CHAPTER THREE

History as Process vs. History as Order: Generativity, 1789–1815

Among the myriad responsibilities of parenthood in revolutionary America was the education of children. For the upper and middle classes, education absorbed a substantial portion of family time and resources. While private tutors and public academies flourished after the war, parents still played a visible role in setting and monitoring educational goals for their offspring. In a broader sense, transmission of the mores and values of a culture to its inheritors ensures its survival. No generation embraced this doctrine more fervently than the young men of 1776. Among them, Jefferson founded a university so that republican ideals might be inculcated among the talented young; Rush sponsored academies for women to spread the revolutionary message; Jay and Adams prepared guides for the education of American youth abroad; and Webster fabricated spellers, readers, and other educational materials for the next generation. The Revolution had stimulated “a rethinking and recasting” of the goals of education—politicizing the schools and refitting them as factories of republicanism. A new era in education was at hand, in which the generation of 1776 had a large stake.¹

Although the results of their enthusiastic efforts at reform were not uniformly pleasing to them—riots at colleges, financial difficulties, and lingering incompetence at lower levels of instruction brought cries of dismay from the would-be reformers—the revolutionary generation continued to insist upon a national commitment to improvement and expansion of education. For Noah Webster, whose financial prospects depended upon this project, an obvious motivation was private gain. Why did the other young revolutionaries of 1776 find the need for new and better schools so compelling? Why did these otherwise busy men spend so much time and energy on educational matters? One clue is telling. During the 1770s and early 1780s education was not so high upon their list of priorities; later in their lives, it assumed far greater importance. An answer is obvious: they became much more concerned with education when they themselves became parents, particularly when their children were old enough to read. With children whose education they directed and could take pride in surrounding them, they began to examine more general educational questions. Within their sitting rooms and libraries and, when public duties separated them from family, from distant places, they prompted, guided, commended, chided, and basked in their children’s educational progress.²

There comes a time in the life of a mature adult when the urge and opportunity to transmit personal experience and ideals dominates other interpersonal relationships. A parent is faced with the task of passing on experience. The danger is stagnation—an inability to reach, communicate, and instill one’s own values in the hearts and minds of one’s children, with the terrible consequence that the next generation will be unprepared to deal with the challenges it faces. The late 1780s and early 1790s found the generation of 1776 acutely sensitive to the challenge of transmitting their values to others. Their own parents were dead or retired, making the once-young men of 1776 into the heads of families and the leaders of the nation. They were now truly the “fathers” of the republic, and they bore the parental burden of ensuring that republicanism survived. The new Constitution was an expression of that yearning, and their public vows under it to “preserve and defend” federal government echoed and reinforced their roles as mature parents.³

As in their past personal quests for identity and intimacy, the onus of generativity for the generation of 1776 was dual. Their private strivings invariably became the motive for public activity. As they tutored their own children in the subject matter of republicanism, so they assumed the duty of rearing up a nation of young republicans. This is why they took the time to aid infant colleges and support public expenditures for schools. Again, they did not—could not—separate the private and the public.

A large measure of the educational interest of these men revolved about the discipline of history. They made history, watched themselves making history, admired themselves making history, and confidently lectured on its lessons to younger audiences. They believed that without a full understanding of American history, and the revolutionary experience at its center, the young would not be able to preserve republican liberties and institutions. “A few pieces of American history,” Barlow boasted to Webster, were a far better tutor of truth than any other text. In letters that may seem stuffy today but were penned with concern and affection, Adams, Jefferson, Jay, and their comrades urged a similar course of study upon their sons and daughters. Not content with private tutorials, for their pupils were all young Americans, the generation of 1776 sponsored and engaged in public historical disquisitions. Their goal was obvious: the young must learn from the sacrifices and achievements of the old. As Ramsay wrote to Jeremy Belknap, “I wish such men [as created the Massachusetts Historical Society] could be found who would take equal pains in writing the history of each state. We are one people in name but do not know half enough of each other . . . to cement our friendship and intercourse.” Barlow insisted as he grew older that everyone, old or young, ought to go back “to the school” to learn the lessons of American history. As in previous challenges to their sense of self and their future plans, history transcended the role of rhetorical tool and tutor; it became a cry from the heart. The young men of 1776, who had first announced their full adulthood with manifestos of American historical independence, in the 1790s attempted to perpetuate the republic with historical confessions. At the end of the decade, Marshall pleaded that history, “if we value it rightly and support it firmly,” would preserve the new generation from “misery, division and civil wars.” They enfolded autobiography within historical discourses, for the history of the Revolution was now their history, a narrative of their works, and their greatest gift to their children.⁴

The once-young men of 1776 were not the first to face generative challenges at this stage of the life cycle. The first Puritan settlers instructed their sons and daughters in the special duties of tending the “garden in the wilderness.” History has always been a part of these lessons, though the text might vary from one generation to the next. Oral history and written history are the primary transmitters of human experience. The revolutionaries’ historical didacticism was not unusual, but what they did with American history in later middle age was unexpected and dramatic.

