Читать книгу The Republic of Virtue - F. H. Buckley - Страница 13
ОглавлениеIN 1789, Thomas Jefferson returned from Paris to become America’s first secretary of state. As neither he nor President Washington wanted entangling alliances with other countries, he would have time on his hands, but soon he became something more than a cabinet member. He also led a growing political movement that was troubled by a centralizing Federalist Party. Jefferson’s party came to be called Democratic-Republicans, and he would run as their candidate for president in 1796 and win the highest office in 1800.
In Paris, Jefferson had witnessed the eruption of the French Revolution—the Tennis Court Oath, the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He returned “in the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for reformation” to what seemed to him a sadly conservative country.1 In France the aristocracy had lost its feudal privileges, but in postrevolutionary America a new hereditary aristocracy appeared to be emerging around the Society of the Cincinnati’s officer class. Writing from France, Jefferson warned Washington that so much as a single fiber of the society left in existence “will produce an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”2 There was also a rising moneyed aristocracy, based in New York and Philadelphia, composed of urban merchants whom the agrarian Democratic-Republicans saw as their natural enemy. The new financial class was led by Washington’s brilliant but imprudent secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who would shortly become a leader of the High Federalists and Jefferson’s principal opponent.
Jefferson was dismayed to find himself surrounded by monarchists in Hamilton’s New York, the new country’s capital. “I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversation filled me. Politics was the chief topic, and a preference for kingly, over republican, government was evidently the favored sentiment.”3 The country was already abandoning the republican principles of its founding, and some people hankered for a return to court government, with its attendant corruption.
Jefferson also objected to the federal assumption of state public debt, which Hamilton had negotiated in 1790. Southern republicans weren’t happy with how this measure was shifting the locus of financial power from the states to the federal government. Worse, those being paid off weren’t the farmer-patriots who had purchased state-issued bonds during the revolution. These bonds had mostly been sold off to a set of “speculators” and “stock-jobbers” who bought them at deep discount. The federal assumption of the debt was nothing other than a bailout of Hamilton’s friends, a moneyed class of wealthy investors (not unlike the 2008–9 bailout of Wall Street by another treasury secretary). What Hamilton’s scheming came down to, said Jefferson, was monarchism, and not just the desire for a king but “a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”
Corruption was a favorite topic for Jefferson, and he returned to it at a private dinner with Hamilton and John Adams in 1791. He wasn’t especially inclined to socialize with either of them, but Washington had left for Mount Vernon and had asked his cabinet and his vice president to deal with important matters that might arise during his absence. So the three met over dinner, and after the tablecloth was removed and the port produced, the conversation drifted to general matters. The Anglophile Adams praised the British constitution. Could it only be purged of its corruption, he said, it would be “the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” For Jefferson that was anathema: Britain was so corrupt that nothing could save it. Then Hamilton spoke up. Corruption was inseparable from what he admired in the British constitution. “Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, & it would become an impracticable government,” he said, but “as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.”4
Among the Framers, Hamilton wasn’t alone in his admiration for the British form of government. At the Philadelphia Convention, many of the other delegates had gone out of their way to praise the British constitution. But they had just fought a revolution to free themselves from it, and they wanted something better for America. Theirs would be a different kind of constitution, an anticorruption covenant.
The crucial moment in American history was not the Revolutionary War but the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, when fifty-five delegates from twelve states assembled to frame a new constitution for the country. (Rhode Island sent no delegates.) It may now seem inevitable that the delegates would agree on a constitution, but at various points in the proceedings they were at full stop. Several of the delegates threatened to walk out, and not a few thought the country might split into two or three parts.5 In that case, said Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, they should prepare for civil war. “The Country must be united,” he warned. “If persuasion does not unite us, the sword will. . . . The stronger party will then make traytors of the weaker; and the Gallows and Halter will finish the work of the sword.” Moreover, foreign powers might have been happy to take advantage of the confusion.6 A formal return to the British Empire, with a right of American self-government, was not beyond the realm of possibility, in which case the revolution would have been undone.
