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Books That Shape Our Times
By James H Smylie

"And that's the way it was . . ." in 1776, or so we have been told on national television during our Bicentennial Minutes. While we may have been instructed on the day-by-day doings of our American Revolution generation, we are not quite sure that we know the way it was during those years in which the United States came to life as a nation. There is no other way to know, should we care about our days of origin, than to study documents-the journals and letters, the sermons and pamphlets, the books and public records-of our Founding Fathers and Mothers. Bernard Bailyn has indicated how rich was that eighteenth century debate about political matters in chapters on "The Literature of Revolution" and "Sources and Traditions" in his Pulitzer Prize winning volume entitled The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967, 335 pp.).

Many of the writings for this period are available to persons close to good libraries. But the literature is voluminous, and reading it all is not necessary to get a first band account of the way it was. In this review, I would like to remember a few great, choice pieces of literature, and recommend reading or rereading them on this Bicentennial occasion.

I

First on my list is L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Mary-Jo Kline, eds., The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 411 pp.). Actually this volume is not a great book of the eighteenth century but from our Centennial observance of 1876. Then Charles Francis Adams edited Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife to uncover the hidden springs of action in the human story bebind revolutionary events. New editors have republished the older work, replacing Adams' deletions dictated by Victorian propriety and filling out the portrait of the couple with additional letters. The Adamses wrote in a spritely style. Their letters are a stimulating introduction to the character of John and his remarkable wife, Abigail, and to what was going on in the America of the 1760's, 1770's, and 1780's.

A frequent contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY, James H Smylie is Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. One of his areas of special interest has been the history of the American church during the Revolutionary period, and during the past year he conducted research at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the Editor of the Journal of Presbyterian History.

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Supported by Abigail, John Adams took a leading part in shaping the public mind in his political activities and in his writings during this time. In "Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law" (1765), "Novanglus" essays (1775), Thoughts on Government (1776), Defence of the Constitution of the United States (1787-1788), and "Discourses on Davila" (1790-1791), we gain insight into the crises which extended from the Stamp Act controversy of the 1760's to the controversy over the Constitution of 1787-1788, and into the development of Adams' views on politics and war. While these writings remain essential for the assessment of Adams' mind, he discloses in his letters to his wife how full of self-doubt, as well as determination, he was in his public life. Abigail was a controlled, confident, and commanding woman who managed to remain properly feminine in the exercise of her many responsibilities on the home front. It was to this daughter of a prominent New England parson that John reported what was going on in Philadelphia, New York, Paris, and his inner thoughts. John and Abigail showed great tenderness toward one another. But John and Abigail also showed respect for each other. As John managed to keep the revolutionary fires going, it was Abigail who literally kept family and farm together while he was away for so much of the time on public affairs. The letters collected in this volume cover the period from 1762, beginning with the courtship, to 1784, when the couple was in Europe. Unfortunately they do not include letters which deal with later major events, for example the writing and ratification of the Constitution of the United States which John considered to be the culmination of the revolutionary conflict. But we have an intimate treasure in these letters which show the way in which one family gave itself in the pursuit of

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the public happiness. The volume makes one muse: "How would a book of John Kennedy and Jacqueline, Richard Nixon and Pat, Gerald Ford and Betty, read by comparison?"

We have been hailing Abigail as one of our Founding Mothers. Her warnings to John in revolutionary language about the natural tendency of the male to play tyrant in the exercise of unlimited power over the female have become widely known. Abigail's perception of some other major problems faced by her husband and his colleagues also deserve attention. "The Reigns of Government have been so long slackened," she wrote to John on November 27, 1775,

that I fear the people will not quietly submit to those restraints which are necessary for the peace, and security, of the community; if we separate from Brittain, what Code of Laws will be established. How shall we be governed so as to retain our Liberties? Can any government be free which is not administered by general stated Laws? Who shall frame these Laws? Who will give them force and energy? … When I consider these things and the prejudices of people in favour of Ancient customs and Regulations, I feel anxious for the fate of our Monarchy or Democracy or whatever is to take place. I soon get lost in a Labyrinth of perplexities, but whatever occurs, may justice and righteousness by the Stability of our times, and order arise out of confusion. Great difficulties may be surmounted, by patience and perseverance.

II

Abigail wrote several months before John sent her a copy of Tom Paine's first famous pamphlet. Second on my list of great books is Thomas Paine, Common Sense and the Crisis, especially the former (New York: Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., n.d., 240 pp.). Paine was an English Quaker who emigrated to America in 1774, long after the American Revolution had taken place, as Adams once remarked, in the hearts and minds of Americans. In a single, brilliantly written tract, Paine was able to capture the mood of the time. Common Sense was not a work of reasoned logic. It was written vividly, with verve, and was a tour de force. But as Bernard Bailyn has pointed out in Fundamental Testaments of the American Revolution (Washington: Library of Congress, 1973, 7-22), enabled Americans to think decisively about the unthinkable-the cutting of political ties with the King of England.

Much of Paine's power came through his language. Through his imagery, also, he showed Americans that a crisis was at hand, that reconciliation was impossible and improper, that independence was desirable and even inevitable. Given Paine's later hostility to things biblical, in The Age of Reason, he made remarkably effective use of the Bible in this 1776 pamphlet. Time, he proclaimed, had found Americans. He used various biblical narratives to legitimize the time. We had it in "our power to begin the world over again." An opportunity to begin at the right end of government had "not happened since the days of Noah until now." We had an obligation as well as a right to throw off the yoke of oppression by a "hardened, sullen-tempered Pharoah of England" in a struggle which was one with the cause of all mankind.

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Moreover, we had the responsibility to throw off hereditary monarchy, not to preserve it as a system of government. "Monarchy is ranked in Scripture," Paine asserted, "as one of the sins of the Jews." When they asked for a king to rule over them, they were involved in another fall. "The birthday of a new world is at hand," Paine proclaimed, to begin government at the right end, under God and the rule of law, not with priestcraft and kingcraft, but with the people and their elders. Paine may have caused his stir by the forcefulness of his language. He also knew American Protestants, and he was able, at this point in his life as a propagandist, to exploit biblical authority brilliantly.

As in the case of the Adams' letters, Paine's writing still stirs the reader. John Adams concluded that Paine's work was offensive, a "poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass," and later that Paine's was chiefly a "Career of Mischief." But Adams apparently had no such idea when he sent the pamphlet to his wife. According to her letters to John in February and March, 1776, which were not included in The Book of Abigail and John, Abigail was thoroughly convinced by Paine's ideas, and did not hestitate a moment to adopt them. She spread the tract abroad as much as she could, and discovered that everyone assented to the truths it contained. Perhaps Paine helped Abigail, for the moment at least, to overcome some of the hesitancy she had in America's direction and the difficulties she saw in independence.

III

Two other volumes, numbers three and four, in order of their publication, are J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., n.d., 235 pp.), first published in 1782, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (William Peden, ed., Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1955, 315 pp.), published in 1785. These books were published after the American Revolution, but the authors were acute observers of the American grain, the way it was. They described in their volumes north and south, east and west, America with all of its problems, promises, and something of what it must have been like to live in this age of freedom's ferment.

A Frenchman, Crevecoeur came to Canada in the 1750's, moved into English America and adopted it as his homeland. He then settled down in New York state to raise a family and a farm. He was a loyalist during the Revolution and went into exile, leaving his wife and two children behind. In his Letters, published while away, he left us his famous definition of an American. "He is an American," Crevecoeur wrote,

who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

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Crevecoeur was not sure that the Revolution was one of those great changes, and he suspected politicians who supported causes in the name of the sovereign people and for the sake of liberty. In his Letters, he showed his great interest in the people, who were being shaped in and by the American environment. He described Andrew the Hebridean, who settled in Pennsylvania with his family. He was poor, and he could scarcely make himself understood, so thick was his brogue. Yet he began to accumulate a small estate and reputation with the help of friends and his own industry. He described the manners, customs, and trade of the sturdy people of Nantucket, a nursery of fishermen, whose way of life provided for simple abundance, safety, peace, and civil happiness. He described the people of Charleston, South Carolina, lawyers, planters, merchants, slaves, who made the community rich, even luxurious, and miserable. He also described movingly the dilemma of a frontiersman caught in the revolutionary conflict. He was unsure of his loyalties, and uncertain about how to protect himself, especially against Indians on the one side and, on the other, ruffians who often made up America's revolutionary force. Crevecoeur put into the mouth of this bewildered man a speech for little people: "It is for the sake of the great leaders of both sides, that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished; by the arms, the sweat, the lives of the people."

