American Experiment (47 page)

In due course, Monroe’s dictum would be sanctified and converted into the Monroe Doctrine. Some Americans had reservations. The message was flamboyantly unilateral. Having cold-shouldered Canning, the President was not inviting any other nation to share the burden of preventing the hemisphere from being further tainted by Europe. No consultations were held with Latin American governments. Indeed, the doctrine called for self-restraint on the part of the United States, but in Europe, not in Latin America; presumably the
yanqui
could intervene to the south as much as he wished. Efforts by some Latin American representatives to convert the
doctrine into a defensive alliance for American security were rebuffed in Washington. Facing Europe, the doctrine was isolationist; facing south, it could be deeply interventionist, allowing Washington to act against European intervention—and Latin American revolutions?—at will. It became apparent later that the Holy Allies lacked the means, and perhaps even the necessary will, to intervene effectively against Latin American revolutionaries.

In many ways the doctrine was simply a reassertion of old policies, such as Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances,” and the No-Transfer principle, which had forbidden the transfer, by one European power to another, of any possession in the New World. Yet it embraced new and even revolutionary potentials, both generous and ominous, especially in a revolutionary age, for it contained the seeds of future pan-Americanism and the recognition of the rights of revolutionaries. Much would depend on Washington’s interpretation, evolution, application, and enforcement of the doctrine. None could foretell all this, but it might at least have been possible for a Latin American critic to say in the 1820s what Salvador de Madariaga wrote in 1962: “I conclude that the Monroe Doctrine is not a doctrine but a dogma…not one dogma but two, to wit: the dogma of the infallibility of the American President and the dogma of the immaculate conception of American foreign policy.”

John Quincy Adams, of course, would have agreed with neither proposition. For him, foreign policy emerged not out of pure, ethical considerations, but out of the most hardheaded analysis of a nation’s true self-interest. And foreign policy making was not merely a presidential effort, but the product of intensive discussion and collaboration among cabinet members, congressmen, and diplomats—the product of collective leadership.

Even these precepts, however, were not enough to define the American way of peace in the 1820s. The founders of the American republic during the half century after the start of the Revolution had shouldered the double burden of organizing the constitutional foundations of a lasting republic and of developing a strategy for protecting the existence and future expansion of that republic in a predatory world. The first effort resulted in a written constitution, the second in a series of precedents, actions, laws, speeches, understandings, and diplomatic notes. By the 1820s these constituted a body of thought and action embracing the principles and practices of sovereign independence to protect the liberties of free peoples, abstention from the everyday alliances and collisions of European affairs, freedom of commerce and navigation on the high seas, self-determination of peoples, especially in Latin America, and non-intervention and other
ideas contained in Monroe’s dictum. But leaders of American opinion—teachers, theologians, ministers, scholars, editorialists, assorted reformers and humanitarians, including some men in government—believed also in certain moral precepts, such as international arbitration, pan-Americanism, globalism, anti-imperialism, suppression of the international trade in slaves, and, above all, aid to people seeking liberation from tyranny.

The political dilemma for American policy makers was not in choosing between a hardheaded, “practical” strategy and a moralistic or idealistic one; it was all too easy for them to pursue policies of narrow national self-interest and clothe them in the rhetoric of benevolence and altruism, as Western leaders had done for centuries. Rather, the dilemma lay in how to follow narrow policies of self-protection when large sections of public opinion wanted not only to protect their nation but also to help other peoples—especially people apparently struggling for liberty—mainly out of altruism but also on the theory that in the long run such help might serve their own nation’s paramount interests. Jefferson was the very model of a President who spoke in moral terms, but he
acted
often on the basis of the most
Realpolitik
if not ruthless conception of national self-interest. Alexander Hamilton won an early and deserved reputation as a theorist and practitioner of
Realpolitik
, but even Hamilton had to allow for consideration of Americans’ values. Thus, in rebutting those who wanted to help revolutionary France against England because they felt that America should be faithful to treaty obligations, grateful to a country that had helped Americans gain independence, and helpful to French republicans and revolutionaries, Hamilton argued that nations help other nations mainly out of self-interest, that the rule of morality between nations was different from that between individuals, that nations should indulge the “emotions of generosity and benevolence” only within strict bounds. But even Hamilton had to grapple with the issue of “how far
regard to the cause of Liberty
ought to induce the United States to take part with France in the present war”—which he did by questioning whether the cause of France was truly the cause of liberty, and whether the liberty of Americans would truly be at stake in the event of the fall of France. Thus, the issue was not the value of national safety versus the value of liberty, but establishing priorities, institutions, mechanisms, and rationales in serving both the value of safety and the value of liberty.

It was the genius of John Quincy Adams, and to a lesser extent James Monroe, to know just where they stood on this issue. Adams’ great accomplishment lay not so much in shaping the essentials of what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine, for those essentials grew out of earlier American doctrine and practice, but in drawing the line between
protecting the immediate national interest and intervening, if only rhetorically, in European affairs in defense of Greek, Spanish, and Italian rebels and liberationists. In Adams, as Hans Morgenthau later wrote, we are “in the presence of a statesman who had been reared in the realist tradition of the first period of American foreign policy, who had done the better part of his work of statecraft in an atmosphere saturated with Jeffersonian principles, and who had achieved the merger of these two elements of his experience into a harmonious whole.”

Still, Adams could resolve the apparent dilemma of realism versus moralism in part because he had a somewhat shrunken and attenuated concept of liberty; as Morgenthau said, between his “moral principles and the traditional interest of the United States there was hardly ever a conflict.” How would the American way of peace fare when men in power had a more generous view of the necessary dimensions of liberty, when continental and global expansion would bring the nation into closer involvement with the self-interest of other nations and the wants and needs and aspirations of other peoples, when the nation’s self-interest and self-esteem would become—not least in the eyes of leaders including Adams himself—entangled with the burning issue of the slave trade, and when many Americans sought, even under new conditions, to return to the “old” Virginians’ ample view of America as primarily the vineyard of liberty, as a decisive experiment for mankind?

James Monroe’s own venture in a government of harmony, far above the din of party combat, ended badly. Not only did the Republican party dissolve into numberless factions fiercely contending for power and pelf in the presidential elections of 1824; Monroe could not even keep the peace in his own official family. During his last weeks in office he had a visit from Treasury Secretary Crawford. Long ailing, and now bitter over his frustrated presidential hopes, the Georgian pressed Monroe hard over some customs officials Crawford wanted appointed in northern ports. Why was the President procrastinating? he demanded. When Monroe explained that members of Congress had asked for a delay in order to supply some information, Crawford erupted in accusations of presidential dilly-dallying and indecisiveness. The President heatedly demanded that Crawford treat him with respect. Crawford raised his cane as if to strike the President, crying out, “You damned infernal old scoundrel!”

Monroe seized tongs from the fireplace, holding Crawford at bay and threatening to have him turned out. The Secretary suddenly backed down,
made his apologies, and departed. The two left office on March 4, 1825, without having spoken to each other again.

Evidently his Virginia birth had not made Crawford into a Virginia gentleman, but in any event the Virginia presidential dynasty ended that March day when Monroe left office. A few months later the pilgrimage to Monticello of General Lafayette, the Guest of the Nation, brought a final, and poignant rallying of the dynasty. Jefferson and Madison were there. Never having really retired, both had been feverishly involved in collecting a small but illustrious faculty for the new university in Charlottesville. Planning the architecture and pedagogy of the university had given Jefferson a brief golden autumn in his life. “He is now eighty-two years old, very little altered from what he was ten years ago, very active, lively, and happy, riding from ten to fifteen miles every day, and talking without the least restraint, very pleasantly, upon all subjects,” wrote a visitor, a young Harvard professor. Jefferson had become much feebler a few months later when he greeted Lafayette, Madison, and Monroe at Monticello, in the stifling Virginia heat of August, but the talk of American and French life and politics ran until late at night.

Perhaps the three Virginia ex-Presidents sensed that this was the last time they would meet, but they could hardly have known that the Virginia dynasty was at an end. For half a century or more, the Old Dominion had supplied cadre after cadre of luminous national leadership—from the earlier generation of Washington, George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Wythe to the last one of James Monroe and his contemporaries. During that half century the commonwealth had incubated not only four Presidents for a total of thirty-two years, and a Chief Justice who would last thirty years, but a host of secondary leaders—cabinet members, congressional luminaries, diplomats, scientists, generals, explorers, judges, political theorists, envoys—who expressed, politically and intellectually and culturally, the collective genius of Virginia both in the commonwealth and in the country. And undergirding this elite were, as Richard Beale Davis found, “at least several hundred” persons who developed “the political mind through which Virginia made herself felt.”

