their public affairs. They called this ability public virtue. America was a blank slate, Tom Paine declared in 1776, and Americans would write with virtue on it. All they needed to do was declare liberty from the corrupt and aging empire that subjugated them.

By 1787, the framers along with many Americans had a different self-assessment. Americans, it turned out, were like people everywhere and at all times, mostly self-interested and self-regarding and, in the public arena, usually unable to suppress their self-interests for the greater good.

What explains such a dramatic reversal of their view of human nature in a mere eleven years? In a word: reality. The reality of American conduct during the war and the ensuing efforts to build the new nation had demonstrated to the founders that self-interest, not public virtue, was the citizenry's most compelling motivation. Simple liberty from Great Britain had not been adequate to ensure success of the new nation. Real people simply could not sustain the life of public virtue envisioned in the revolutionary fervor.

This change of view would have a profound effect on the shape of our government as laid out in the Constitution. Americans needed a new form of government based on this new acceptance of what people are really like. “But what is government,” James Madison, the father of the Constitution, wrote in 1788, “but the greatest of all reflections of human nature?”

A U
TOPIAN
M
OVEMENT

Gordon Wood, the eminent historian, described the Revolution as “one of the great utopian movements of American history.” This sounds puzzling at first, because we have come to think of the founders as such practical, pragmatic men. But Wood is starting the conversation in the mid-1700s with an examination of the decision to rebel in the first place. That decision was built, centrally, on a belief that human beings can improve. Or, more specifically, that Americans in their new land could be better citizens—
more virtuous
is how they would say it—than they had been under their British rulers. Virtue was an important political concept to the colonists. Their reading of history, particularly classical history, led them to conclude that liberty was “fragile” and required public virtue for its maintenance. Public virtue was an ability to see the larger, common good and sacrifice some of your own interests to achieve it. “When virtue is banished, ambition invades the hearts of those who are capable of receiving it, and avarice possesses the whole community,” observed the philosopher Montesquieu. It was self-interest, the decline of virtue, which had destroyed the Greek and Roman republics. Without public virtue, tyranny would prevail, the founders believed, but with it greatness was possible. The framers themselves would come to recognize the utopian nature of this faith.

Avarice possessing the whole community would not be a bad description of America in the 1760s and early 1770s. It certainly was not a harmonious place. The entire country seemed to be in a self-destructive uproar. The colonists were “a quarrelsome, litigious, divisive lot of people.” People seemed to sue each other “almost as regularly as they ate or slept.” Such contentiousness also marked the behavior within and between the colonies. Western North Carolina went to war with eastern North Carolina. The farmers of western Massachusetts were at odds with the commercial interests of Boston. Among the colonies there were constant disputes over boundaries. For example, rival settlers from Pennsylvania and Connecticut almost shed blood over claims to land in northeastern Pennsylvania. Discord among colonists was so prevalent that even some of the most independence-leaning leaders saw it as a threatening problem. James Otis, a Massachusetts revolutionary, warned in 1765, “Were these colonies left to themselves tomorrow, America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion.”

Yet despite this discord, over the next ten years, the colonists moved steadily if not inexorably toward separation from England. How was this possible? In large measure it was because they believed the chaos, the decaying virtue, was caused by their relationship to Great Britain. England was their prime modern-day example of a fallen country, like the Greeks and Romans. As viewed from the Atlantic seaboard, the English had dissipated the liberty brought by the Glorious Revolution (1688) through an obsessive desire for wealth, power and position, social rank and refinement. This pursuit of self-interest, according to John Dickinson, had sunk the English into a “tameness and supineness of spirit” and, as a result, servitude to both Parliament and king. Dickinson worried the same thing was happening already in America.

Among the leaders of the American Revolution, John Dickinson was an important figure. He was involved in every debate from the opposition to the stamp tax in 1765 to the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. He drafted the Articles of Confederation, America's first, ultimately failed, constitution. Yet he has been largely lost to us, compared to the prominence of his colleagues. Perhaps that is because he was more conservative than some of them. He was a forceful defender of American rights, yet until the bitter end he argued for reconciliation with Great Britain. On July 2, 1776, he said that declaring independence was premature (although once done, he immediately joined the Revolutionary Army).

But to understand the ideas that motivated the colonists in those years, we must excavate John Dickinson's powerful and articulate voice. He was a master wordsmith. Indeed, it was Dickinson, not Thomas Jefferson, who was known as “the penman of the Revolution.” In the prewar years, he was the most brilliantly articulate spokesman for that faith in public virtue that gave Americans the confidence to rebel.

John Dickinson was a lawyer by trade, an American “aristocrat” by birth and a conciliator by nature. In 1765, he had gained a national reputation, at the age of thirty-three, as a leader of the resistance to the Stamp Act, England's imposition of a direct tax on such things as newspapers, almanacs, legal papers, and playing cards. The colonists won the Stamp Act fight, but almost immediately Parliament enacted new measures that Dickinson considered a new threat to American freedom. The Quartering Act required the colonies to house and supply British troops. The Restraining Act suspended the New York State Assembly for refusing to obey the Quartering Act. And the Townsend Acts imposed various duties and tariffs on colonial trade.

In the winter of 1767, Dickinson published fierce arguments against these burdens. More important, in terms of the intellectual evolution of America's ideas of government and public virtue, he lectured the colonies themselves for their poor response to these acts, particularly the Restraining Act. They had been selfish, he believed, refusing to support each other. “He certainly is not a wise man, who folds his arms, and reposes himself at home, viewing, with unconcern, the flames that have invaded his neighbor's house.” This lack of concern of one colony for another, one group of persons for, echoed what Dickinson believed had undermined liberty in both England and in all of history's republics. The colonies needed to be warned that selfishness, failure to stand together, and failure to display public virtue were threats to liberty.

Dickinson's medium was a series of letters, titled “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies.” Dickinson was a farmer in only the loosest sense. He was actually one of the largest property owners in Pennsylvania, wealth he inherited on his father's death in 1760. But that detail did not interfere with the enormous impact of his writings.

First published in the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
between December 2, 1767, and February 15, 1768, these letters proved so popular that they were quickly reprinted in all but four of the twenty-three colonial newspapers and in pamphlet form. They contained a sharp critique of British policy and the deterioration of British politics. But more, they are a brilliantly articulate record of the belief in the importance of public virtue that was taking hold among the intellectual classes of revolutionary-era America. In his letter of January 15, 1768, he described the fatal vice of the English people that most Americans believed was destroying English freedom: