American Experiment (23 page)

Paine and his fellow radicals rejected this view of human nature and the Whiggish apparatus that went with it. Perhaps the people of the Old World, divided into unequal estates and corrupted by their rulers, were prone to depravity and unreason, they granted, but Americans were different. Farmers and mechanics and all others who wore “leathern aprons,” being more equal and fraternal and less grasping and competitive, were more reasonable and virtuous. Because of his faith in human nature and the perfectibility of man, as Eric Foner has said, “Paine could reject the need for governmental checks and balances.”

What kind of system, then, did the radicals want? Simple, the radicals answered—a government directly representing the people, a government mirroring the wants of the people, a government that could act quickly to meet the needs of the people, a government constantly renewed by the people so that it would never become remote from them. Under a people’s government the people’s liberty would be secure. It was Mercy Warren’s kind of polity.

How establish such a government? The Philadelphia radicals had scored a decisive coup by waging a grass-roots, populist campaign and thus gaining control of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention held in 1776 as part of the breakaway from Britain. Then they proceeded to write perhaps the most democratic, most directly representative constitution of the founding period. The new charter granted the right to vote to every white male over twenty-one. It abolished property qualifications for officeholding. It gave the state assembly control over the government of Philadelphia. And—by far the most important—it established a unicameral legislature, elected annually, with rotation in office. The new assembly would be open to the press and people, its votes published weekly, its records available to the public. In one sweep the colonial gentry had lost its political power.

The implications of the radicals’ constitution were frightening to Whig and conservative alike. Any year they were so minded, a majority of the voters in Pennsylvania—perhaps a majority made up of the uneducated and the unwashed—could pass whatever laws it wished, with no power in the executive to veto or in the judiciary to void. Conservatives feared the powerful currents of egalitarianism loose in Philadelphia in this first year of independence. What if the many ganged up on the few? Did not the new constitution itself bar the imprisonment of debtors not guilty of fraud,
allow people to hunt on unenclosed land, provide for schools with low fees throughout the state? What other “leveling” measures might be passed?

The radicals rejected these fears as groundless in a free society. How could any kind of republican object to putting power squarely into the hands of the directly elected representatives of the people? Indeed, the new constitution placed a limit on the number of terms a legislator could serve; that, plus annual elections, would cause legislators to be constantly refreshed by immersion in the grass roots and thus maintain their ties to the people. And if they did, the radicals contended, the Pennsylvania legislature would be a safe depository of power because it would directly reflect and embody the people’s virtue, sense of good, concern for the whole public, willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of all. These public virtues grew out of people’s private virtues of tolerance, understanding, benevolence, enlightenment. How could an assembly representing such virtues be harmful to the public interest?

Opponents of the new constitution flatly rejected this whole premise. They simply did not share the radicals’ faith in the people’s wisdom, virtue, and benevolence. So the radicals would lodge supreme power in the people? But
any
sovereign power must be guarded against; whether “that power is lodged in the hands of one or many, the danger is equally great.” The new constitution presupposed “perfect equality, and equal distribution of property, wisdom and virtue, among the inhabitants of the state.” The anti-radicals would not assume this. They argued that the people would deprive themselves of their own liberty, as well as others of theirs. Behind this contention was a deep fear of the people—of their leveling tendencies, their ignorance, their bumptiousness, their eternal desire for more.

None expressed these doubts better than Benjamin Rush, who soon began to have reservations about the radical constitution. “Absolute power should never be trusted to man,” Rush wrote the year after adoption of the new constitution. He actually meant
men
, no matter how many, for there was no safety in numbers. “Although we understood perfectly the principles of Liberty,” Rush wrote in 1787, “yet most of us were ignorant of the forms and combinations of power in republics.”

