It's my custom to pick a reading in American history to celebrate the Fourth of July each year. In browsing my bookshelf, which is amply stocked with Garry Wills, and my eye caught this title. I'd bought it and read it when it was published in 2005, so I thought I could dip into it to meet my quota of patriotic reading.
Wrong.
I can't "dip into" Garry Wills. There are few living authors of whom I've read--and re-read--so much. I was like a fish thinking I'd just take a nibble of that juicy worm and avoid the hook. No way with this expert angler of readers. And as I read and quickly realized that I wasn't going to read just a portion of this work, I also realized that I was really getting a twofer by doing so: extended quotes of Henry Adams along with a guided tour from Wills. Indeed, as Wills explains, the book serves as a mini-biography of Adams and a guided tour of Adams's great work, The History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1801-1817), originally published in 1889 and1891 and consisting of nine volumes. Is this long venture worth it? Wills describes Adams's work here as ""the greatest prose masterpiece of non-fiction in America in the 19th century." And as to Wills, I'll venture the opinion that he's one of the outstanding prose stylists of the later 20th and early 21st century America, as well as serving as one of our most astute contemporary political observers and historians (among other achievements). This is a perfect match.
The first main contention Wills argues is that History is misread (if read at all) and overshadowed by Adam's The Education of Henry Adams (written in 1906 although not published until 1918). Wills describes The Education as a"world-weary and pessimistic view of the nation and its politics." But the History was written by Adams when he was in his forties and reveals "a man optimistic, progressive, and nationalistic, instead of one detached, arch, and pessimistic [compared to the author of The Education]. Even the prose begins to look different, more energetic, flexible, and engaged, less mannered and self-conscious." Wills also shatters the contention, surprisingly wide-spread, that Adams was out to defend the honor of his great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams. Not so. Adams wasn't keen on his grandfather or his New England heritage, nor was he sour about Jefferson. Finally, historians who know better often read only the opening, which consists of a social history of the United States in 1800. While some may praise this part of the work as a pioneering effort of social history, they ignore the remainder. But such a limited reading, as Wills describes it, consists of "the chrysalis without the butterfly, the windup without the pitch." With these three misconceptions dispatched, Wills then walks the reader through Adams's History and related works (biographies of Albert Gallatin, John Randolph, and an unpublished biography of Aaron Burr).
ADAMS HAS TOLD a dramatic story in his nine volumes—how a nation stagnating at the end of Federalist rule shook itself awake and struck off boldly in new directions in the first sixteen years of the Jeffersonians' rule. In one way, this picture corresponds with accepted notions. Jefferson had, after all, promised a "second revolution." But his aim was initially a conservative one—to return to the original Revolution, which had been betrayed by the Federalists. He would draw back from the world, hobble federal power, let states and merchants conduct their own affairs. He promised to be even more wary of foreign entanglements than President Washington had been. He would recall embassies, put the navy to sleep, get rid of all taxes but customs duties, and give himself little to do. Adams agrees that there was, indeed, a second revolution—just not the one Jefferson thought he would be conducting. Yet he gives Jefferson the credit for aspiring to a new revolution, whatever its shape. Jefferson did not betray his principles in riding these new energies. It just proved impossible to return to the days of the first revolution, whether that was conceived in Federalist or Republican terms.. . . .Politics had moved on. Old political alignments no longer applied when the New Englander John Quincy Adams was serving as secretary of state to the Virginia president James Monroe, and when a Connecticut Supreme Court justice like Joseph Story wrote opinions indistinguishable from those of the Virginia chief justice John Marshall.
Wills also describes the multiple feats of historical accomplishment and unique insights that Adams reveals in his work:
What sets Adams's History apart, in its own time and in ours? There are a number of original features. It turns upside down the previous consensus on the period covered, so drastically that many have missed the point of the History entirely—which is not that Republicans became Federalists in office, but that they led a breakout from both ideologies. Adams brings to bear on his daring thesis many kinds of evidence, archival and cultural, that had not before been so deftly interwoven. The book also thinks internationally while telling a national tale. No other general account of the Jeffersonians' achievement tracks so carefully the international events that were affecting and being affected by what went on within the borders of the United States. Adams was bucking an American tendency of long standing—the sense that America's special destiny could be worked out without foreign aid or hindrance.
This last observation is expanded by Wills:
If one were to ask for the two leading figures in American history during the first sixteen years of the nineteenth century, the normal answer might be Jefferson and Madison. Adams, on the other hand, thinks they were Jefferson and Napoleon. Jefferson's actions were taken in the context of endless joustings with Bonaparte, or attempts to distance himself from him, or to escape the shadow of alleged collaboration with him. Even in electoral politics, he had always to cope with the charge of Francophile leanings toward Napoleon. The fate of Louisiana and the Floridas was dependent on Bonaparte. The War of 1812 was in large part prompted by his maneuverings to pit the Anglophone nations against each other. His power was continually felt or feared or flattered by the Jeffersonians. He, more than anyone or anything, forced Jefferson out of his original plan of disengagement from the world.
