Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part I, Chapter 8, subchapter 22: “On the Advantages of the Federal System Generally, and Its Special Utility for America.” 

 

In order to construct modern, centralized states on the model advocated by Machiavelli, European monarchs weakened the aristocratic class, which had ruled feudal states characterized by weak monarchs and powerful landlords. Weak aristocracies meant increasingly egalitarian civil societies within the modern states, whether their regimes were monarchic or republican. For Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘democracy’ is not itself a regime, and equality is neither a natural or legal right; democracy is a social condition, one that must be understood clearly if it is not to descend into despotism. As the most thoroughly democratized society in the world in the 1830s (this, despite slavery), America fascinated the young French aristocrat, living in the aftermath of the debacle of French republicanism in the 1790s and of French monarchy in the 1780s and again in the Napoleonic Wars.

Differing from feudal states in their degree of centralization, modern states also differed from ancient city-states in size, being far larger in both territory and population. In small states, Tocqueville remarks, “the eyes of society penetrate everywhere” (as the popular song advises, “Don’t try that in a small town”), and ambitions are modest (no Napoleon has arisen from Slovenia). In small states, “internal well-being” takes precedence over “the vain smoke of glory.” Manners and morals are “simple and peaceful,” inequality of wealth less pronounced. Political freedom is the “natural condition” of small states; in all times, antiquity (Athens) and modernity (Switzerland), “small nations have been cradles of political freedom.”

They lose that freedom on those rare occasions when they eventually muster the power to expand. “The history of the world does not furnish an example of a great nation that has long remained a republic,” whether the nation was ancient Rome or modern France. That is because “all the passions fatal to republics grow with the extent of territory, whereas the virtues that serve as their support do not increase in the same measure.” The gulf between rich and poor widens; great cities arise, with their “depravity of morals”; individuals become less patriotic because their country seems less immediately real to them; accordingly, individuals become less patriotic, more selfish. This is worse for republican regimes than for monarchies, as republics depend upon citizen virtue while monarchy “makes use of the people and does not depend on them.” In sum, “nothing is so contrary to the well-being and freedom of men as great empires.”

This notwithstanding, “great states” enjoy some substantial advantages. While morally injurious, their cities are “like vast intellectual centers,” where “ideas circulate more freely” than in the more censorious atmosphere of small communities. The people are safer from invasion, since the borders are remote from much of the population. Above all, great states wield greater force than small states, and the security force obtains “is one of the first conditions of happiness and even existence for nations.” Tocqueville “does not know of a condition more deplorable than that of a people that cannot defend itself or be self-sufficient.”

What, then, shall republican lawgivers do? The American Founders took the recommendation of Montesquieu: federalism, which (as Publius argues in the tenth Federalist), permits Americans to live in an “extended” republic, one that can preserve the virtues needed for republicanism while enjoying the advantages of a large modern state. [1] While the Congress “regulates the principal actions of social existence,” it leaves administrative details to the “provincial legislatures.” [2] In a democratic republic, the people are sovereign; in the United States, the people have divided their sovereignty between the federal government and the “provinces” or states. The federal government attends to the general welfare of the nation, but can act only through specific, enumerated powers set down in the Constitution. It can reach into the states and rule their citizens directly, but not in all, and indeed not in most, things.

This is what allows democracy or civil-social equality to ‘work’ in the United States. Because the federal government conducts American foreign policy, the states need not take on the expense and effort to defend themselves and so can concentrate their energies on internal improvements, just as small political communities incline to do. This spirit of economic enterprise is enhanced by the Constitutional prohibition of tariffs among the states, which makes American into a vast free-trade zone. The spirit of economic enterprise itself redirects ambitions toward peaceful commerce and away from military glory, the passion of aristocrats. With no arms to purchase and no wars to undertake and sustain, among state politicians “ambition for power makes way for love of well-being, a more vulgar but less dangerous passion.” “Vulgar” means not-noble, not aristocratic but democratic. Federalism thus reinforces the democratic republican regime, unlike in the South American republics of the time, where republicanism extended over large territories but under centralized governments, control of which fired ambitious souls, bringing political turmoil. In the federal republic of the United States, however, “the public spirit of the Union itself is in a way only a summation of provincial patriotism.”

Thanks to the Framers of the United States Constitution, “the Union is a great republic in extent; but one could in a way liken it to a small republic because the objects with which its government is occupied are few.” The federal government exercises substantial power but in a manner “not dangerous to freedom” because, unlike a fully centralized government, it does not “excite those immoderate desires for power and attention that are so fatal to great republics,” whether in ancient Rome, modern France, or modern Brazil. Such desires that do arise “break against the individual interests and passions of the states,” jealous defenders of their own share of popular sovereignty.

In the civil society of American democracy within a federal system, “the Union is free and happy like a small nation, glorious and strong like a great one.”

American federalism did in fact guarantee civil liberty with civil equality, even as the extended republic extended itself from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a vast imperial project. Tocqueville worried that Americans were going too fast, that their liberties were in danger, but by 1890, when the American frontier was judged to have been ‘closed,’ the original republic stood, and without the scourge of slavery that had compromised republicanism in the South. The foreign threats that became more acute with the invention of steam-powered battleships, threatening the country’s ocean trade routes, was settled by establishing not an overseas empire, as some advocated, but a network of naval bases from Cuba to the Philippines, countries whose governance Americans gladly handed back to the peoples in them, in the decades following their acquisition from Spain. The real danger arose not from foreign policy but from domestic policy, a danger Tocqueville also warned against. Ambitious men in the twentieth century first ‘theorized’ and then implemented a substantial federal bureaucracy, ‘professionalizing’ government and thereby weakening the civic spirit of Americans, whose local, county, and state governments now depended upon decisions implemented by the national ‘administrative state.’ This effected a regime change, whereby the democratic republic of the Founders became what Aristotle would call a ‘mixed’ regime consisting of elected officials, some of them a bit Caesar-like, and a tenured set of experts, whom no one elects, and no one can remove except by abolishing the agencies which serve as their platform for rule. 

 

Notes

1. See Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, Part II, Book 9: “On the laws in their relation to defensive force.” 
2. Tocqueville uses the term “provincial” rather than “state” because his European readers associated statehood with sovereignty, which American states wield only in part, and only as representatives of the true sovereigns, the citizens.

Leslie G. Rubin: America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018.

 

Although it is more usual to associate the moral foundations of the American republic with the political philosophy of John Locke, attempts to link them to Aristotle are not unknown. [1] Here, Leslie G. Rubin illuminates one substantial connection between Americanism and Aristotelianism: a shared esteem for a ‘middling’ class of citizens who can serve as moderating ballast for a regime of the people, who might otherwise list catastrophically, to the left or to the right—or even worse, to shiver between both sides in a factional conflict that splits the ship and sends it to the bottom of the sea.

The American Founders’ “new science of politics” (as Publius called it) addressed the “inconvenience” of faction by proposing a large, “extended” republic in which no faction could likely dominate the others; in America’s capacious civil society, factions would survive, even thrive, but their very contentiousness would cause them to frustrate each other’s plans. As Publius also remarks, American civil society is and will remain middle-class or, as its enemies like to say, bourgeois; America is a commercial republic, and many of its factional conflicts have centered on what sort of commerce should prevail—agrarian, agrarian-slaveowning, financial, industrial, and now ‘post-industrial’.  And in the government, faction would be thwarted by the separation of powers, which makes it much less likely that any faction could seize control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at once. 

Aristotle too commends that republican lawgivers base their regime “upon the middling element,” and to arrange the ruling offices in such a way that the several governing powers “interact in order to discourage a regime’s tendency toward tyranny.” The middling element is the one most amenable to political life, strictly speaking, which is a life of ruling and being ruled in turn, a life that eschews the one-way rule of both patriarchy (or matriarchy) and mastery or tyranny. Thus, “the insights of the science of politics are not as new as Publius might suggest,” although they had “never [been] put together into a working regime until the American experiment.” [2] “The founders rediscovered some long-ignored truths about human nature, and they had the resources, the political will, and the political culture required to put them into effect, while Aristotle did not.”

Both the Aristotelian and the American sciences of politics contradict the political science and indeed the ‘social science’ generally prevalent in the United States today. “Modern Americans speak of office politics and sexual politics and governmental politics as if they were all subcategories of an essentially similar assertion of power.” But this reduces human rule to the dominance games animals play, a reduction which overlooks a distinctive human trait: “Humans do not use their voices like other animals.” “The political animal uses logos, speech that implies reason,” in discovering the advantageous and the harmful, the just and the unjust.” Unlike herds, human association, and especially the political association, “is based on common moral perceptions—not [or not distinctly] on place, leadership, or ethnic bonds, but on a common understanding of the good and the just.” “If the fundamental moral consensus does not hold, there is no political whole.” Elk and gorillas have no such concerns. They do not deliberate together about the common good. Human beings, however, must deliberate together not only in order to survive but in order to thrive—for “the good life, that is, the practice of the excellence appropriate to being human.” The regime—the way political communities are ordered in terms of who rules, the ruling structures or offices within which their rulers rule, way of life those rulers and structures conduce to, and the purposes they aim at all require such deliberation.

The word translated as ‘regime,’ politeia, is also the word Aristotle uses for the best practicable regime, usually translated as ‘polity’ or ‘republic.’ Rubin prefers ‘republic,’ deriving as it does from the Latin res publica, the ‘public thing,’ a ‘mixed’ regime is ruled by all the people, rich and poor alike. To avoid factitious rule by the rich of the poor or by the poor over the rich, such a regime needs the moderating, balancing influence of a middle class. That need needs to be seen as needed: “If most citizens—wealthy, middling, and poor alike—are not raised to appreciate the middling virtues (including the political/moral/social value of the middle class itself), to take a turn in some office beneficial to the community, to cultivate friendly relations across the economic spectrum, and to aspire to personal and community-wide excellence, the republic will suffer a decline.” This is likely to occur especially if the middle class fails to appreciate its own virtues, first among them being moderation. 

To be the best practicable regime does not mean that the republic is readily founded and readily sustained. Politics is difficult work. Rubin sets herself “to illuminat[ing] both the brilliance and the weaknesses of the Philosopher’s and the founders’ expectations.” Aristotle himself is well aware of the difficulties; “if politics and the city are natural to human beings,” he needs to explain “why it is so hard to find a stable and self-sufficient city,” in practice and even in theory.

In terms of theory, Aristotle’s most distinguished political-philosophic predecessor made two main proposals, one in the Republic, the other in the Laws. The regime of the Republic is not republican in Aristotle’s sense of a mixed regime but the rule of philosopher-kings. In subordinating the other parts of the city, the warriors and the craftsmen, this regime cannot endure for long; those excluded from rule rebel, their own rule inducing future rebellions in an endless cycle. Plato’s Socrates’ (quite possibly ironic) attempt to reduce “a theme to a single beat,” as Aristotle puts it, fails because it is insufficiently political, lacking in reciprocal ruling and being-ruled. The regime’s “communal arrangement of property,” which “aimed to create an artificial friendship among the guardians and between the guardians and the working classes,” is not sustainable because it is not consensual. The regime of the Laws attempts to address this problem. Neither a democracy nor an oligarchy, it aims at a midway point between the two, a polity founded on an arms-bearing middle class. Aristotle rejects this more practicable regime, as well, because it valorizes military virtues to the extent of ignoring “other productive services for the city,” such as agriculture and manufacturing. Supporting “five thousand warriors (and their wives and attendants) in idleness is not economically feasible.” And the more the city’s economic belt is tightened to accommodate such a regime, the more moderation becomes stinginess, the less liberality or generosity can flourish. But liberality is a foundation of friendship, and political friendship is indispensable to political cohesion, to the prevention of severe factionalism. Both of the Platonic regimes overlook this.