Even after the delegates agreed on the new Constitution, on September 17, it still had to be ratified by the states. But the outcome was then in little doubt, because the Framers presented the states with a take-it-or-leave-it document. It would be this or nothing, and the second option was not in the cards, since remaining under the Articles of Confederation might have resulted in a breakup of the new country. In the end, even corrupt little Rhode Island came around and ratified the Constitution in May 1790, a year after George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president. The state may have earned its label of “Rogue Island” from the convention delegates, but trying to make a country of itself just wouldn’t make sense.
So we got our Constitution. The debates along the way were filled with high drama and extended argument among an extraordinary group of politically astute leaders. But that isn’t to say they were all high-minded great men. “There is nothing less true,” said George Mason. “From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few.”7 It’s all the more striking, then, to see how often the delegates expressed their concerns about corruption, and some of the strongest voices for virtue came from the strangest places.
When Mason spoke of the middle-state “office hunters,” he likely let his eye fall upon Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. At the age of eighty-one, Franklin was the oldest person at the convention, and next to Washington he was the most famous, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac and a member of the Royal Academy. As a politician and a diplomat he had first asked the British to expel the French from North America and then persuaded the French to kick the British out of the United States, a triumph unmatched in U.S. diplomatic history. He was the indispensable American as much as Washington was. And he had built a career by securing lucrative public positions for himself and his family, beginning with his appointment as postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737.
The delegates may therefore have suspected that Franklin was less than sincere in his statements about the corrupting effects of payment for high office. In proposing that presidents should serve without pay, Franklin argued that men are moved by their passions for money and power, and that the worst candidates will seek office when the two are combined. The result would be British-style corruption, with vast numbers of placemen appointed to government office in reward for services to their party. “The struggles for [government places] are the true sources of all those factions which are perpetually dividing the [British] Nation, distracting its councils, hurrying sometimes into fruitless & mischievous wars, and often compelling a submission to dishonorable terms of peace.”8 It would be the same in America if the posts of honor became places of profit.
When he finished speaking, there was silence among the delegates. Perhaps they were thinking of how effectively Franklin had sought profitable places himself, and how much he had enjoyed the salons of Paris. They may also have been recalling the services he had done for America and wondering if it might be a mistake to discourage people like Franklin from taking public office. Finally, Hamilton seconded the motion for an unpaid presidency. Few delegates had less sympathy for the proposal, but Hamilton did not want to see the older man embarrassed. No one wished to debate Franklin’s proposal, wrote Madison in his convention notes, yet “it was treated with great respect, but rather for the author of it, than from any apparent conviction of its expediency or practicability.”9 And so it went nowhere.
Hamilton wasn’t particularly troubled by corruption, as we have seen, but if any delegate was more cynical still it was Gouverneur Morris. While the story that he owed his peg leg to a jump from a window to escape a jealous husband is probably apocryphal, we do know something of his many affairs, thanks to his candid diary.10 When he went to Paris on banking business, he quickly adapted to local customs and shared a mistress—the comtesse de Flahaut—with Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun. With a touch of envy, a French diplomat described Morris as a man “without morals and, if one believes his enemies, without principles.”11
At the convention, Morris was the master of the adroit suggestion, the strategic compromise, the art of the deal. Though he was present at the start, in mid-May, he left after a few days, returning only on July 2, and then he wasted no time in launching into a patronizing speech in favor of an aristocratic senate, composed only of those who could serve without pay. The “aristocratic interest” would then be set against the “popular interest,” so that the two would check and control each other. Morris hoped the delegates had “strength of mind eno’ . . . to look truth in the face” and acknowledge what really motivates people, rich and poor. “He did not hesitate therefore to say that loaves & fishes must bribe the Demagogues.”12 In his brashness, Morris failed to take the measure of the delegates, and Madison was especially annoyed. On July 11, he admonished Morris for continually insisting on the “political depravity of men, and the necessity of checking one vice and interest” against another.13 Within a short time, however, the two had made up, and Morris persuaded Madison to support the idea of a popularly elected president in a system of checks and balances.
