The Surprising Pessimism of America's Founding Fathers
Episode Stats
Summary
When Americans think about their country s founding fathers, they tend to think of them as cool and competent figures who were supremely confident in the superiority and longevity of the Republican government they had created. But my guest says that nearly all the founders experienced great internal and external conflict in conjunction with the new government, and can be greatly pessimistic about the future of the democratic experiment they had helped birth.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.780
Now, when Americans think about their country's founding fathers, they tend to think of them
00:00:14.100
as cool and competent figures who were supremely confident in superiority and longevity of
00:00:20.720
But my guest says that nearly all the founders experienced great internal and external conflict
00:00:25.240
in conjunction with the new government and can be greatly pessimistic about the future
00:00:29.120
of the democratic experiment they had helped birth.
00:00:33.080
He's a professor of political theory and the author of Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment
00:00:38.760
Today on the show, Dennis unpacks how four of the founders, George Washington, Alexander
00:00:42.260
Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, ultimately came to worry that the American
00:00:46.380
Republic wouldn't last past their own generation based on concerns that ranged from the rise
00:00:50.620
of partisanship to the lack of virtue amongst the American citizenry.
00:00:53.940
Dennis also discusses why it was that one founder, James Madison, remained optimistic about the
00:00:59.600
We end our conversation with why the disillusionment of the founders actually carries a message
00:01:04.480
After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash founding fathers.
00:01:21.260
So you got a new book out, Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders.
00:01:25.960
Now, I think when most Americans think of the founding fathers, they're almost like demigods.
00:01:30.060
They likely imagine these men in powdered wigs who were high-minded and who coolly and
00:01:35.600
rationally created a government that would last for the ages.
00:01:38.720
But in your book, you make the case that most of the founding fathers, most of the signers
00:01:42.700
of the Constitution were disillusioned with the government they had created.
00:01:46.280
And a lot of them thought it wouldn't even last a generation.
00:01:49.440
So how did you pick up on this disillusionment?
00:01:51.620
Well, in some ways, I guess it was hiding in plain sight.
00:01:55.340
I, like many Americans, I've long enjoyed reading, you know, the big popular biographies
00:02:01.340
of the founders that seem to come out almost every year by folks like Joseph Ellis, Ron
00:02:07.440
But it often struck me over the years that the, you know, the stories were generally meant
00:02:17.580
On the contrary, almost all of the leading founders ended up being, later in their lives,
00:02:21.560
rather disappointed in the government, the nation they'd helped to create.
00:02:25.560
And this seemed like a really interesting fact, of course.
00:02:27.820
I was surprised when I looked around at the scholarship on the period that no one had really
00:02:38.020
And once I did, once I started systematically going through the founders' letters and other
00:02:43.920
writings, frankly, disillusionment was really all over the place.
00:02:47.720
I'm not pulling at strings here or trying to infer disillusionment from a few stray comments
00:02:53.600
There's just a vast historical record attesting to their anxieties and disappointments and
00:03:00.300
sometimes even despair about the country's future, which is all the more striking given
00:03:04.820
that they're all keenly aware that everything they wrote would be poured over by posterity,
00:03:11.040
And still, their growing disappointment in what America had become was something that it wasn't
00:03:16.260
even something that they tried to hide from the future generations.
00:03:19.600
So for each of them, there are just dozens and dozens of letters and other writings, maybe
00:03:23.980
hundreds in the case of John Adams, in which they bemoan the fate of the country that they'd
00:03:28.640
helped to create, often in very overwrought, hysterical terms.
00:03:33.180
And I just think that, you know, given the perennial interest that Americans have in their
00:03:37.960
founders, it's really an amazing thing that this isn't better known or more talked about.
00:03:43.320
Okay, so in your book, you focus on the disillusionment of four founding fathers.
00:03:46.740
You have George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
00:03:51.640
And each one grew pessimistic about the government they formed for different reasons.
00:03:58.060
What drove his disillusionment with the Constitution and the government he helped form?
00:04:01.700
Well, the key source of Washington's disillusionment was the rise of political
00:04:08.040
parties in partisanship, which he thought were just fatal to Republican government.
00:04:13.400
And these worries really set in for him, I think I'd say in 1792, in the run-up to the
00:04:21.920
So he thought, basically, that the country's first couple years went pretty great, all things
00:04:26.240
But then during that time, partisanship sort of began to brew beneath the surface, starting
00:04:33.620
So it was led by Alexander Hamilton, who's, of course, the Treasury Secretary, as well as
00:04:38.940
the leading figure in the emerging Federalist Party, and Thomas Jefferson, who's Secretary
00:04:44.120
of State and the leader of the Republican Party.
00:04:46.620
And the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry, really their hatred for one another, you know, stayed mostly
00:04:52.620
beneath the surface, I think, for the first year or two.
00:04:55.340
But by 1792, it started to break out into the press, to spread across the public more
00:05:04.780
And so everyone at the time at least professed an aversion to parties.
00:05:11.660
This was something from the beginning to the end of his public life.
00:05:16.200
He's constantly warning his fellow citizens about the dangers of partisanship.
00:05:21.100
But of course, partisanship just continued to grow and grow, certainly over the course
00:05:24.860
of his second term, even more so, I'd say, during his short retirement.
00:05:29.200
So by the time of his death in 1799, he was convinced that not just, you know, the Hamiltons
00:05:35.220
and Jeffersons, not just the political elite, but also the American people more broadly were
00:05:44.300
And he had always insisted since his days commanding the Continental Army that Republican
00:05:49.620
government just couldn't survive under those circumstances.