Aristotle shows how such theoretical misconceptions work out in practice, even in regimes whose citizens don’t do much theorizing. Sparta’s founders failed to “understand the delicate relationship between education for citizenship and the institutional arrangements for the restraint of the citizens from vice.” Spartan women are as undisciplined as their warrior husbands are overdisciplined, since the regime’s “excessive emphasis on soldiering…leaves these self-indulgent persons essentially in charge of the city much of the time.” (In the middle-class American republic, the separation of home and workplace has caused a less acute version of the same disadvantage.) Oftentimes the only men left at home are the underclass, the helots, who restlessly eye not only ruling-class women and property but the regime itself. “Sparta’s experience serves as a warning to all founders and legislators.” The polis at Crete suffers similar defects, despite its somewhat more democratic structure. Food is distributed on an equal basis and population is controlled “by the encouragement of homosexuality and the segregation of the women” from the men. But the actual governing body is less democratic than that of Sparta; “the people’s opportunities to defend themselves or to influence political decisions are limited to a virtually powerless assembly,” leading to instability. 

Carthage is superior to Sparta and Crete. “Internally peaceful” and with none of its citizens enslaved, the regime enjoys the consent of the governed. This is due to its “more balanced mixture of the elements” of democracy and oligarchy, along with a requisite degree of attention to virtue, to ‘aristocratic’ rule in Aristotle’s sense of the word. The regime prevents oligarchy, the rule of the few who are rich, by enabling those of middling or low riches to become rich through service in the empire—a point the modern Britons would take. But as in modernity so in antiquity; if the empire falls, crisis will ensue. “In Carthage, as in Sparta and Crete, the majority of Aristotle’s criticisms center on the problem of keeping the many satisfied and preventing a revolt.” As a more commercial republic than either Sparta or Crete, Carthage does a better job of this, but at the cost of a fragile imperialism. 

Rubin summarizes the importance of both political theory and practice, citing Aristotle’s insistence that theory provides standards that are ‘ideal,’ but that such standards are not directly applicable to practice, to the “activity of politics and the arrangements proper to political life.” We might well pray for the ideal but we had better attend to the real. He therefore “introduces a standard for a stable and decent regime,” the republic, applying that standard to the actual regimes in of the Spartans, Cretans, and Carthaginians. If political science, the result of philosophizing about politics, points beyond politics to the higher and more comprehensive good of philosophizing, of science concerning nature as a whole, then the political art is the needed corrective, ensuring that the best not become the enemy of the good, the decent, the ‘middling’ way. And so, although “Sparta, Crete, and Carthage aimed at becoming aristocracies,” regimes aimed at achieving the good simply, “Aristotle praises them for the aspects that would make them republics.” Would-be aristocracies overreach because genuine virtue is rare. Not only can no regime, even one that “respects the freedom and the equal claims of all its citizens,” can “control all the chance events or the human choices that would need to be controlled in order to predict the long-range effects of their policies.” And even if it could, “a regime that controls education and the actions of citizens to such an extent that it can guarantee full virtue is not actually producing virtue, which is a matter of reasoned choice.” “The best political regime is not the best that can be imagined, but the best that can be accomplished among free and equal people, people practicing politics.”

In considering the several types of regimes, Aristotle accordingly judges them against standards whereby “the goodness of both the regime and the citizen body are judged” by “the requirements of political life, as distinct from other human activities.” If “the purpose of city life is mutual assistance for life and the good life,” regimes should be classified with respect to “whether they aim at such mutual assistance—the common good—or at the benefit of the ruler(s) alone.” Although “no good political life is possible without attention to the good of all involved,” “actual cities are full of people of a despotic bent, who believe that they are ‘sick’ unless they are ruling.” This is an important point the more materialist/’economistic’ observers of politics miss: as Aristotle puts it, no one becomes a tyrant in order to get out of the cold. Tyrants want to rule, defining ruling itself, preferably with no backtalk, as the good life. In this, they recognize that political life aims at more than mere life, mere survival; “a central flaw in most cities is the failure to recognize just this distinguishing characteristic of politics,” the characteristic not satisfied, or not satisfied in some, by farming, hunting, making, fighting. 

Although the Spartan and Cretan regimes take the militarization of the citizen body too far, citizens in every well-ordered regime will need to be capable of bearing arms and practicing military virtue. Aristotle therefor must “explain why it is good political practice to reward with exclusive political power those who provide only one, albeit a necessary, material benefit to the city, the wherewithal for its defense.” But such a regime is not a military oligarchy but the rule of the middle class; “however unextraordinary, the self-supporting citizen-warrior displays some virtues, while a poor freeman or a very wealthy oligarch need not display any virtues to maintain his status. To define a citizen body in terms of military capacity, then, is to give some attention to political virtue.” A large middle class of citizen-warriors stands ready to sacrifice not only comfort but individual self-preservation for the sake of the city, for the way of life of the city. “Political virtue or noble action is what distinguishes the full practice of true politics from the practice of subordinate parts of politics,” such as household management and commercial production, “which may call forth some virtues, but not all and not the finer ones.” Oligarchs and democrats tend to use political life to serve the interests of themselves; the middle class, somewhat less so, and without insisting on excluding others from a share in rule.

Oligarchs want to squeeze the poor in order further to enrich themselves. The poor want to squeeze the rich, confiscate their property. Both ambitions ruin regimes, including the regimes that undertake to enact such ambitions. However one defines justice, one must admit that “justice does not destroy the city,” the association justice is intended to perfect. At the same time, given the recalcitrance of reality in the face of ‘idealism,’ seen in consideration of Platonic regime theory, “justice, including the justice of a particular person’s claim to rule, cannot be considered in abstraction from the political need to preserve the locus of justice, the city itself and its regime.” Reasoned consent of the governed is required for the establishment of justice, but reasoned consent is often not forthcoming from impassioned human beings. In recognition of this, some take the shortcut of defining justice as “the will of the stronger,” with strength derived from “numerical superiority, wealth, or physical or military power.” And in recognition of that, many (including Plato) incline to uphold the rule of law in an attempt to avoid rule by sheer coercion. This strengthens the tendency to define justice as the rule of law because law seems to hover above the various factions in the city, moderating all of them.  “Aristotle rejects both definitions of justice.” The inconvenience of defining justice as the rule of the strongest readily occurs to everyone who finds himself on the receiving end of such rule. The inconvenience of the rule of law is that law doesn’t really rule; human beings do, framing and wielding laws. Laws are subordinate to regimes; though needed, they cannot make the regime problem disappear.

To achieve the common good of the city as a whole, its survival and its material and ethical prosperity, “all regimes” should “consider the claims of the excluded,” as “even those who do not measure up to a regime’s standards may have at least a partial claim to consideration.” The ‘mixed’ or republican regime is the only one “that deprives no one of honor arbitrarily or by force,” or even by legalistic sleight-of-hand. Republics and democracies, the two regimes ruled by ‘the many,’ resemble one another ‘quantitatively’ but not ‘qualitatively’ precisely because democracy, the rule of the many who are poor to the exclusion of the rich and the middle class, invite the overthrow of their own regime on the grounds of its own injustice. Indeed, while “the many must be given some prerogatives in order to retain them as friends of the regime,” the ruling offices “with the greatest discretionary power require a greater-than-average capacity for just and prudent decision-making.” Those prerogatives include serving on juries, with evidence and arguments are laid in front of them, and judging the performance of public officials by the results they achieve—no trivial tasks, as both Socrates and Pericles would acknowledge. The practice of statecraft is another matter. “Because the best political actor requires prudence above all in order to contribute to the good of the regime, and prudence is a virtue and a knowledge that eludes precise definition and is impossible to display fully outside of ruling office, there are great disagreements, among regimes and sometimes among citizens of the same regime, about who, among those who are not holding office at the moment, has the potential to fulfill the requirements of a good political ruler.” That arduous challenge is not necessarily beyond the capacity of a popular regime.

To meet that challenge, the city’s inhabitants need to be “educated in the principles revered by the regime.” Such “education in the regime” will “teach the full citizens both to rule well and to be good human beings.” Teaching requires teachable persons, however. “If the citizens are incapable of the highly trained virtues, the legislator must decide which element among his less gifted citizens to honor and to put in office in order to benefit the whole city.” Education must supplement the rule of law, both understood as emanations of the regime. Rule of a “political multitude” that includes a substantial middle class will feature virtues sufficient to sit still for civic education and to exercise rule by just laws, justly, consisting as it does of “all kinds of people capable of some self-mastery” and excluding those who are incapable. [3]

The founder of a republic should therefore “not confuse this task with that of the founder of the simply best regime, and [Professor Rubin adds, astutely] the citizens probably should not be reminded of a standard of educated virtue that they will never attain collectively.” Such a political science differs from Socratic political philosophy, to say nothing of efforts of professional rhetoricians and sophists. Aristotelian political science remains mindful of the best regime discovered by political philosophy, as this provides a standard of justice uncompromised by circumstances, but it concentrates its attention on finding “the best regime under given circumstances,” taking note of regimes (and they have multiplied in modern times) “governed by a partisan principle of justice that may assume it is the best simply or the best possible, but is neither,” and, finally, considering “the regime most fitting for all cities.” Aristotle offers a typology of regimes. One set of identifying criteria are material, consisting socioeconomic classes; “the preeminence of one economic class will create, in general, an oligarchy, a democracy or a republic.” These ‘quantitative’ regime identifiers must be supplemented by ‘qualitative’ ones, regimes that are better or worse, ethically. This category is very far from abstract, however. “Because of the superiority of the good life to mere life and of the soul to the body, despite the fact that the mouth and the digestive system are crucial to existence, the parts that contribute to knowledge and that allow the whole are superior.” In a good regime, politicians and warriors outrank farmers and artisans. But “the key to the characters of the regimes in the second list is not so much the type of work the citizens perform…as the quantity of leisure time available to them,” time they can use to deliberate about city policies. For Aristotle, political freedom or liberty consists not simply in freedom from unjust government coercion but in the political participation that enables citizens to guard themselves and their fellow citizens against such coercion.

Although “other forms of government may produce as superior way of life for some of the inhabitants, it is their exclusion of large numbers of free persons from participation in ruling that marks them as inferior,” as “they are not political in the strict sense, characterized by ruling and being ruled among free and roughly equal persons.”  This is the merit of the republic. Whereas aristocracy, rule of the few who are virtuous (and “usually wealthy”) aims higher than most political communities can reach, the republic is “the good regime for those of some wealth and freedom who are not extraordinarily virtuous”—the sort of population a founder/lawgiver is much more likely to encounter. “The excellence of a republic lies not so much in the virtue of its citizens individually as in its balance” among the several classes of people within it. Political stability, a very great good but one detested by many ambitieux, “is not to be purchased at the cost of tyrannical measures, but to be earned by satisfying all the major parts of the city.” In this regime, the middle class serves the indispensable function of enabling the governing body to avoid both deadlock and class warfare between the few who are rich and the many who are poor. In so doing, the middle class arbitrates between the rich and the poor. “The middle class satisfies uniquely the requirement that the republic take account of riches and poverty without outstanding virtue, by mixing riches and poverty in the same persons, so to speak, in a combination that produces a certain moderate virtue” within the city. A middle-class republic gives voice to practical if not to theoretical reason, to citizens if not to philosopher-kings. In it, citizens will exhibit “a willingness to rule untyrannically and to be ruled unslavishly.” This regime gives citizens fewer reasons who “desire the regime to change.” 