The eruption of the French Revolution put these Founding Fathers (a term that by then fit this generation) to an immediate test of pedagogic commitment in its largest sense. In 1789 and 1790, Americans could not stop their ears to the French appeal. Jefferson and Paine in France, American visitors throughout Europe, and French spokesmen in America shouted the message: France was following in American footsteps. Controversy over policy toward France among the revolutionaries of 1776 combined with the challenge of generativity to force a subterranean rift over the meaning of American experience to rise to the surface. The revolutionary generation was driven to focus upon an unresolved dilemma: was their own Revolution truly finished? In particular, was the Revolution a process—one giant step forward on the long road toward fuller equality and liberty—or was it a conservative effort to purify and guard an older order? Did transmission of republican values to a new generation of Americans depend upon further domestic revolution—more change, experiment, and reform—or did it depend upon the conservation and perfection of established institutions? The French upheaval, followed by war between France and England, made the issue unavoidable. The generation of 1776 came to believe that failure to define the limits of our Revolution would result in stagnation of republican institutions and the waste of the previous decades’ effort. The choice of strategy was momentous, both from a personal and a political perspective, and under the pressure of the French controversy, the historiographical consensus of the 1780s crumbled. Factions rose to do battle over the meaning of the American past. Parties of liberty and order, as John Quincy Adams later recalled, fiercely contested disparate visions of American history. No mere scholarly difference of opinion, their struggle over historical ideas reflected the generation’s attempt to grapple with the challenge of maturity, to pass on the true heritage of the Revolution to the next generation.⁵

To be sure, the ideological split over the reception of French revolutionary thought in America was not caused by the increasing maturity of the generation of 1776. Nor did historical concerns dictate how Jefferson or Adams would regard the French constitution of 1789 or the later regicide. Age, life cycle, and historical ideas fit into complex patterns of motivation. The point is that in the 1790s the stage of life of the revolutionary generation of 1776 and the demands of the French radicals combined to produce an unexpected and (from the Americans’ perspective) unexplored shift in their historical thinking, a shift that should not be minimized in importance. The partisan issues of the 1790s are so familiar and the urgency and energy of the protagonists so enervating that one may lose sight of the importance and novelty of the subject at hand. It is nothing less than the tearing of revolutionary historical thought into two distinct and antagonistic parts, not to be reunited in the lifetimes of these Founding Fathers. On the surface, destruction of three decades of literary and intellectual labor is surely a puzzle. During the crisis, the revolutionary war, and the years of constitution-making, the young men of the Revolution insisted that American history was a separate, unique saga, incomparable and praiseworthy. It was a versatile, appropriate thesis, for it bound together the different states and regions, as well as rationalizing the speed and violence of the Revolution. This view of history was a foundation for emotional unity and national scholarship. The 1790s witnessed the mature revolutionaries’ demolition of this historical thesis, laying bare with almost compulsive ferocity the latent conflict between liberty and order in America. The historical essays of the 1790s were perhaps truer reflectors of American experience than earlier revolutionary chronicles, but the exaggeration of the two concepts of liberty and order into polar opposites was hardly a sign of rising historical realism. Instead, the twin pressures of external exigency and internal life-cycle challenge had driven the revolutionaries to ransack American history for polemical ammunition in an internecine war.

The stress placed upon the American revolutionaries by the French Revolution from without and from their own generative wishes from within does not of itself explain the bipolar fracture of national history. Why not a multitude of historical visions expressing individual revolutionaries’ answers to the riddle of the preservation of the republic? Each of these men did wrestle with this issue, but any answer to the broader paradox must fit the irreducible fact that two general views did emerge and the revolutionaries joined in the task of explicating one or the other of them. Michael Kammen has posited the existence of certain “biformities” within American culture which are so pervasive and so compelling that they tended to arrange thought in a bipolar fashion. A biformity is the simultaneous presence of two intrinsically opposed ideas within the same cultural framework. The commitment to both the extension of liberty and the preservation of order in these years was such a biformity. The fragmenting of historical thought in the 1790s was influenced by the larger biformity. A split between history-as-process and history-as-order was implicit in pre-1790 historical essays, and the combined pressure of diplomatic crisis and maturational strain fell on this fault line. The revolutionary generation came to blows over this question in the 1790s because the need to hand down their political ideals, the challenge of “generativity,” induced them to explore the full range of their differences over the meaning of the uprising. Their view of history (their own history and the history of the Revolution, now inextricably bound together), still the mirror of their inner lives and their struggle for full maturity, shattered along the margins of their ideological disagreements over liberty and order.⁶

In their defense of the French Revolution lay the essence of one group of mature revolutionaries’ effort to nurture republicanism at home. For the achievements of the “party of liberty” to be impressed upon a new generation of Americans and stamped upon the face of the republic, the young had to be taught that American history was a process. Led by Jefferson, again the penman of their cause, these revolutionaries insisted that the American upheaval was not a discrete event, a thing in being, but a becoming: a gradual, incomplete unfolding of human potential. They characterized the American Revolution as but one major victory in a continuous, often bloody struggle against tradition, superstition, and tyranny. It was to them the central event in American history not because it concluded the search for liberty but because it typified the process of experiment and reform. From one standpoint, this argument was a self-serving retrojection of their immediate political aims back into American history, a method of giving legitimacy to their progressive policies. By expanding the American Revolution to include the entirety of American experience, these men made support for the French Revolution a test of support for true American principles. And if revolution and American history were synonymous, then the American Revolution could not be over. Had American history stopped with 1776, 1783, or 1789?—no more than in 1761 or 1774. The “party of liberty” concluded that the same forces expanding liberty in the 1760s and 1770s were grappling with English-spawned reaction in the 1790s. The real issues were change, reform, and human freedom, not France, neutrality, or regicide.