00:05:52.800
And this is why I think it's not really that surprising that his later letters are just
00:05:57.160
littered with predictions that some kind of crisis was imminent.
00:06:01.800
And that's why I suggest that in some ways, Washington's political career was the reverse
00:06:07.980
So in politics, he won every election unanimously.
00:06:14.020
But in the end, he failed in what he saw as the key effort to prevent partisanship from
00:06:20.440
So I say in politics, unlike in the revolution, he won most of the battles only to lose the
00:06:27.780
Well, can you explain Washington's, you know, why you abhorred party politics so much?
00:06:31.720
Because like I said, a lot of most of the founders, like, you know, publicly would say
00:06:35.180
But Washington, this was like, this meant a lot to him.
00:06:41.440
I think part of it was that he thought that partisanship was just a sign of a bad character.
00:06:47.320
So if you're being partisan, that means you're being partial, right?
00:06:50.420
You're putting the interests of some parochial group ahead of the public good, which meant
00:06:57.820
You weren't exhibiting the kind of disinterested virtue that Washington so prized.
00:07:01.620
But he also thought that parties would be, as I said before, fatal to Republican government.
00:07:06.460
He thought that parties would sow conflict among the people.
00:07:10.220
They would open the door to corruption and foreign intrigue.
00:07:13.520
They would prevent the government from being well administered, right?
00:07:17.200
When there's a sort of standing opposition party whose job it is to try to prevent the
00:07:22.200
president, the leaders of Congress from getting things done.
00:07:24.420
Now, of course, today, it sounds almost impossibly naive, right, to suppose that parties would
00:07:31.560
But most of the other founders, frankly, had the same expectation.
00:07:35.800
The Constitution itself was designed under the assumption that parties wouldn't play much,
00:07:42.380
So today, I think most political scientists would say that we need parties.
00:07:46.140
Democracies can't really function without parties.
00:07:48.100
But that's, it's just one area where Washington and the other founders had a very different
00:07:56.220
One interesting point that I liked a lot and insight you had about Washington's why he
00:07:59.900
didn't like partisanship was it was likely influenced by his experience as a general of
00:08:03.880
the military, too, where in the military, you had to have everyone on the same page or else
00:08:09.460
And he likely carried over that idea to his civil leadership.
00:08:14.920
And I think it was also partisanship within the Continental Congress, the kind of partisan
00:08:19.480
bickering that often prevented him from getting the money and the troops that he needed.
00:08:23.880
So certainly that, you know, he thought you needed national unity for any kind of great
00:08:29.160
undertaking, whether it's winning independence or launching this new government.
00:08:34.720
Because I mean, I think when we think about party politics, our reference is what's going
00:08:38.280
on now in our country in the last 20, 30 years.
00:08:41.260
What was the acrimony like amongst the parties back in the 1790s?
00:08:50.540
We have these, as you described, group of very high minded figures.
00:08:53.460
They are all professed this aversion to partisanship.
00:08:56.920
And yet they very quickly within a year or two, they split up into a pair of hostile opposing
00:09:04.460
Partly, I think it was frankly a matter of personality.
00:09:06.560
As I suggested, Hamilton and Jefferson really just hated one another.
00:09:10.660
Their clash was a sort of unusual one insofar as Hamilton was cast as a champion of the economic
00:09:17.340
elite, despite being himself a self-made immigrant, whereas Jefferson liked to present himself at
00:09:23.300
least as the apostle of humble farmers, whereas he himself was a rich, well-connected slaveholder.
00:09:29.160
But of course, there's far more than just personality at play.
00:09:31.260
So the two sides, the Federalists and Republicans, had very different visions, sort of policy
00:09:38.680
So one of the big flashpoints for controversy was that Hamilton created this sweeping financial
00:09:44.420
program that was designed to try to get the country on a sound economic footing.
00:09:52.780
But Jefferson and the Republicans saw it as part of a vast conspiracy by scheming money men
00:09:58.020
to fleece the poor, to corrupt the young nation.
00:10:00.340
More generally, the Federalists advocated a robust exercise of federal power, especially
00:10:06.640
by the president, whereas Jefferson and his followers tended to prefer reserving more power
00:10:15.640
The Federalists tended to side with Britain in foreign affairs, whereas the Republicans
00:10:21.080
But when it came down to it, each side really saw the other as an almost existential threat to
00:10:27.460
The Federalists tended to see the Republicans as more or less unreconstructed anti-Federalists,
00:10:34.180
which is to say opponents of the Constitution, opponents of the government under which they
00:10:38.920
They thought that the Republicans basically wanted to go back to the disastrous situation
00:10:43.680
that the country had been in under the Articles of Confederation.
00:10:46.040
And the Republicans on the other side thought that the Federalists were essentially monarchists
00:10:50.600
at heart, that they wanted to put a crown on Washington's head, make him the new King
00:10:55.140
And so having each side see the other as effectively treasonous, you know, it didn't exactly foster
00:11:02.180
reasonable compromise between the two sides of the kind that Washington expected.
00:11:05.920
Well, and you make this case, too, with Washington.
00:11:07.400
So throughout his career, he tried to stay above partisanship.
00:11:10.580
But then as he got older, after he was president, he actually kind of became increasingly partisan.
00:11:18.420
Yeah, I think some historians would say that Washington was a partisan, a Federalist all
00:11:23.200
along from the very beginning of his political career.
