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 second in a two-part sequence examining Dr. Kirk’s veneration for the Federalists. Read his first contribution here.
Russell Kirk greatly admired the mind and temperament of John Adams. He exemplified the Federalist party’s temperate response to a crisis of radicalism. Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and John Randolph of Roanoke similarly opposed the American Jacobins. In large measure, the Federalists aimed to shore up the authority of the federal government. While committed to America’s republican forms, Kirk wrote that they sought “to oppose local radicalism by means of conservative consolidation.” They believed a stronger government could provide material prosperity to help the new United States achieve that “separate and equal station” on the world stage and security against domestic uprisings such as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Insurrection. On the whole, the Federalists were afraid of popular revolution and thought that the leadership of men such as George Washington was necessary for a flourishing Republic.
Despite the successes of Washington’s administration, Kirk wrote that the conservative mind of the Federalists was somewhat sepulchral. Many who looked abroad saw the terror of the Jacobin Republic as democracy’s inevitable destiny; the rising support for Jefferson at home inspired even more desperation and fear. Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts statesman, became what Kirk called “the gloomiest and most eloquent of the Federalists” by “prophesying mediocrity in spirit, anarchy in society” should democracy triumph.
Ames was an early supporter of the Constitution and an advocate of the Bill of Rights, but something about his politics resembled the old Toryism that had fallen out of fashion. He believed in what David Hackett Fischer described as a “deferential spirit,” the notion that society ought to be governed by an aristocracy of virtue. Of course, Ames and his fellow Federalists were still committed republicans and by no means had dreams of reinstalling a king or introducing titles of nobility. But they believed that too much democracy would lead to moral degradation; firm leadership enabled by talent, education, and gentlemanliness was the only thing that could make a government like America’s work. Ames was more extreme than other prominent Federalists, filled with a despairing sense that the Republic was “doomed to destruction,” Kirk wrote, almost as though his conservatism was “born with the sardonic grin of death upon its countenance.” Powerful as the New Englander’s writing was, it is evidence of why the Federalists failed as a national party.
Alexander Hamilton, the true leader of the Federalist party, was perhaps more successful than Ames. From the framing of the US Constitution to his support of neutrality during France’s revolutionary wars, he was always at the head of the party of order. Kirk especially lauded him for his condemnation of the French Revolution as both a statesman and a popular writer; his efforts helped, in part, to ensure that Jacobinism would never take root on these shores. Kirk also admired Hamilton’s commitment to balancing liberty and energy in the framing of American government, as well as his spirited defense of the Constitution in The Federalist and as a cabinet secretary. Hamilton had a way of explaining to the American people just how great a risk disorder truly was, and that liberty can only be defended with carefully designed safeguards and a resolute spirit of opposition to any forms of tyrant.
And yet, Kirk noted, Hamilton lacked the prophetic sensibility of conservative minds like Edmund Burke. “It seems hardly to have occurred to Hamilton’s mind that a consolidated nation might also be a levelling and innovating nation,” he wrote, “and he does not appear to have reflected upon the possibility that force in government may be applied to other purposes than the maintenance of a conservative order.” The New Yorker’s ambitions blinded him, to some extent, from the unintended consequences of his centralizing political program—and to the revolutionary tendencies of his mercantilist economics. As great as Hamilton was, his leadership required a kind of ballast.
A ballast was achieved, at least in part, by the Virginia statesman John Randolph. A Southerner loyal to what had become a primarily Northern party, he was more balanced in his approach than some of the High Federalists around Hamilton or Ames. As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Kirk writes, Marshall was able to make “the Constitution the incarnation of Federalistic conservatism” by defending through law the party’s “vision of an expanding, united, commercial nation, in which the rights of property and the division of authority were secure.” In Marshall’s writings, from his biography of George Washington to his judicial decisions, readers find a uniquely conservative articulation of the chief principle of the Old Republic: liberty under law. “These were conservative tendencies, in part,” Kirk concluded, “yet in another sense they opened the way for the illimitable changes of industrialization and consolidation, and they desperately wounded another sort of conservatism, that of the South and the agricultural interest.
This is perhaps best demonstrated by the ways that Marshall’s jurisprudence created the modern economy. “The Chief Justice was an evangel of economic progress,” Kirk wrote in Rights and Duties, which “was part and parcel of Marshall’s confident nationalism.” He “approved what we now call ‘venture capital,’ speculation that usually would produce large returns in goods and services, and” felt that “such bold investors must be protected against arbitrary interference by public authorities or by rival economic interests.” Conservatives in the Anglo-American tradition have always affirmed these sorts of property rights, of course, but they were perhaps somewhat cautious about the actual growth of liberal capitalism. Prosperity is a good and indeed virtuous thing, but materialism makes a people vicious and, ultimately, spiritually dispossessed.
The tension between conserving the goods of prosperity and the goods of stability can perhaps best be illustrated by Marshall’s actual decisions. In his celebrated 1819 decision in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, for example, Kirk argued that “Marshall’s primary interest in this case was to establish still more firmly his principle that the Constitution protects private property and contract against encroachments—and state governments in particular.” In another decision, Fletcher v. Peck (1810), Marshall defended the contract rights of Native American tribes for the same reasons. The Chief Justice believed these were matters of both justice and economic development. “In his political economy as related to the Constitution, then, Marshall was a strong champion of rights to property and rights of contract, a friend to rapid economic development of the territories of the United States, and a defender of intelligent economic speculation,” Kirk wrote, even though he also seemed to have little “notion of what astounding consequences his protections for corporations would produce in the long run.”
The Federalist party, of course, is no more. It barely lasted past the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. But, as Russell Kirk demonstrated throughout his work, its conservative vision remains one of the most profound expressions of the meaning of the American Founding itself. Its adherents cannot simply be dismissed as retrograde aristocrats—they were patriots who understood that “order is the first need of all.” In an age when the American Republic seems to be forgetting just that, it is altogether fitting and proper that we remember the contributions of the Federalists.
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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