Nation building

National Review, Dec 31, 2005 by Algis Valiunas

Henry Adams and the Making of America, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 448 pp., $30)

OF great American books, Henry Adams's History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-91) is almost certainly the least read. The book's sheer mass terrifies: Originally published in nine volumes, it runs to some 2,700 pages in the two-volume Library of America edition. One doesn't read a book this thick unless someone authoritative tells one to, and the authorities have long had little or no use for the History.

The Northwestern University historian and critic Garry Wills wants justice--and a readership--for Adams's book, which he reveres as "the non-fiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America." Not only Adams but also the young America he portrays, Wills contends, deserve their countrymen's highest esteem. Wills angrily flattens the distinguished historians--Richard Hofstadter, Henry Steele Commager, Merrill Peterson--who have made the History out to be Adams's scourging of "a low and vile period" in our national life. These eminenti, Wills argues, could have reached their dire conclusions only by reading the first six chapters of the first volume--which summarize the sad state of America's material, intellectual, and spiritual development in 1800, the year before Jefferson assumed office--and by ignoring the remaining 2,600 pages of the story. In Wills's view, Adams turns the exalted conception of his model, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, upside down and inside out, as he happily chronicles "the rise of a democratic nation."

Democracy itself appeared a dubious proposition to many Americans at the beginning of the 19th century. The notorious animadversions attributed to Alexander Hamilton on popular sovereignty indicate the tone into which the dispute descended: "Your people, sir--your people is a great beast!" In response, Jefferson called such Federalists as Hamilton "incurables," as though their loathing for democracy were a wasting moral disease. Led by Hamilton, the Federalists, whose center of gravity lay in New England and New York, tended to favor English ways in politics, manners, literature; some even pined for a king of their own who would crush the democratic beast under his magnificent boot-heel. The Republicans, most of whose preeminent figures were Virginians, found their inspiration in the French Revolution and the Rights of Man, embracing a fundamentally egalitarian society, though under the sage direction of nature's own aristocrats--men such as Jefferson, Madison, James Monroe, and Albert Gallatin. Adams's History shows how an America riven by these competing Old World influences became a unified nation and a power commanding the respect of its fiercest and most potent rivals--none other than England and France.

America came by this respect the long way round. Jefferson wanted to make sure that the United States became precisely what England, France, and the other brawling thugs of Europe were not: peaceable, decent, homespun, unconcerned with the beguiling glitter of military glory. He preached, and tried to practice, a utopian cosmopolitanism with exemplary American righteousness as its foundation. As Adams writes, in a passage of central importance:

   Few men have dared to legislate as
   though eternal peace were at hand, in a
   world torn by wars and convulsions and
   drowned in blood; but this was what
   Jefferson aspired to do. Even in such
   dangers, he believed that Americans
   might safely set an example which the
   Christian world should be led by interest
   to respect and at length to imitate. As he
   conceived a true American policy, war
   was a blunder, an unnecessary risk; and
   even in case of robbery and aggression
   the United States, he believed, had only
   to stand on the defensive in order to
   obtain justice in the end. He would not
   consent to build up a new nationality
   merely to create more navies and armies,
   to perpetuate the crimes and follies of
   Europe; the central government at Washington
   should not be permitted to indulge
   in the miserable ambitions that had made
   the Old World a hell, and frustrated the
   hopes of humanity.

As Jefferson wanted malevolent Europe to leave America alone, so he wanted the national government to leave the state governments alone. Indeed, the more everyone left everyone else alone, the better for all concerned: "Cities, manufactures, mines, shipping, and accumulation of capital led, in his opinion, to corruption and tyranny." Virtue resided in the simple life of the yeoman farmer, idyllically self-contained.

Subsequent events reveal Adams's apparently innocent summary of Jefferson's high-minded ambitions to be discreetly but unmistakably mordant. The History provides the long answer to the question, How ridiculous can you be and not get eaten alive? For although Jefferson and his protege Madison were among the presiding geniuses of the American Founding, incapacity and folly marked their presidencies.