00:11:27.180
I think for his first term, at least, he managed to steer a pretty even course between the two
00:11:32.560
So he had a small cabinet, only four people, and it was evenly balanced.
00:11:36.300
You had Hamilton and Henry Knox, Federalists on one hand, and Jefferson and Edmund Randolph
00:11:43.780
And so he was always, for every policy issue or question that came up, he's always presented
00:11:50.100
He tried to sort of balance, mediate between them himself.
00:11:52.600
And I think he did a fair job, the fact, the very fact that he kept Jefferson and Hamilton
00:11:58.500
in the same cabinet for almost four years is something of a miracle.
00:12:01.980
But then, you know, as time went on, by the end of his second term, Jefferson and Randolph
00:12:07.380
had both left the cabinet, as had Hamilton and Knox, for that matter.
00:12:10.940
And Washington was eventually, maybe forced, I guess isn't too strong of a word.
00:12:15.600
He eventually replaced them all with rock-ribbed, second-rate Federalists, which I think is a
00:12:21.400
sure sign of how far he drifted into that camp.
00:12:24.860
And then he went even further during his retirement.
00:12:26.800
He, during those three years, he corresponded almost exclusively with Federalists.
00:12:33.140
He, in his correspondence, he started referring to Republicans as the French Party rather than
00:12:39.440
So I think he did eventually succumb to the kind of partisan rancor that he so abhorred.
00:12:45.300
I don't know if there's one thing that we can point to that would explain this conversion.
00:12:49.180
Part of it, surely, was that the Republican press started attacking him openly and rather
00:12:55.460
viciously during his second term, which I'm sure put him off.
00:12:58.740
The Republicans' unwavering support for the French Revolution, even after it turned monumentally
00:13:06.340
And it was just true that Jefferson and Madison spent a lot of time working against his administration,
00:13:12.880
his policies, even while Jefferson was still in the cabinet.
00:13:16.340
And so, you know, I guess in some ways it's not surprising that he drifted into the Federalist
00:13:20.520
camp, but it's also a sure sign of just how deeply he failed and they failed that by the
00:13:28.180
mid to late 1790s, less than a decade into the new government, this partisan divide is
00:13:33.380
so wide that even George Washington, right, even this figure of almost Olympian stature can't
00:13:41.380
So Washington partisanship was the thing that got him disillusioned.
00:13:45.460
What drove his disillusionment with the government?
00:13:48.820
So Hamilton's main worry was that the national government wouldn't have sufficient vigor or
00:13:54.580
energy, particularly in relation to the state government.
00:13:57.580
So Hamilton was a more consistent, more unabashed proponent of a strong central authority than
00:14:05.400
And, you know, from the very beginning, he was convinced that the Constitution didn't do
00:14:09.400
enough to set up this kind of energetic government that he wanted.
00:14:12.660
So he gave a really remarkable speech at the Constitutional Convention in which he basically
00:14:18.640
said that they should imitate the British system as closely as they could.
00:14:22.020
For instance, that he said the president and senator should, after being elected, should
00:14:27.480
And then on the last day of the convention, he said that, quote, no man's ideas were more
00:14:33.620
So, essentially, he thought that the government had to have a great deal of energy, as he called
00:14:39.440
it, so that it could stand up to the states, so that it could stand up to other countries,
00:14:44.340
and just so that it could govern effectively and protect people's liberties and the like.
00:14:49.200
And so Hamilton spent most of the 1790s, the first half of which he's in Washington's cabinet,
00:14:56.620
the second half of which he's out of politics, formal politics.
00:14:59.320
But he spends the whole decade basically doing everything he can think of to build up the
00:15:08.480
He worked to build up the military during the Whiskey Rebellion and what was known as
00:15:14.640
He did everything he could to expand the president's powers in both domestic and foreign affairs,
00:15:20.100
especially while Washington, the war hero Washington is in office, and it's just kind of hard for
00:15:25.480
people to object too much. But he was never convinced that he'd done enough, right? Jefferson
00:15:30.420
and Madison and the Republicans were always there fighting him, hounding him, keeping him from
00:15:35.780
realizing the full extent of his vision. So he just never thought that the federal government they
00:15:43.640
And I thought it was interesting, too, you talk about another rivalry that Hamilton have.
00:15:48.020
He had a rivalry with John Adams, who was also a federalist.
00:15:51.780
But this rivalry, it seemed more personal than political.
00:15:56.200
Then you also highlight that sometimes Hamilton, these ill feelings towards Adams,
00:16:00.820
it caused him to cut off his own political nose just to spite Adams.
00:16:07.200
What was the acrimony between those two? And how did that get in the way of Hamilton pushing his
00:16:11.120
idea about the country should have a strong national or federal government?