Up to this point, Madison had subscribed to a very different theory for restraining corruption. The voters, he thought, might be made to elect their betters through a process of filtration, an idea first proposed by David Hume. Madison would have read Hume’s essays as a student at Princeton and would have come across his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” There, Hume proposed a highly artificial scheme of government that began with a division of Great Britain and Ireland into one hundred counties, and each of these into one hundred parishes, and then built up from there with county-town assemblies, county magistrates, and senators.14 Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who in turn would elect a higher level of representatives, and so on up the ladder. At each rising level, the electors would presumably have better judgment than those who elected them, resulting in a superior set of representatives at the highest levels. The cream would rise to the top.
Madison suggested this concept of filtration or refinement of representatives in “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” his essay on the defects of the Articles of Confederation. What he envisaged was “a process of elections” designed to ensure that the most senior places in government would be occupied by “the purest and noblest characters” in society.15 Such a system would “extract from the mass of the Society” those who “feel most strongly the proper motives to pursue the end of their appointment, and be most capable to devise the proper means of attaining it.” People like Washington, in short. People like Madison himself, come to think of it! And so he proposed a constitution in which the voters would directly elect the House of Representatives, which would then choose the Senate, and both bodies jointly would pick the president. At the convention he described this as a “policy of refining the popular appointments by successive filtrations.”16
This process would be a remedy for the defects of democracy, argued Madison. Ordinary voters would have little information about candidates and wouldn’t know how to choose wisely. They could easily become pawns in the hands of a corrupt demagogue “veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with the glowing colours of popular eloquence.” In addition, self-interest would blind people to the common good. Washington, himself the paragon of virtue, privately agreed that governments could not rely upon a disinterested citizenry, for as he wrote to Madison’s father, “the motives which predominate most in human affairs” are “self-love and self-interest.”17
Many politicians since Madison have questioned whether the voters, unaided, choose well. After the 1994 Republican landslide, Rep. Barney Frank was asked what he thought of the election’s message to his fellow Democrats. “The voters,” he exploded. “They’re nothing to write home about either!” When the Framers looked at the American electorate of 1787, they also didn’t see much virtue. They saw the confederation falling apart through an “excess of democracy,” with its “turbulence and follies.”18 In George Mason’s view, “it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people, as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”19
In parliamentary systems of government, the voters do not choose the chief magistrate. The voters in Britain do not elect the prime minister. Only the voters of the Maidenhead constituency have the privilege of voting for or against Theresa May. What makes her prime minister is the support of Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, and that’s a form of filtration. It might be a minimal kind of filtration, since the MPs who chose May have run for election as members of her party in modern media campaigns. But Madison wanted this type of parliamentary or congressional government for the United States. He didn’t get what he wanted at Philadelphia.
On July 16, 1787, the delegates voted for the Connecticut Compromise, under which the state legislatures would appoint U.S. senators, and the states would have equal representation in the Senate. There would be filtration, but the states would do the filtering. As a strong nationalist, Madison hated this plan. The next morning, the dispirited nationalists from the large states of Virginia and Pennsylvania met over breakfast to consider their options. Some thought they should make the best of the situation. Others argued for a walkout, and as Madison more than anyone else wanted to draw power from the states, he was likely of this number. The Connecticut Compromise had caused “serious anxiety,” he wrote,20 but the group of nationalists came to no decision. “The time was wasted in vague conversation.”21
Virtually all of Madison’s ideas had been rejected. He had lost, and he knew it.22 He must have wondered whether anything could still be rescued of the convention.
That breakfast meeting was on July 17, arguably the most important day in American history. There would be no walkout, and the convention would produce a constitution. The delegates had settled on how to choose the House of Representatives and the Senate, but they had yet to decide on the executive branch, and that would turn out to be the most important question of all. The debate over how the president would be chosen is the most fascinating story of the convention, and it began with a speech about corruption that Gouverneur Morris made that day.