If the French Revolution was not the source of these Jeffersonians’ commitment to history-as-process, it was a catalyst in the refinement of that concept. Initially, there was general enthusiasm for the French uprising. Among conservatives, advocacy soon chilled into wariness. Not so for Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, Barlow, Brackenridge, and their allies. Even a man so little given to ecstacy as Brackenridge exulted, “O! France, if thy republic perish, where is the honor due to ours?” Jefferson and Freneau were passionate men, but Brackenridge and Madison were not—why did the latter then join in perfervid displays of sympathy for France? Jefferson had aided the fledgling revolutionaries, Freneau was proud of his ancestral heritage, but Madison and Brackenridge and many more of the pro-French party did not have any contact with France. Could gratitude for French intervention in 1778 have so moved some of the generation of 1776 and not touched the rest? The commitment of these men to the cause of France drew strength from life-cycle sources. Actual aid to the French never amounted, even among these men, to more than words of praise and expressions of encouragement. Their labor was educational, not diplomatic or military, and the motive for it was kin to the motive for educating their own children. They adopted the French Revolution as their child and regarded its progress as proof of their generative powers. It became the litmus test of their capacity to transmit their own particular vision of republicanism to others. At the heart of this vision was not a set of principles which France must duplicate in order to merit American aid. Instead, they hoped that France would master the process that lay at the center of American experience (as they perceived it), the guiding principle of American history. Jefferson named it when he wrote to Madison in September 1789: “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Here was a principle of American history that could be exported (and did not violate the new doctrine of incomparability). The American Revolution had established this principle but did not dictate for all time the content of another nation’s history, for the principle was one of process, not substance. If and only if every generation had the right to refashion its constitutions and laws, and no generation had the power or right to bind any future generation to debt, subservience, or antiquated custom, then and only then would the future be safe for liberty in that nation.⁷

To Jefferson’s side in the struggle to establish that America’s creative power (and their own personal generativity) lay in continuous change, reform, and progress came other members of his generation. All fused personal ideology, life-cycle promptings, and public careers in their defense of France. Madison, leading spokesman for France in the House of Representatives, explained the principle behind the historical analogy to the readers of the National Gazette, Freneau’s pro-French newspaper. Madison reasoned: “Every nation has the right to abolish an old government and establish a new one. This principle is not only recorded in every public archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of a host of American martyrs, but is the only lawful tenure by which the United States holds their existence as a nation.” The object was to teach the French the central tenet of American history and aid them while they applied it to their case. Freneau also reminded his readers of this analogy. “The movements of human life,” the editor perceived, “in all its various stations, have and forever will be responsive to the same principles, and the principle upon which the French Revolution was founded is not new here.”⁸

Even when, after 1793, the French situation diverged from the Francophiles’ expectations sufficiently for stalwarts of the pro-French party to admit that the course of the French Revolution would be a perilous one, Jefferson and his allies still linked their own power to teach to their continuing advocacy of reform. “We have chanced to live in an age,” Jefferson wrote to a French friend in 1795, “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 results.” Only the time scale for renewal of reforming energies had changed. When the French republican experiment ended in Bonapartism, Jefferson maintained his faith in revolutionary change and experiment. He merely sighed to Joel Barlow, “There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind, under which we must acquiesce.”⁹

But if American history were incomparable, where was the danger in the miscarriage of the French uprising? America would still be safe. The dramatic language of the friends of France among the mature revolutionaries showed as much fear as hope. Their unease and irritability grew not from the erratic course of the French Revolution—for this they forgave or dismissed as the natural excess of Gallic enthusiasm and a necessary self-defense against aristocratic machinations. France was not their prime concern. The twistings of events in the French republic were seen as clues to the fate of the American experiment, for the obverse of the Francophiles’ historical analogy made revolutionary France’s troubles into a warning against dangers American republicanism might face. As Jefferson told Edmund Pendleton, “The question of war and peace is still doubtful. . . . The success of [the French Revolution] will ensure the progress of liberty in Europe and its preservation here” (my italics). The important question to the mature Jeffersonian revolutionaries was who or what stood in the path of continuing revolution in America.¹⁰

Their study of the French Revolution enabled the Jeffersonians to identify and execrate the political aims of Britain and her American friends. They accused America’s English sympathizers of refusing to accept change, of turning back the clock to return the United States to subservience to Great Britain. Unregenerate Tories and English agents, the Jeffersonians averred, warped history to support a pro-British neutrality policy. In mid-1793, Freneau sounded the tocsin: “Certain persons here see nothing but castles, crowns, sceptres, lords, knights, princesses and kings.” The radical editor insinuated that the friends of England wanted to reverse progress so much that they would welcome a reestablishment of medieval political and social institutions. Freneau, an able revolutionary propagandist, well knew American fears of medieval fealty to kings and priests. He was not alone in these fears. In a “Candid State of Parties” (1793) for the National Gazette, Madison found that Toryism still existed in America and was organizing itself in the federal government to oppose not only France but revolutionary creativity in America. Throughout his essay, Madison identified the enemies of the French Revolution with the enemies of the 1776 upheaval. During the Jay Treaty ratification debates of 1795–96, supporters of the treaty provided the friends of France with additional evidence for their claim that republicanism would languish in Federalist hands. French sympathizer Edmund Randolph, who lost his cabinet post during the controversy, trumpeted the attack on the pro-treaty forces: “They were the enemies of France, the friends of monarchy, and the violators of our constitution.” At stake in all of these contests was more than foreign policy; it was the Francophiles’ capacity to sustain their procreative power. The Revolution had either to go forward or to die. Covert alliance with England was not just an erroneous policy, it was a betrayal of revolutionary principles. Submission to England denied that Jeffersonian ideals had any generative power.¹¹

The mature revolutionaries who joined Jefferson in defense of continuing reform soon agreed that one guarantor of future generativity would be a national political party. The Republican party that Madison, Jefferson, and others created was to be both spiritual repository and active engine of ongoing revolution in America. The organization of a party not only would enable the inheritors of “true” revolutionary principles to exercise national power and so transmit their values to successive generations but would become a model of political generativity for younger men to emulate. Organized national party opposition to government might be almost without precedent in Anglo-American political ideology, but the Republican party, championing the rights of the oppressed and checking arbitrary power, would claim to be the voice of the people rather than a party.¹²