In his Letters, Crevecoeur showed great respect for the part women played in colonial life. I suspect that while the relationship between John Adams and Abigail may have had a special literary quality, it was by no means unique in the mutuality shown by many men and women to one another in this period. Crevecoeur returned to America after the war to find his home destroyed and his wife dead. After a heartbreaking search, he found his children. They had been saved and cared for in his absence.

If Crevecoeur's Letters give to us a portrait of people, the gentleman of Monticello showed his scientific interest about many things in the Notes. Asked by the French government for information about America, Jefferson took the opportunity to learn more about his native state. At the time, it extended from the tidewater of Virginia to the Mississippi River, a vast and awesome expanse of territory. He described rivers, seaports, mountains, cascades, climate; he described aborigines and whites, counties and towns, constitutions and laws, religion and manners, manufacturers and commerce. Jefferson's reflections on Virginia's civil and religious institutions are of great interest. For example, during the years in which he gathered information for his Notes, Jefferson was engaged in lobbying for his act of religious liberty. In Notes, he gave some of the reasons for concern. He maintained that coercion of conscience in matters of religion served only to "make one-half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." With this observation many Virginians must have agreed, since they finally passed his act. He went on to make the following assertion: "The legiti-

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mate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." With this latter point many Americans did not agree, and Jefferson's detractors used it to portray him as an infidel.

Jefferson's reflections on American culture are also of interest. He was engaged in refuting the ideas of the French naturalists, Buffon and Raynal, who maintained that Americans were an inferior and uncivilized people. Jefferson put the Indian in favorable light, and also extolled American genius. In a short period of time, he argued, America had produced Washington, Franklin, and Rittenhouse. Given the number of centuries it had taken for Europe to produce a Newton, America was not doing too badly. John Adams, writing from France on May 22, 1785, commended Jefferson for the Notes. Apparently be and his wife had been reading them as they traveled. Adams informed the Virginian that Abigail was disappointed that he had not included Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley on his list of American notables.

Crevecoeur's and Jefferson's comments on Blacks and slavery are worth recalling. In Letters, Crevecoeur reflected his Quaker concern for blacks as human beings. Commenting on the insensibility of South Carolinians to the misery of the people, he wrote, "Their ears by habit are become deaf, their hearts are hardened; they neither see, hear, nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labor all their wealth proceeds." On his journey to visit a plantation, he was startled by the scene of a slave imprisoned in a cage, hanging from a tree. The black was dying gradually of starvation and thirst, as birds slowly picked out his eyes and snatched off his flesh. By describing such cruel and unusual punishment, Crevecoeur showed that the populace were not melting into a new race of people so obviously as he had been suggesting.

Jefferson also made an attack on slavery in the Notes. Condemning the institution as unjust, be uttered this warning: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . ." He maintained, shortly after, that the way was being opened for a total emancipation, although it should be noted he did not manumit his own slaves, Jefferson himself showed ambivalence about the black as a person. In the Notes, as a scientist he expressed his suspicion that blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind," thus rolling a great obstacle in the path of black liberation. He dismissed the writings of Phyllis Wheatley of Boston as below the "dignity of criticism."

Abigail Adams had expressed her opinion of slavery and of Virginians on March 21, 1776, a number of years before Jefferson published the Notes. She told John that the "passion for Liberty" could not burn very brightly in the breasts of those who were "accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs." In responding later to Jefferson's Notes, however, she did not plead the cause of Phyllis Wheatley.