Such fears led to a relentless drive against the 1776 constitution throughout the following decade. To destroy the “constitution of the people” the anti-constitutionalists went to the people themselves. Meeting in the City Tavern to plan strategy, they organized a grass-roots effort to call a new constitutional convention. The press was enlisted; one newspaper warned that Philadelphia would not be chosen as the federal capital if the state legislature remained unicameral. The anti-constitutionalists
recruited candidates for the convention, organized election tickets, and won control of the convention. Soon Pennsylvania had a new constitution, replete with separation of powers and checks and balances—most notably, with a bicameral legislature and a strong, independently elected governor.

So Pennsylvania’s brief experiment in popular government, in majority rule, had come to an end, as did the reign of the radicals. It would live on only as a memory that might be invoked in some future era of conflict and crisis. That rule in Pennsylvania had seen no tyranny of the majority, nor had the reign of the radicals brought radical government. Property had not been confiscated, churches leveled, merchants taxed to death. Life had gone on pretty much as before. Perhaps the radicals should have changed things more fundamentally. By the time the federal government was established in Philadelphia it was too late. Pennsylvanians lived under both state and federal governments hemmed in by checks and balances. They were doubly safe against the tyranny of the people.

But Philadelphia would be experiencing more change in the 1790s. Its population continued to expand. Craft workers started to unite in local unions. Voting participation doubled. Local political cadres began to organize grass-roots parties. For almost a decade congressmen and federal officials lived among memories of old conflicts and amid the pressures of new ones. The new conflicts challenged the Constitution of 1787, with its carefully separated powers. It remained to be seen whether a constitutional system so fragmented and inhibited could deal with rising change and conflict on a national level.

The nation would also confront formidable power abroad—and that would raise the question whether the President of the United States would need more executive authority in dealing with prime ministers and potentates.

John Adams entered the presidency at a time when relationships with the French were rapidly deteriorating. Washington had sent James Monroe to Paris with the hope that he could reconcile the French to Jay’s treaty, but even as good a Virginia Republican as Monroe could not placate the increasingly xenophobic and bellicose French government. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had taken Monroe’s place, but Adams had been in office only ten days when he was informed that the Directory had sent Pinckney packing too. The new President had already made clear in his Inaugural Address that the government would be in peril when a single vote could be influenced by “foreign nations, by flattery or menaces; by fraud or
violence; by terror, intrigue, or venality”—an obvious thrust at the likes of Genêt and Adet. Now with the rebuff to Pinckney, and more news of French seizure of American ships in the West Indies, Adams faced a dire choice between peace and war.

He first turned to his Cabinet—a natural move, except that this was not his Cabinet but Washington’s and increasingly Hamilton’s. In order to unite Federalist ranks and strengthen himself with the Hamiltonian wing of the party, Adams had asked Washington’s Cabinet to stay on. This meant keeping on such high Federalists as Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, a Salem lawyer and merchant as proud and haughty as the Cabots though not as rich; Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, a Connecticut farmer and banker, who had proved himself a good administrator under Washington; and Secretary of War James McHenry of Maryland. When members of the Cabinet promptly turned to Hamilton in New York for advice on how to respond to the President, he seemed more concerned with domestic Federalist party strategy than with foreign policy. Hamilton urged his friends to press for further negotiations with Paris in order to combat Republican charges that the Federalists wanted war with France. They passed on this advice as though it were their own. Assured of backing from leaders of both parties, Adams convened a special session of Congress, which he asked to enact and fund defense measures and to approve a special mission to France.

Making up that mission was in itself an exercise in diplomacy for the new President. For the sake of weight and balance the mission should consist of three persons—but what three could undertake such a crucial and delicate assignment? It was agreed that Pinckney would be sent back, and Adams would have liked to appoint both Hamilton and Madison, but he encountered resistance to this idea. John Marshall of Virginia, an experienced lawyer and moderate Federalist, was agreed on, despite his lack of diplomatic experience. The third place Adams filled with a curious choice: Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Considered by some Federalists as unreliable and even a “hidden Jacobin,” but too much of a gentleman to enjoy the company of Massachusetts fishermen and rural Republicans, Gerry followed an independent course—which was the main reason Adams trusted him and turned to him for advice.

