In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, I plan to publish a number of essays over the next couple of months about the journey to that day, some of the persons who were instrumental in making it happen, the ideas which made the event inevitable, and the document itself. This is not an exhaustive examination; there are books for that. The first essay is one of several which will address what has been understood by “republic.” After all, Americans “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, and to the republic for which it stands.” The essays will also explore the meaning of “virtue” and how virtue and education have been deemed essential to the success of a republic.
“Virtue” and “republic” have long been connected to each other among philosophers of politics. That connection was frequently asserted, as well, in the rhetoric of Americans during the founding. Indeed, it was while states were writing constitutions that these ideas were more rigorously investigated and debated by Americans, and an increasingly sophisticated understanding emerged. The most widely read source on the experiences of republics and the importance of virtue was Plutarch’s Lives, which contained the biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. Many intellectuals also read primary sources, such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius, and interpreters of those sources, such as Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and various 18th century English political essayists.
These investigations led to a political conundrum. Common opinion, bolstered by religious teaching, held that mankind’s actions were driven by base desires, such as avarice, gluttony, and lust. Yet the success of republics had always been said to rest on public virtue, the requirement that the rulers and the people overcome their passion for personal gratification and act for the benefit of the community, “res publica.” Moreover, the wisdom received from ancient writers postulated that public virtue was derived from private virtue. For Plato and Aristotle, the polis was the individual writ large, and politics, properly done, was inseparable from ethics. The task became to reconcile this tension between the reality of private passions and the perceived need for republican virtue.
Three Theories of Early-American Republicanism
Three theories of republicanism emerged, with attendant differences in their conceptions of private and public virtue and the connection between them. These three conceptualizations had significant geographic roots. One was an American version of classic republicanism, which might be called Puritan republicanism. The proponents looked to the firm hand of government to promote both aspects of virtue, private and public, and to insure their continued interrelation. It was founded in the religious tradition and political experience of New England communities, although its influence was not confined there. It was “positive” republicanism, demanding civic involvement from the citizenry, as was reflected in the town meeting structure of New England local governments. Perhaps the most erudite exponent of that tradition and its republican significance was John Adams.
Another was agrarian republicanism, which coalesced somewhat later, and was rooted in the experience of the South, especially its largest and wealthiest state, Virginia. Agrarian republicans also accepted the need to inculcate private virtue rigorously, but they were less optimistic that private virtue assured public virtue. At the very least, they were skeptical that sufficient public virtue might be realized among those who would gain political influence. That skepticism was particularly acute when the matter became who would control the distant general government and thus be most removed from effective supervision by the people.
Best, then, not to rely on virtue among the rulers, but to look for other means to limit their ability to cause harm to the republic. If the supply of private virtue among the rulers or the people was inadequate to the task of producing public virtue, one might need instead to harness a baser human quality. The rulers’ self-interest must be channeled to serve the public good. James Madison worked out these ideas in his constitutional ideology, which found its way into basic structures in the Constitution. Madison was not alone, and he was not the most rigorous expositor of agrarian republicanism. That title goes to John Taylor of Caroline.
A third approach was national republicanism, represented by Alexander Hamilton as its most prominent ideological proponent and George Washington as its leading public figure. In many ways their views complemented those of the agrarians that virtue, private and public, was a necessary, but also a regrettably flawed, guardian of the success of republics. However, there was a crucial difference. Government would have a much more active role in using incentives to create conditions through which republican virtue of the public sort might be fostered. Moreover, republican virtue was not limited to those connected to the land but extended to those engaged in commercial and even manufacturing and financial enterprises. Hamilton, after all, was not part of the landed gentry, as Adams was, or the Southern planter class, as Taylor was. National republicanism was based in the emerging commercial centers of the mid-Atlantic states.
John Adams and the Classic (Puritan) Republicanism of New England
John Adams’s major work on constitutional government and republicanism was A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, a treatise on the emerging American constitutionalism with its emphasis on checks and balances of governmental powers. But Adams was also a prolific writer of letters to numerous correspondents. Many years before he wrote in his 1798 response to the Massachusetts militia, “Our government was made only for a moral and religious people,” he wrote to the chronicler of the period Mercy Otis Warren that republican government could survive only if the people were conditioned “by pure Religion or Austere Morals. Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Sounding the theme of positive classic republicanism, he continued, “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honor, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real liberty.” [Emphasis in the original.] Aristotle would have agreed with Adams that people must be trained to virtue through the inculcation of good habits.