00:16:16.640
Yeah. So Hamilton and Adams did hate each other, despite being members of the same party,
00:16:20.940
despite having, you know, in the broadest terms, similar worldviews. Part of it here,
00:16:25.620
too, is just personality. They're both headstrong, kind of volatile, and so maybe they were bound
00:16:30.480
to clash. But I also think Adams never wanted to go quite as far as Hamilton did in building up the
00:16:36.720
government and especially building up the army during the quasi war. And as a result, as you hinted in
00:16:42.500
your question, in the election of 1800, Hamilton published this really outrageous screed about
00:16:49.180
basically how unfit for the presidency Adams was, which in turn all but ensured that Hamilton's
00:16:56.320
arch enemy Jefferson became the next president, right? So you had the split between the Federalist
00:17:00.440
Party, between Hamilton and Adams and their followers. This opens the door for the Republicans
00:17:05.320
to step in. And that's really when I think Hamilton's hopes for the future were essentially
00:17:11.000
dashed for good, right? He'd always feared that the government was too weak. And now here, Jefferson
00:17:16.340
and the Republicans are elected with a mandate to pare down its power still further. And so in 1802,
00:17:23.460
a couple of years into Jefferson's presidency, Hamilton wrote this really, I think, touching letter
00:17:28.140
to his friend Governor Morris, in which he lamented that after all he'd done after so many years to try to make
00:17:35.740
this work, to try to make the government work, it just wasn't going to happen. He went so far as to call the
00:17:41.140
Constitution a frail and worthless fabric. And he lamented that this American world is not made for me. So by the
00:17:48.440
end of his life, by the end of his, by the time of his famous duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton thought that the
00:17:54.380
already weak government was only going to get weaker over time, and that little but disillusion and disorder
00:18:05.760
We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:18:11.500
Okay, so another guy, end of his life, didn't think it was going to happen in the country. Let's talk about John Adams.
00:18:19.240
So his worries centered on the lack of civic virtue among the American people. He thought that
00:18:25.640
Republican government depended not just on having the right institutions set up, but also on the
00:18:32.180
people having the right character, that people needed a sense of patriotism, of duty, a willingness
00:18:37.720
to put the public good ahead of their own selfish interests. And this is something he insisted on from
00:18:42.460
the beginning to the end of his long career in politics. He thought that people needed to be willing
00:18:47.420
to sacrifice on behalf of the public, as he himself so often did, at least in his own eyes.
00:18:53.060
Early on during the Revolutionary War, Adams sometimes dared to hope that, well, maybe this
00:18:57.900
will happen. Maybe the people will be sufficiently virtuous once we've attained a dependence.
00:19:03.500
But at least by the 1780s, mid-1780s, if not earlier, he was convinced otherwise.
00:19:08.980
And so his disillusionment came quite a bit earlier than it did for the other figures in the book,
00:19:13.820
before the Constitution is even a twinkle in the framers' eyes.
00:19:16.520
And it lasts so long. He doesn't die until 1826. So it lasts for almost a half century.
00:19:22.980
One of my favorite quotations from the book comes from a letter that Adams wrote just a month or so
00:19:28.920
after being inaugurated as the nation's first vice president. So he's writing to Abigail,
00:19:34.500
asking her to come to New York. New York is where the first temporary capital was. And he says to her,
00:19:40.280
we have to think of New York as our home for the next four years, assuming, of course,
00:19:44.020
that the government lasts that long. So he's not even sure that the Constitution or the government
00:19:48.240
that it created is going to last for four years. But really, there are dozens, if not hundreds of
00:19:54.320
these wonderfully colorful and cranky letters from throughout Adams' life, where he constantly
00:20:01.400
bemoans the character of the American people, the follies, the vices of his fellow citizens.
00:20:06.320
And he's really one of the first great critics of the idea of American exceptionalism, this idea that
00:20:13.340
the American people are somehow innately more virtuous or more fit for democracy than other
00:20:19.840
Well, where did this sort of high-minded, extremely idealistic idea of the type of character a citizen
00:20:27.020
of republic needs to have in order for a republican government to last, where did Adams get that from?
00:20:32.440
Well, I think it was mostly from reading. So remember, there's hardly any republics in the
00:20:38.260
world at this time, certainly none as big as the United States was, even then, limited to the first
00:20:42.900
13. So there weren't a whole lot of concrete examples to look at or to draw on. But Adams was
00:20:50.480
very well-read. He was as well-read in political theory and history and the like as any of the founders
00:20:55.640
were. And the lesson that he drew from his studies was, again, that republican government
00:21:02.360
required civic virtue. So as he saw it, monarchical government didn't require the same kind of virtue
00:21:07.320
because the people in charge aren't in charge, right? You don't need as much virtue among the
00:21:11.820
people. But under a system of popular self-government, he thought that if people were always looking out
00:21:17.920
for their selfish interests, then politics would just be an insoluble clash of conflicting interests.
00:21:26.880
So there was times when Adams was hopeful, like during the Revolutionary War, he was kind of hopeful
00:21:30.620
because he saw Americans sort of embracing this idea of civic virtue that he had, making sacrifices for
00:21:35.120
something bigger than themselves. What was it about, like, that he saw after the Revolutionary War and the
00:21:41.040
formation of the Constitution? He was like, yeah, no, Americans, they're corrupt. They lack virtue.
00:21:47.760
What was it that he saw that he pointed to? Well, I think he just looked around and saw people not
00:21:54.560
living up to the expectations, the frankly and possibly high expectations that he'd sent for them.
00:22:01.440
He would see people, you know, again, during the war for independence, sometimes he would see people
00:22:05.960
rallying around the flag, rallying against the British, and he'd think, okay, maybe this will work.
00:22:09.880
But then, you know, every time a soldier deserted the army, every time someone showed that they
00:22:14.620
cared more about making money than the public good, you know, he'd dash off a letter to Abigail or one
00:22:19.520
of his friends lamenting how selfish and corrupt and addicted to luxury Americans were. Some of this
00:22:24.900
came when he was abroad. So for most of the 1780s, he was serving abroad in various posts as an envoy for
00:22:32.580
the United States. And he would get lots of letters from people back at home telling him how, you know,
00:22:38.000
what Hamilton was doing with this big financial program, how addicted to luxury Americans were.