. . . .
To emphasize from the outset the importance of Napoleon to the Jeffersonian administrations, Adams introduces him in the History's first volume with a Miltonic flourish: "Most picturesque of all figures in modern history, Napoleon Bonaparte, like Milton's Satan on his throne of state, although surrounded by a group of figures little less striking than himself, sat unapproachable on his bad eminence; or, when he moved, the dusky air felt an unusual weight"
Wills pivots from the importance of Napoleon to the American story to a comparison of Adams with his contemporary Leo Tolstoy, who also contends with Napoleon in his monumental War and Peace (although Wills notes, there is no evidence that Adams had read War and Peace). Wills writes:
To say that Jefferson and Napoleon are the contending giants in Adams's History is not, oddly enough, to say that he is writing "great man" history. These two are like Napoleon and his Russian rival, General Kutuzov, in War and Peace, men doing they knew not what, borne along by their people, by their foes, by accident or by concatenating factors seen and unseen—so that they accomplish very often the exact opposite of what they intended. Napoleon abets or baffles Jefferson into policies that succeed despite Jefferson's will. But Napoleon, too, is baffled over and over while he acts with an illusion of control—in Egypt, in Saint Domingue, in Spain, in Russia, at the English Channel. Adams and Tolstoy—contemporaries who were writing about the same Napoleonic years—are the supreme ironists of their subject.
While working on the History in 1883, Adams reflected on how his leading figures were being led:
"In regard to them I am incessantly forced to devise excuses and apologies or to admit that no excuse will avail. I am at times almost sorry that I ever undertook to write their history, for they appear like mere grasshoppers, kicking and gesticulating in the middle of the Mississippi River. There is no possibility of reconciling their theories with their acts, or their extraordinary foreign policy with dignity ... My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water. "
As Wills notes, there is an irony here with both Adams and Tolstoy, both focus on a "great man" (Napoleon) but seems him only a conduit. Wills elucidates:
Why, with this view of things, do Adams and Tolstoy dwell on their respective leading figures? Tolstoy answers that some men are better fitted to be the instruments of "the unseen hand" of history. They are used because they are usable. Napoleon was a force field in which all the hopes and angers and fears of the French Revolution, and resistance to it, and its aftermath, played themselves out. Men followed or resisted him because the same electrical currents were running through them, not because he was giving them the energies they lent him. In the same way, Adams's Jefferson is the only vehicle for a national vision of any sort in America. He offered "the line of least resistance" to forces breaking out of the old ideologies, out of the material constraints and mental blinders of the past.
And while both Adams and Tolstoy see providence in events, each has his own source: Tolstoy in the traditional providence of God's will and Jefferson in the "the people" and "the future." Thus the Jefferson of the revolutionary era could change course so drastically as Jefferson the president. This comparison of Adams and Tolstoy and their respective accounts lead Wills to his own insightful observations about the course of events:
But whatever one thinks of Adams's own views, anyone can learn from the construction of the History how to study the interplay of the many factors—national and international interests, personal and impersonal influences, planned and unplanned events—that go into a period of great social change. Why and how did the Jeffersonians make a nation? Because they had to. They could not make or maintain a government fitted to their time without doing so. Their own acts and those prompting or responding to their acts insensibly but irresistibly bore them along. That is why Adams is right to see continuity between the Jefferson and the Madison administrations, all of it the work of the Jeffersonians. Party-making (with patronage, the Twelfth Amendment, the war on the judiciary), war-making (with Tripoli or with England), the supplanting of state militias with a standing professional army, territorial expansion achieved or attempted (in Louisiana, Florida, or Canada), a vigorous campaign of internal improvements, a central financial system, intellectual and technological innovations, a religious tolerance across regional boundaries—all these worked together in nation-making.
But literally uncountable agencies were also necessary to the unforeseen result. To identify many of these factors is not to know them all or have one binding explanation for the outcome. Tolstoy's novel moves on many levels, with a highly personal story to tell, but it reminds us that much will never be told because much will never be known:
"The more deeply we search out the causes [of a war], the more of them we discover; and every cause, and even a whole class of causes taken separately, strikes us as being equally true in itself, and equally deceptive through its insignificance in comparison with the immensity of the result, and its inability to produce (without all the other causes that concurred with it) the effect that followed.8 This is the irony of history as Adams traces it. It tells us how the Jeffersonians wrought better than they knew while they thought they were doing something else. In the end, they made a nation." [War and Peace, 688.]