Madison doesn’t tell us who attended the July 17 breakfast meeting. Morris was likely there, as a representative of a large state and as one who spoke more than anyone else during the convention. He must have argued against a walkout, for he had a fresh card to play, and later that morning he would deliver one of the most consequential speeches in American political history. Over the following weeks it would be Morris’s convention more than anyone else’s, as he rallied his side, stick-handled the puck, and polished the language of the text. The convention would have another two months to go, and during that time Morris returned again and again to the danger of corruption.
By the time Morris made his speech, the structure of the new government had largely been agreed upon. The states would not be abolished, as Hamilton would have wished. Instead, they would retain broad powers in their internal affairs, and would be represented on an equal basis at the heart of the federal government, in its Senate. Seats in the House of Representatives would be allocated by population, and the members elected by the people. Still to be decided was how the president would be chosen. “This subject has greatly divided the House,” said James Wilson, “and will also divide people out of doors. It is in truth the most difficult of all on which we have had to decide.”23 It was also the most consequential, for today we have a government that is dominated by the presidency.
Over the course of the convention, the delegates voted six times for a congressionally appointed president, once unanimously, and they also voted once for a president chosen by state legislatures. (The convention didn’t follow strict rules of procedure, so the delegates returned again and again to matters previously voted on.) We would have a president appointed by Congress today, but for the way Morris cleverly turned the delegates by appealing to their fear of corruption. He had initially wanted a congressionally appointed president, for like Madison he was suspicious of democracy. Also like Madison, he was a nationalist who wanted to draw power to the new federal government. And he was a quicker thinker than Madison. After the Connecticut Compromise had passed on July 16, Morris was the first to recognize that a congressional appointment of the president would weaken the national government. If senators were appointed by state legislatures, and small states were given equal representation in the senior branch of Congress, then a congressionally appointed presidency would empower the states. When Morris realized this, his nationalism trumped his fear of democracy, and he promptly began to argue for a popularly elected president.
First he sidled up to the small-state delegates by opposing Madison’s pet project, a federal veto power over state legislation. He was “more and more opposed to the [federal] negative. The proposal of it would disgust all the States.”24 Having thus positioned himself as a moderate on the issue of federal power, Morris then made his masterstroke in a speech designed to persuade the small-state delegates to support a popularly elected president as a means of combatting corruption. Two weeks earlier he had told the delegates that bribery of demagogues with loaves and fishes was to be expected, but now he presented himself as corruption’s implacable foe. He argued that a congressionally appointed executive would be “the mere creature of the Legis[lature] if appointed & impeachable by that body.” Instead, Morris said, the president “ought to be elected by the people at large, by the freeholders of the Country.” He acknowledged difficulties in this method, but noted that “they have been found superable” in New York and Connecticut, and he believed it would be likewise for choosing the executive of the United States.
If the people should elect, they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character, or services; some man . . . of continental reputation. If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals; real merit will rarely be the title of the appointment.25
This was catnip to the small-state delegates, with their aversion to corruption. But would the Virginia nationalists recognize that having a popularly elected president would mean a shift of power to the federal government? Not at first. When the matter was put to a vote shortly thereafter, only the Pennsylvania delegates voted with Morris, while Madison’s Virginia joined the other states in the majority. But then Morris returned to the fray on July 19 with new arguments for a popular election. As the country was large, he said, it would require a vigorous executive to govern it, and a president who was popularly elected would be more powerful than one who owed his election to Congress. Also, the government would be less corrupt with a popularly elected president. Were Congress to appoint him, it would become the dominant branch, and its members would be chosen from among the “Great & the wealthy.” Corruption would be the result, for “wealth tends to corrupt the mind & to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression.”26 That would be avoided with a popularly elected president, for he would be the tribune of the people, especially of the lower classes.