This can be so, because “moderate property holders are temperate by the nature of their social and economic position, not so much by an education that tries to create a ‘second nature'” in them. The passions of middle-class persons “more ruled by reason” than those of the rich or the poor; their ambitions are also more moderate; relatively easygoing, they readily make friends among themselves; and they neither envy the rich nor fear the poor. And they are ready, willing, and able to defend themselves and their city in war. And not only in war: “Both the justice and the stability attained by a republic should be able to withstand chance, the hard times or crises that are brought on by domestic strife, warfare, and economic decline.” The middle class will “muddle through,” waiting for the first opportunity to restore more favorable circumstances. While aristocracies require “extensive education” to discipline and refine the young, the middle-class republics “are educational in the way they operate,” institutionalizing “the tendency toward moderation that the middling citizens ordinarily displays” and, by institutionalizing that tendency, reinforcing it. “The citizen virtue of a middling republic does not create grand individuals worthy of great honor but rather good citizens who, when considered as a whole, sustain a regime worthy of emulation.” A principal danger to that regime is the failure of brilliant and ambitious souls to appreciate such virtue and the regime animated by it. Unlike America’s Franklin, a man scarcely lacking in brilliance and ambition, they cannot bring themselves to laud “happy Mediocrity.”

What would Aristotle think of the United States? “Two prime factors make the modern liberal state praiseworthy in Aristotelian terms: political stability and an understanding of justice as fairness to all parts of the society.” He would also see a weakness: “Modern Americans, like Aristotle’s middling element, know they should participate in elections and they should serve on the jury, but when the moment arrives, any think of something they would rather be doing.” Unlike the middle class of an ancient polis, where the connection between citizen participation and liberty was obvious, the middle class of the large, centralized modern state inclines to abominate ‘the politicians’ while refusing to engage in politics.

Prominent American Founders esteemed the middle class. John Adams “seriously studied Aristotle” and praised the rule of law, equally, over “all men.” With Aristotle, Adams praised the middle class as “compliant to reason,” as “willing to submit to command or law” while “knowing how to rule over freemen,” as neither covetous nor thieving but intolerant of being stolen from, as likely neither to scheme against others nor to tolerate others who scheme against them, and as the class “least liable to seditions and insurrections.” Middle-class “self-restraint and public spirit” will “keep factional conflict at bay both inside and outside the government,” so long as the state and federal constitutions reinforce those virtues by separating and balancing the three powers of government, including a division of the legislative power into two institutional branches, one representative of the rich, the other of ‘the commons.’ In America’s case, however, the existence of a middle class more numerous than the poor will require not the middle class itself but the executive branch to serve as the arbiter between the two legislative chambers.  And although the founding generation would soon divide into partisan ‘Republicans’ and ‘Federalists,’ Adams’s Republican rivals concurred with him on the value of the middle class; as Republican James Madison wrote, “mediocrity of fortune is a leading feature in our national character” in a population with “few dangerously rich” and “few miserably poor.” Republicans inclined rather to worry that the middle class might in time be too complacent, “too moderate in their ambition to combat the avaricious forces” of rich and poor.

Federalists, the early anti-Federalists and later Democratic Republicans accordingly saw the need to inculcate citizen virtue in successive generations, “simple manners” among a “laborious and saving” population. Federalists “left the control of education and the administration of people and things to the states and their localities,” practicing a “laissez-faire attitude over what recent commentators call family values or personal moral choices.” But in those states, counties, and municipalities, Federalists and their opponents alike worked to cultivate what Delaware delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention John Dickinson called “the seeds of liberty.” “Dickinson argues that the only way that the new government will become a despotism is ‘after a general corruption of manners,’ at which time will be a matter of course.”

To stave that off, Noah Webster of Massachusetts became America’s most prominent advocate of a public civic education entailing “knowledge of the rights of men and the principles of government” and encouraging a “keen sense of liberty and a watchful jealousy” in guarding those rights and principles. In a democratic republic, the great dangers are the demagogue who beguiles the people by “pretending to patriotism,” wins their votes, then rules “like a giant” and a “powerful lawmaking body favoring the propertyless over the moderate property holder and not restrained by moral integrity.” Foreseeing “a day when economic circumstances will move the society away from rough equality and self-reliance,” when “the family farm will decline and manufacturing arise” and the consequent increased dependence of the middle-class and the poor upon the rich, Webster calls not only for civic education but for better educators, paying “extended attention to finding good teachers for the common schools as well as academies.” Such men (and the teachers in the early decades of the United States were men, for the most part) must be “prudent, accomplished, agreeable, and respectable,” inasmuch as students learn as much from example as from books. Students who respect their teachers (because the teachers themselves are respectable) are more likely to become good citizens as adults. “Parents who abide ill-mannered, clownish, or profligate teachers must not be paying sufficient attention” to hiring, or perhaps refuse to pay for better ones. Even as the students, in Webster’s words, “lisp the praise of liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor,” they will have before them decent if not heroic men who exhibit the steady habits of the middle class.

“Self-government, at both the individual and the community levels, requires sustained effort, and in the modern world, where the acknowledgment of human rationality has released humanity from blind obedience, that sustained effort must be rationally defensible and appealing.” Can “each new generation” in the middle-class republic resist “the temptation to climb into a more luxurious social position”? Can “the chosen leaders of the political institutions resist the lure of becoming an oligarchy”? Alexander Hamilton came to doubt it. “As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature…. It is a common misfortune, that awaits our state constitution, as well as all others.” Webster, Delaware Anti-Federalist newspaper editor Robert Coram, along with Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams, all in effect turned toward the Aristotelian remedy for such decline, citizen education, if not precisely toward Aristotelian ethics as the substance of that education. Coram advocated a national education curriculum “intended to produce good citizens of the new republic through job training, inasmuch as a “truly free government, suited to the nature of man, requires teaching all the citizens how to make a living.” Public schools that teach literacy, mathematics, and the sciences, along with “mechanics and husbandry,” followed by apprenticeship programs, will accomplish that. Franklin thought in similar terms, while emphasizing the study of political and commercial history as a means of smartening up students about the menace posed by tyrants and titled aristocrats while instilling a good regard for such virtues as temperance, order, frugality, industry, and perseverance. Both men commended religious instruction insofar as it fostered sound morals. Franklin especially “combines the traditional lures of liberal learning with the commercial inducements of a modern society.”

Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence along with Franklin, emphasized the importance of religious instruction for republican citizenship. Public education in the primary grades should “be founded upon the study of the Bible, both for learning to read and write and for inculcating at the most retentive age the Christian virtues of ‘humility, self-denial, and brotherly kindness’ and the Golden Rule, all of which are ‘useful to the republic’ and ‘wholly inoffensive.'” Indeed, as he wrote, “the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.” Rubin cautions that Rush’s claims “should not be simply labeled either prejudice or proselytizing zeal,” but rather as the basis of a serious matter public policy should address: the need for young people “to choose the religion that will form the moral center of their adult lives.” As a stalwart of the American branch of the Enlightenment, Rush himself did not assume that Christian revelation was true, but rather that Christian “doctrines and precepts are calculated to promote the happiness of society and the safety and well-being of civil government.” Some other religion might serve that purpose, but Christianity is the one we have. To prevent bitter disputes over sectarian doctrine, Rush recommended that children of the same religious sect be educated together in “a variety of schools [that] might enhance the citizens’ toleration of other religions.” Such religious instruction will reduce crime (“confessions of criminals show that vices are the fatal consequences of the want of proper early education,” Rush maintained) and thereby reduce the tax revenues needed to support jails. As Rubin summarizes it, “A free citizen will vote wisely, work hard, obey the law and stay out of trouble, and make efforts to improve his community and his state without taxing and spending too much.” And he will do so as a citizen, that is, as a person who shares a core of moral convictions and habits with other citizens in the regime. And not only “he”: girls will be educated in much the same way; as the first teachers of children and exercisers of influence over men, they too must understand the principles of liberty and government. They will also prove important supporters of education and the rule of law. The right kind of education, Rush hoped, would “preserve our morals, manners, and government from the infection of European vices.”

Rubin completes her survey of Founding-era American educational writings with Nicholas Collin, a pre-Independence Swedish immigrant who became the pastor of the New Jersey Branch of the Lutheran Church of Sweden and eventually a minister at Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia. Instead of proposing a variety of public schools serving the many Christian sects, Collin devised a syncretic approach, writing “a how-to book incorporating all the wisdom of the world’s religions that teach about an afterlife without offending any of them,” a book he intended for inclusion in public school curricula. A doctrine concerning the afterlife supports morality. Since “a truly republican government cannot impose its laws by force,” since laws “cannot enforce themselves,” and since “the theoretical foundation of republican government is the justice of each human being’s ruling himself,” the majority of its citizens “must be so satisfied with the laws that they obey them as if they and made them themselves.” In Collin’s words, “As the people cannot be led as children, or drove as mules, the only method is, to make them rational beings.” That won’t be easy, as civil society will always have its “refractory elements”—those of “weaker wills” and “slower intellect,” who might still be brought to trust those who have “better knowledge” of politics and government. Religious education can accomplish this. “While Aristotle associated the middling virtues with middling economic status, Collin implies that the larger the ruling class, the more effort has to be put into their intellectual moral development.” Without the pressure from powerful rich and poor classes to keep the middle class on the straight and narrow, that class will lapse into complacent self-indulgence. “The ‘overdriven spirit of trade,’ put together with America’s ‘overdriven principle of equality,’ creates the sense that all can have and should have whatever they desire.” This would lead the American middle class into the characteristic mistake of Aristotle’s democrats: defining liberty not as self-government but as doing as one likes. Add to this the absence of fixed classes in America, with the resulting tendency of everyone to “both envy and emulate the rich,” and the need for a serious religious upbringing at home and in school becomes clear.