In light of man’s fallen nature and his helpless soul’s inclination to sin, a firm hand was needed. God was at the center and indispensable. Hence, three New England states had an official church, the Congregational Church, heir to the Puritans. Moreover, a Stoic virtue of private simplicity and public duty was cultivated, not the least by intrusive sumptuary laws. Such laws, passed in the name of protecting the people’s morals and sometimes dressed up in broader cloaks of liberty and equality, restricted various luxuries and excessive expenditures on jewelry, clothing, victuals, and entertainment. Adams, in his 1776 book Thoughts on Government, touted the benefits of such laws, “[The] happiness of the people might be greatly promoted by them….Frugality is a great revenue, besides curing us of vanities, levities, and fopperies, which are real antidotes to all great, manly, and warlike virtues.”
The historian Forrest McDonald, in his invaluable book Novus Ordo Seclorum, provides details about the constitutional and statutory sources of such laws. For example, Article XVIII of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights urged a “constant adherence” to “piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality [which] are absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty.” Legislators and magistrates must exercise “an exact and constant observance” of those principles “in the formation and execution of the laws.” None other than John Adams had drafted that document in the Massachusetts convention. Other states had similar provisions. At the Philadelphia Convention, George Mason of Virginia sought to grant Congress the power to enact sumptuary laws, but his proposal was defeated and the matter left to each state to decide.
Adams also lauded laws that resulted in the division of landed estates, because he perceived such laws as promoting relative equality of property ownership. Adams termed it the “mediocrity of property” on which liberty depended. While this sounds uncomfortably like forced expropriation of land, it is unlikely that Adams would have supported that kind of law. Certainly, such sentiment would conflict with the sanctity of rights in property which was a matter at the heart of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Security in one’s property was one of those natural rights for which, under the social contract theory broadly accepted at the time, government was established.
John Taylor of Caroline and the Agrarian Republicanism of Virginia
The broader sentiment, that broad distribution of land ownership was essential, had an ancient republican pedigree and put Adams in good company with American republicans of other stripes. Indeed, “agrarian republicans” were, if anything, even more militant than Adams in their adoration of land ownership as the bulwark of republican virtue and personal liberty. Thomas Jefferson spoke for most Americans in his 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia, when he declared that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever He had a chosen people, in whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” He expressed similar views in other writings.
During the debate over the subsequent Louisiana Purchase during his administration, Jefferson was able to overcome his constitutional qualms with the satisfaction that the United States had acquired sufficient land to guarantee its existence as a republic of yeoman farmers and artisans for many generations hence. Land was not to be taken from those who already had legal title. Instead, new sources were found and made available for private purchase and settlement.
As a theorist of agrarian republicanism, Jefferson was thin gruel compared to John Taylor, a Virginia planter, lawyer, and politician, who served off-and-on as Senator. To distinguish his branch of the family, Taylor is usually referred to by his birthplace, Caroline County. The aphorism “That government is best which governs least,” has often been attributed to Jefferson, although it appears first in Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau in 1849. If, however, one might at least grant Jefferson the same sentiment, this aphorism even better describes Taylor’s philosophy. In particular, his 1814 book An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States sets out a systematic philosophy for land as the basis for personal happiness and republican vitality. Land gives its owners sustenance and trains them to self-reliance, which produces independence, which, in turn, is the source of liberty. A key to maintaining that independence is the right to keep arms.
The (mostly) Southern agrarian republicans shared with their (mostly) New England classic republican compatriots a belief that widely-distributed land ownership is most conducive to private virtue. However, they parted ways on the connection between private and public virtue as crucial to the survival of republican government. Taylor wrote, “The more a nation depends for its liberty on the qualities of individuals, the less likely it is to retain it. By expecting publick good from private virtue, we expose ourselves to publick evils from private vices.”
While a republican system, as a whole, is strongest when it rests on a broad base of a virtuous and civically militant citizenry, it is risky to rely only on that condition to preserve republican government by producing virtuous politicians. Homo politicus is better known for seeking power for personal gain and influence over others than for personal sacrifice and care for the general welfare. As described by the modern school of “public choice” theory, politicians are self-interested actors, whose actions are best explained by their foremost goal, to get re-elected. As well, the Puritan approach of an intrusive government which would vigorously police private behavior to instill and maintain virtue raised red flags for the agrarians.