The formation of parties, when party activity and particularly organized party opposition to government were prohibited by longstanding maxims, expressed parental as well as partisan impulses. Hamilton’s program was the initial cause of Madisonian opposition, but Madison’s trek along the coast of the country in search of support and his leadership role in the first Congresses bespoke deeper commitments. Hamilton’s second message on the debt, the Neutrality Proclamation, and the Jay Treaty controversy heaped fuel on the fires, but Madison tended the embers between times. The need to ensure the survival of republican principles (as he understood them) drove Madison beyond the pale of conventional antiparty wisdom. The solicitude a parent feels for a child—in this case, Madison’s for his Constitution—outweighed the cold instructions of Whig political theory. Madison and Jefferson, when the latter joined in the party struggle, now occupied the position Washington held during the 1780s (and, to continue the analogy, Thomas Hutchinson and William Smith, Jr., occupied in the 1760s). They were not mere factious men but teachers, whose textbook was history and whose classroom was party.

However impelling the urge to pass on true republicanism might be to them, organized political opposition was so new that the Jeffersonian Republicans only developed a full justification of their party activities when the Alien and Sedition Acts made opposition to government liable to criminal prosecution. Republicans of the generation of 1776 responded by arguing that the Sedition Act reversed history in America. The reasons why the Federalists in Congress would pursue such a course had already been explored in earlier Francophilic essays. In their counterattack upon the Sedition Act and the Alien Acts that accompanied it, Republicans blended the idea of revolutionary history-as-process into a defense of organized political opposition. Again, this thesis was self-serving, for it gave the sanctity of revolutionary origins to an instrument of partisanship. At the same time, one must remember that in these controversies past and future were bound together for the mature Republican party leaders. It was their past that was disputed and their power to hand down their views that was challenged by the threat to the future of their party.

The Republican outcry against the Seditious Libel Act was not limited to members of the party who matured in the crisis of 1776, but their response to it arose in different headwaters from younger Republicans’ sources of discontent. Republicans who had come to adulthood in the 1790s correctly saw the seditious libel law as a dagger aimed at their party’s heart. Their present and future were imperiled. Older Republicans regarded the party in a different light; they remembered a time when there were no national parties. The Republican party for them was not merely a necessity of politics but an insurance policy, the end result of a struggle they began in the 1760s and 1770s. Again, they turned to history (now almost synonymous with their own historical achievements) to make this point. Republicans Edward Livingston, St. George Tucker, and George Nicholas, young men of 1776 whose aspirations and experiences were similar to those of their more illustrious comrades, dug into history (as much recollection as scholarship) to inform Americans of the meaning of the Revolution. The will of the people was then paramount. The Republican party, threatened with extinction by the seditious libel law, was the inheritor of that tradition. How could the revolutionaries transmit republicanism to a new generation, if the Republican party were to be destroyed by its enemies?¹³

Throughout 1798 and 1799, other mature Republicans echoed these sentiments. James Madison’s draft for the Resolution of the Virginia House on the Alien and Sedition Acts, followed by an address to the people passed by the Virginia lawmakers in 1799, combined legal and political history to vindicate Republicanism. Madison combed colonial, revolutionary, and Confederation history to verify the fact that the common law of libel—the source of the Seditious Libel Act—was never received in any American federated government. The English law, which had “deluged the scaffold with blood,” ill suited American society and government. It became the duty of the assemblies of the people to reject the common-law-derived Alien and Sedition Acts. The Republican party, the organized arm of the popular will, obeyed the living mandate of the Revolution in its opposition to Federalist rule. He concluded: “And a fair comparison of the political doctrines not unfrequent at the present day with those which characterized the epoch of our Revolution, and which form the basis of our republican constitutions, will best determine whether the declaratory recurrence here made to those principles ought to be viewed as unseasonable and improper, or as a vigilant discharge of an important duty.” That duty was the regeneration of republican values.¹⁴

Jefferson, who became fully engaged in the mechanics of party controversy in the early 1790s, understood the danger of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the need for a positive historical justification of opposition. The acceptance of Republicanism would establish once and for all the legitimacy of revolutionary history-as-process as a generative philosophy. Jefferson joined the campaign against the acts with his secret authorship of the provocative Kentucky Resolutions. “Free government,” Jefferson thundered, “is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.” In 1801, after his election to the presidency, a still-worried Jefferson wrote to Elbridge Gerry: “The only difference [from 1776] is that the leaders [of the Federalists] who remain behind are more numerous and bolder than the apostles of Toryism in ‘76.” The triumphant Republican party would not reinstitute the Revolution, but with power in its hands, its members could rest assured that republican principles would be transmitted to the next generation.¹⁵

Needless to say, political parties advanced other ends than the transmission of accumulated personal knowledge. Party organization conferred immediate material benefits upon the victors of electoral and legislative contests. Nevertheless, even the brief view of Jeffersonian revolutionary history above suggests that beneath the ambition of the mature Jeffersonians for political advantage, there lay a shared purpose to impart a body of republican wisdom to younger inheritors of their offices. All of these advocates of the extension of liberty had reached a sobering stage of life. They were the older generation. The task of maintaining family and state fell to them. The historical lessons they offered to the nation reflected the parental demands of maturity. Embedded in their solemn invocations to the saving power of revolution was an admonition to a child: make the world better.