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IV

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, were responsible for the fifth great book on my Bicentennial list. It is The Federalist (Benjamin Fletcher Wright, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961, 572 pp.), or The Federalist Papers (Clinton Rossiter, ed., New York: A Mentor Book from New American Library, 1961, 560 pp.). These are two editions of the 1787-88 newspaper letters, and are recommended for different reasons. The former includes Wright's extremely helpful introduction to the leading problems of the book, while the latter gives Rossiter's collation of The Federalist with the Constitutions of the United States and a very useful index of ideas. Douglass Adair identified the authors of the various papers, and his findings in addition to his own perceptive insights may be found in a collection of posthumously published essays entitled Fame and the Founding Fathers (Trevor Colbourn, ed., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, 315 pp.). The letters of John Adams and Abigail, Common Sense of Paine, the Letters of Crevecoeur, and the Notes of Jefferson, give us a flavor of the way it was in the latter part of the eighteenth century. But Publius, the pseudonym of the authors of The Federalist, gives another view. Publius shows how Americans faced some of the hard problems Abigail raised about the government of America after revolutionary tumult and shouting died down.

It was in the heat of the battle for the ratification of the Constitution in New York in 1787-1788, that Hamilton, who was not overjoyed with the document, enlisted Madison and Jay to write the public letters which comprise their great political commentary on the supreme law of the land. Hamilton was the chief architect of the papers and their chief author. Jay contributed very few of them because of an illness he suffered. Madison's contributions were second to Hamilton's. He wrote a number of the most important papers, for example numbers 10 and 51, on some of the assumptions held by our Founders about power. The papers were not altogether original. In fact, John Adams complained in his autobiography that Publius had borrowed from his writings in defense of the Constitution of the United States. Despite Adams' caveat, Publius put the matter in a form and language which lasted. The papers are also of uneven quality, a characteristic easily understandable since Publius did not intend to write a systematic treatise, but arguments to persuade New Yorkers to pass a constitution. Despite this, we should not fail to recognize the result as the basic exposition of our Constitution, and to ponder its flashes of insight into the problems and promises of free government. Publius attacked the Articles of Confederation for failing to provide effective federal government, and defended the new Constitution as a viable political instrument.

Publius discussed such matters as representative democracy, fundamental law, federalism, and the structure of government provided in the new Constitution, and he did so in such a way that we invariably

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turn to The Federalist when we want to understand our political institutions. Publius explained best the attempt of our Founders to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" for themselves and their posterity. Those purposes added up to a sizeable political challenge then. They still do.

Much attention has been focused in recent years on what Publius thought about human nature and about economics. Since Madison is the author who reflects most cogently on these matters in The Federalist, his contribution has assumed more and more importance. Madison was not, as has been suggested, a Marxist before Marx, but neither was he or the other Founders naive about their own vested economic interests. Madison, in papers numbered 10 and 51, spoke of government as being the greatest reflection on human nature. If men and women were angels, government would not be necessary. Factions in human society were sown in human nature, and human beings would have their divisions for the most frivolous and fanciful reasons. Since factions cannot be eliminated from life, government should be developed to control it. That is why the Founders framed the Constitution as they did, in a search of republican remedies to republican diseases.

It is in the light of this primary assumption that Madison's view of economics must be interpreted. While factions were rooted in human nature, Madison wrote, "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property," and "those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." While we might wish that Madison had said more about this division between the haves and have-nots, we should not overlook the fact that Madison saw the economic problem as much more complex. He acknowledged many other economic factions, for example, creditors, debtors, landed interests, manufacturing interests, mercantile interests, and moneyed interests with the many lesser interests of a free and civilized society. Madison would have been surprised at Charles Beard's accusation that the Founders had their vested interest which they were trying to serve. It was in recognition of those interests, and in an attempt to make them work for the public good, that the Founders devised the Constitution that they did.