“Politics—the experience of debating and horse-trading, drafting and redrafting, articulating principles and compromising on specifics—led the Americans to produce a republic similar in crucial ways to Aristotle’s best political regime,” a regime characterized by “rule of law rather than…human whim,” crucially inflected by a reasonable and reasoning middle class. While much of recent political science scholarship foregrounds the Founders’ constitutionalism, their application of the rule of law, Rubin sees that the Founders “also took up Aristotle’s parallel concern with the moral qualities, the ‘manners,’ as they term them, of the citizens who both rule and are ruled, whose way of life characterized the republic,” gives it its distinctive ethos. As the Founders foresaw, as Tocqueville and Lincoln would soon warn, “if the majority of citizens no longer knows how the system works or why it was instituted, no longer cherishes citizen virtues and votes for respectable officials, and no longer sustains itself independently, the majority will be hard pressed to make a sensible judgment about needed reforms and trustworthy reformers.” They will then become prey for demagogues and for “unsympathetic elites.” Those elites are likely themselves to fall prey to “philosophic demands,” that is, demands by philosophers (to say nothing of rhetoricians and sophists) that their ideas be realized, persons who may be ‘political’ in the sense of addressing political life, but are not ‘politic,’ lacking a prudential sense of what most human beings can achieve and sustain. The libertarianism of Thoreau, the utilitarianism of Mill, the socialism of Marx, the progressivism of Croly all exemplify philosophizing that had calcified into ideology. “A large but partially obscured challenge of the founding era, as for Aristotle, is to make mediocrity admirable.”  “This is mediocrity, which is but called moderation!” Nietzsche exclaims, beckoning subsequent generations to deplore along with him. The results of such efforts have been less than impressive. What happens when Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocracy of virtue and talent separates virtue from talent, proposing instead a social science that studies ‘values’ and ‘facts’? “Barely a single one of the Aristotelian middling virtues or the Founders’ republican manners is openly revered today.” Are Americans the better for that, the happier for it? What has “a culture that prizes self-definition (license) over old-fashioned liberty and notions of equality that are beyond the capacity of a free society to achieve” achieved?

 

 

Notes

1. See Robert H. Horwitz, ed.: The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (Charlottesville: Uni9vrsity Press of Virginia, 2001). On American Aristotelianism, see Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the America Polity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974).
2. The Roman Republic and the modern British republic of the Founders’ time might be put forth as conspicuous exceptions, although of course the Founders regarded British rule of its colonies as nothing better than tyrannical.
3. Self-government has been a neglected theme of American political thought; studies more usually address equality and liberty. For two attempts to redress the balance, see Will Morrisey: Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 20004) and The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).

François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux: Chastellux’s Travels in North-America in the Years 1780-81-82. Translated by “An English Gentleman Who Resided in America During that Period.” Carlisle: Applewood Books, n.d.

 

A veteran of the Seven Years’ War, where he fought in Germany, the Marquis de Chastellux had distinguished himself in France as the author of De la Félicitie Publique and other works in which he placed himself firmly in the camp of the Enlightenment. These included a well-received eulogy of Helvétius. He won election to the Académie Française in 1775, at the age of forty-one. Five years later, he arrived in the United States, a major general under the command of Jean-Baptiste de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, serving as the liaison officer between Rochambeau and General Washington, with whom he began a cherished friendship. At the decisive Yorktown siege in 1781 he served as third in command of the French troops, but initially he deployed to Newport, Rhode Island in July of 1780. Newport residents, most of them Loyalists with memories of the French and Indian War, were unhappy to see the French soldiers; the city’s population of 9,000 in the mid-1770s had diminished to fewer than 5,000 (about one-fifth of them slaves) during the British occupation, which had begun in December 1776 and lasted until October 1779. The French had allied with the United States in February 1778 and declared war on Great Britain in March; its fleet went to the Delaware Bay that year but finding that the British troops had withdrawn from Philadelphia, they set off for Newport, arriving in July, where their fleet was heavily damaged by a storm and by the British warships. The French retreat left their American allies in Rhode Island unconfident, and the Catholicism of French soldiers and sailors scarcely endeared them to New Englanders. Fortunately, Rochambeau was not only an able military officer but a man adept at public relations. By imposing strict discipline on his troops and providing them with then-scarce coin to pay for their provision, he began to endear himself and his men to the locals. [1] Although the British fleet showed itself offshore that summer, Chastellux reports that by November things were sufficiently calm to begin his “tour” of the region, “faithful to the principles, which from my youth I had lain down, never to neglect seeing every country in my power.” His travels eventually took him to all three parts of the United States.

The Nature of North America, and of the Americans’ Impact on It

As a philosophe, he duly noted his natural surroundings. When Rochambeau’s army arrived in Virginia, he observed that Americans had cleared the woods for agriculture but warned that “nothing is more essential than the manner in which we proceed in the clearing of a country, for the salubrity of the air, nay even the order of the seasons, may depend on the access which we allow the winds, and the direction we may give them.” In Spain, for example, droughts had followed excessive clearing in Castille. At the same time, swampland “can be dried only by the cutting down a great quantity of wood.” It being “equally dangerous either to cut down or to preserve a great quantity of wood,” the middle course is to disperse human settlements “as much as possible, and to leave some groves of trees between them.” On other occasions, he took the time to relish the American blue jay (“really a most beautiful creature”); the mockingbird (he was told it “has no song, and consequently no sentiment peculiar to himself,” instead “counterfeit[ing] in the evening what he has heard in the day”—a claim he later corrects, when he sees and hears one, writing, “nothing can be more varied than its song,” which it sings in addition to its mockeries); and the hummingbirds (“I never tired of beholding” these “charming little animals,” which “are so fond of motion that it is impossible for them to live without the enjoyment of the most unrestrained liberty”). These observations hint that American nature may partake somewhat of the nature of Americans.

But not simply. “While I was meditating on the great process of nature, which,” according to then-current scientific estimates, “employed fifty thousand years in rendering the earth habitable,” Chastellux encountered “a new spectacle, well calculated as a contrast to those which I had been contemplating”: the American’s successful attempt to conquer nature for the relief of his estate. After amassing the modest revenues needed to purchase between 150 and 200 acres of woodland, an American will bring some livestock and “a provision of flour and cider” to it, fell the smaller trees and fence off some of his property. The huge oaks and pines, “which one would take for the ancient lords of the territory he is usurping,” die after he girdles the trunk, which he burns a year later. The soil, now exposed to the sun, consists of rich loam; “the grass grows rapidly,” making “pasturage for the cattle the very first year.” Eventually, he can till the soil, “which yields the enormous increase of twenty- or thirty-fold.” In two years, he has surplus crops to sell and in five years, having paid off the mortgage, “he finds himself a comfortable planter,” with “a handsome wooden house.” “I shall be asked, perhaps, how one man or one family can be so quickly lodged; I answer, that in America a man is never alone, never an isolated being,” since “the neighbors, for they are everywhere to be found, make it a point of hospitality to aid the new farmers.” This is how North America, “which one hundred years ago was nothing but a vast forest, is peopled with three millions of inhabitants”; “such is the immense, and certain benefit of agriculture, that notwithstanding the war, it not only maintains itself wherever it has been established, but it extends to places which seem the least favorable to its introduction.” Agriculture can even provide a form of currency. In Petersburgh, Virginia, he visits a tobacco warehouse where he learns that the crop has become “current coin,” hearing the residents say, “This watch cost me ten hogsheads of tobacco.” He judges this “a very useful establishment,” as “it gives to commodities value and circulation, as soon as they are manufactured, and, in some measure, renders the planter independent of the merchant.” Such noted agrarians and critics of commerce as Thomas Jefferson, whom he befriended, and many other contemporary and subsequent Southerners, understood this means of avoiding what they regarded as the anti-republican tendencies of commerce, without no need to fear the establishment of an American empire, which could indeed be “an empire of liberty,” as Jefferson called it.

Washington himself looked forward to expansion into the continent. In a letter to Chastellux written a couple of years after his friend had returned to France, Washington remarked “the vast inland navigation of these United States”—indeed, the finest on any continent in the world, centered on the Mississippi River—the “immense diffusion and importance of it,” and “the goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand.” “Would to God we may have wisdom enough to make a good use of them. I shall not rest contented till I have explored the western part of this country,” which he, like Jefferson, considers “a new empire.” 

The Revolutionary War

Chastellux’s primary task remained military, and in the course of it he took care to visit the places where battles had been fought between the Americans and the British before the French arrived. By ‘reading’ the terrain and considering the stories of those battles, he formed a sense of the character of his allies—officers and soldiers alike. The earliest battle, at Bunker Hill, proved revealing. “I could find nothing formidable” in the hill itself or in what remained of the breastworks. The Americans’ “obstinate resistance…and the prodigious loss sustained by the English [some 1,100 casualties] on this occasion, must be attributed solely to their valor.” He is less impressed by the Americans’ prudence: “Was it necessary to expose themselves to the destruction of their own houses, and the slaughter of their fellow-citizens, only that they might harass the English in an asylum which sooner or later they must abandon?” Because Americans had not yet declared their independence, negotiation could have prevented further “animosities.” In failing to negotiate, however, the British were, if not imprudent, decidedly mistaken, considering the outcome of “this long quarrel” and indeed the outcome of their occupation of Boston. In the event, the British government, “not expecting to find the Americans so bold and obstinate,” hurried to reinforce their “little army at Boston.” Their ships were impeded by north Atlantic storms, one of several hazards owed to their long supply lines. “The Americans, on the contrary, who had the whole continent at their disposal, and had neither exhausted their resources, nor their credit, lived happy and tranquil in their barracks, awaiting the succors promised them in the spring”—namely, reinforcements from Virginia, “who, for the first time, visited these northern countries.” “Who could foresee, in short, that the English would be compelled to evacuate Boston, and to abandon their whole artillery and all their ammunition, without costing the life of a single soldier?” This early success tempted the New Englanders to continue to dream of what would have been a greater act of imprudence, the invasion of Canada, even after the disastrous foray by the Continental Army under the command of General Richard Montgomery into Quebec in 1775-76. During a visit with General Philip Schuyler, Chastellux was permitted to read the correspondence between his host and General Washington, who agreed that the project should not be undertaken a second time. “I contented myself…with remarking that every partial expedition against Canada, and which did not tend to the total conquest, or rather the deliverance of that country, would be dangerous and ineffectual; as it would not be strengthened by the concurrence of the inhabitants, they having been already deceived in their expectations in Montgomery’s expedition and dreading the resentment of the English, should they a second time show themselves favorable to the Americans.”

Schuyler, the father-in-law of Washington’s impressive aide, Alexander Hamilton, and future United States Senator from New York, saw the British attempt to sever New England from the Middle and Southern states by taking forces from Canada under the command of General John Burgoyne down the Hudson River in 1777. To prevent this, Americans had established a major encampment and supply depot at Fishkill, “a post of great importance,” being a key point through which commerce on the river passed between Albany and New York City. Chastellux visited Fishkill and its military complement, West Point, where he received the honor of thirteen-gun salute. “We recollected that two years ago West Point was a desert, almost inaccessible, that this desert has been covered with fortresses and artillery, by a people who six years before had scarcely ever seen cannon.” “The fate of the United States depended in great measure on this important post,” and in one of the ironies of history, the courageous American officer Benedict Arnold—a “hero, always intrepid, always victorious, but always purchasing victory at the price of his blood,” nonetheless “sold, and expected to deliver this Palladium of American liberty to the English.” After the failure of Arnold’s treasonous scheme in 1780, General William Heath, a rich farmer from Massachusetts, a careful reader of the French military writer, Guibert, [2] and commander of American forces in the 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord, took charge of West Point. “I cannot but congratulate myself on the friendship, and thorough good understanding which subsisted between us.” Built by American soldiers who were seldom paid, West Point cost the U. S. government nothing, yet “the defeat of Burgoyne,” in part made possible by that outpost, along with “the alliance of France has changed the face of affairs in America.”

