Henry Adams: History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison. New York: The Library of America, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, April 8, 1987.
‘Leadership’ obsesses political commentators today. Strong leadership is good, weak bad. ‘History’ is said to be going somewhere, and leaders are to take us there, quickly and efficiently.
But leadership is not statesmanship. A statesman may lead; he may also follow, or seem to. More than that, he cultivates. He cultivates the character and circumstances of citizens, with a view to a particular achievement of the human good.
Henry Adams’s history of James Madison’s presidency shows us an unusually intelligent, careful historian who is also a historicist—one who believes that ‘History’ wholly encompasses individuals—as he tries to assess a statesman who was no historicist. Adams exercises his considerable wit by turns sneering at leader-worship and deriding inept leaders. He overlooks statesmanship.
Adams wants to do justice to Madison: “always a dangerous enemy, gifted with a quality of persistence singularly sure in its results,” Madison “rarely failed to destroy when he struck.” But Adams’s judgment of Madison, and of what constitutes doing justice to him, is low. He complains of the “colorless character” of Madison’s oratory, while conceding it was “intended to disarm criticism,” not to quicken some historian’s pulse. A poor administrator, “never showing great power as a popular leader,” Madison lacked la grande passion . For that reason, Adams, devotee of force, falls rather out of patience with “this circumspect citizen”—who, unaccountably by Adams’s lights, “paid surprisingly little regard to rules of consistency or caution” when pursuing some “object which seemed to him proper in itself.”
Completed in 1891, the full, nine-volume History spans the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. There can be no question: It remains the most gracefully written, scrupulous, and penetrating major history ever written by an American. Adams shows how the Jeffersonians won resounding victories against the Federalist Party, then gradually adopted Federalist principles in practice. What began as a movement for states’ rights, ended by strengthening the Federal government. Adams takes this to illustrate the historicist thesis, that social and economic forces finally overwhelm the intentions of statesmen, and that historians therefore should study not individuals so much as society, in “the same spirit and by the same methods” as other scientists study “the formation of a crystal.”
In Jefferson’s case, Adams may well be right. All his life, Jefferson condemned centralized government, yet his Louisiana Purchase was a Hamiltonian exercise of presidential power at the service of (sound) geopolitical calculation if ever there was one. Madison, however, presents a more complex problem.
After all, Madison had collaborated with Alexander Hamilton years before, writing the two most important essays in The Federalist. His conduct throughout the 1787 Constitutional Convention promoted energetic national government and vigorous commerce—the bonds of union, not of ‘states’ rights.’
By the year 1809, when he succeeded Jefferson in the White House, Madison had of course publicly associated himself with Jeffersonian doctrines. How strongly did he believe them? If Jefferson could prudently relax his doctrinal muscles, the better to catch Louisiana, might not the circumspect Mr. Madison permit himself even less partisan dogmatism?
Eight years of Jeffersonianism had left the War Department in a shambles and the Treasury almost bankrupt. Mediocrities peopled both Congress and the Executive branch. Madison at first did little, and perhaps could do little, to resist the decline. Adams suggests that by 1811 the federal union itself was in jeopardy.
Madison “did not want a distinct issue of peace or war with England,” which had been harrying American shipping and impressing our sailors. He pursued a policy of “peaceful coercion”—commercial restrictions of English trade—so that American commerce could develop its own strength at its own pace. The English didn’t cooperate, and the War of 1812 began with the American Army guided by generals who combined the exhaustion of old age with the ill judgment of inexperience in war.
“The process by which a scattered democracy decided its own will, in a matter so serious as a great and perhaps fatal war, was new to the world; bystanders were surprised and amused at the simplicity with which the people disputed plans of war and peace, giving many months of warning and exact information to the enemy, while they showed no signs of leadership, discipline, or union, or even a consciousness that such qualities were needed.” The United States may have been the first nation in history “to hope that the war itself might create the spirit they lacked.”
Madison prosecuted the war energetically. The spikes of Adams’s criticism cannot quite puncture the statesman’s tough hide: “If a strong government was desired, any foreign war, without regard to its object, might be good policy, if not good morals, and in that sense President Madison’s war was the boldest and most successful of all experiments in American statesmanship, though it was also among the most reckless.” Because strong government was Federalist Party doctrine, not Jefferson’s, Adams doubts that Madison had this in mind. But Madison had read his Montesquieu, and had lived through the Revolutionary War. He knew war’s centralizing tendency, could not have been so naïve as to suppose America to be exempt from it, and, while perhaps not intending war, did not abase himself in order to avert it. When it occurred, he put it to use.
The first two years of conflict actually weakened national unity, bringing the Anglophile Federalists of New England one step away from secession. But “little by little the pressure of necessity compelled Congress and the country to follow Madison’s lead.” He sent his best men to negotiate a peace treaty with England, and they did–after battlefield events convinced the British government to accept reasonable terms.
Madison underlined the lesson in his 1815 Message to Congress: “Experience has taught us that neither the pacific dispositions of the American people, nor the pacific character of their political institutions, can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears, beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period of the world”—the period of the Napoleonic Wars. “Experience demonstrates that a certain preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters in the onset, but affords the best security for the continuance of peace.” And the preparation for war that secures peace requires a strong federal government.
Madison had known these truisms twenty-five years before the War of 1812. Had he forgotten them in the 1800s, only to relearn them as president?
It is more plausible to think that this quiet little man, “always treated by his associates with a shade of contempt as a closet politician,” more theorist than man of affairs, waited for years, with a farmer’ vigilant patience, for the seeds of 1787 to mature into the harvest of 1815. Then peace and prosperity” “put an end to faction.” In 1787, James Madison had predicted the diminution of faction’s effects, if not its “end,” thanks precisely to the soothing effects of peaceful commerce, prospering under the aegis of Constitutional union. By then, experience had taught Americans lessons that Madison and the other Founders arranged for our political conditions to teach.
And it may be that the resolutely unheroic Mr. Madison moved unobtrusively among such forceful men as Hamilton and Jefferson, allowing them to use him, the better to use them, in rather the same way Madison’s Constitution invites us to use it, pursuing our own purposes but bending them to our own good. Henry Adams admires force, albeit with a touch of irony. James Madison understood force, and used it for the good of his country. His “new science of politics” excels Adams’s newer science of history, because it is a genuine science, one that never confuses men with crystals.
2017 Note:
For the last decade, Robert Eden of the Hillsdale College Politics Department has been preparing a study of Adams’s History in which he will argue that Adams himself partook of a sort of literary statesmanship that featured exactly the sort of prudent indirection Madison practiced in politics. I happily expect to ‘stand corrected’ by Bob’s interpretation, as it should raise Henry Adams even higher than before, to or even in a sense above the level of the great men he studied.
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