Cecelia Kenyon has shown in her edition of the papers of The Anti-federalists (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, 435 pp.) that those who opposed the Constitution shared the Federalist view of human nature. They believed the inclination to abuse power might be better curbed by keeping it close to home. It may be that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay did not leave us sufficient insight to deal with the economic factions which have developed since their time, but they were well aware of the economic factor in human life. Reading their comments on the Constitution, designed in part to deal with this type of faction, is an illuminating experience.

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The Federalist should be required reading for presidential candidates during this Bicentennial election year, as well as on the reading list of people who just want to know a little more about the way it was in the eighteenth century. In fact, the present incumbent, Gerald Ford, should read it. At a press conference on February 17, 1976, Ford discussed his executive proposal to control America's various intelligence communities. Ford was asked his opinion about the accusation that his plan for more presidential control invited more presidential abuse. Ford answered: "It shouldn't happen, and I would hope that the American people will elect a President who will not abuse that responsibility. I certainly don't intend to." That Ford should make such a statement after the way in which he arrived at the pinnacle of power contrasts with what Madison wrote in The Federalist:

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

Such a view of political realities made our Founders insist upon a government of law, not of executive order.

V

John Adams wrote to Abigail from Paris on May 12, 1780, under the influence of the glitter of that great city and filled with thoughts about his posterity: "I must study Politicks and War, that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine." Adams and his generation studied statecraft and gave themselves in a remarkable way in the pursuit of justice, liberty, and the general welfare. They were also, however, more cultured than Adams' words to his wife suggest. Indeed, the movement of which they were leaders in America took place in an era of a great expansion in human learning.

In this connection, I wish to mention a sixth and final book on my Bicentennial list. In 1803, Samuel Miller, a learned Presbyterian divine of New York city, published a book entitled A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, Containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science, Arts, and Literature during that Period (2 vols., reprinted, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970, 544, 510 pp.). Although Miller's publication started out as a sermon on the close of the eighteenth century, there was nothing brief about the first part of his book. Indeed, he planned to carry forward the study to include a review of developments in Politics, Morals, and Theology during the century, although he never carried out his plan. Perhaps I should not

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include this volume in a list of great books for the Bicentennial. Not a great book, it is, however, a significant one, and it has been recognized increasingly as America's first intellectual history-a remarkable achievement for its time.

Miller interpreted the century in providential terms, and located our American Revolution in the larger cultural context in which it must be seen. It may be that Adams thought he had to study politics and war, but he did so in the midst of the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, and he was influenced by it. Miller, drawing upon vast resources, characterized and described the period as an age of free inquiry, of physical and economical science, of experimentation, of great literary and scientific discourse, of literary honors, of printing, of books, and as an age of the unprecedented diffusion of knowledge, not simply among members of the higher classes, but among those in the middle and lower orders, and even among women. He saw the complexity of the struggle which was going on between faith and unbelief. He maintained that while it was an age of infidel philosophy and the impious theory of materialism, it was also an age of Christian science in which the advocates of the supremacy of reason and human perfectibility found themselves effectively refuted and confounded. Miller himself managed an approving word for both Voltaire and Hume, who served providential purposes, at least with regard to the contribution both of them made to the historical science. The author of A Brief Retrospect spoke of the revolutions and improvements which had gone on during the century. He did not make the terms synonymous, and he was only cautiously optimistic about the improvement of the human condition.

America, Miller suggested, was one of the nations of the world which had recently become literate, and he described the progress which Americans had made in the sciences, arts, and literature. He mentioned Thomas Jefferson as one who had distinguished himself as a statesman during the American Revolution, and also John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, for their contributions to political science. These men were celebrated in Europe as well as in America. Although America had produced much, Miller indicated some of the problems which stood in the way of cultural progress. The United States had to develop more and better institutions of learning, greater leisure and desire to learn, and more books. In time, Americans would make a larger contribution to the improvement of human society.

The Adams' offspring, through several generations, actually illustrate the way in which Americans gradually increased the contribution to culture. Now, two hundred years after John Adams wrote to Abigail, America is full of painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. But, we may ask, what good is it that we latter-day Adamses and Americans should gain the whole glittering world of the arts, as well as all the material comforts of our culture, if at the same time we lose our political souls?