While in New York, Chastellux also visited “Bream’s Heights”—actually Bemis Heights—site of an important earlier battle between the Americans and Burgoyne’s army, best known as the Second Battle of Saratoga. After the first day’s exchange of fire, “General Burgoyne purchased dearly the frivolous honor of sleeping on the field of battle,” as he was so close to the American camp that “it was impossible to maneuver, so that he found himself in the situation of a chess player, who suffers himself to be stalemated.” “Being too near the enemy to retreat without danger, he tried a second attack,” and his men were routed by forces commanded by, among others, Benedict Arnold, whose leg was broken by a musket ball but got on his horse and escaped by leaping his horse “over the entrenchment of the enemy.” A hero, in fact—then.

New York State had been the center of the Iroquois Confederation, allied with the British. Chastellux, who invariably calls the Iroquois “the savages,” and does not find them noble. Visiting one Iroquois household in the Albany area, he finds “the squaw” to be “hideous, as they all are, and her husband almost stupid.” By then, this settlement had come under American rule, although crimes among the Indians were adjudicated by their own chiefs. “The State gives them rations of meat, and sometimes of flour; they possess also some land, where they sow Indian corn and go hunting for skins, which they exchange for rum.” Conquered, they switched sides, and when “employed for war [they] are commended for their bravery and fidelity.” As for those still fighting with the British, “I do not believe that these five nations can produce four thousand men in arms,” and so were “not much to be dreaded, were they not supported the English and the American Tories”; “as an advanced guard, they are formidable, as an army they are nothing.” Nonetheless “their cruelty seems to augment in proportion as their numbers diminish,” making it “impossible for the Americans to consent to have them long for neighbors.” Chastellux predicts that Congress will expel them, except for those who fought with them, who “will ultimately become civilized and be confounded” with the Americans, presumably by intermarriage. As an example of the savagery of some Iroquois, Chastellux tells the story of a Miss MacRea, who had fallen in love with a British officer. In her attempt to join him, she was captured by the Iroquois vanguard of the British army, who were “not much accustomed to distinguish friend from foes.” They “carried her off” and fell to disputing “to whom she would belong,” a debate they settled by “kill[ing] her with a tomahawk.” [3]

Upon arriving in Philadelphia, still under Rochambeau’s command (having marched through New Jersey, “called the garden of America”), Chastellux again visited some important battlegrounds. In the winter of 1776, Washington had famously crossed the Delaware, having been driven from New York by General William Howe’s army. On the day after Christmas, he recrossed the river, surprised Great Britain’s Hessian mercenaries, and surrounded Trenton. The Hessians soon surrendered, and “this is almost all that can be said of this affair, which has been amplified by the Gazettes on one side and the other.” Given their surprise, the defeat was “neither honorable nor dishonorable for the Hessians.” During his stay, Chastellux notes a sign on an inn, a “political emblem” depicting “a beaver at work, with his little teeth, to bring down a large tree, and underneath is written, perseverando.” After this raid, Washington retreated across the Delaware, then returned to Trenton after adding to his troops. Britain’s General Charles Cornwallis gathered his troops, marched against the Americans, who retreated across the Assunpink River, which divides the city. Without provisions or lines of communications with any possible reinforcements, Washington ordered a retreat, but a retreat through Princeton, where the British had taken over the college. Although today’s accounts have the British soldiers occupying Nassau Hall, which was pounded by the Americans’ artillery and soon surrendered, Chastellux contends that the soldiers in fact took their stand in a nearby street, “where they were surrounded and obliged to lay down their arms.” Having stolen a march on his enemy, Washington recrossed the Delaware once again, Cornwallis withdrew to the northeastern New Jersey towns of New Brunswick and Amboy, where they were contained by the local American militiamen, prevented from foraging. “Thus we see that the great events of war are not always great battles, and humanity may receive some consolation from this sole reflection, that the art of war is not necessarily a sanguinary art, that the talents of the commanders spare the lives of the soldiers, and that ignorance alone is prodigal of blood”—that last aphorism an ‘Enlightenment’ thought, if ever there was one.

The following year saw several important engagements in and around Philadelphia. Chastellux observes that the same continental vastness that saved Washington and his army more than once also caused difficulties for himself as well as for the British. “Let us figure to ourselves the situation in which a general must find himself, when obliged to comprehend in his plan of defense, and immense country, and a vast extent of coast, he is at a loss to know, within one hundred and fifty miles, where the enemy is likely to appear.” At this early stage of the war, Washington’s army wasn’t really an army, since “a number of soldiers, however considerable, does not always form an army”; “the greatest part of them” were “new levies” with little training and less experience in battle. Political support was questionable, inasmuch as “Congress were giving him orders to fight, yet removing their archives and public papers into the interior parts of the country, a sinister presage of the success which must follow their council.” This excuses Washington’s several defeats during the 1777 campaign in Pennsylvania.

The first of these was at Brandywine Creek in September. The British, commanded by General William Howe, defeated the outnumbered Americans and General Cornwallis seized Philadelphia. Howe had originally intended then to march north and join up with Burgoyne along the Hudson, but he delayed this march in order to kill more of Washington’s soldiers in the region. Dividing his troops once more between a camp along the Schuylkill River, four miles outside of Philadelphia, and Germantown, eight miles to the north, he also “sent a considerable detachment to Billingsport, to favor the passage of their fleet, which was making fruitless endeavors to get up the Delaware.” At this point, “General Washington thought it was time to remind the English that there still existed an American army.” On October 4, Washington attacked the forces stationed at Germantown, hoping to surprise them. Modern commentators agree that his battle plan was too complex for his raw troops to execute, a point that the ever-discreet Chastellux only hints at. He prefers to emphasize the British reinforcements that arrived from the Schuylkill encampment and Philadelphia, forcing the Americans to retreat.

Soon after, the British opened the Delaware River for their ships, but they were blocked from reaching Philadelphia to resupply the British troops because the Americans had built two forts, Fort Mifflin on an island in the river and Fort Mercer in Red Bank on the New Jersey side (and not to be confused with today’s Red Bank, New Jersey, located well north and east of the Delaware, near the Atlantic Ocean). General Howe pulled his troops out of Germantown, regrouped in Philadelphia, then sent his soldiers against the forts. On October 22, Hessian troops under the command of their Colonel Carl von Dunop, attacked Fort Mercer but failed, Dunop mortally wounded in the battle. Chastellux recounts care he received from Thomas-Antoine du Plessis Mauduit, a French engineer and artillery officer. When menaced by American soldiers, Dunop said, “I am in your hands, you may revenge yourselves.” but Mauduit intervened and silenced them. “Sir, who are you?” “A French officer.” “I am content; I die in the hands of honor itself, a victim of my ambition, and of the avarice of my sovereign,” who had loaned the Hessians to the Brits for money. “Perhaps I have dwelt too long on this event,” Chastellux admits, “but I shall not have to apologize to those who will partake of the pleasing satisfaction I experience, in fixing my eyes upon the triumphs of America, and in discovering my countrymen among those who have reaped her laurels.” More materially, he recalls that on the day he arrived in Philadelphia to return Hessian captives to Howe, Mauduit could confirm that Burgoyne had surrendered, frustrating Howe’s plan to link his forces with invaders from Canada. A few weeks later, Howe sent Cornwallis with 2,000 men to take the fort. The Americans evacuated it; the British returned to Philadelphia, and Washington spent a brutal winter in Valley Forge. 

In view of the French alliance signed late that winter, and Howe replaced by General Henry Clinton, the British abandoned Philadelphia and returned to New York. Having strengthened his army over the winter, Washington left Valley Forge, in pursuit. The one major battle, at Monmouth Courthouse, delayed but did not prevent the British from reaching Sandy Hook, New Jersey, from which they were ferried over to New York City. The war stalemated throughout 1779 and 1780, with Washington spending the winter in Morristown, New Jersey. The real warfare shifted to the south, where the French fleet drove the British out of Chesapeake Bay in September 1781 and the combined American and French forces defeating Cornwallis’s troops in the final major battle at Yorktown in October. Chastellux says nothing of that. At the beginning of the following year, Washington wrote to Chastellux, now back in Paris, hoping for further monetary and naval support for the next campaign, but by November the two sides had settled on preliminary articles of peace, to be solemnized by the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

In his letter to Chastellux after the war, Washington worried about French militarism. “Your young military men, who want to reap the harvest of laurels, don’t care, I suppose, how many seeds of war are sown; but, for the sake of humanity, it is devoutly to be wished, that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefits of commerce, should supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest.” As it happened, the young bloods prevailed, culminating in the career of Napoleon. But we Americans, Washington continued (anticipating the well-remembered theme of his Farewell Address, a decade later), we “who live in these ends of the earth only hear of the rumors of war, like the roar of distant thundering,” hoping that “our remote local situation will prevent us from being swept into its vortex.” But he doubted that the “halcyon days” of peace on earth would ever come. “A wise Providence, I presume, has decreed it otherwise; and we shall be obliged to go on in the old way, disputing, and now and then fighting, until the great globe itself dissolves.” Chastellux may not have been so sure of the peaceful character of Americans, whether agrarian or commercial. “Among the men I have met with, above twenty years of age, of whatsoever condition, I have not found two who have not borne arms, heard the whistling of balls, and even received some wounds; so that it may be asserted, that North America is entirely military, and inured to war, and that new levies may continually be made without making new soldiers.” [4] It may perhaps be suggested that the commercial republic, after the first years of its Revolutionary War, continued to foster a degree of esteem for military prowess that would give it otherwise unexpected military heft, even as its main enemies—from the British and Indians, to its own Confederates considering the supposedly unwarlike Yankees, to the Germans in both world wars, the Japanese in the Second World War—have inclined to underestimate American battle-readiness.

Manners and Morals

Recalling his stay in Providence, Rhode Island, Chastellux introduces his readers to Miss Pearce. “This young person had, like all the American women, a very decent, nay even serious carriage; she had no objection to being looked at, nor to have her beauty commended, nor even to receive a few caresses, provided it was done without an air of familiarity or libertinism.” In all this she is typical, he will have us know: “Licentious manners, in fact, are so foreign in America, that the communication with young women leads to nothing bad, and that freedom itself there bears a character of modest far beyond our [French] affected bashfulness and false reserve.” Nor are these manners restricted to Puritan-derived New Englanders. Recounting a dinner in New Jersey, he remarks “the extreme liberty that prevails between the two sexes, as long as they are unmarried.” While “it is no crime for a girl to embrace a young man, it would be a very heinous one for a married woman event to show a desire of pleasing.” In America, “the youth of both sexes are more forward, and more ripe…than with us,” although he hastens to insist that French women “retain their beauty longer than in any other country”; “if they are not always those we most admire, they are certainly those we must love the most and the longest.” The American training, as it were, for marriage consists of dancing, “at once the emblem of gaiety and of love” but also “the emblem of legislation,” inasmuch as places are marked out, the dances named, and every proceeding provided for, calculated and submitted to regulation,” and “of marriage, as it furnishes each lady with a partner, with whom she dances the whole evening, without being allowed to take another.” [5] Newly married American couples live well, as exemplified by a household in Newport. “This little establishment, where comfort and simplicity reign, gave an idea of that sweet and serene state of happiness, which appears to have taken refuge in the New World, after compounding it with pleasure, to which it has left the Old.” As to the children consequent to American marriages, Chastellux finds them rude—as, for example, the seven-year-old son of a prominent New Yorker, “very forward and arch, as all American children are, but very amiable,” who, while “running about the house, according to custom, and opening the door of the salon,” where some defeated British officers were staying. “He burst out laughing on seeing all the English collected, and shutting it after him, crying, Ye are all my prisoners.” Such parents, “indulgent to children in their tender age,” “form them into petty domestic tyrants”; “negligent of them when the attain to adolescence, they convert them into strangers.” Parents should instead follow the educational practice commended by John Locke. “Do you wish your children to remain long attached to you? Be yourselves their teachers.” Seeing that their parents “know more than them,” children will respect them more.