00:22:43.640
And so some of it was even secondhand. But once he returned and got back into politics,
00:22:48.040
he would see the partisan bickering, the selfishness. He just, the people never lived up
00:22:55.180
Yeah. Speaking of these like cranky letters, he would write. There's one, he, I forgot who he's
00:23:00.080
writing to. I think it's Mercy Otis Warren. He said, but madam, there's one difficulty,
00:23:05.160
which I know not how to get over. Virtue and simplicity of manners are indispensably necessary
00:23:10.240
and republic among all orders and degrees of men. But there's so much rascality and so much
00:23:15.360
veniality and corruption, so much avarice and ambition, such a rage for profit and commerce
00:23:20.040
among all ranks and degrees of men, even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there's
00:23:24.280
public virtue enough to support a republic. He was pretty, pretty pessimistic.
00:23:28.340
And if I'm remembering, I think that was from 1776, right? This is very early on.
00:23:32.120
Right. 1776. So, okay. He, he didn't think Americans had the character to be self-governing.
00:23:39.400
So, you know, he started thinking, well, maybe this isn't going to last. So he started coming
00:23:42.560
with some ideas after, you know, later on in his life on how they could sustain a country or a
00:23:49.080
government, even though the people weren't, didn't have the virtue for it. What were some of those
00:23:54.900
Okay. So there's a brief time just before and during the constitutional convention. So he's in London at the
00:24:00.840
time, but he writes his magnum opus. There's a big sprawling three-volume work called Defense of
00:24:06.920
the Constitutions of the United States. And by the constitutions, he meant the state constitutions,
00:24:11.440
since the U.S. Constitution hadn't been written yet. And in this work, he seems to, he's at least
00:24:17.420
toying with the idea that if you have a properly balanced government, could that solve the problem,
00:24:22.180
right? Could the country survive under a Republican form without virtue? But I think those hopes didn't
00:24:28.220
really last for that long. Once he returned to the United States and kind of saw the way things
00:24:32.700
were working, he didn't think the right balance was being struck. And so I think those hopes went
00:24:37.200
away fairly quickly. He toyed with the idea in the early 1790s that, well, if we have enough
00:24:43.040
kind of pomp and splendor, especially surrounding the president, surrounding Washington, maybe that
00:24:49.020
will get people to revere the government and be attached to the government enough. He at times even
00:24:56.060
hinted that maybe we would have to introduce some element of hereditary rule that maybe the president
00:25:01.960
and or senators would need to be passed down from father to son and that this would keep the
00:25:08.440
commotions that surrounded elections at bay. I think maybe the most interesting, you know,
00:25:14.120
I don't know if it was an idea so much as a sort of reprieve from his habitual pessimism
00:25:20.220
came during the war of 1812. So this is in the midst of his long retirement. So during the war
00:25:25.900
of 1812, he looks around and he sees Americans rallying together against their common enemy once
00:25:32.420
again, Britain, and exhibiting sort of unity, patriotism that he hadn't seen since the Revolutionary
00:25:39.320
War. And this sort of buoyed his hopes for the nation's future, at least for a few years.
00:25:44.000
And at this point, he came to think or maybe to worry that war may be necessary to inculcate
00:25:50.940
civic virtue, right, to get people sufficiently attached to their country to arouse patriotic
00:25:55.400
feelings, and thus that war might be necessary to maintain the long-term health of Republican
00:26:00.940
government. And he writes a number of letters to John Quincy and others at this time that, you know,
00:26:06.220
maybe too much peace and prosperity is a bad thing. Maybe it's inevitably going to lead to decadence
00:26:11.840
and corruption and the like. But he's also obviously discomforted by this idea that, well,
00:26:16.900
people can't be virtuous without murdering one another, as he put it.
00:26:20.800
Okay. So he, so it seems like Adams, like his, he would sometimes be optimistic. Some guys get
00:26:26.040
pessimistic. At the end of his life, was he pessimistic or optimistic?
00:26:31.740
You know, he sort of seemed to go back and forth. I think during the Revolutionary War,
00:26:35.920
and then again, at the very end of his life, he veered back and forth day to day,
00:26:41.180
even sometimes within the same letter, he would seem to go back and forth. The last letter he ever
00:26:46.060
wrote was about the 50th anniversary, that they were going to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
00:26:51.160
the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1826. As many listeners will probably know, that ended up
00:26:56.420
being the day that he and Jefferson both died. And he wrote a letter about the upcoming celebration
00:27:02.460
in which, you know, I'm sure the people who are writing to him asking for a comment on it
00:27:08.000
were expecting a kind of tribute to American democracy from one of his venerable founders,
00:27:13.580
you know, something that they could read amid the fireworks and parades. But instead,
00:27:18.180
he kind of punctures their hopes a little bit. He says, basically, it's too soon to tell. Was the
00:27:22.780
American Revolution the brightest or the blackest page in American history? We'll find out. We'll see
00:27:27.640
what people make of this country after I'm gone. And so he ends up going out, you know, sort of
00:27:34.440
Okay, so let's talk about Thomas Jefferson now. And you make the case that he took the longest
00:27:38.400
to get disillusioned. In fact, he was pretty much optimistic about America up until, you know,
00:27:43.940
late in his career. Why was that? And then what drove Jefferson's disillusionment?
00:27:49.120
Right. So Jefferson was the perennial optimist among the founders for the vast majority of his life.