Taylor and other agrarians distrusted government generally, but the more removed from direct and frequent popular control officials were, the greater the danger to the republican form. The good news was that sufficient public virtue could be produced even if, for whatever reason, private virtue was lacking in those who would govern. To that end, it became incumbent on those who framed constitutions to recognize the inherently self-interested nature of politicians and to harness that self-interest through constitutional structures which would simultaneously authorize and limit the power of government officials of all types. Politicians would “do the right thing” not because they were sufficiently trained to private virtue, but because it would serve their own self-interest in preserving their positions.
Taylor’s prescription was not novel. The Scottish philosopher David Hume began his 1742 essay, “Of the Independency of Parliament,” by declaring, “Political writers have established it as a maxim that, in contriving any system of government and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, cooperate to public good.” The works of the charismatic and often controversial Hume were well known to educated Americans.
James Madison expressed these sentiments in a famous passage in Number 51 of The Federalist:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be
connected to the constitutional rights of the place…. In framing a government
which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:
you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next
place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the
primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the
necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Those “auxiliary precautions” were the structural checks and balances in the Constitution.
Various historians have noted the importance of Taylor’s contributions to American political theory, even lauding him as in some ways the best political theorist that America has produced. Although his vision was republican, it may better be characterized as a branch of classical liberalism or liberal republicanism. Note that the term “liberal” does not have the current political connotation. Unlike today’s version, which is more akin to a soft compulsory communitarianism, the classic liberalism emerging during that period was directly tied to the individual’s liberty to live free from state-enforced mandates beyond the minimum needed for social stability.
Taylor certainly was not the first Anglo-American skeptic about the classic Aristotelian and Ciceronian connection between private and public virtue reborn in the Puritan republicanism of John Adams. The history of 18th-century Anglo-American political ideas reveals influential predecessors, such as Bernard de Mandeville and, as mentioned earlier, David Hume. Mandeville wrote his satirical Fable of the Bees in 1705, a famous parody of English politics of the time. In the poem, he describes a thriving colony of bees, where each individual bee works to live a life of luxury and ease, a sentiment not disagreeable to Taylor’s Southern planter class. But this prosperous existence comes to an end when some of the bees begin to denounce the personal corruption caused by luxury and to call for a life of simplicity and virtue to be imposed, as the Puritan republicans were wont to do. Many bees die, their hive becomes impoverished, and they live in a hollow tree, “blest with Content and Honesty.” He concludes,
Bare Virtue can’t make Nations live,
In Splendor; they, that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.
In short, personal vices, such as greed and ambition, generate public virtue of industriousness and prosperity. Similar ideas also infused, albeit in more genteel presentation, the writings of an important contemporary of the American founders, the political economist Adam Smith.
George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the National Republicanism of the Rising Commercial Centers
Even more than Taylor, it was the adherents of an emerging “national republicanism” who agreed with Mandeville, Hume, and Smith. Although all persons are driven by their passions, they asserted, not all passions are the same. Some, especially those who already have material riches, might be gripped by a simple desire for fame or honor, or by love of country. Moreover, a properly constructed constitution, produced by those few motivated by such nobler passions, might harness the baser passions of lesser politicians towards the public good. The men who met in Philadelphia for the specific purpose of drafting the Constitution might qualify as men whose primary, if not sole, passions were fame and love of country. For most, no immediate financial gain or personal political success was to be realized. Indeed, contrary to the progressive theory advanced in the early 20th century by the historian Charles Beard that economic self-interest was the driving force behind the Constitution’s adoption, it is well-established that delegates often voted in favor of proposals which would, if anything, hurt their financial interests.
