Will the Center Hold? Factionalism in the United States. A look back to think forward, from great biographies of Founders--Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams

What did the Founders intend for a future United States? While no historian, I began reading biographies in lock-down for insight into our fractious nation. It's oddly comforting to learn of similar divisions in colonial times--a political split between the east and north (which wanted a strong Fed) and the south and west(which wanted power invested primarily in the States). During the Continental Congress, some representatives were more interested in keeping their British trading partner than war. After winning independence, there were rebellions against government authority. The Whiskey rebellion (against a tax) had to be quelled in-person by Washington and Hamilton with troops.

I wondered if the optimism and unity of post WW2  America, when I grew up, was a historic aberration--result of a boom economy built on war production. Perhaps factional discord is the norm? Is our time more dire--can the center hold against the assaults on democratic ideals?  Can anything solid  emerge from our ideological chaos?  Did the colonies really back up Jefferson's Declaration?  

The idea of a war with Britain, the pre-eminent military power in the world, was a joke to many nations. A recent book on Samuel Adams (Stacy Schiff) shows the colonies were divided about Britain, before Adams united them with his "news" about British outrages. In a time of scarce communication, he created a network. Building a consensus for the war was only a start. There was no money to fight the war without a central government or agreement to collect taxes. Washington's few troops were often unpaid, unfed, and naked without uniforms. They deserted.  

When Washington asked Franklin to go to Paris to secure financing, it was a desperate assignment. At 70, Franklin was the only choice with diplomatic experience.  Fortunately, unlike America, post-enlightenment France was infatuated with inventions. The genius who tamed electricity was welcomed as a huge celebrity. 

Playing the "savage" in his coonskin cap, as Stacy Schiff relates in Franklin in Paris: A Grand Improvisation, invitations from influential hostesses in Paris society became a route to court. Despite little understanding of the French language, over a period of  20 years Franklin obtained financial and military support. This surprisingly entertaining book shows how and why funds were given to the U.S.  That decision played a part in bankrupting France's Treasury--a cause of the French Revolution.

Franklin's "long game" meant supplies were sent to Washington sporadically and at great risk. Quelling rebellion was imperative to  Britain, whose valuable colonial resources had to be safeguarded from  competitors, like France and Spain. This created opportunity for Franklin, who sought help from their foreign ministers.When Franklin enlisted Beaumarche, a playwright (the Barber of Seville) they inflated troop numbers and painted the progress of the war in glowing terms to France's wily minister and his King.. Beaumarche obtained ships and facilitated the procurement process of unirforms, weapons, ammunition, food stuff.  And, despite British and French spies  in Franklin's house and reading his correspondence, ships sailed. Some were sunk and captured, but Washington was thankful for what he got.

Ron Chernow's Hamilton, Jon Meachum's The Art of Power on Jefferson and Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis  picked up the Founders' stories (pre and post revolution). They collaborated and clashed to define "democracy" in a singular unique republic. While Washington, military commander and first President, existed on a rarified plane to the public, he was down to earth in his assessment of  his own abilities and how the talents of others  might be used to develop and advance the nation. Defining direction was an ongoing collaboration. 

During the war, Washington recognized his ability to express his ideas in words was limited. He relied on young Alexander Hamilton, his aide de camp, to draft his orders, speeches, policy. Hamilton's desire to fight was ignored by Washington. Despite Hamilton's unease over this situation, he later continued to serve Washington, who needed his in-depth knowledge of government. Hamilton's model was a strong central government and banking system, which had enabled Great Britain to be the most successful nation of its time. The two men worked as allies with mutual respect and objectives.  Hamilton founded a Federalist party to stabilize the country and Washington supported it.  But the ascendant Federalists were contested by Jefferson's Republican party (the ancestor of today's Democratic party), which advocated powerful state governments making policies with a weak Fed.

Washington and Jefferson, though both southern plantation owners, found little common ideological ground. Jefferson's advocacy of states' rights, based on the "wisdom" of the common man, was opposite Hamilton's views of the need to control the violence and irrationality of men ruled by passion. Founders' policies were shaped, (even as ours) by education, genetics, class, and sheer force of personality.

Hamilton's deep, yet wide-ranging education (law, business, government, philosophy, literature and science) reflected his self-discipline and thirst for learning. Growing up poor on the islands of St.Croix and Nieves, he saw how a culture of indebted plantation owners with brutal laws maimed rebellious or hungry slaves. He never forgot the senseless suffering of the enslaved. Orphaned young,Hanilton realized he needed discipline and study to make something of himself. At 15, he entered a trading company as a clerk. Local businessmen sent him to college in America, where Hamilton remade himself as a gentleman and lawyer. He was known for his knowledge and as a man of principle. Where Jefferson, an American-born aristocrat was also an intellectual, his were solitary pursuits--architecture, inventions, music.  Jefferson saw men (like himself), as well-meaning sensible and capable of self-rule. Hamilton saw dangerous mobs as inevitable without orderly structures. 