00:27:55.560
He had this deep abiding faith in the American people. He believed in the idea of American
00:28:00.820
exceptionalism that Adams found so wrongheaded. So even when things didn't go his way during the
00:28:07.420
1790s, so even when Hamilton enacted his financial program later in the decade when the Federalists
00:28:13.080
passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, even when things didn't go his way, he was always sure that
00:28:18.700
things would turn out right in the end. Because he was confident that sort of deep down at the bottom
00:28:24.400
of their hearts, the American people were almost all good Republicans with a small R, and in fact,
00:28:29.900
also Jeffersonian Republicans with a capital R, right, that they're really on his side.
00:28:34.680
And he thought that things did turn out right in the end in 1800. So in 1800, he's elected president,
00:28:40.740
the Republicans swept to power in Congress. And he saw this election not just as the temporary victory
00:28:47.200
of a political party. He saw this as the permanent triumph of Republican liberty in America.
00:28:51.900
He writes all these sort of self-congratulatory letters to his friends where he says,
00:28:56.040
we've made it. We won after all. The ship is in port. You know, America succeeded.
00:29:01.340
And then, of course, he spends eight years as president. He succeeded for another eight years
00:29:05.780
by his closest political ally, James Madison. And then another year, eight years after that,
00:29:10.920
he succeeded by his acolyte, James Monroe. So in some ways, it's totally predictable, of course,
00:29:15.840
right, that he retained his optimism for so much longer. The Republican Party that he founded
00:29:20.620
basically won, his Federalist opponents essentially disappeared from the political scene.
00:29:26.560
But then in the last, I'd say, decade or so of his life, between 1816 and 1826,
00:29:32.620
even more starting in, let's say, 1820, even he lost heart. So there's a variety of reasons for
00:29:40.380
Jefferson's disillusionment. We had things like the spread of industry, the rage for banks and
00:29:46.620
financial speculation, where he always preferred a more agrarian society. He was worried by what he
00:29:52.620
saw as the usurpations of the Supreme Court under the leadership of his cousin, Chief Justice John
00:29:58.060
Marshall. He was very worried about the consolidation of more and more power in the federal government,
00:30:03.140
even with the Republicans themselves in charge. But I think the thing that really led to his outright
00:30:08.760
despair was the division between the North and the South over the spread of slavery,
00:30:14.220
which came to the fore, especially during the Missouri crisis of 1820, 1821. So during this time,
00:30:22.000
he writes a very famous letter where he says that this conflict awoke me, filled me with terror like
00:30:29.240
a fire bell in the night. I considered it once as the death knell of the Union. And so Jefferson
00:30:34.660
basically foresaw the path of the Civil War, that once there's a geographic line dividing the country
00:30:41.260
with a deep moral principle, deep moral opposition between the two, that is never going to go away,
00:30:47.540
that every event, every year is just going to mark it deeper and deeper. And Jefferson concluded this
00:30:53.360
letter with a just, I think, unforgettable expression of regret. I don't have it in front of me, but he says
00:30:59.020
something like, I'm now going to die believing that everything that we fought for in 1776 was in vain.
00:31:06.140
It's all going to be thrown away by the present generation. My only consolation is that I won't
00:31:12.020
myself live to weep over the destruction of the Republic.
00:31:17.480
Well, listen, can you flesh this out about Jefferson? This is why he thought the Missouri
00:31:21.080
compromise, the Missouri crisis would cause this rank. And this is really interesting because you
00:31:25.540
really, you bring to the forefront this sort of these self-contradictory paradoxical views
00:31:30.480
Jefferson had about slavery. Because on the one hand, this is the guy who wrote the Declaration
00:31:36.320
of Independence, this document about human freedoms and human liberties. Publicly, he denounced the
00:31:42.420
institution of slavery, but we all know privately he held slaves. But then later on in his life,
00:31:47.780
even though earlier in his career, he sort of denounced slavery and kind of made moves to make it
00:31:51.520
illegal, he really started kind of pushing for slavery or allowing states that, new states into the
00:31:57.720
country to allow them to be slave states. So can you walk us through that? Like what was going on?
00:32:04.940
Yeah. I mean, look, we could do a whole podcast on Jefferson and slavery and barely scratch the
00:32:08.840
surface. There's so much that could be said about it. But basically early in his career, Jefferson,
00:32:14.760
I think fought a reasonably forceful battle against slavery, at least in the political realm.
00:32:20.100
So he not only wrote the Declaration, where he says all men are created equal and the like,
00:32:24.080
he tried to include a rather stinging denunciation of the slave trade in the Declaration of Independence.
00:32:29.460
It had to be taken out to get the southern states to join on, but he wanted to include it in there.