Suddenly this rich vein of creative genius came to an end. Never since, during the past century and a half and more, has a Virginia leader been elected President. Men from other states made up the new cadres of governance. How explain the Old Dominion’s sunburst of leadership during the nation’s founding years?

Intellectual leadership may flourish in cultures where at least a few persons enjoy enough leisure and enough security from economic harassment to allow the fruitful reading, conversing, corresponding, writing, and
reflecting necessary for disciplined and creative thought. The plantation life of Virginia provided such a culture for the masters. Neither the long trips by horseback or jolting carriage nor the slowness of the post stopped the elite from exchanging ideas by mail or in meetings, or from striking sparks off one another. Intellectual leadership in Virginia was a collective enterprise. Not only the Jeffersons and Madisons but the run-of-the-plantation Virginia gentlemen took pains to be well educated and informed. Robert Carter III subscribed to British and American journals and built a library of 1,500 volumes, ranging in subject from music to religion to politics; he read avidly and lent his books to his friends. John Bernard, visiting the young republic in 1797, had found men “leading secluded lives in the woods of Virginia perfectly
au fait
as to the literary, dramatic, and personal gossip of London and Paris.” Wrote one planter to an English friend, better “never born than ill bred.”

The country lives of these gentlemen embraced a “curious contradiction,” as Louis Morton observed. Carter and his friends thoroughly enjoyed the rich offerings of Virginia’s rural life—hunting, racing, fishing, riding, drinking, gambling, cockfighting. But Carter’s Nomini Hall overflowed with the sounds of learned discussions and lively music, of polite socializing and stately dancing. There was a deeper contradiction. The sons of the Virginia elite grew up in gracious homes, accustomed to the services of slaves and to the finest imports: Irish and Scotch linens, Madeira wine, German beer, French silks, shoes, and hats. But tobacco, the underpinning of much of this wealth, was notoriously unstable in price and unpredictable in yield. Some planters relied on their Scottish stewards—“factors”—to handle their business affairs, but many others employed their own intellectual resources to meet the challenge. Tales of Jefferson’s scientific farming are commonplace—but Jefferson himself regarded Madison as Virginia’s best farmer. Robert Carter devoted long months to personal supervision of his sprawling estates, as did John Randolph, one of the few planters ever to clear himself of debt.

Perhaps the contradiction itself—the interest in intellectual pursuits and the need to master prosaic business matters—helps explain the full flowering of the cultural life and the political genius of the Virginia elites. The conflict between the two ways of life helped produce a brilliant hybrid, enabling the scientific minds and philosophical pens of Randolphs and Jeffersons and a host of less-known men to turn out treatises on animal husbandry and crop rotation, as well as on literature, government, and public affairs.

It took powerful feelings of duty, moral and religious responsibility, and self-efficacy and purposefulness to draw youths away from the diverse and
diverting life style of the Old Dominion. Here their education often played a key role. These Virginians, said Henry Adams in an unusual tribute from the hub of the intellectual universe, “were inferior to no class of Americans in the sort of education then supposed to make refinement.…Those whom Liancourt called ‘men of the first class’ were equal to any standard of excellence known to history.” Colonial gentlemen believed in rigorously educating their sons in mathematics, classics, modern languages, perhaps some history and philosophy. The Virginia scion was favored with much individual attention; it was common, Edmund S. Morgan observed, for students to be educated up to the level of their particular needs and abilities. Sometimes planters would send their sons to small private schools—there were no public ones. Others would hire a young tutor to live in, sharing the family’s meals and social activities, and occupying an ambiguous position between social equal and mere employee. Some sons went abroad to study at Cambridge or Oxford; more often they went off to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, or to William and Mary, which gave its students considerable choice in their plan of study and rightfully boasted of its diverse and brilliant faculty. In the South as in the North, women had little share in such educational opportunity.