The historical ruminations and proclamations of the generation of Jefferson and Madison on the meaning of parties have a different quality from the “chronicles” of party that James Callender, John Daly Burk, and James Duane, to name a few of the younger party polemicists, produced. The former spoke from concern for the republic, from their teaching responsibility; the latter, able writers and hardy propagandists, merely used past events as evidence of the Federalists’ shortcomings. The past was very dear to the aging Republicans; though they did not wish to stop time, its great moments were part of their lives. Younger Republicans, introduced to politics in the 1780s and 1790s, did not yet share the urge or the need to find and transmit lessons from past experience. To take one example: William Branch Giles of Virginia, thirty-six years old when the Federalists passed the dreaded Sedition Act, was as angry and afraid of its consequences as his mentor, Jefferson, and his colleague in the House, Madison, but his historical disquisition against it had none of their attachment to the past. When, more than twenty-five years later, he returned to the subject (as governor of Virginia, speaking before the assembly), his reminiscences did ring with a concern and sense of proprietorship of the past. By then, of course, he had passed into the generative stage of his own life.¹⁶

Mature revolutionaries who opposed Jefferson and Madison also experienced the need to transmit cherished values and ideals. Many Federalists who had worked with the two Virginians to secure domestic tranquillity in the 1780s recoiled with horror at the politics of Republicanism. The French Revolution, praised by the Republicans as symbol (if not reality) of human striving for liberty, genuinely frightened Hamilton, Adams, Ames, and others of their persuasion. While younger Federalists pressed on with organization of the party and competition with local Republican leaders, Federalists who had matured in the crisis of 1776 had more at stake in the contest against French radicalism and its American admirers. To protect and hand down their own version of republican values was their prime objective. Despite the fervor of their condemnation of France, Adams, Hamilton, Jay, and Pickering did not fear that the United States would enter war on the French side. Even Jefferson and Madison had agreed to neutrality. The aging Federalists feared the influence of French ideas because they wished to transmit a very different body of ideas about republicanism to younger Americans. In part, this is why the animosity of the Francophobes magnified in intensity after the regicide. These men held no love for Louis, or for kings in general. French republicanism should have pleased them—but the removal of the French monarch’s head made France into a true republic—and thus a rival tutor of republican decorum and authority. How could the priority of their own experience be established in the face of “Jacobin” enthusiasms? As did the Republicans, the “friends of order” turned to the trusted discipline of history to state their case to the next generation. Fisher Ames understood the root of the historical musings of his comrades in this decade: the Federalists “wish not only to enjoy but to perpetuate liberty, by giving energy enough to government to preserve its own being, when endangered by tumult and faction.” Properly taught, American history would not only support current programs but ensure the preservation of the republic.¹⁷

The Federalists of the generation of 1776 launched a three-pronged historical campaign to transmit their view of republicanism. First, they prepared accounts of the Revolution, the writing of the Constitution, and the origins of party contest, which proved that American institutions worked because Americans were an orderly, moderate, and virtuous people. What they valued themselves they perceived in the past. Perception followed desire, for history served inner needs. The Federalists of this generation discovered the secret of the success of the Revolution in the sober character of its men and the stability of its institutions. During one partisan contest early in Washington’s second administration, Timothy Pickering asserted that his party, unlike the opposition, was composed of men “of sense and experience, who gave the reins, not to . . . passions, but to reason.” Fisher Ames took pleasure in recalling the origin of Federalism: among his colleagues, reason checked enthusiasm and built a stable federal government. “No sooner did the new government begin its auspicious course, than order seemed to arise out of confusion.” Sensible men led the ratification effort of 1787 and strove, after 1789, to maintain sound government.¹⁸

Reasonable men, Ames and others explained, had built lasting public institutions from the founding of the colonies to the inauguration of President Washington. From his diplomatic post in Lisbon, David Humphreys lauded the administration for uniting energy, reason, and harmony. Humphreys credited this achievement to the fact that the government in the 1790s was staffed and directed by the same men who wrote the federal Constitution. As Gouverneur Morris reminisced in 1804, “History, the parent of political science, had told the writers of the Constitution that it was almost as vain to expect permanency from democracy as to construct a palace on the surface of the sea.” Instead of the unruly mobs and demogogues of democracy, the constitution-makers of 1787 wisely created a “balanced republican government” of “sound principles.” A year later Marshall combined the personal and public Federalist collections into the fifth volume of his Life of George Washington. “In 1786,” he wrote, “the continent was divided into two great political parties, the one of which contemplated America as a nation and labored incessantly to invest the Federal head with powers competent to the preservation of the Union. The other attached itself to the state authorities.” In this crisis, “enlightened men of sound politics” gathered to support the federal Constitution in the federalist party. The antifederalist “confounded liberty with an exception from legal control . . . it was a disorderly spirit which moved them.” To Chief Justice Marshall, the division over the Constitution was that between the “sound and unsound, republican and democratic, orderly and anarchistic.”¹⁹

The second prong of the Federalists’ attack was to condemn the Jeffersonians’ analogy between the revolution in France and that which they had led in 1776. It is easy to understand the horror with which these aging men of “sound principles and steady habits” watched the growth of French revolutionary sympathy in the United States, for France’s influence threatened the intellectual and moral bequest they intended to will their children. John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, the semi-official organ of Hamilton’s friends, published a stream of older Federalists’ essays asserting that the American Revolution was endangered by “Jacobin” intrigues. Ames worried “how far we shall probably travel in the revolutionary road and whether there is any stopping place.” To leave behind the steady and sure, the orderly and sensible, was to ignore the lessons of the Revolution in America.²⁰