Such “good” passions, although they manifested a self-interest, also produced the public virtue necessary for republican government. It produced policies for the general welfare and in the interest of the public, for example, by raising material well-being through enhanced economic efficiency from technological innovations and increased commerce. The problem, of course, is that all politicians—and, indeed, bureaucrats of all kinds—routinely claim to be driven by a passion for public service and that their policy proposals are in the public interest. A multitude of unelected non-governmental organizations and litigious law firms also wrap themselves in the mantle of the “public interest.” Alas, to consider, for instance, who benefits from pay-outs in the typical class-action lawsuit, the reality rarely matches the professed public virtue. One never hears a politician say that a policy, no matter how nefarious and self-rewarding, is done for anything other than the noblest public purpose. Non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) assiduously hide connections to foreign interests while working for what they claim are public benefits of the highest order. Rare even is a politician as honest as the 19th-century New York Tammany Hall leader George Washington Plunkitt. He famously distinguished between “dishonest” and “honest” graft and was frank about his practice of the latter. Dishonest graft meant working solely for one’s own interests. Honest graftwas to work for one’s own wealth, while simultaneously furthering the interests of one’s party and community.
The big problem, then, for the national republicans was to constrain those politicians who would in fact hold political offices longer and with less-defined objectives than those who drafted the Constitution. George Washington had long and carefully cultivated the public image of the man moved solely by a passion for honor. Whatever his motives in his private actions, such as, for example, acquiring huge tracts of land, Washington in his public life appears to have been driven by his concern about the public’s perception of him as a man of honor. Forrest McDonald and numerous other historians have painted the picture of a man who might be said to have “staged” his public life.
Washington was deeply affected throughout his life by Joseph Addison’s play Cato about the Roman republican statesman Marcus Porcius Cato (“the Younger”). Cato, a committed Stoic, was famous for his unrelenting honesty, an attribute Washington also cultivated in the public eye and which he may well have possessed to an unusual degree. Mason Locke Weems’s early-19th century mythical tale of the boy George Washington and the chopped-down cherry tree (“I cannot tell a lie….”) reflects the success of Washington’s efforts in that regard.
But Washington was a rare specimen of homo politicus. The national republicans’ plan to keep the more run-of-the-mill politicians on the path of public virtue was similar to that of the agrarians. One must rely on one measure of citizen virtue and another measure of constitutional structure to produce public virtue from politicians driven by private passions. Unlike the agrarians, they were convinced that a strong national government must be a part of that structure. On that point Hamilton and at least the 1787 version of Madison could agree. However, Hamilton and the national republicans soon parted ways with Madison—and with Jefferson and the more resolute agrarian republicans such as Taylor—by enthusiastically embracing the role of manufacturing and banking in promoting public virtue.
The Agrarian Reaction against National Republicanism
Jefferson’s ideal republic of yeoman farmers and artisans, comprising a large middle class possessed of a rough equality of means, had little ideological room for manufacturers, and none for bankers and other “jobbers” dealing in “phantom wealth.” Manufacturing, when combined with commerce, the fear went, would necessarily soon lead to two anti-republican results. One was a love for material luxury, the other was a life of drudgery for the impoverished masses. The history of the ancient Roman Republic was a vivid cautionary tale. Taylor and the agrarians accepted the benefit of commerce but only within their preferred system of political economy, because it facilitated the export of products from the agricultural South and the importation of manufactured goods from abroad. But, in a preview of the South Carolina Nullification Crisis of the 1820s and ‘30s, this required free trade. Like most Southerners, Taylor was a committed free trader and suspicious of any national government regulation of economic matters, especially Hamiltonian tariffs.
The agrarians’ fear of manufacturing tied into a general belief among political writers going back to antiquity that political systems evolve and, ultimately, decay. Entropy is inevitable in politics as much as in physics. Agriculture may be the most desirable occupation, but, sooner or later, the limited productive land area is fully occupied, as New England was discovering. People would flock to cities where manufacturing would become their occupation. As Adam Smith described the effect on people, “the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are, perhaps, always the same … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become ….” This fate stood in sharp contrast to that of the farmer, artisan, and merchant, who must possess broad knowledge and understanding of many activities.
If this process was inexorable and created human brutes unfit to practice private virtues, it also made the demise of the republic inevitable. Even Benjamin Franklin believed in the dangers from this progression, which puts his remark to his interlocutor, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” in yet another light. It also explains the urgency which Jefferson and other agrarian republicans felt about the westward expansion of territory and the opening of western land to agricultural settlement needed to forestall this threat to republican governance.