This is the irony of history as Adams traces it. It tells us how the Jeffersonians wrought better than they knew while they thought they were doing something else. In the end, they made a nation.
After this mediation on history, Wills concludes with some pertinent observations on American politics. First, he describes the lingering desire to divide Americans into "Jeffersonians" and "Hamiltonians," although the History establishes that "the Jeffersonian era" described in the History effectively erased such this distinction. Wills effectively mocks his contemporaries who still attempt to deploy this simple binary today. Second, and of special note, we have our infatuation with the Founders:
The Founders have the air of demigods. Such piety has, of course, prompted revisionist attempts to bring the idols back down to our level, but they float magically back up again. . . . [The approval of the Founders] is the seal of approval endlessly sought. We feel that we not only honor but need the Founding Fathers. Without them we become illegitimate children.
We are always seeking their approval (as if they could grant it from the grave). Thus we are fed ideas of "original meaning," "strict construction," and other such nostrums of contemporary conservatives. Wills uses no less a personage than James Madison--the single most important figure in the drafting of the Constitution and one of the authors of The Federalist--to take down this nonsense:
Madison, who drew up the rough draft of the document [the Constitution] but disagreed with key portions of its final promulgation, said that it was a first effort that should be "liquidated" (clarified) in practice. It was like a blueprint that should be a guide but not a prison to contractors working from it. In Federalist No. 37, he criticizes what we know as "fundamentalist" readings of the Bible to attack fundamentalist readings of the Constitution:
"All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides, the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other, adds a fresh embarrassment [obstacle]. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspecuity therefore requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriated to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that, however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be considered, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And its unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated. Here then are three causes of vague and incorrect definitions: indistinctness of the object, imperfection of the organ of conception, inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas. Any one of these must produce a certain degree of obscurity. The convention, in delineating the boundary between the Federal and State jurisdictions, must have experienced the full effect of them all."
Thus, as Wills argues, what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" in 1790 (for instance) must be given a newer (and better) reading based on contemporary standards (and yes, our idea of what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" for crimes is better than theirs). That we can (and must) "misread" the Constitution was given its greatest model by Lincoln's "misreading" of the Declaration's statement that "all men are created equal." Jefferson never meant to include slaves or women by his statement, but the progress of the republic--a moral progress--demanded this "misreading." Wills concludes this portion of his argument:
This or that. Either-or. Adams says both-neither. History is far more complex than the interplay of two (or many) ideologies. Chance, mistakes, opportunism, progress, reassessments, forgetfulness—all of them and more concatenate something less neat than anyone envisaged.
. . . .
There was no going back to Jefferson's or Hamilton's "original intent." Jefferson's "agrarian virtue" was inextricably entangled in slavery. Hamilton's commercial elitism was at odds with the populist direction of the country. Some analogues or extensions of what they said can be found—just as broadening of constitutional meanings can—but constantly trying to revalidate what was time-bound as if it were eternal leads to quibbling and waste of intellectual energy. It diverts attention from what is really happening in the world. It constantly cycles back to childish illusions. Does this mean that the past has nothing to say to us? Certainly not. Lincoln learned from the Declaration without being slavish toward it. The founding achievement is rich with lessons, of problems overcome, of ways to address obstacles, or brave first attempts at what was insoluble in the Founders' time but not necessarily in ours.
Wills and Adams do agree that one Founder provides the soundest foundation for emulation--the founder who was the least intellectual: George Washington. Wills quotes historian Joseph Ellis about Washington's place:
Whatever minor missteps he made along the way, his judgment on all the major political and military questions invariably proved prescient, as if he had known where history was headed; or, perhaps, as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices. He was the rarest of men, a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet. [Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 202–3.]*
Wills concludes with this thought:
There is much to be learned from the past—but it is better learned from the pragmatists than from the ideologues. Washington would have been the least surprised or disoriented to see what the nation looked like after the Jeffersonians had made it.
Thus ends my nibble at the worm. But I'm delighted that I swallowed it (again) hook, line, and sinker. Two for the price of one--a real bargain for a gem.
*I recently was at an art museum in San Francisco that included a portrait of Washington. The caption indicated that Washington was adulated as a Founding Father, but then it cautioned that he owned slaves for many years. True, and not inconsequential, but small, and insulting to me that I didn't know this already and the implication that I needed this moral correction. We don't honor those before us for their perfection--none have it--but for the worthy accomplishments. Heaven save us from small-minded, moralistic historians and pedants! Thus my enthusiasm for the likes of Adams (to his detriment, he essentially ignored slavery) and Wills.
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