Mature Federalists rejected all analogies between French and American history. Gouverneur Morris, after service in Paris, judged that “the French were inspired by our example,” but there existed little similarity between the two revolutions: “We were in the actual enjoyment of our freedom and fought not to obtain but to secure its blessings.” The French revolutionary government would inevitably deteriorate into a “despotism both in principle and in practice,” because the French “had to create a new political system” for themselves, whereas the American revolutionaries had only to “preserve their ancient and beloved” representative government. In a letter to President Washington urging a policy of neutrality, Hamilton insisted that only revolutions similar to America’s merited American support. Process was not important; content was. In order to resemble the American Revolution, the French rising had to be “a free, regular and deliberate act of the nation, and with such a spirit of justice and humanity, as ought to silence all scruples about the validity of what has been done.” If a revolution, such as the French, ran counter to these standards, then the United States was absolved of any commitment to that nation. In a later note to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton contended that “a general invitation to revolution and insurrection, under a promise of fraternity and assistance . . . is not justifiable. Such a step is of a nature to disturb the repose of mankind, to excite fermentation in every country . . . and to endanger government everywhere.²¹

Among themselves, the older Federalists nervously mocked the analogy between the two revolutions. On his return from England in 1795, Jay toyed with the reverse of the analogy, proposing that, because the American Revolution had been a conservative event, any American who believed in the similarity of the two uprisings could expect that the French Revolution should be equally conservative: “If the intelligence is true that the French are forming a [new] Constitution and government similar to ours, that government will naturally discountenance such schemes and politics as may be hostile to it, and consequently will become cautious how they promote attacks on ours.” Jay’s correspondent, Secretary of War Timothy Pickering, evidently appreciated this satirical reversal of Francophilic arguments, for he repeated its substance to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney shortly before Pinckney departed to explain Jay’s treaty to the French. “Your own observations,” the secretary also told the minister plenipotentiary, “will furnish abundant proofs of the zeal . . . with which the people of the United States embraced the cause of the French revolution.” Indeed, Pickering continued, the zeal was so great that it spilled out onto the streets in mobs and infiltrated to the very core of government. Tangled in Talleyrand’s machinations during the XYZ controversy, John Marshall put the consensus of the “party of order” simply: “It is in America and America only that human liberty has found an Asylum. . . . [France] is not and never will be a republick.” Marshall, Jay, Pickering, and Pinckney agreed that American Francophiles were men of passion, with a love for outlandish and inflamed historical comparisons, whereas anti-French men of affairs contented themselves with sober thoughts.²²

For other Federalists drawn from the youths of 1776, the analogy between the two revolutions was too frightening to ridicule. Writing to Rufus King, Ames gasped at the consequences of the Francophilic parallel: “Jacobinism now uses and urges democracy, as it did in France—we are now in the Roland and Condorcet act of our comedy—whether we go on to the Danton and Robespierre acts depends on time and accident.” Jacobinism was frightening not because it was new or rowdy but because its very nature—its worship of novelty and demagogy—disrupted order and ignored authority. Once in the saddle, the Jacobins would overthrow settled government and established law.²³

Among the voices raised in the “party of order” were those of New England clergymen among the young revolutionaries of 1776. From the early pages of the first chapter, this book has primarily concerned itself with secular thought and secular figures. Puritan history in America had always insisted upon an apartness to New England experience, for the Puritans saw themselves as God’s pilgrims in the New World. The sermons of both young and old ministers conventionally assumed the separateness and superiority of American history long before the generation of 1776 walked upon the earth. As the first two chapters attempted to show, shifts in the young revolutionaries’ ideas of history signified their modification of a Whig science of history, rather than an adoption of Puritan historiography. There were certainly budding clerics among these youths, however, and they passed through the first stages of adulthood with other revolutionaries. When they reached their middle age, in the 1790s, they also faced the challenge of generativity—of passing on to a new generation their faith and experience. They tended to be conservative in habits, dress, and political preferences, and, as with other Federalists, these learned clergy were troubled by the demands of French radicals. The historical writing of these clergymen indicates that they wrestled with uncertainty in trying to transmit their experience and ideas. For some, like Timothy Dwight, the fear that they would not be able to inculcate their values in a new nation showed itself (among other manifestations) as a progressive hardening of historical judgment. Dwight’s historical ideas appeared in poetic form, at first as gentle (for he was a moderate theologian in the 1780s and early 1790s) praise for Connecticut. By 1795 his fears had soured his view of history. When he assumed the presidency of Yale, he donned the mantle of historical orthodoxy: history could be taught in only one way to ensure that its lesson of conservatism and obedience never be misunderstood.²⁴

Jedidiah Morse, another Yale-trained divine, though more moderate than Dwight through the early 1790s, reached the same conclusion by mid-decade. The first editions of his American Geography, in the middle 1780s, were optimistically nationalistic. By 1794, he had seen an error in his ways. Morse viewed the appearance of the Jacobin clubs as proof that the “French party intended to uproot all of America’s past and establish a French dictatorship on American soil.” In 1794, Morse published an anguished historical appeal for “order and harmony” in his American Universal Geography. The Federalist government, which Morse described as the foremost bulwark of social order, “the most perfect, the best administered government” in the world, was “steadily opposed in all its important measures” by radical demagogues. Morse presented an account of law and religion in the various states’ histories in his American Geography, hoping his readers would adopt his models for good government and sound religion. He concluded that only an educated and conservative clergy, protected by strong government, could preserve society in the future, as it had in the past. “Faction and party spirit,” “wretchedness and meanness,” and “chaos” disturbed every state except Connecticut, where an entrenched clergy (composed of men with views similar to Morse’s), “who are numerous, able and harmonious and very respectable as a body, have hitherto preserved a kind of aristocratic balance in the very democratic government of the state. This happily operated upon the overbearing spirit of democracy.” Morse’s fervor bespoke the enmity of many in the revolutionary generation of established New England clergymen for French revolutionary irreligion. On other occasions, Morse pleaded for the reawakening of “Christian religion and its sacred institutions, spurned at and rejected” in France and, he feared, in America after the French Revolution. It did not escape these clerics that Jefferson and others in his party were not so conventionally churchgoing as they might have been. Whether the Republicans were irreligious themselves, or merely the pawns of French impiety and philosophical anticlericalism, did not matter, for without the rituals and customs of religion, its doctrines would lose their power to move the spirit of the young.²⁵