The delegates weren’t buying this argument, but Morris succeeded in one thing: he turned Madison around. For Madison, the penny finally dropped on that day, and he was persuaded to support a popularly elected president. His speech on the subject is frequently quoted:
If it be a fundamental principle of free Govt. that the Legislative, Executive & Judiciary powers should be separately exercised; it is equally so that they be independently exercised. . . . This could not be if [the president] was to be appointable from time to time by the Legislature. . . . Certain it was that the appointment would be attended with intrigues and contentions that ought not to be unnecessarily admitted.27
Of course, it wasn’t Madison’s idea that the separation of powers required a popularly elected president. It came from Morris, as did the idea that this measure was necessary to avoid the corruption that would follow upon a congressional appointment of the president.
In following Morris’s lead, Madison abandoned the filtration theory he had brought to the convention. What changed his mind was realizing the implications of the way senators would be chosen under the Connecticut Compromise. If state legislatures chose senators, and then Congress chose the president, this would empower the states. For Madison, as with Morris, nationalism trumped filtration, and with it the dream of virtuous leaders chosen by Congress. Thereafter the nationalists from Pennsylvania and Virginia, the two largest states, would unite around the principle of a popularly elected president, though the other delegations still opposed it.
On July 26 the delegates turned over a draft constitution, with an appointed president, to a Committee of Detail for fine-tuning, and then they adjourned for ten days. The committee reported back on August 6 with a new draft that had significant changes but retained a congressionally elected president.28 That question, it was thought, had been settled. It wasn’t, though. A motion for a popularly elected president was brought forward once more, on August 24, winning only two votes against nine.29 Then Morris spoke up again to warn of corruption if the president were to be chosen by Congress. “Cabal & corruption are attached to that mode of election,” he said.30 His proposal for a popular election of the president did better, but still failed, with five votes against six.31 That was as close as the Philadelphia Convention came to giving us a popularly elected president. Not once did the delegates ever vote for it.
On August 31 the delegates referred the question of presidential elections to the Committee on Unfinished Parts, with one delegate for each state. The committee was dominated by delegates who supported a popularly elected president, including Morris. Four days later, on September 4, they presented a plan for the president to be chosen by electors appointed in a manner determined by each state’s legislature. Today that means a popular election in every state, but in 1787 the delegates would have expected state legislatures to pick the electors. They also expected that presidential candidates after George Washington would usually not have nationwide support, and with no candidate winning a majority of electoral votes, the decision would be thrown to the House of Representatives (originally, to the Senate), voting by state. This is what would happen in the elections of 1800 and 1824, and most of the Framers thought it would almost always be that way. In essence, they thought they had agreed on a congressionally chosen president.
The deliberations of the Committee on Unfinished Parts were kept secret, but the plan for selecting a president seems to have come mainly from the pen of Gouverneur Morris, who was the foremost advocate of a popular election and who had the strongest strategic sense of any of the delegates. He was also the committee’s chief spokesman in explaining the new plan to the other delegates. The new system for choosing a president was designed to address the possibility of corruption, he said. “The principal advantage aimed at was that of taking away the opportunity for cabal,” which the delegates would have taken as a reference to corruption. A legislative appointment would have introduced “the danger of intrigue & faction.”32
In accepting the new plan, the delegates did not anticipate the extension of the franchise to all adults or the direct election of senators under the Seventeenth Amendment. They didn’t think the presidential electors would be chosen by the voters, and they did expect that electors would exercise independent discretion in picking a president. Most of the delegates didn’t even realize they had effectively abandoned the idea of a congressionally appointed president, since they expected that few candidates would ever secure a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Nor did they think the nationalists had won. But over time, power shifted from the states to Washington, and in Washington it shifted to the executive office; and the cumbersome machinery of the Constitution’s Article II has given America its strong presidential form of government.
All of this began with Morris’s little-known speech on July 17. And when his proposals were put to a vote, it was the fear of corruption that tipped the scales.
What Corruption Meant to the Framers
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, with its presidential system and separation of powers, was sold as an anticorruption covenant, and that is how the convention delegates understood it. But just what did the Framers think corruption meant? The answer is several quite different things, but the simplest explanation is that it referred to how the British were governed.