While American women are faithful wives, Chastellux finds them a bit boring. They “are very little accustomed to give themselves trouble, either of mind or body; the care of their children, that of making tea, and seeing the house kept clean, constitutes the whole of their domestic province.” He did not choose to marry one, but later on did choose to marry one of those perdurably beautiful French women, as the ever-observant General Washington duly noticed. In a letter dated April 1788, Washington describes himself “not less delighted than surprised” to learn that his friend has married, having returned to France. “Well my dear Marquis, I can hardly refrain from smiling to find that you are caught at last.” Having praised “the happiness of domestic life in America,” you have indeed “swallowed the bait,” as (Washington professes) he knew he would, “as surely as you are a philosopher and a soldier.” 

As to American manners generally, Americans celebrate the New Year by getting drunk and firing guns. At their more formal occasions, “there is more ceremony than compliment.” Americans’ politeness “is mere form, such as drinking healths to the company, observing ranks, giving up the right hand, etc. But they do nothing of this but what has been taught them, no particle of it is the result of sentiment; in a word, politeness here is like religion in Italy, everything in practice, but without any principle.” Such toasts function only “as a sort of check in the conversation, to remind each individual that he forms part of the company, and that the whole form only one society.” This formality contrasts with the warmth of his countrymen. On a trip to see battlefields around Philadelphia, Chastellux, Lafayette, and their companions talked about war at first, but then “suddenly changed the subject, and got on that of Paris, and all sorts of discussions relative to our private societies. This transition was truly French, but it does not prove that we are less fond of war than other nations, only that we like our friends better.” [6]

American unsentimentality characterizes their religion, as well. Chastellux was especially unimpressed with the Quakers. “Inflamed with an ardent love of humanity,” they nonetheless “assume a smooth and wheedling tone, which is altogether jesuitical,” in their address to individuals. They are politically useless, too, “concealing their indifference for the public welfare under the cloak of religion, they are sparing of blood, it is true, especially of their own people, but they trick both parties [i.e., Whigs and Loyalists] out of their money, and that without either shame or decency.” He draws the ‘enlightened’ conclusion: “In fact, nothing can be worse than enthusiasm in its downfall; for what can be its substitute, but hypocrisy? That monster so well known in Europe, finds but too easy an access to all religions.” The Quaker women are preferable to the men, as the women are “well dressed, seemed desirous of pleasing, and it is fair to conclude that their private sentiments were in unison with their appearance.” He finds Quaker religious services absurd, listening as “one of the elderly makes an ex tempore prayer, of whatever comes to his mind; silence is then observed until some man or woman feels inspired, and arise to speak.” “I arrived at the moment a woman was done holding forth; she was followed by a man who talked a great deal of nonsense about internal grace, the illumination of the spirit, and the other dogmas of this sect, which he bandied about, but took special care not to explain them,” as “the brethren, and the sisterhood” assumed “all of them a very inattentive and listless air.” “After seven or eight minutes silence, an old man went on his knees, dealt us out a very unmeaning prayer, and dismissed the audience”—a “melancholy, homespun assembly, indeed.” The Episcopalians exhibited the other extreme. “The service of the English church appeared to me a sort of opera, as well for the music as the decorations: a handsome pulpit placed before a handsome organ; a handsome minister in that pulpit, reading, speaking, and singing with a grace entirely theatrical, a number of young women answering melodiously from the pit and boxes.” “All this, compared to the quakers, the anabaptists, the presbyterians, etc. appeared to me rather like a little paradise itself, than as the road to it.” Ah, well, when it comes to religion, it “is better to leave [ man] in his error than to cut throats with him.”

Other than the Quakers, American Christians are, at least, often patriotic. He tells of a “young preacher” he heard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who “spoke with a great deal of grace, and reasonably enough for a preacher.” “I could not help admiring the address with which he introduced politics into his sermon, by comparing the christians redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, but still compelled to fight against the flesh and sin, to the thirteen United States, who, notwithstanding they have acquired liberty and independence, are under the necessity of employing all their force to combat a formidable power, and to preserve those invaluable treasures.” In all, he finds Americans’ morality more impressive than their religion. Having met a woman who took in an unmarried girl and her child, he considers it proof, “more than any other thing, [of] the pure and respectable manners of the Americans,” for whom “vice is so strange, and so rare that the danger of example has almost no effect.” Among them, “a fault of this nature is regarded only as an accidental error, of which the individual, attacked with it, must be cured, without taking any measures to escape the contagion.” And more, “a girl, by bringing up her child, seems to expiate the weakness which brought it into existence.” He concludes with a rather Aristotelian observation on the moral importance of situation: “Thus morality, which can never differ from the real interest of society, appears sometimes to be local and modified by times and circumstances.”

The American Character

Chastellux presents brief character sketches which, taken together, amount to a ‘pointillist’ outline of the American ethos. For contrast, one may begin with his portrait of Thomas Paine, the English polemicist then residing in Philadelphia, hoping to catch on with a government job. “I discovered, at his apartments, all the attributes of a man of letters; a room pretty much in disorder, dusty furniture, and a large table covered with books lying open, and manuscripts begun.” His dress was correspondingly slovenly, and while his conversation was “agreeable and animated,” he exemplified what we now call an ‘intellectual’; “it is easier for them to decry other men’s opinions than to establish their own.” Unlike the Americans, “the vivacity of [Paine’s] imagination, and the independence of his character, render him more calculated for reasoning on affairs, than for conducting them.” 

Americans are better exemplified by Captain Muller, a Virginian who extended his hospitality to Chastellux shortly before the Battle of Yorktown and would accept only modest payment in return: “You come from France to my country to support and defend it; I ought to receive you better and take nothing, but I am only a poor countryman, and not in a condition to demonstrate my gratitude. If I were not ill, I would mount my horse and attend you to the field of battle.” 

It is true that American democracy inclines American souls to commercial life and practical politics. “All ranks here being equal, men follow their natural bent, by giving the preference to riches.” Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut’s “whole life is consecrated to business, which he passionately loves, whether important or not.” He reminds Chastellux of the old burgomasters of Holland, with “all the simplicity in his dress, all the importance, and even pedantry becoming the great magistrate of a small republic.” Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris was “a very rich merchant, and consequently a man of every country, for commerce bears everywhere the same character,” excluding both “the virtues and the prejudices that stand in the way of its interest.” In church, Morris’s demeanor varies with the fortunes of his privateers during the week preceding. In the management of his household, he lives “without ostentation, but not without expense, for he spares nothing which can contribute to his happiness, and that of Mrs. Morris, to whom he is much attached.” In all, “a zealous republican, and an epicurean philosopher, he has always played a distinguished part at table and in business.” 

Zealous republicanism and epicurean philosophy make an uneasy alliance, but the Americans of the Revolutionary War leaned toward the republican virtues, as exemplified by General William Nelson of Virginia, briefly the state’s colonial government in the early 1770s. At the time the British army was ravaging the state, Nelson “was compelled to exert every means, and to call forth every possible resource, to assist Monsieur de la Fayette to make some resistance; and furnish General Washington with horses, carriages, and provisions.” Although “the only recompense of his labors was the hatred of a great part of his citizens”—a fact that “will do but little honor to Virginia”—he persevered in commandeering horses, carriages, and forage. Out of office, he enjoyed pardon for “the momentary injuries he had done the laws, by endeavoring to save the state,” as befits a “good and gallant man, in every possible situation of life.” 

The greatest example of such civic courage and many other virtues besides was set by George Washington. Upon meeting him in his headquarters in New York, “I soon felt myself at my ease ear the greatest and the best of men.” Although animated by “goodness and benevolence,” thereby inspiring “confidence” in all who deal with him, Washington’s demeanor “never occasions improper familiarity” but rather “a profound esteem for his virtues, and a high opinion of his talents.” Even his horses partook of his character; riding one of them, leant by the General, south to Philadelphia, Chastellux found his mount “as good as he is handsome, but above all, perfectly well broke, and well trained, having a good mouth, easy in hand, and stopping short in a gallop without bearing the bit,” all thanks to his owner’s training. Washington “is a very excellent and bold horseman, leaping the highest fences, and going extremely quick, without standing upon his stirrups, bearing on the bridle, or letting his horse run wild.” Indeed, “the strongest characteristic of this respectable man is the perfect union which reigns between the physical and moral qualities which compose the individual; one alone will enable you to judge of all the rest.” Chastellux finds in Washington’s character “the idea of a perfect whole, that cannot be the produce of enthusiasm, which rather would reject it, since the effect of proportion is to diminish the idea of greatness.” (In this, Chastellux anticipates the contrast Chateaubriand would draw between Washington and Bonaparte, a man entirely too enamored of personal greatness.) [7] Washington well understood himself as a “general in a republic,” eschewing “the imposing stateliness of a Marechal de France who gives the order; a hero in a republic, he excites another sort of respect, which seems to spring from the sole idea, that the safety of each individual is attached to his person.” “He has obeyed the Congress; more need not be said, especially in America, where they know how to appreciate all the merit contained in this simple fact.” A republican regime, then, aimed at securing the natural rights of individuals along with the independence of his country, which makes that defense more likely to succeed. “It will be said of him, AT THE END OF A LONG CIVIL WAR, HE HAD NOTHING WITH WHICH HE COULD REPROACH HIMSELF.” Looking at Washington and seeing the more or less universal esteem his fellow citizens feel for him, Chastellux “is tempted to apply to the Americans what Pyrrhus said of the Romans: Truly these people have nothing barbarous in their discipline!“

The American Regime

In considering America’s regime, Chastellux begins with one of those who began the movement to found it: Samuel Adams. “Everybody in Europe knows that he was one of the prime movers of the present revolution.” Chastellux finds his company satisfying because “one rarely has in the world, nay even in the theatre,” the experience of “finding the person of the actor corresponding with the character he performs.” Adams “never spoke but to give a good opinion of his cause, and a high idea of his country,” and “his simple and frugal exterior seemed intended as a contrast with the energy and extent of his ideas.” Adams proved to Chastellux that New England “were not peopled with any view to commerce and aggrandizement, but wholly by individuals who fled from persecution, and sought an asylum at the extremity of the world, where they might be free to live, and follow their opinion,” putting themselves under England’s protection but not thereby granting the Empire a “right of imposing or exacting a revenue of any kind” from them. [8] In a phrase, no taxation without representation. This being so, “we passed to a more interesting” topic, the character of the nascent republic. Chastellux raised an important question: Representative government is all very well, so long as “every citizen is pretty equally at his ease, or may be so in a short time,” but once “riches arise among you” a “combat between the form of government, and its natural tendency,” republicanism and oligarchy, will arise, with the democratic impulses of republicans inclining toward anarchy, the oligarchs toward the rule of themselves—either fatal to the regime. To this, Adams replied that a republic with a modest property qualification for those who are eligible for election to office in one house of the legislature, if combined with a governor and a senate whose members are elected by voters with fairly high property qualifications—who can exercise veto power over the laws the popular assembly passes—can moderate popular passions and be ruled rather by “the permanent and enlightened will of the people which should constitute law.” Since a veto can be overturned by a two-thirds majority vote in the assembly, the veto power “moderates, without destroying the authority of the people,” preventing “the springs [of republicanism] from breaking by too rapid a movement, without stopping them entirely.” “Thus the democracy is pure and entire in the assembly, which represents the sovereign; and the aristocracy, or, if you will, the optimacy, is to be found only in the moderating power.” Further, although the governor of the state will “employ the forces of sea and land according to the necessity,” the land army of each state “will consist only in the militia, which, as it is composed of the people themselves, can never act against the people.” Adams, heretofore “the most extravagant partisan of the democracy,” now advocates what Aristotle calls a politeia or ‘mixed regime’ republic.