Awaiting the mission in Paris was Count Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, a man who personified all that Americans suspected in the diplomats of the Old World. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had won a reputation as a promiscuous, pleasure-loving rake, without scruples or morals—a “cloven footed Devil,” a diplomat’s wife had called him. He had spent two years in prudent exile in the United States and
professed to know Americans well—perhaps too well, as he claimed that they pursued gold far more than liberty. On gold the French foreign minister was something of an expert, for he had amassed tens of millions of francs by shaking down European kings, dukes, and even a grand vizier.

Talleyrand did not disappoint. After being allowed to cool their heels for days, and after being informed that the Directory was outraged by Adams’ Inaugural Address, Pinckney and company were approached by Talleyrand’s agent, who whispered that in order to sweeten the Directory, a small
douceur
of twelve million livres or more would be necessary. The Americans rejected the proposition. Later, when the agent threatened war, Marshall replied that his country would defend itself.

“You do not speak to the point,” Talleyrand’s man exclaimed. “It is expected that you will offer money…What is your answer?”

“It is no; no;” Pinckney said; “not a sixpence.” Later a newspaperman converted this remark into a grander retort: “Millions for defense, but not one cent for Tribute.”

The long months of awaiting the Pinckney mission’s report had been a wretched time for John Adams. The Republicans in Congress fought almost every proposal he made, and he could not depend on Federalists or even his Cabinet, as Hamilton continued to interfere in Administration affairs from New York. Bache and other Republican editors flogged him in print as hard as they had Washington, and even though Adams pretended not to notice the scribblers, he in fact read them and was incensed by them. His relationship with Jefferson cooled again as the Vice-President, confined in Philadelphia by his Senate duties, was drawn more and more into the role of party leadership. Lacking firm congressional, party, or even cabinet backing, Adams turned for support to Abigail Adams.

He had begun his presidential days without his lady, as Washington had done without his wife, but like Washington he soon brought his wife to the capital. More outspoken than John, at least to her friends, more likely to suspect plots, even more aroused than he by the venom of Bache and the other “Jacobins,” the First Lady followed events closely and conducted a wide correspondence, while managing the President’s house and even the farm in Quincy from afar. There was hardly an important matter the President failed to discuss with her, though she served mainly to comfort his raveled ego and bolster his views. In their closeness they still managed to keep a little distance. On coming to his office one morning she found him reading a letter to her from Mary Cranch; she promptly lectured him on the sanctity of private correspondence.

The political doldrums in Philadelphia ended suddenly in early March 1798 with the arrival of the first dispatches from the Pinckney mission.
Reading them, Adams did not know whether to be more furious at the French or at the emissaries for their “timorous” behavior—a result, obviously, of sending amateurs abroad. The President drafted a war message to Congress that flayed French and Republicans alike, but he had second thoughts. His Cabinet urged caution, and Adams feared that publishing the mission’s dispatches would overstimulate the public, and even jeopardize the lives of the three emissaries in France. In a mild final version he rebuked the French and called for stepped-up coastal defenses and protection of American shipping, including the arming of merchantmen.

Adams’ action was far too little for the high Federalists, far too much for the Republican opposition. At this point the Republicans fell into a trap largely of their own making. Not satisfied with blocking some of Adams’ defense measures, they demanded to see the actual dispatches from the mission in Paris, on the grounds that the saber-rattling Adams had exaggerated the hostility of Talleyrand and the Directory. While some Federalists baited the trap by joining in the call for the papers, and while some of the shrewder Republicans held back fearing a ruse, the bulk of the Republicans in the House voted through a demand for the documents. Forced to do what he had wanted to do from the start, Adams sent the dispatches to Congress after substituting the letters, X, Y, and Z for the names of Talleyrand’s agents.