The Framers may have recalled, for example, how James I plundered the Royal Treasury to give presents to his favorites. David Hume tells how James once observed a porter bearing £3,000 on his way to the Treasury. “How happy would that money make me!” said one of James’s handsome courtiers, whereupon the king gave it to him. “You think yourself very happy in obtaining so large a sum,” said James. “But I am more happy, in having an opportunity of obliging a worthy man, whom I love.”1 James subsequently ennobled the favorite as the Earl of Holland, a title he would bear until he died on the scaffold in 1649 at the hands of a vengeful Puritan Parliament.
Not all the gifts were so conspicuously without merit, however. One cannot read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets without being struck by how many of England’s greatest writers were sustained by the patronage of the king or the nobility. When he wrote The Old Bachelor, the twenty-three-year-old William Congreve was made one of the commissioners for licensing coaches, and soon afterward he was given places in the Pipe Office and the Custom House. Johnson himself held a pension from the king. Nor did contemporary Britons see themselves as especially corrupt. When George III ascended to the throne in 1760 promising a reign of virtue, free of corruption, no one thought he meant a government from which the tools of influence had been banished. Whig politicians, beginning with Robert Walpole (prime minister 1721–42) and continuing with the Pelham brothers (Henry Pelham, prime minister 1743–54; Thomas Pelham, 1st Duke of Newcastle, prime minister 1754–56, 1756–57), had perfected a patronage machine through which the government could rely on the support of a majority in the House of Commons. The king held important cards as well, in his control of the civil list of paid government appointees and his ability as the fount of honor to ennoble his supporters. With these instruments at his disposal, he could rely upon his allies in the House of Commons, the “King’s Friends.”
All sides thought it legitimate to offer plums to political friends and to feast on whatever was sent their way. “Men . . . no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity,” observed Sir Lewis Namier, “than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it.”2 David Hume thought the king’s patronage powers had even served a useful purpose in preserving the balanced British constitution, which had been undermined by the rising power of the House of Commons. Formally, the king could veto legislation, but his power to do so had fallen into abeyance and could not be revived. What he retained was the ability to rally the King’s Friends in Parliament through the favors he could grant, and this permitted him to shape ministries to his liking. “The crown has so many offices at its disposal, that, when assisted by the honest and disinterested part of the house, it will always command the resolutions of the whole; so far, at least, to preserve the ancient constitution from danger.” Call this “corruption and dependence” if you will, said Hume, but it was “necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.”3
In America, the Patriots weren’t buying this. They had read of British corruption from John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Cato’s Letters, 1720–23) and from Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), and they wanted no part of it. American visitors to Britain had brought back reports of the mother country’s appalling level of public vice. As John Adams saw it, both electors and elected in Britain had “become one mass of corruption.”4 John Dickinson, “the penman of the American Revolution,”5 was the strongest Anglophile at the Philadelphia Convention, but when he had visited England earlier he was shocked by how the British conducted their elections.
It is astonishing to think what impudence & villainy are practizd on this occasion. If a man cannot be brought to vote as he is desird, he is made dead drunk & kept in that state, never heard of by his family or friends till all is over & he can do no harm. The oath of their not being bribd is as strict & solemn as language can form it, but is so little regarded that few people can refrain from laughing while they take it. I think the character of Rome will equally suit this nation: “Easy to be bought, if there was but a purchaser.”6
It was bad enough that Britain was so corrupt, but worse still that the British were exporting their corruption to America through the officers they appointed. Royal governors such as Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts (Anne’s great-great-grandson) had created a system of dependents through their placemen, which John Adams thought amounted to a tyranny.7 “Cæsar, by destroying the Roman Republic, made himself perpetual dictator,” and likewise “Hutchinson, by countenancing and supporting a System of Corruption and all Tyranny, has made himself Governor.”8 Adams’s obsession with Hutchinson bordered on neurosis, but it wasn’t entirely divorced from reality. At one point Hutchinson was simultaneously the colony’s lieutenant governor, a member of its house of representatives and its chief justice. The tea that the Sons of Liberty threw into Boston Harbor had been intended for delivery to Hutchinson’s sons.