Civil society is sound, there. New Englanders “were not adventurers, they were men who wished to live in peace, and who labored for their subsistence,” intentions which in turn “taught them equality, and disposed them to industrious pursuits.” As fishermen and navigators,” they remain “friends to equality and liberty.” 

After consulting an eminent New Englander, Chastellux turns to the governor of Virginia, Benjamin Harrison. That is, he discussed the character of the American regime with what eventually would become the two factions leading to civil war, four generations later. With regard to the origins of the revolution, Harrison observed that the founders of his states were planters, not merchants or seekers of religious liberty. Virginians nonetheless rejected taxation without consent just as firmly as New Englanders. “Every man, educated in the principles of the English constitution, shudders, at the idea of a servile submission to a tax to which he has not himself consented.” Nonetheless, Virginians were initially skeptical of their representatives’ claim that the British intended to “invade our rights and privileges.” They came around when Lord North made a speech “in which he could not refrain from avowing, in the clearest manner, the plan of the British government.” “Henceforward they were resolutely determined upon war.”

Harrison warned Chastellux not to assume that Americans were unified in all ways. Europeans “would be much deceived in imagining that all the Thirteen States of America were invariably animated by the same spirit, and affected by the same sentiments,” or that “these people resembled each other in their forms of government, their manners and opinions.” Chastellux affirms this. Virginia was first settled by “a number of adventurers” who, “disdaining agriculture and commerce, had no other profession but that of arms,” animated by a “military spirit” which “maintained the prejudices favorable to that nobility from which it was long inseparable.” These settlers carried these principles and prejudices “into the midst even of the savages whose lands they were usurping.”  Such a people may adopt a democratic or republican government, but its “national character, the spirit of the government itself, will be always aristocratic.” Add the social condition of slaveholding to this spirit and you produce rulers animated by “vanity and sloth, which accord wonderfully with a revolution founded on such different principles.” “Whereas the revolt of New England was the result of reason and calculation, pride possibly had no inconsiderable share in dictating the measures of Virginia.” Admittedly, the people relied “upon a small number of virtuous and enlightened citizens” to design their government, but that “the mass of citizens was taking part in that government” and “the national character prevailed, casing things to get “worse and worse.”

The sharp class distinctions Chastellux expected to develop in New England already were evident in Virginia, where “wretched, miserable huts are often to be met with, inhabited by whites, whose wan looks, and ragged garments bespeak poverty,” contrast with the “immense estates,” sometimes of five or six thousand acres, “clear[ed] out only as much as [the proprietors’] negroes can cultivate.” The rich whites “sometimes dissipate their fortunes” by “gaming, hunting, and horse-races,” although admittedly the horses they breed “are really very handsome.” Women “have little share in the amusements of the men; beauty here serves only to procure them husbands,” as “their fate is usually decided by their figure.” As a result, “they are often pert and coquettish before, and sorrowful helpmates after marriage,” and “the luxury of being served by slaves still farther augments their natural indolence.” Like the Americans and indeed the English generally, “they are very fond of their infants, and care little for their children.” The leading virtues of rich Virginians are “magnificence, hospitality, and generosity.” Religion does little to correct either class of whites, as there is “nothing remarkable respecting it in this country, except the facility with which they dispense with it.” 

There is also a middling class of whites, the farmer who lives “in the center of the woods, and wholly occupied in rustic business,” yet quite distinct from a European peasant, inasmuch as “he is always a freeman, participates in the government, and has the command of a few negroes.” In “uniting in himself the two distinct qualities of citizen and master, he perfectly resembles the bulk of individuals who formed what were called the people in the ancient republics; a people very different from that of our days, though they are very improperly confounded, in the frivolous declamations of our half philosophers, who, in comparing ancient with modern times, have invariably mistaken the word people for mankind in general.” 

The slaves are beneath even the poorest whites—and although “ill lodged, ill clothed, and often oppressed with labor,” they are better off than slaves confined to the sugar colonies Santo Domingo and Jamaica. “In truth,” in Virginia “you do not usually hear the sound of whips, and the cries of the unhappy wretches whose bodies they are tearing to pieces.” Indeed, “I must do the Virginians the justice to declare that many of them treat their negroes with great humanity,” and “in general they seem afflicted to have any slavery, and are constantly talking of abolishing it, and of contriving some other means of cultivating their estates.” Whereas “the philosophers and the young men, who are almost all educated in the principles of a sound philosophy, regard nothing but justice, and the rights of humanity,” while “the fathers of families and such as are principally occupied with schemes of interest, complain that the maintenance of their negroes is very expensive,” and that day laborers would cost them less. Chastellux is happy that both types of slaveholders have come to this conclusion, “for the more we regard the negroes, the more must we be persuaded that the difference between them and us, consists in nothing more than complexion.”

Admittedly, abolition of slavery in the South presents difficult practical problems. Liberated, the African-Americans “would unquestionably form a distinct people, from whom neither succor, virtue, nor labor could be expected.” The difference between slavery now and slavery among the ancients is that the ancients’ slave was white, with “no other cause of humiliation than his actual state; on his being freed, he mixed immediately with free men, and became their equal.” Even if slavery had to some degree debauched their morals and caused them to resent work, their ambition to rise politically could overcome these handicaps. “But in the present case, it is not only the slave who is beneath his master, it is the negro who is beneath the white man.” This racial bar inclines many freed African-Americans to “continue to live with the negro slaves,” where family and economic ties support them. Chastellux’s proposed solution is to liberate and deport the male slaves and “to encourage the marriage of white men with the females,” who would then be freed. The sharp-eyed Frenchman adds that “such a law, aided by the illicit, but already well-established commerce between the white men and negresses, could not fail of giving birth to a race of mulattoes, which would produce another of Quarterons, and so on until the color should be totally effaced.” 

Here as in Massachusetts, Virginians have divided their state legislature into an upper and a lower house, along with an executive branch, a “substitute for the executive power of the king in England.” Unlike Massachusetts, however, Virginians have banned the professional classes, consisting of clergy, judges, and lawyers, from “any share in the government”—this, on the democratic ground of “prevent[ing] the public interest from falling into competition with that of individuals.” The judges and lawyers are restricted to the judicial branch. Their exclusion from the other branches is “an inconvenience at the present moment,” since “the lawyers, who are certainly the most enlightened part of the community, are removed from the civil councils, and the administration is entrusted either to ignorant, or to the least skillful men.” [9]

Finally, there are the states between New England and the South. They are diverse in character. New York and “the Jerseys,” north and south, “were peopled by necessitous Dutchmen who wanted land in their own country and occupied themselves more about domestic economy and the public government.” Today, “their interests, their efforts, so to speak,” remain “personal,” their “views are concentered in their families, and it is only from necessity that these families are formed into a state.” They have fought the British with determination—New Yorkers because they were already “animated by an inveterate hatred against the savages, which generally preceded the English armies,” with whom the Indians of New York had allied, Jerseyans because they wanted “to take personal revenge for the excesses committed by the troops of the enemy, when they overran the country” in the advance-and-retreat struggles of the late 1790s.

Across the Delaware River, Pennsylvanians are quite different. Its government “was founded on two very opposite principles: “a government of property, a government in itself feudal, or, if you will patriarchal,” but animated by a “spirit of which was the greatest toleration, and the most complete liberty.” Such were the Quakers, the most eminent being William Penn and his family, who “first formed the vain project of establishing a sort of Utopia, or perfect government, and afterwards of deriving the greatest possible advantage from their immense property, by attracting foreigners from all parts,” populations now “intermingled and confounded, and more actuated to individual, than to public liberty, more inclined to anarchy than to democracy.” Even now, in Philadelphia, the Quakers “consider every species of private or public amusement as a transgression of heir law, and as a pomp of Satan.” Penn intended Philadelphia as the future capital of America, which it became, and also as a great commercial port, which now boasts “upwards of two hundred quays,” which can accommodate hundreds of ships. Its commerce has been impeded not by its geography but by its government, which has mismanaged the state’s finances, deranging the price of commodities and thereby nearly causing a famine. “Philadelphia is, so to speak, the great sink, wherein all the speculations of America terminate, and are confounded together.” The population has too many Quakers and Tories, “two classes of men equally dangerous, one from their timidity, and the other from their intentions.” Benjamin Franklin’s state constitution is “too democratical” to produce stability in such a city, although Chastellux defends Franklin himself, who was attempting to make Pennsylvanians “renounce monarchical government” by “employing a sort of seduction in order to conduct a timid and avaricious people to independence, who were besides so divided in their opinions, that the republican party was scarcely stronger than the other.” “Under these circumstances he acted like Solon; he has not given the best possible laws to Pennsylvania, but the best of which the country was susceptible.” 

Given this civil-social diversity and (often) stratification, aside from antagonism toward their common imperial enemy, what unites the United States? It is the universal principle of reason, of “genuine morality”: “the equality of rights; the general interest which actuates all; private interest, connected with the general good; the order of society, as necessary as the symmetry of a beehive.” An example of this may be seen in the action of a soldier at the Battle of Saratoga. A slave who attended him, said, “Master, you are hurting yourself, but no matter, you are going to fight for liberty; I should suffer also patiently if I had liberty to defend.” “Don’t let that stop you,” the soldier replied, “from this moment you are free.” This morality will find its political expression in constitutionalism, as seen in the gentleman who asked Chastellux to send him a copy of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois in the original French. Such interest in constitution pervades America. In 1788, Washington wrote to inform him that the recently proposed by the Federal Convention had already been adopted by seven states, with no rejections so far. “Should it be adopted (and I think it will be) America will lift up her head again, and, in a few years, become respectable among the nations. It is a flattering and consolatory reflection, that our rising republic has the good wishes of all philosophers, patriots, and virtuous men, in all nations that they look upon it as a kind of asylum for mankind. God grant that we may not be disappointed in our honest expectations by our folly or perverseness!”

As an Enlightenment man, Chastellux hopes and expects that education will refine and sustain these moral and political strengths. As an exemplar, he chooses Thomas Jefferson, whom he visited at Monticello, the elegant home Chastellux elegantly describes as “a debt nature owed to a philosopher and a man of taste, that in his own possessions he should find a spot where he might best study and enjoy her.” “We may safely aver that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” “At once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman,” Jefferson has a “mild and pleasing countenance” with a mind to match. As a good Lockean, unlike most Americans, “he himself takes charge” of the education of his children. And he is a man of refined sentiment: after dinner, they happily conversed about the poems of ‘Ossian.’ For Chastellux, Jefferson embodies the standard for the American mind and heart.

