By Michael Lucchese.
A Russell Kirk Center Special Series
Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured. The series seeks to advance understanding of the significance of the American founding to our times through fresh, concise presentations. The following piece by Michael Lucchese is the first in a two-part sequence examining Dr. Kirk’s veneration for the Federalists.
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches, it seems natural that the American mind turns to Thomas Jefferson. The principal author of the document, his republican ideology represents one of the major sources of our country’s identity. As his sometimes-ally Thomas Paine put it, radicals of this party believed the new nation had a chance to “begin the world over again” along more equal, democratic lines. Americans could tear down the last vestiges of hierarchy, establishment, and empire, these radicals contended, and replace it with new and supposedly more enlightened modes and orders.
But as Luke Sheahan recently noted in The University Bookman, Russell Kirk had a different interpretation of the American Revolution. Unlike other historians, such as Gordon Wood or R.R. Palmer, who emphasized an expanding blaze of radicalism, the conservative writer argued that the birth of the American Republic was a “revolution of memory,” a return to what he sometimes called the “old moral order” that had animated Western civilization for thousands of years. According to Dr. Kirk, the constitution of the American people was fundamentally conservative. The liberties they sought to defend were ancient, not innovative, and for the most part they had no desire to completely remake society according to speculative principles.
As such, he located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both “the most successful conservative device in the history of the world” and a “great monument” to the Federalists. Men like Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and above all John Adams proved that republics could resist the temptations of revolution just as well as monarchies—wisdom worth recovering at the 250th anniversary of American independence.
That is not to say Kirk found nothing to admire in the Jeffersonian persuasion. As he wrote in The Conservative Mind and elsewhere, the Virginian’s “doctrines were always more radical than his practice,” and there is something substantively conservative about his agrarian vision—even if it was tainted by a leveling spirit. In succeeding generations, Old Republicans who broke with Jefferson, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, pulled on the conservative threads in his thought more productively by emphasizing localism, constitutional government, rural society, and the virtues of gentlemanliness. But at the outset of the Early Republic, the more conservative force—the party truly advocating classical virtue against egalitarian ideology—could be found in their opponents, Northern and Southern alike, among the Federalists.
Kirk argued that, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “men essentially conservative found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence hardly anticipated.” The creation of the US Constitution was the first great effort to establish order in the newborn Republic, and the Federalist party was formed to defend it against enemies foreign and domestic. As Kirk put it in an introduction to a selection of their works in his Portable Conservative Reader, “In America, the Federalists became as resolutely opposed to the ideas and consequences of the French Revolution as was Edmund Burke.” Their opposition was, for the most part, successful; though the Jeffersonians triumphed in elections, Kirk claimed, the Federalists’ principles remain highly influential.
The Federalist with the most truly prophetic conservatism, according to Kirk, was John Adams. Kirk certainly admired Adams as a practical statesman, but he devoted most of his attention to his political thought. He compared Adams to Burke, although the Massachusetts man was sometimes critical of the Irishman. “Where Burke talked of prejudice, prescription, and natural rights,” he wrote, “Adams attacked the doctrine of perfectibility and the idea of a unitary state.” Though his only term as president would seem him scorned by Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians alike, Adams emerges from Kirk’s account as perhaps America’s foremost conservative mind. His republican vision, committed to achieving a balance of power and preserving a space for liberty and virtue, is perhaps the best explication of the Constitution—and the meaning of the American Founding itself.
Though Adams affirmed the Declaration’s self-evident truths about human equality, he never let his commitment to such a notion lead him into a fanciful utopianism. Human nature was, to be sure, something noble in Adams’s thought—but it was also something debased. He believed that all human beings were equally fallen and given to vanity, avarice, and foolishness. The human mind could only achieve progress, according to Adams, through the painstaking work of education. He certainly believed that widespread education was vital to America’s republican liberties, but he was never deluded into thinking it could permanently cure the human condition.
Given this notion of human nature, it should come as little surprise that Adams was incredibly skeptical of political power itself. “The fundamental Article of my political Creed is,” he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, “that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or absolute Power is the Same in a Majority of a popular Assembly, an Aristocratical Counsel, an Oligarchical Junto and a Single Emperor. Equally arbitrary cruel bloody and in every respect, diabolical.” For this reason, the only free government must be a balanced government. Adams argued that the different orders and interests in society each needed to be represented so that they could check each other and, ultimately, work together for the common good.
Adams held to these principles so strongly that he ultimately broke with the more ambitious and reactionary elements of the Federalist party. When he presented a serious obstacle to their quest for power and their factional rage, they denounced him. But far from betraying their conservatism, Kirk argued in The Conservative Mind that this independence made Adams both a greater statesman and a greater thinker:
He was the truest Federalist of them all; for where Hamilton accepted the federal system merely as a tolerable substitute for central government, and where Pickering and Dwight and the other Hartford Convention men adhered to the federal idea only when it suited New England’s interest, Adams believed in the federal principle as the best possible government for America. More than any other nation in the world, the United States cling affectionately to the idea of political balance; and in large measure, this is the harvest of Adams’ practical conservatism.
At the heart of Adams’s political project was a hope that law and liberty could be reconciled. Just as Publius did in his own time, and Alexis de Tocqueville a generation later, the statesman-philosopher uncovered the latent wisdom in the American constitution and found a way to defend good government against arbitrary power. This is an inheritance which can ward off the worst forms of radicalism, and one we desperately need to rediscover today.
Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.
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