At the conclusion of the passage quoted above, Adam Smith extended a saving hand. After all, he was not opposed to either manufacturing or banking as sources of wealth. The evils of a poor and brutish urban working class would happen, “unless the government takes some pains to prevent it.” Smith had his views of what that might be. In any event, Hamilton, as an enthusiastic believer in Smith’s ideas, agreed that wealth was not fixed, and that even a personal profit motive can contribute to the public welfare. Investing in new processes and useful products and services is a public benefit. Thus, actions of the manufacturer and even the banker exemplify public virtue, whether or not they are driven by self-interest. He, like Adam Smith, believed that private wealth-producing activities qualified as private virtue. While others might not go that far, Hamilton successfully advocated the connection between such activity and the public virtue needed to maintain republican government.
Having established that manufacturing and banking could be “virtuous” in the public sense, the national republicans urged policies to promote those activities in order to ameliorate the conditions of poverty predicted by the agrarians which would threaten republican government. After all, if enough wealth is created for all, “poverty” ceases to be objective and becomes relative. A rising tide floats all ships. At least from a material standpoint, people today usually own a car and various electric and electronic devices, live in an abode with air conditioning and indoor plumbing, and have clean water, basic sustenance, and modern medical and dental care. Their every-day lives are vastly better than even the wealthy of past generations enjoyed.
Hamilton and his supporters believed that their strong national government was the best mechanism to institute policies which would foster the growth of wealth. Hamilton’s later program in his four reports to Congress between 1790 and 1795 on the public debt, a national bank, and manufactures, laid out in considerable detail his plans to that end. These sophisticated reports were a monument to Hamilton’s intellect and experience applied to the economic problems of the early United States. They had such potency, and were so hotly contested, that they precipitated the First American Party System of Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans and made Hamilton in effect the dominant figure of American politics in the 1790s.
The Degeneration of Republicanism as Democratic Passions are Let Loose
It should be noted in conclusion that all republicans of the time—classic (Puritan), agrarian, and national—opposed democracy. This antipathy also has ancient roots, for example in Plato’s characterization of democracy as a corrupt system that inevitably degenerates into tyranny, and in Aristotle’s point that democracy was a corruption of constitutional government. Even those political leaders and various delegates to the Constitutional Convention who at some point in their lives had been most favorable towards broad public participation and involvement in politics, were shaken by Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. That event in 1786 had created much tumult and political chaos and was put down by the arrival of an army raised by the state. It was very much on the minds of the attendees at the Philadelphia convention. Some of the most vociferous detractors of the Constitution as being insufficiently “republican” were also the harshest critics of democracy. For them, Shays’s Rebellion exposed the danger of relying on private virtue to provide the public virtue necessary for republican self-government. James Madison spoke for them all when he opined in Number 10 of The Federalist about the inadequacy of democracies to promote public virtue:
“[Such] democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronised this species of government, have erroneously supposed, that, by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
This is a warning to be pondered as Democratic Party politicians today push to extend the voting franchise to persons as young as 16 and to non-citizens. The latter generally are not acculturated to exercise such power in the American polity. According to psychological research, the young do not have fully matured rational brains and are not deemed competent to smoke, drink, buy guns, drive a vehicle without significant restrictions, serve in the military, decide on their own to get married, write a will, be held to a contract, support themselves, or generally be responsible as adults for their criminal acts. They are nevertheless said to be mature enough to evaluate complex issues of public policy. Although Socrates in Plato’s Republic did not phrase it this bluntly in his critique of democracy, others have described his remarks as characterizing such a system as based on the irrationality of one multiplied by the irrationalities of many others. One begins to see his point.
Democratic Party politicians in increasing numbers promise to abolish the Electoral College, expand the size of the Supreme Court to that of a legislative chamber, and change the structure of the Senate to one based on population. The push for these proposals rests on a numerical fetish, 50% plus 1, i.e., uncontrolled majority rule, traditionally a prescription for political turmoil and entirely inconsistent with the history and founding ideas of our federal republic. History shows again and again that a winner-take-all approach creates a tyranny of the majority, and just like a tyranny of one, inevitably brings the exercise of unrestrained power, resentment by those targeted, and, eventually, retribution once the political tide shifts. Some of these proposals would require amending the Constitution, admittedly an unlikely prospect. However, even the increased currency of such ideas shows how far the degeneration of American republicanism has proceeded.
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