To see more Jeffersonlike men, America will need to build colleges and cultivate the fine arts. A brief visit to the College of New Jersey at Princeton revealed how much work needed doing. Nassau Hall is a building “only remarkable for its size” and therefore unnecessary to describe. The president, John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of Congress, and “much respected in this country,” spoke French very imperfectly, and although his college is “a complete university” with room for two hundred students, the library was ransacked by the British and needs to be restocked. The University of Williamsburgh in Virginia (the royal name, ‘College of William and Mary’ seems to have been suppressed) evidently had suffered less damage. There, Chastellux conversed with the Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, Bishop James Madison, cousin of the future fourth president of the United States, on the prudent way to bring the arts and sciences to greater prominence and better influence in America. Evidently mindful of Rousseau’s critique, Madison sought a way to reconcile them to civic virtue. Chastellux is far from destitute of recommendations. The arts, admittedly, “can never flourish, but where there is a multitude of men,” but the biggest cities of America “are seaports, and commerce, it cannot be dissembled, has more magnificence than taste; it pays, rather than encourages artists.” To remedy this, Americans should build state capitals, cities, that do no commerce. Although commerce “is friendly to individual” liberty, making no discrimination “between citizens and foreigners,” a city whose business is government conduces to civic liberty. “I should desire that their capital were situated in the center of [each] republic, so that every citizen, rich enough to look after the education of his children, and to taste the pleasures of society, might inhabit it for some months of the year, without making it his own residence, without renouncing his invaluable country-seat,” where he will continue to serve in local government. Each capital would have a university teaching civil and public law and the higher sciences in a three-year course of study. In the capital, with these universities, “the true national spirit might be preserved, like the sacred fire; that is to say, that spirit which perfectly assimilates with liberty and public happiness.” 

What about the rest of the country, where commerce prevails? Merchants aim at “exciting the taste of the consumers,” thereby “establish[ing] the empire of fashion,” the material expression of “those caprices of opinion which have begot so many errors, so many revolutions.” The remedy to this, “the study of the arts, the knowledge of abstract beauty, the perfection of taste”—in sum, reason and philosophy—alone will suffice. “Let us never cease repeating, that ignorance is the source of evil, and science that of good,” the Enlightenment man insists. “Erect altars, then, to the fine arts, if you would destroy those of fashion and caprice,” as those who “taste and learn to relish nectar and ambrosia” will never become “intoxicated with common liquors.” American women, especially (“I have observed them as a philosopher”) ought to be protected from the excesses of fashionableness by “retirement, and distance from all danger” but also by the “loftiness” of sentiment, “that estimable pride for the preservation of their virtue as well as of their fame.” To be sure, a woman should attend to her dress, since “every woman ought to seek to please,” as “this is the weapon conferred on her by nature to compensate the weakness of her sex,” and “without this she is a slave, and can a slave have virtues?” American women should be well but simply dressed, eschewing the luxurious display of “gold, silver, and diamonds.” Thus “we have imperceptibly prepared the way for the fine arts, by removing the principal obstacles which might be opposed to them; for if, far from rendering nations vain and frivolous, they rather tend to preserve them from the excesses of luxury, and the caprices of fashion, they can certainly be considered neither as dangerous nor prejudicial.” Americans have the advantage of living amidst nature, “always great and beautiful.” “Let them study; let them consult her, and they can never go astray.”

“As long as a taste for the arts can assimilate itself with rural and domestic life, it will always be advantageous to your country, and vice-versa.” Such arts as music, drawing, painting, and architecture comport with home life; “public spectacles, gaudy assemblies, and horse races” do not. Make music with your neighbors. Have your daughter amuse herself with drawing, an art she can teach to her own children. Do not hire foreign teachers of the arts, as “Europeans, it must be confessed, have vices from which you are exempt.” It will be “much better to defer even for a long time, the progress of the arts, than to make the slightest step towards the corruption of your manners.” As to foreign artists, “naturalize them as much as possible” in order “to assimilate and identify them with the inhabitants of the country.” The way to do this is to make them husbands of American women, property owners, and citizens. “It is thus that by securing the empire of morals, you will still farther guard against the effect of those national prejudices, of that disdain which render foreigners so ridiculous and odious, and which reflect upon the art itself the disgust inspired by the artist.” Put them, and your own artists, to work making statues of your virtuous men, such as Washington and the courageous officer Nathaniel Greene. Hang pictures of battles. Sculpting the likenesses of such men and painting the scenes of courage will encourage civic virtues in the hearts of artist and onlooker, alike.

As for the sciences, Chastellux assured Madison that “America will render herself illustrious” by them, even as she has distinguished herself “by her arms and government.” To remove “obstacles which might possibly retard their progress,” avoid the mistake of the English universities, which have been “too dogmatical” (i.e., too rigorous in the promotion of theology) and “too exclusive.” This leaves the English in a condition of “a half liberty.” “Leave to an unrestrained philosophy the care of forming good men,” the confident Enlightener advises the Anglican bishop-philosopher of Virginia. “Leave owls and bats to flutter in the doubtful perspicuity of a feeble twilight; the American eagle should fix her eyes upon the sun.”

To this end, consider the academician “a senator of the republic of letters,” taking “an oath to advance nothing he cannot prove.” It is true that “such men cannot be numerous,” and so “ought not to be thrown into discredit by associates unworthy of them”—presumably, those dogmatic, theological types. As to ‘the many,’ the public draw them to science by offering prizes, especially for the invention of “the most useful objects.” “It is to them that first efforts are indebted for celebrity; it is by them also the young man thirsting for glory is dispensed with sighing long after her first favors.” Chastellux would worry about a country that attached celebrity to mere entertainment. In the sciences as in the arts, Americans can thrive in the midst of nature, as guarded by the extended republic that the other James Madison commended. “The extent of [America’s] empire submits to her observation a large portion of heaven and earth. What observations may not be made between Penobscot and Savannah? Between the lakes and the ocean?” The American land, waters, and sky should inspire the American people to the scientific study of nature.

Along with Chateaubriand, then, Chastellux establishes himself as a worthy predecessor of Tocqueville as an observer and commentator on the American way of life. As a soldier, of course, he far surpassed them both.

 

Notes

1. On his visit to Boston, Chastellux had occasion to notice that Louis-Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vandreuil, a veteran naval officer and eventually the commander of the French fleet in the war, had similarly “contributed to conciliate the two nations, and to strengthen the connections which unite them” by setting a “splendid example of good morals’; this, along with “the simplicity and goodness of his manners, an example followed, beyond all hope and belief, by the officers of his squadron,” had “captivated the hearts of a people, who though now the most determined enemies to the English, had never hitherto been friendly to the French.” Indeed, “the officers of our navy were everywhere received, not only as allies, but brothers; and though they were admitted to the ladies of Boston to the greatest familiarity, not a single indiscretion, not even the most distant attempt at impertinence every disturbed the confidence, or innocent harmony of this pleasing intercourse.”
2. Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert published his Essai générale de Tactique in 1770. Translated into many languages, it was considered the best study of military affairs of the time. Washington read it, along with Frederick the Great’s “Instructions to His Generals,” showing, Chastellux writes, that “he knew well how to select his authors as to profit from them.”
3. In an unsigned footnote (most are clearly attributed to the anonymous translator, but not this one), the writer judges the British use of the Indians to have been the reverse of their hopes. The Indians “united the inhabitants of all the countries liable to their incursions as one man against them and their allies,” thereby “producing such bloody scenes of inveterate animosity and vengeance as make human nature shudder.” One such incident illustrated “to what lengths even the christians of an enlightened age can go, when compelled to act under the guidance of the worst passions.” In western Pennsylvania, in 1782, American settlers “goaded to fury by the ravages committed on them by the Indians, and by the murder of their families and kindred,” militiamen came upon the Muskingums, a small tribe of Christian Indians. Despite the pleadings of these peaceful folk, the Americans murdered all two hundred of them. Herded into a barn, “the innocent victims spent the night in singing Moravian hymns, and in other acts of christian devotion; and in the morning, men, women and children, were led to the slaughter, and butchered by their fellow worshippers of the meek Jesus!” Once the news of the massacre reached Philadelphia, “both Congress and the Assembly of the State were fond unequal to the punishment of these assassins, who were armed, distant form the seat of government, the only safeguard and protection of the frontiers, and from their own savage nature”—savagery being the monopoly of no one race but a potentiality of all. 
4. An example of this among the American military officers was General Henry Knox, who worked as a bookseller in Boston prior to the war, “amus[ing] himself in reading military books in his shop.” He quickly transitioned to a capable artillery commander during the war and would later serve as President Washington’s Secretary of War.
5. On one such occasion in Philadelphia, Chastellux is pleased to recall, “The Comte de Darnes had Mrs. Bingham for his partner, and the Vicomte de Noailles, Miss Shippen. Both of the, like true philosophers, testified a great respect for the manners of the country, by not quitting their handsome partners the whole evening.”
6. Although Lafayette remains a well-known figure of the American Revolution in the United States, he has become a matter of some puzzlement to the French of recent generations. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, the great historian Jules Michelet dismissed him as “a mediocre idol,” and at his May 1962 dinner in honor of André Malraux, President Kennedy acknowledged that the French now tended to think of Lafayette as “a rather confused sort of ineffectual, elderly figure, hovering over French politics” for entirely too long. But not so, in his lifetime. Chastellux calls “the confidence and attachment of the troops” Lafayette’s “invaluable possessions, well acquired riches, of which nobody can deprive him,” yet “what, in my opinion, is still more flattering for a young man of his age, is the influence and consideration he has acquired among the political, as well as the military order” in the United States. “Fortunate his country, if she knows how to avail herself” of his talents; “more fortunate still should she stand in no need of calling them into exertion!” Unfortunately, as it happened, his country did need him, during its own revolution, but did know how to avail itself of those talents, or of his virtues, which may explain his descent into obscurity in the minds of later generations.
7. See Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Book VI, chapter 8, reviewed on this website in the “Nations” category under the title, “The Many Regimes of Chateaubriand.”
8. This was confirmed in a later conversation with Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut, who affirmed that the Massachusetts Bay Colony declined to ask for Parliament’s protection in 1670, when threatened by war with nearby Indian tribes, since “if they put themselves once under the protection of parliament, they should be obliged to submit to all the laws that assembly might impose, whether on the nation in general, or on the colonies in particular.” This proves that “these colonies, even in the very origin, never acknowledged the authority of parliament, nr imagined they could be bound by laws of their making.”
9. Respecting the other states, Chastellux reports that Maryland was initially a proprietary colony, a “private domain” held “in a state of the most absolute dependence” upon its owners. It nonetheless “seems to be forming under good auspices” since independence,” and “may become of great weight after the present revolution.” He did not venture into the Carolinas and Georgia, and so was “not sufficiently acquainted with these three states to hazard on them observations,” other than hearsay. Of them, South Carolina is the most important, with its major seaport city, Charleston. As a “commercial town, in which strangers abound, as at Marseille and Amsterdam…the manners there are consequently polished and easy” and its inhabitants “love pleasure, the arts, and society,” exhibiting manners “more European than any in America.”