Whether or not the British system of government and the royal governors it gave America were as corrupt as all that, many of the colonists (anticipating Henry James) subscribed to a notion of American innocence versus European experience. Like George Mason,9 they may have admired the British constitution but detested British corruption, and that was an argument for Americans to have a different kind of government.10 They would build a republic of virtue.
In the eighteenth century there was a special understanding of disinterested republican virtue, the virtue of patriots who scorned corruption and championed the general good. In Britain it was represented by a “Country party,” whose members detested Walpole and were avid readers of Cato’s Letters and of Bolingbroke, and who stood in opposition to a “Court party” that was more comfortable with corruption. In France, republican virtue found its most striking expression in the paintings of Jefferson’s friend Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), where it reached repellant heights.
Jefferson and David belonged to the same radical-chic set, the seedbed of revolution in a Paris where the line between art and politics was thin.11 Just a few years after Jefferson returned from France, David would sign the death order for Louis XVI and would become a close political ally of the sea-green incorruptible Robespierre. Jefferson greatly admired The Oath of the Horatii when he was in Paris. “I do not feel an interest in any pencil but that of David,” he wrote.12 It wasn’t simply the stunning tableaux that drew him to the artist, for both men shared Robespierre’s belief that “immorality is the basis of despotism, as virtue is the essence of a republic.”13 Both yearned for a reign of virtue clothed in classical republican garb, as seen in the painter’s subversive The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons.
David took his inspiration from Livy’s account of how Lucius Junius Brutus established a Roman Republic by expelling the last king in 509 BC. The king, Tarquin the Proud, had outraged his subjects but was nevertheless supported by a class of courtiers who knew that “as long as there was a king, there was a person from whom they could get what they wanted, whether lawful or not.”14 That didn’t save him, however. After the revolt had succeeded and Brutus became the first leader of the Republic, he provided the supreme example of self-sacrifice and republican virtue by having two of his own sons executed for conspiring to restore the monarchy. David’s painting portrays the moment when the bodies are brought home. Brutus sits in the shadows, his back to his sons, his face stern and grim, the picture of republican self-sacrifice and a reproach to the weeping women of the family on his left. If the symbol of the frivolous ancien régime was the feminine salon, republican virtue was a distinctly masculine trait.
The Country party and the ideal of republican virtue were well represented at the Philadelphia Convention, in delegates such as Roger Sherman and George Mason.15 These were the people to whom Gouverneur Morris appealed in his speeches on corruption. But Morris privately belonged to a Court party that scoffed at the idea of a special kind of republican virtue. Hamilton might also be counted a member of the Court party. So too can Madison, who in “Vices of the Political System of the United States” had argued that self-interest would blind voters to the common good: “Place three individuals in a situation wherein the interest of each depends on the voice of the others, and give to two of them an interest opposed to the rights of the third? Will the latter be secure?”16 Later, in Federalist 51, he famously expanded on the limits of republican virtue. Men are not angels, he said, but seekers of private gain, and government should channel self-interest in such a way that it serves the public good. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” so that the overweening pursuit of advantage by one group is checked by other groups in the competition for power.
While the Country party had a stronger aversion to government corruption than did the Court party, all the Framers shared Madison’s skepticism about the innate goodness of the people. None would have agreed with Robespierre, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that social ills never stem from le peuple freely pursuing their own interest. “To be good, people have only to prefer their interests to that which is not in their interest,” wrote Robespierre. “To be good, the magistrate has only to sacrifice himself (s’immoler) to the people.”17 No one in Philadelphia would have spoken like that—not Madison, certainly not Hamilton or Morris, and not the Country party members either. As Hamilton observed, “the members most tenacious of republicanism . . . were as loud as any in declaiming against the vices of democracy.”18 Robespierre defended the jacquerie that burned down castles in the French Revolution, but the Framers took a different view. They had witnessed mob violence at home, with Shay’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts still a fresh memory, and they wanted none of it. Jefferson might perhaps have agreed with Robespierre about the innate goodness of the people, but happily he was in Paris and did not attend the Constitutional Convention.