Washington originally viewed Jefferson as a threat to the solid rational government he was evolving with Hamilton. But toward the end of his term, as he witnessed Jefferson's skill interpreting and manipulating the public ethos, and his growing popularity, he thought him the most able politician to succeed him. (At that time, the Federalist movement was ineffectual and Hamilton disgraced.)  Unexpectedly, John Adams won the ballot. Known for his stormy paroxysms, as he grappled with duty, morality and the fate of nations, yet this Puritan schoolmaster's son had serious convictions and integrity. At issue was the seeming contradictions of his behavior and reason.

While Washington took the oath of office in a suit of simple homespun fabric, he found Adams' display of imported finery hard to fathom. Adams also kept a fancy carriage, reminiscent of British gentry. In office, his emotional expressions, temper made him less than comprehensible to his peers. They noted how often he left Washington to be at his home in Massachusetts.  But in later years, he was viewed as  a sage, profound scholar and thinker of the mission of his country and civilization.

Though Adams and Jefferson were lifelong friends (both died on the same July 4th)  Adams never forgave Jefferson his support of the French Revolution (unfettered "liberty" led to the bloody Guillotine and ultimately to the despot Napoleon). And Adams, who never catered to popular opinion, believed a strong government with checks and balances was the only safeguard. His logic was rooted in his studies of man's destiny-- from life to decline and death. He saw the same trajectory for nation-states. Underappreciated as a visionary (there is no monument to John Adams), he  looked unflinchingly at the nature of mankind.

In Adams' retirement, the dramatic economic and geographic expansion of the U.S. made him both proud and nervous. He wrote "our country is rising with astonishing rapidity in population and wealth," but it was also "proportionally sinking in luxury, sloth and vice."  At the same time his colleague Jefferson, applauded "progress" and saw government's mission,  as to get out of the way and let mankind be as inventive and creative as possible. Adams, who was more aware of the savagery of men, believed the role of government was to slow expansion, guarding progress as a gradual process. 

Government was to guide the nation so decline, though inevitable, was not destructive. Just as individuals are run by emotional often irrational impulses, so are nations, thought Adams. For him, strict self-knowledge was the essential route to self control.  Adams and Jefferson mirror our conflicts in 2023--strong government vs. states' rights, unfettered liberty vs. laws to protect people. The constitution's three branches were to balance each other, and safeguard democracy from becoming an oligarchy or dictatorship. 

Founders seized every chance to form and advance their unique republic. President Jefferson called it luck, when he  managed to buy Louisiana from Napoleon, doubling the nation's size. Yet these leaders were flawed as are all men. Knowing slavery was an abomination, they feared dissolving the tenuous union of north and south. In 1780's  there was a resolution to outlaw new slavery in America in the north. But it continued in the South. The Missouri compromise, not to allow slavery in the open west, was diluted by the wealth of tobacco and cotton. So the Civil War, when it came, was no surprise. The schism of North and South with Western states made  government again untenable. 

John Adams' nightmares of the eventual decline of American culture and his passionate distrust of man's undisciplined nature, made him unpopular. But despite his fragmented writing, his ideas are singular, passionate and true. And his correspondence with Jefferson is considered unprecedented in American history.  Inoculated with the Jeffersonian dream of mankind's unlimited "progress," are we successors harder hit now by our threats--dissolution of government, armed uprisings, social chaos?  Do unprecedented environmental breakdown means societal breakdown?  Perhaps the Center will hold.  

Founders were aware that the Declaration of Independence was just words. And even inspired words are useless without precedents to guide them. They had to act in real time, as situations developed. These men knew fate had a role and did not want to be thought exceptional. Each had vanity about their gifts but believed every generation had men as competent. The danger (I think Franklin wrote about this)  was enshrining Founders in  myth that future generations could not "live up to." Every generation had the duty of redefining what democracy meant. He saw this duty as handed off, one generation  to the next.

Yet where are the women in these narratives?  They were mostly "silent partners" to history--listening advising.  Abigail Adams' astute correspondence with her husband survives. She wrote, in one well-quoted letter, that the the men should "not forget the ladies" in the constitution--which they did. Black men got the vote in 1870, women 1920. Maybe future Founders will be any gender?.  (And it will be no big deal.) While this hasn't happened much in Earthly councils, I can look to those in Star-Trek...)

P.S. As a nonacademic, I strive for clarity but don't pretend expertise. Thought this threading of narratives might be of interest to those pondering the state of our nation. 

S.W.