Out of their own chronicles of the republic and their criticism of the Jeffersonian version of history, the mature Federalists fashioned a general theory of American history that supplied their need to preserve the past. The mature Federalists were convinced that national survival depended upon already established American institutions. This was an exploration of the portion of revolutionary historical thought dismissed by the Jeffersonians among the generation of 1776. The “party of order” prayed that the dangers of French-inspired radicalism, cynicism, and democracy could be exposed as well as countered by exhibition of the personal virtue and conservatism of past generations of Americans. In the same way that such Francophiles as Madison and Jefferson used American revolutionary precedent as evidence for their case that the American Revolution would remain incomplete if the French republic failed, so the enemies of the French Revolution found that America’s historic principles were antagonistic to French disorderliness, and republicanism at home was endangered by the agitation of the French interest.

The historical formula of the aging Federalists for the survival of the republic began with xenophobia. It proved a short step from condemnation of the French influence to the broader thesis that foreign influences always threatened America’s native liberties. This was true, Francophobes reasoned, because America’s treasured institutions evolved from purely native stock, and her liberty could be discovered in the first settlers’ town meetings and burgesses. Unlike the French, who had erased their history, Americans had preserved their past in living political, social, and religious institutions. Americans were a different people—a people who had known how to create and preserve liberty in orderly fashion. In 1790, one year after John Adams had returned from England to assume the office of vice-president, he explained his distrust of the French experiment in terms of the generativity of conservatism:

The French were trying to ignore their own history—a tale of oppression and demoralization—but they would not succeed. The past was never dead chronicle; it was habit and custom, values and ways of seeing, that lived in the present and must be transmitted to the next generation if the American republic were to survive.²⁶

Mature Federalists insisted that the republic would be safe only when the habits and ideas that had gone into its creation were protected. Noah Webster, driven into a far deeper conservatism as the decade passed, surrounded by other Federalists’ anxiety at the progress of French radicalism, expressed this tenet of historical conservatism in a letter to Jefferson. Webster dramatically denied any sympathy for history-as-process. Instead, he embraced the theory of the “corporate structure” of the state and built upon it a conception of a fixed, orderly, stable national history. Jefferson’s creed that a people should not be bound by the will of past generations was particularly objectionable to the Connecticut educator: “that the members of a corporation [the State] cannot express the will of that corporation without a meeting for the purpose, and as this is impossible, no instructions of individual members can be binding . . . that every right claimed by a citizen of the government is liable to vary with circumstances, except what rest wholly on the moral law; that therefore every right created by political law should be always subject to be modified by the power that created it, viz, the will of the State.” Only when the will of the people was embodied in their established institutions could popular consent be equated with true national law. The wisdom, order, and authority of the past ought not be dismissed by the whims of a new generation. Webster had come to believe the key to the health of republicanism lay in teaching young people to revere the past. The best defense against evil novelties, he wrote in 1796, was to place historical instruction in the hands of those “who feel a partiality for their native country, their laws, government and prosperity.”²⁷

As Webster’s xenophobic thesis implied that America’s liberties were not only unique but also the product of a long, evolutionary process, so his assertion of the conservatism of earlier generations of Americans implied that Americans had traditionally valued law, order, and “free debate and mature deliberation.” This conclusion fit the Francophobes’ abhorrence of radical and violent change. In Humphreys’s words, the ideal was “choice free and frequent, yet no lust of change.” Dwight discovered that, unlike Europeans, “Americans adored peace and tranquility.” He captured this culminating historical thesis of the Francophobes—that American history was a saga of obedience to law and authority—in his pastorale, Greenfield Hill. Dwight first proposed that Americans had never before been influenced by speculative radical philosophy:

Americans always shunned European influences in favor of order:

Reliance upon native virtues taught conservatism and stirred Americans’ love of order. Dwight’s final injunction, like John Adams’s and Noah Webster’s, was

As incisively as Jefferson’s “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” encapsulated a theory of regeneration based upon reform, so Dwight’s poem captured the Federalist view of regeneration through conservation. If Jefferson’s view of history possessed the power to change men and institutions, violently if necessary, to avoid corruption, so Dwight’s history stood as an impregnable fortress in the face of new and foreign dangers. To him and his fellow Federalists of the generation of 1776, the secret of parental responsibility for the republic lay in the stability and virtue of individuals, buttressed by tested and proven instruments of government. Orderly men preserving an orderly society were the only hope of national safety. To alter government and law violently was to alter American historical development unnaturally and thereby undermine the power of good men to direct events. Shortly before he died, Hamilton summarized this thesis in words that epitomize his own generative efforts as well as the credo of his party: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.”²⁹

To Hamilton and others, George Washington became the symbol of the connection between conservatism and generativity; his life and values were a model for generations to come. He was a living father for the country, a paragon of parental concern. His manner embodied continuity, authority, and sobriety, replacing the deposed father-king (and, in a sense, became the rallying point for the Federalists that the French Revolution was for early Republicans). Such fathers are often compelling examples for children when the latter grow into the heads of their own families—in this case the younger revolutionaries now in the Federalist party. After witnessing Washington’s first inaugural, Ames had written: “It was a very touching scene, and quite of the solemn kind. . . . It seemed to me an allegory in which virtue was personified, and addressing those whom she would make her votaries. Her power over the heart was never greater, and the illustration of her doctrine by her own example was never more perfect.” Washington was the father they had sought in 1776, and, more important to them as mature revolutionaries in the 1790s, he was a model for mature leadership: an example not just of policy, but of the way to transmit the values behind policy to a new generation. To Ames and others, he was history teaching by example—order and self-discipline personified.³⁰

Beneath the historical broadsides in this combat over national policy lay the striving of mature family men to carry on the procreative tasks of fathers of the republic. Under these promptings, mature individuals will sift and review their past for its most important lessons, but for the generation of 1776, the “past” had a broader context. When Hamilton argued that the future of the republic rested upon “birth, education, and family” he was not speaking of his own childhood but of the collective birth, education, and domestication of the new nation. For the revolutionary generation, the past was nothing less than the history of the Revolution. This may seem a grandiose and arrogant presumption to a modern reader, but the revolutionaries, long upon the public stage and convinced of their just claims to fame, naturally shifted their thoughts back and forth between personal experiences and the great events of the three decades of nation-building. Thus Hamilton, in the midst of the struggle to ensure the supremacy of the Federalist party, and with it all of his own axioms of republican stewardship, cried out to Washington that the French party “are ready to new model our constitution, under the influence or coercion of France.” One must remember that the writing and later interpretation of the Constitution, through the agency of the Federalist party, was the work of his lifetime and that Hamilton genuinely feared the radicalism of the Francophiles. He could not tolerate the thought that the work of his hands and heart might be misused by others. He dreaded that the legacy that he, as a Founding Father, wished to present to a new generation, was about to be destroyed.³¹

On the other side of the political fence, Elbridge Gerry moaned: “It has been unfortunate for their country, that the new [federal] constitution has divided the people, and enabled those who were disaffected to the revolution and who only supported the constitution as a stepping stone to monarchy, to avail themselves of the denomination of a party and styl[e] themselves federalists.” In truth, the Federalists whom Gerry accused were not antagonistic to the Revolution—no more so than Jefferson or Gerry intended to deliver the federal government into the hands of French Jacobins—but Gerry’s emotion had roots in the same tender, tutorial urge as Hamilton’s. From the moment Gerry walked out of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in protest, he had viewed himself as an advocate of true revolutionary republicanism against monarchical consolidation of national power. Hamilton’s indefatigable efforts to strengthen the national government and make war upon French radicalism had driven Gerry to question Hamilton’s commitment to republicanism. Gerry concluded that such a man could not be trusted to inculcate revolutionary sentiments in a new generation.³²

With history as their guide, the “party of liberty” and the “party of order” posed solutions to the challenge of regeneration that were creative and appropriate for the new republic. In the 1780s, these men had proclaimed that fundamental laws in the new nation, unlike any that had preceded it, were designed to promote the fullest expression of individual liberty, while providing for the due authority of government. Whether in power or in opposition during the 1790s, the mature revolutionaries found ways to give substance to their earlier boast. They found the materials to build a viable political structure upon the constitutional framework of the 1780s. The mature individual needs order—a sense of progression and achievement, a foundation for self-worth. The mature individual also needs liberty—the right and power to decide things for himself, to be himself, to continue to grow and change. In the public arena, the clash over generative ideology ended with a creative mixture of the two ideals of liberty and order: a democratic constitutionalism. Its crowning achievement was the two-party system, a stable, effective vehicle for the transmission of political ideals and policies from one generation to the next. Parental motives were served, for the personal quest of the mature revolutionaries to hand down their great experiment to the next generation flourished in public institutions surrounding the political parties: democratic electoral canvasses, rotation in office, and open political dissent.

But the psychic toll of the clash of histories was immense. In 1794, David Ramsay, a Federalist and a Francophile managing somehow to stand above the virulence of party, gave voice to the sincere goal of both parties: “France is daily proving, that a handful of citizens, fighting under the banners of liberty, is more than a match for an host of mercenaries, engaged in support of tyranny. It remains for us to recommend free governments, by the example of a peaceable, orderly, virtuous and happy people.” Ramsay hoped in vain for reconciliation among the aging revolutionaries. The 1790s left them scarred and wary. Although the hardening of lines in the debates of the 1790s truly hurt them, they had pressed on because their generative motive was so basic to human needs. Small disputes grew into larger ones, cliques became factions, and factions organized themselves into parties because public debates of historical differences expressed fundamental personal needs. Angered or uneasy at the words of critics, tired of rethinking and reweighing their past, party leaders came to hear and consult only their allies. Extreme positions within both camps gradually became rival orthodoxies under the dual demands of internal needs and external criticism. Men once deeply attached to each other, co-workers in a great enterprise, began to hate each other. And the fury of partisanship, the abusive meetings and harsh letters, would never be wholly forgotten.³³

Worst of all, the polarization of revolutionary historical ideas meant that the Founding Fathers had to defend one part of their experience against another part. All had loved liberty; all had sacrificed some portion of that liberty for social and political order. The historical debates of the 1790s forced each of them to make war upon a part of themselves, to separate ideas that had hitherto been fruitfully integrated in their minds. That they could do this to their own beliefs in the name of the regeneration of the republic, and still direct their efforts into effective political and intellectual channels, is testimony to the degree to which the needs of the eighteenth-century self could be sublimated to the higher good of public life. The inevitable by-product of this compartmentalization of historical ideas was to distance the public conduct of the once-young revolutionaries of 1776 from their inner lives, to make them ill at ease with the picture they themselves painted of political reality. Accusations and arguments were exaggerated, and friendships, like Adams’s and Jefferson’s, or Edmund Randolph’s and Washington’s, which had survived many crises, broke upon these shoals. The now-aging revolutionaries would have to deal with this artificial, self-deceiving separation of inner and outer lives when public tasks no longer occupied their attention.