00:32:34.860
He drafted a couple of gradual emancipation laws for his home state of Virginia. He proposed to ban
00:32:40.400
slavery from all the western territories, included some really harsh denunciations of slavery in his
00:32:45.380
book. And so, you know, whatever he did in his personal life back at Manichello, where,
00:32:50.260
of course, he kept hundreds of people in bondage. In the political realm, I think, frankly, he did as
00:32:55.360
much as you reasonably could have done in the 1780s. He went even further than most of his
00:33:00.540
contemporaries, even in the north would go in fighting it. But then basically, he stopped trying,
00:33:06.680
even trying after that. During the 1790s, he's much more worried about fighting Hamilton and the
00:33:12.000
Federalists. So he sort of puts slavery on the back burner. As president, he does next to nothing to
00:33:17.240
fight slavery, even when there's this big question about once he makes the Louisiana Purchase about
00:33:22.800
slavery being expanded to the new territory. He basically doesn't lift a finger to try to stop
00:33:27.080
it from expanding. And then during his retirement, he doesn't just do nothing. He does worse than
00:33:33.040
nothing. As you suggested, he actively advocated the expansion of slavery to Missouri, to the western
00:33:39.840
territories, which is something he himself had opposed when he was younger. And so the reason he did so
00:33:46.140
was he adopted this theory, a rather crackpot theory, I think it has to be said. But the
00:33:51.020
theory is known as diffusion. And the basic idea is that, okay, if we allow slavery to expand to new
00:33:58.080
territory, that's not going to lead to an increase in the number of enslaved people. It's just going to
00:34:03.440
make them more spread out. And that spreading them out would have a number of benefits. So for instance,
00:34:08.000
he thought that enslaved people would be treated better if they weren't as concentrated. And so then the
00:34:13.060
sort of fear of slave rebellions wouldn't be as prevalent. But even more importantly, he thought
00:34:17.760
that spreading out slavery would mean that emancipation would be easier to achieve. Because
00:34:23.220
if enslaved people are more spread out, each individual slaveholder holds fewer people in
00:34:28.720
bondage, well, then they have less to lose if slavery would be abolished. That was the idea.
00:34:34.240
Of course, it's wildly delusional, I think, to have supposed that, well, we can really combat
00:34:39.340
slavery by giving it free reign, right? Let's make it a big national problem rather than a narrow
00:34:44.420
southern sectional problem, right? That's like saying, I have this fatal disease. Let me first
00:34:49.260
let it spread throughout my body, and then surely it'll go away.
00:34:52.300
And so as you say, so what happened, so in 1820, there was the Missouri Compromise, and basically
00:34:56.480
said that territories above the 36-30 parallel, except for Missouri, those states, they're going to be
00:35:03.620
free states. And so Jefferson, when he saw that, he's like, yeah, once you have that line, that's
00:35:09.520
just going to cause, once you have that geographic line, that's just going to cause division that you
00:35:16.380
That's right. And that every time that there's some new question, the divide between the two will just
00:35:22.660
be marked deeper and deeper. And so he, as I said, he basically foresees the path to the Civil War.
00:35:27.720
He all but predicts what's coming. Okay. So then you go into detail with these four founding
00:35:33.340
fathers, but then you also have a chapter where you kind of, you know, touch on the service of
00:35:36.780
other signers of the Constitution who were just like, yeah, this was, this is a mistake. This
00:35:41.040
isn't going to last. But then you, you highlight there's, there was actually one founding father.
00:35:45.400
He never got disillusioned. And that's James Madison, our fourth president. Why didn't Madison
00:35:50.200
grow pessimistic about the American experiment? Yeah. And I think this is a surprising one in some
00:35:56.000
respects. I don't think people think of James Madison as particularly optimistic. He's very
00:36:00.720
hardheaded and skeptical in certain ways. And he also lived so long, right? Despite being a rather
00:36:08.220
sickly hypochondriac, he's certainly the least conventionally manly of the founders, but he outlived
00:36:13.180
them all, right? He didn't die until 1836. He lives well into Andrew Jackson's second term. And through all
00:36:19.780
that time, he remained remarkably confident in the American experiment, despite some surprisingly deep
00:36:27.020
reservations that he'd had at the outset, in the immediate wake of the convention, he wasn't sure
00:36:30.800
the Constitution was going to work, despite us calling him the father of the Constitution. He had
00:36:35.920
deep reservations at the outset, but over time, he grew more and more confident in this lasted
00:36:40.380
through 1836. And so I devote a couple of chapters toward the end of the book to exploring,
00:36:46.440
well, why was he such an outlier in this regard? Here too, I think part of it was just personality.
00:36:53.280
Madison was far more even-tempered, even-keeled than the other founders were. And this sort of
00:36:59.820
unflappableness, I think, surely contributed to his lack of despair. Another factor, I think,
00:37:04.860
was that he had lower expectations than the other founders did about what was politically possible.
00:37:10.960
So his kind of skepticism maybe fed his optimism in the sense that he never expected the American
00:37:17.260
people to always surmount partisanship like Washington or always surmount selfishness like
00:37:22.780
Adams. He never expected the nation to play this grand role on the world stage, to compete with the
00:37:29.700
European imperial powers on their own terms the way Hamilton did. Nor did he even really expect,
00:37:35.080
like Jefferson, that yeoman farmers would get together to wisely manage their political affairs,
00:37:40.960
on a local level. And so these lower expectations, I think, meant that he was less likely to be
00:37:46.560
disappointed in what America ultimately became. I go through a few more in the book. Let me just
00:37:52.480
mention one more factor here that I think went into it, which is simply that by the end of his
00:37:57.900
life, he's the last of the fathers, as he's sometimes called. By the end of his life, Madison had
00:38:03.780
already seen the country endure so much, right? By that point, America's constitutional order had
00:38:09.800
already weathered any number of storms, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the War of 1812, the Missouri
00:38:15.060
Crisis, and so on. And so Madison believed or hoped at least that that meant it could weather a good
00:38:22.200
deal more, right? So the more the nation endured, the more durable it seemed to him.
00:38:27.940
So this idea that your book is called Fears of a Setting Sun, where did that idea of a setting sun
00:38:32.320
come from? So the title comes from a quip from Benjamin Franklin on the last day of the
00:38:41.360
Constitutional Convention. So this is September 17, 1787. It's the last day. The delegates are
00:38:47.300
getting together to sign the document. They line up at the front of the room to put their names at the
00:38:52.580
bottom of the charter. They'd spent the whole year crafting. And according to James Madison's notes,
00:38:57.720
Franklin pointed to the chair that Washington had sat in at the front of the room all summer. So
00:39:04.300
Washington was the president of the convention, and he occupied this high-backed mahogany chair,
00:39:09.980
which you can still see. It's on display at Independence Hall. But the chair had a sort of
00:39:14.680
decorative half sunburst carved into the crest. And so the story goes that Franklin called attention
00:39:20.940
to the sun, and he said, I've often wondered over the course of this summer, looking at that sun on the
00:39:27.400
chair. I've often wondered, was it a rising or a setting sun? Now I have the happiness to know that
00:39:33.680
it is a rising and not a setting sun. And so this is supposed to be sort of emblematic of the founders'
00:39:39.700
optimism, their great hopes for the new government during the founding period itself. And then the
00:39:45.160
play on that for the book's title, Fears of a Setting Sun, is of course that by later in their lives,
00:39:50.580
most of the founders with Madison is really the lone exception, feared that in fact maybe the sun was
00:39:55.720
setting rather than rising. So what do you hope people walk away with thinking after they finish
00:40:00.640
your book? Well, certainly I hope that they walk away with a fuller picture of the founders
00:40:06.580
and their worldviews than you get by just looking at the founding period itself, which we often do,
00:40:12.100
right? I think we need to remember that they didn't somehow stop thinking about politics in 1788
00:40:18.020
after the Constitution's ratified. They, of course, kept living, kept observing, kept thinking about
00:40:22.920
what they'd wrought. And, you know, their later views were also informed by more real-world experience.
00:40:29.900
And so I think it's worth taking a more holistic view of what they said and did.
00:40:34.580
It might sound funny to say for a book on disillusionment, but I hope that readers also
00:40:39.580
walk away with a certain kind of hopefulness about today's world. So there's no question,
00:40:45.640
of course, that the founders' key causes for worry are still very much with us, right? So partisanship,
00:40:51.300
the frequent fecklessness of the federal government, the lack of civic mindedness,
00:40:56.400
the geographical divisions, all of these are still problems. They're certainly not the only
00:41:00.500
problems with American politics. You only have to read the newspaper every day to see that
00:41:04.620
all is not well with the Republic. But, you know, if we take a page from Madison's book,
00:41:10.280
the fact that we've lived with these problems since the founding for more than 230 years
00:41:15.500
suggests that, well, maybe they're not as likely to doom the country as we sometimes fear, right? So
00:41:22.260
we're constantly told that, you know, the death of American democracy is nearly upon us.
00:41:28.120
But then people have consistently said that since the very founding of the country.
00:41:32.400
And, you know, it hasn't happened yet. The country, on the contrary, the country has grown into
00:41:37.300
history's greatest economic and military superpower. So however appalling the state of American politics
00:41:46.160
might be at the moment, and I'm frequently pretty disgusted with it myself, but, you know,
00:41:50.900
it's important to remember that things were far worse in many respects when the founders whom we so
00:41:57.260
admire, when they presided over the country, right? So most obviously, we no longer have widespread
00:42:02.360
chattel slavery. We no longer see the routine dispossession, even massacre of indigenous tribes.
00:42:08.260
On the contrary, basic civil political liberties have never been extended to more people.
00:42:13.520
We no longer face serious, repeated threats of secession and civil war, as the founders constantly
00:42:20.000
did. It seems like every event in the era of the founding caused one group or another to threaten
00:42:24.660
the breakup of the union. We see political violence far less today, even notwithstanding the recent,
00:42:30.440
you know, pretty harrowing attack on the Capitol. But we don't see legislators brawling on the House
00:42:36.380
of Representatives with canes and firepokers. We don't have uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion and
00:42:41.100
so on. Our elections, our presidential elections, as nasty as they can be, don't really hold a candle
00:42:47.720
in that respect to the election of 1800, which pitted Adams against Jefferson, right? Two of our most
00:42:53.160
revered founders. Even our media, our mainstream media that gets so much criticism today is far more
00:42:59.780
responsible and fact-based than the partisan newspaper of the 1790s were, and so on and so
00:43:05.300
forth. And so, you know, I don't think any of this is grounds for complacency by any means. We have
00:43:10.440
serious pressing problems that we should try to meet, but I do hope that a fuller understanding
00:43:16.360
of the founders and the founding at least helps to summon a broader perspective on these problems.
00:43:23.940
Well, Dennis, this has been a great conversation. Is there someplace people can go to learn more
00:43:26.740
about the book and your work? Well, I'm not on social media, but they can go to either the
00:43:32.560
Princeton University Press website or to my Amazon author page for more on this book and my other
00:43:38.500
books. Fantastic. Well, Dennis Rasmussen, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:43:41.760
Thank you, Brad. I appreciate it. My guest today was Dennis Rasmussen. He's the author of the book
00:43:45.960
Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders. It's available on amazon.com
00:43:50.480
and bookstores everywhere. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash setting sun,
00:43:54.360
where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:44:04.360
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:44:07.980
artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:44:11.380
written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
00:44:14.800
episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
00:44:18.900
sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up,
00:44:22.300
download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of
00:44:26.020
the AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute
00:44:29.380
to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. If you've done that already,
00:44:32.960
thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think we'll get
00:44:36.940
something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time,
00:44:40.320
this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard