REVIEW: Fears of a Setting Sun, by Dennis C. Rasmussen

Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, Dennis C. Rasmussen (Princeton University Press, 2021).

George Washington spent the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and he did it from a beautiful, high-backed wooden chair. The chair had been designed and built a few years earlier for the Pennsylvania legislature by local cabinetmaker John Folwell,¹ who filled it with symbolism: there were cornucopias for plenty, a pileus and vindicta for liberty, and at the top was a golden sun half-concealed behind the horizon.

It was to this chair that Benjamin Franklin gestured when he made the epigrammatic remark that furnishes² the title of this book: as Madison documented it in the federal record, while the final signatures were going on the new Constitution,

Doct FRANKLIN…observed to a few members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. “I have,” said he, “often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”

Franklin died only a year into the new regime, so he went out still satisfied with the Constitutional order and the government it created. But he was one of the only ones. Nearly all of the American founders, from the august figure of George Washington on down through John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush, would conclude by the ends of their lives that their “great experiment” had failed. Fears of a Setting Sun is the story of their disillusionment, disappointment, and despair.

It’s also, and I should say this at the outset, a really fun read. I would’ve read pretty much anything that was pitched to me as “did you know the Founding Fathers universally blackpilled on America?” but many an interesting book is turns out to be a real slog. Luckily, this is not one of them. Perhaps the strongest endorsement I can offer of Rasmussen’s engaging prose is that as soon as I finished reading this one I went looking for his other work, and have now snagged a copy of his book about how Adam Smith and David Hume were BFFs, a topic in which I had absolutely no prior interest.

But back to the topic at hand: when I say “the founders blackpilled,” I really mean it. Here, for example, is Jefferson in 1820: “I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ‘76, to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.” Or Hamilton in 1802, earlier but no less dire: “In vain was the collected wisdom of America convened at Philadelphia. In vain were the anxious labours of a Washington bestowed. Their works are regarded as nothing better than empty bubbles…”³ Most dramatic of all, see Dr. Benjamin Rush, who wrote to Adams that he now felt “shame for my zeal in the cause of our Country” during the Revolution and in the drafting of the Constitution, and that “I…sometimes wish I could erase my name from the declaration of Independence.”

Why did they despair? Different reasons for different men, obviously, but they fall into four main categories: political partisanship, the relative power balance between the states and the federal government, the poor moral character of the American people, and the sectional divisions that arose over the question of slavery. Rasmussen frames the book as a discussion of the four most famous Founding Fathers, each of whom exemplified one of these reasons (in order: Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Jefferson), but the lesser lights of the revolutionary generation fell into the same buckets. Samuel Adams, for instance, was disappointed by America’s failure to be a “Christian Sparta.” Gouverneur Morris predicted the Union would split over slavery and looked forward to the day that the North could leave the South to “exercise the privilege of strangling commerce, whipping Negroes, and bawling about the inborn inalienable rights of man.” And Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the 1830s that “I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our constitution cannot last… The union has been prolonged thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.”⁴

Of these reasons, the strangest to the modern reader is surely partisanship. It’s not that we like partisanship, particularly, but we regard political parties as a fact of life. In fat, if you believe the political scientists they’re even a necessity: parties aggregate interests, channel ambitions, mobilize supporters, provide some form of collective accountability to the voters, and so forth. But in the 18th century, political partisanship — what they often called “faction” — was a dirty word. A party was necessarily partial, dedicated to the private interests of its members at the expense of the common good, and thus inevitably the enemy of disinterested republican government. Absolutely everyone talked about their opposition to faction; Jefferson and Madison even did so while they cheerfully set up the nation’s first political party specifically to undermine the administration. But when George Washington opposed parties, he really meant it. “If we mean to support the Liberty and Independence which it has cost us so much blood & treasure to establish,” he wrote early in his first term, “we must drive far away the demon of party spirit.”

Washington wasn’t naive. He fully expected that people would disagree with one another, especially over important political questions. But he thought the alliances in favor of some policy or other would be short-lived and limited in scope: a man who opposed a particular tax might band together with others to fight it, but once that battle was won or lost they would separate again and the same man might later find himself allied with a former tax foe when the topic turned to, say, a treaty with a foreign power. The idea of a lasting opposition party, dedicated to thwarting the government in all its actions, horrified him. How could anyone hope to accomplish anything under such circumstances?

Washington had come of age politically in one of the least factional moments of American history, Virginia of the 1750s and 60s, and his experience commanding the Continental Army had convinced him of the necessity of unity for any great deed. As the followers of Hamilton and Jefferson became increasingly polarized, their newspapers rife with vitriolic and scurrilous denunciations of one another, Washington wrote long heartfelt letters to both men:

Without more charity for the opinions & acts of one another in Governmental matters, it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the Reins of Government or to keep the parts of it together: for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way & another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must, inevitably, be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness & prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever!

It was not to be. Washington reluctantly returned for a second term as president, largely because he was (probably correctly!) convinced that only his tremendous personal authority could prevent the fledgling state from collapsing entirely under the pressures of parties that “create dissensions; disturb the public Tranquility; and dissolve, perhaps forever, the Cement which binds the union.” But when Hamilton left office, the Republican (i.e., opposition) press finally turned on the president himself. Rasmussen summarizes the increasingly outrageous charges:

Washington was senile; he was a blasphemer; he was a womanizer; he had embezzled public funds; he was a tool of the British crown or desired a crown of his own; Hamilton not only controlled him behind the scenes but was also his illegitimate son; he had been a secret British agent during the Revolutionary War, and his efforts to betray the patriotic cause were foiled by Benedict Arnold beating him to the punch.

By the time Washington left office, he was thoroughly disillusioned. “Until within the last year or two,” he wrote, “I had no conception that Parties Would, or even could go, the length I have been Witness to.” He had spent his political career battling the forces of faction, but in the run-up to the election of 1800, he more or less admitted defeat: it was now the candidate’s party, not his character, that drove votes. “Let [the Republicans] set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto!” And republican government, he believed, could not long survive such an electorate. Shortly before his death, he wrote: “I have, for sometime past, viewed the political concerns of the United States with an anxious, and painful eye. They appear to me, to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis; but in what they will result—that Being, who sees, forsees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”

However much Washington may have lamented political parties, though, their rise was inevitable. His vision of temporary alliances over individual questions was always a pipe dream: it might work for a polity with relatively harmonious goals, but it had to fail as soon as goals diverged and policy disagreements stopped being randomly distributed. The war for independence had been unifying because the choice was binary and the goal obvious: victory rather than defeat. As soon as the war was won, though, the options opened up and the cracks began to show.⁵ And once you begin to disagree on the level of principle — once the goals stop being shared — the same coalitions will start popping up in every policy debate.

The new United States, it turned out, was full of disagreements about principle. Some of them were ironed out during that long, hot summer of debate and compromise at the Constitutional Convention, but as soon as the new government came into effect it was clear that there was still plenty of room for argument and interpretation. Broadly speaking, two camps formed: the Federalists, centered around Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and the Republicans, centered around Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.⁶ Hamilton and his Federalists favored a robust federal government and a strong executive — far stronger, in fact, than the Constitution actually gave them, though Hamilton tried hard to read his desired powers into the document — and wanted to get the new country onto the sound economic footing by imitating the British financial system. Jefferson and his Republicans, on the other hand, favored a much weaker executive with much greater power for the states and the people, and criticized their opponents as “stockjobbers,” “moneymen,” and “monocrats.” They also enthused over the French Revolution’s radical dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and feared the Federalists would abandon revolutionary principles in favor of a monarchical return to the tyranny of British rule.⁷ “I consider the establishment and success of [the French revolutionary] government as necessary to stay up our own,” Jefferson wrote in 1791, “and to prevent it from falling back to that kind of Halfway-house, the English constitution.”

The appearance of the Republicans on the political stage threw Hamilton into “serious alarm” that “Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration, and actuated by views in my judgment subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the Country.” (Yes, all that emphasis is really his.) And as the French Revolution began to claim lives overseas, Hamilton began to fear that the guillotine would soon find its way to American shores — with Republican encouragement. “The game to be played may be a most important one,” he wrote to an old college friend in 1795. “It may be for nothing less than true liberty, property, order, religion and of course heads. I will try…if possible to guard yours & mine.” A few years later, Abigail Adams recorded him saying that “for his part, he did not expect his Head to remain four Years longer upon his Shoulders, unless it was at the Head of a Victorious Army.”

Many of Hamilton’s economic policies were adopted, and war and Jacobinism did not come to American shores, but when Jefferson was eventually elected to the presidency in 1800 Hamilton considered it the final repudiation of everything he had worked for. Jefferson’s first message to Congress, he argued, “ought to alarm all who are anxious for the safety of our Government, for the respectability and welfare of our nation. It makes, or aims at making, a most prodigal sacrifice of constitutional energy, of sound principle, and of public interest, to the popularity of one man.” And from there his outlook only got worse: “Truly,” he wrote in 1802, “the prospects of our Country are not brilliant. The mass is far from sound. At headquarters a most visionary theory presides. Depend upon it this is the fact to a great extreme. No army, no navy, no active commerce…as little government as possible within—these are the pernicious dreams which as far and as fast as possible will be attempted to be realized.” He had devoted his political career to the creation and defense of a vigorous national government; now he thought the cause was lost. “Perhaps no man in the UStates has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself,” he wrote to Gouverneur Morris, “and contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very begginning I am still labouring to prop the frail and worthless fabric.” He died a few years later, convinced that the weakened United States was doomed.

John Adams, a voracious reader on history, politics, and law, was by far the most thoughtful of the Founding Fathers when it came to political philosophy. He was also congenitally cranky and contrarian. The combination of these two, Rasmussen suggests, means his disillusionment was predictable — almost overdetermined. Like Washington, Adams hated political parties; like Hamilton, he feared revolutionary populism. But his most profound fear for America was her people’s lack of the civic virtue he considered absolutely indispensable for republican government.

It was a consistent theme throughout his life. In 1772 he wrote that “the preservation of Liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral Character of the People.” In 1776:

…there must be a possitive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest Connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.

In 1795: “when Ambition and Avarice, are predominant Passions and Virtue is lost Republican Governments are in danger.” In 1798: “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In 1807: “without national Morality a Republican Government cannot be maintained.” And in 1819: “without Virtue, there can be no political Liberty.”⁸

To his credit, Adams lived up to his ideals. He spent more than thirty years serving his country, first as a legislator and then as a diplomat (to France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain), separated from his beloved family by storm-tossed oceans and snowy mountains. He hovered in the wings as Washington’s vice president, sidelined in the cabinet and presiding over a senate where he couldn’t join the debate. His own presidency ended in humiliating electoral defeat after his party abandoned him over his peace treaty with France — a thoroughly predictable outcome, but one Adams willingly suffered in order to avoid a war America might not win and which would certainly tear the country due to Republican sympathies with the French. “I will defend my Missions to France as long as I have an Eye to direct my hand or a finger to hold my pen,” he later wrote. “They were the most disinterested And meritorious Actions of my Life. I reflect upon them with So much satisfaction that I desire No other Inscription on my Grave Stone than ‘Here lies John Adams who took upon himself the Responsability of the Peace with France in the Year 1800.’ ”

But even before independence was declared, let alone won — and long before the Constitution was framed — he began to harbor grave doubts that about the virtue of his fellow citizens. In January of 1776 he worried that “there is So much Rascallity, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition, such a Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.” A few months later he complained to his wife that “there is too much Corruption, even in this infant Age of our Republic. Virtue is not in Fashion. Vice is not infamous.” His outlook only worsened as the war’s unifying effects faded into memory, and by 1787 he would write to Jefferson from London that “you and I have been indefatigable Labourers, through our whole Lives for a Cause which will be thrown away in the next Generation, upon the Vanity and Foppery of Persons of whom We do not now know the Names perhaps.”

Adams entertained brief hopes that a properly structured political system might make up for a lack of virtue, but he quickly decided that even if that were possible, the Constitution would not do. The rise of political parties alarmed him, as did the relative weakness of the federal government, but he also recoiled from Hamilton’s financial system: debt, banks, and paper money were inescapable signs of moral corruption. “You will not babble to me about Patriotism, Zeal, Enthusiasm, Love of Property, and Country at this time of day,” he wrote in 1789. “I see nothing since I arrived from Europe, but one universal and ungovernable rage for the Loaves and Fishes. The Corruption of Ambition and Avarice, has more universal possession of the Souls of the Gentlemen of this Country, than of the Nobility of any Country in Europe.” Even as president, he fretted that “the Want of Principle, in so many of our Citizens…is awfully ominous to our elective government.” And his worries continued through his long retirement. “Oh my Country,” he wrote in 1806, “how I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecillity, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves! … We are left without resources but in our prayers and tears.” And in 1817 he was still beating the same drum, telling his son John Quincy that “…the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholly, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe…the distemper in our Nation is so general, and so certainly incurable.”

If Adams seem a little overwrought, you have to remember that the American founders were engaged in a highly speculative and uncertain endeavor. Today we assume that republican (i.e., non-monarchical) government is basically normal — all but a handful of countries are republics, de facto if not de jure⁹ — but in 1776 the only ones in existence were tiny city-states like Venice and confederations of city-states like Switzerland. Literally everyone else had a king. And yes, there were a few examples of democracy or republicanism from the classical world, but the founders regarded them primarily as cautionary examples.¹⁰ The “American experiment” seemed precarious to them precisely because it was: no one had ever attempted a political project of this type or scale before. The Founding Fathers, no less than the French revolutionaries they inspired,¹¹ were undertaking a deeply Enlightenment project to make the world anew according to the dictates of reason and philosophy. Frankly, it’s astonishing that it worked.

Or did it? Certainly the United States are still here (I’m sitting in one), and we still don’t have a king, but do you really feel like you’re governing yourself? Or that your elected officials and fellow citizens are notably marked by public virtue and a willingness to sacrifice for the general good? Or maybe I’m too cynical; it’s an election year, after all, and I’m sure things have changed since 1810, when John Adams wrote:

Our Electioneering Racers have Started for the Prize. Such a Whipping and Spurring and huzzaing! Oh What rare Sport it will be? Through thick and thin, through Mire and Dirt, through Bogs and Fens and Sloughs dashing and Splashing and crying out, the Devil take the hindmost. How long will it be possible that Honor, Truth or Virtue should be respected among a People who are engaged in Such a quick and perpetual Succession of Such profligate Collissions and Conflicts?

Thomas Jefferson took a long time to lose hope in his country, but even the inveterate optimist who had shrugged off Shays’s Rebellion with the remark that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing” and left office in 1808 praising “this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, & the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom & self-government” eventually concluded that America was doomed. And in a sense he was correct, because his fears hinged on slavery.

Jefferson was notably inconsistent on the topic. On the one hand, his first draft of the Declaration of Independence claimed King George had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” He drafted two statutes (in 1779 and 1783) that would have gradually abolished slavery in Virginia, and a bill for the Confederation Congress in 1784 that would have banned slavery in the western territories after 1800. (The Virginia laws were never introduced, but the Confederation bill failed by only a single vote.) And in 1786 he mused on the incongruity of American revolutionaries owning slaves: “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty and the next moment..inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.” On the other hand, he owned a great many slaves himself, opposed 1804 legislation to ban slavery in the Louisiana Territory, and politely declined any participation in the fight to abolish the practice. (He preferred to hope that “time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.”)

Of course the issue that alarmed Jefferson wasn’t really slavery per se, despite his famous line on that topic that “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” but the political conflict and sectional divisions created by the fight over slavery. And while the precipitating crisis — the battle over whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a slave state, thereby upsetting the even balance of eleven slave states and eleven free — was settled with a famous compromise, Jefferson accurately predicted the path to the Civil War:

…this mementous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. … a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.

In 1820, on his 75th birthday,

I have been among the most sanguine in believing that our Union would be of long duration. I now doubt it much, and see the event at no great distance. …My only comfort & confidence is that I shall not live to see this: and I envy not the present generation the glory of throwing away the fruits of their fathers sacrifices of life & fortune, and of rendering desperate the experiment which was to decide ultimately whether man is capable of self government.

And in November 1820, a Maryland Quaker who visited Jefferson at Monticello recorded this nigh-prophetic insight: “The Union will be broken. All the horrors of civil war, embittered by local jealousies and mutual recriminations, will ensue. Bloodshed, rapine and cruelty will soon roam at large, will desolate our once happy land and turn the fruitful field into a howling wilderness.”

Jefferson was entirely correct in his predictions. There was indeed a hideously bloody civil war, and when the dust finally settled there were a series of political changes so thoroughgoing that they could — and indeed have, by their fans — been called a “second founding.” (There was arguably also a third, under FDR, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) But what really fascinates me is that unlike political partisanship (inevitable), people not agreeing with Alexander Hamilton (also inevitable), and people being kind of fundamentally lousy (also also inevitable), the reasons behind Jefferson’s disillusionment were contingent. Things could have been — indeed, almost were — otherwise.

The founding generation, even the slave-owners, generally believed that slavery was a grave evil but that it was so deeply entrenched in the South that it couldn’t be immediately eradicated without creating a major rift in the new nation. Still, they were hopeful that something would happen, and with good reason: the 1780s and 90s saw the largest wave of emancipations ever (mostly in Virginia), the global tobacco market was glutted, and it seemed entirely plausible that the institution would soon die a natural death. Of course we know this was not to be — the invention of the cotton gin made slave labor incredibly profitable again, with predictable consequences for its spread — but in those years it was distantly possible.

So naturally, being me, I wondered: if you could manage to cast yourself back in time and hijack Alexander Hamilton’s six hour speech to the Constitutional Convention, what should you advise them to do?¹² What was the most humane but political feasible course available in 1789? Once you proved your bona fides as a time traveler, I suspect it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to convince them that “nothing” was a bad plan — if the details of the Civil War didn’t do the trick, a few clips from the Hamilton musical probably would — but what’s a better one? (I posed question this to some friends and a DC policy wonk immediately replied, “Oh, getting people to transition from the use of a socially harmful capital good? You need cap and trade for slaves.”)

It turns out there were actually discussions about what to do with the slaves once they were freed (eventually, somehow, by someone else). Simply living alongside one another was widely considered a non-starter, due partly to racism but also to the very reasonable fear that the former slaves would be violently angry about the whole “having been enslaved” thing. The most plausible scheme was termed “colonization”: settling the newly-freed people somewhere in Africa or the Caribbean, probably funded by the sale of public lands in the West to compensate the slaveholders, transport the freedmen to their new home, and help them get their new society up and running. In fact, as late as 1830, James Madison — a founding member and by this point ceremonial president of the American Colonization Society — was writing to the Marquis de Lafayette that “Outlets for the freed blacks alone are wanted for a rapid erasure of that blot from our Republican character.” It’s still not exactly humane, and the American Colonization Society’s real world project in Liberia was hardly a roaring success, but it would certainly have been better than another fifty years of slavery and the bloodiest war America has ever known.

So why don’t we hear these stories? It seems, well, notable that nearly all of the American founders died thinking their experiment had failed. (The one exception, James Madison, gets two chapters of his own, but he was both an inveterate optimist and far less idealistic about the project in the first place.) But of course a moment’s reflection reveals the answer: the people who like talking about why America is bad don’t really care about the Founding, and the people who care about the Founding don’t want to make America look bad. The Revolution, the Declaration, the Constitution — they’re all integral parts of our central myth, the idea that we are an exceptional nation founded on uniquely pure principles and still loyal to them. Discussing the universal disillusionment of the Founding Fathers comes perilously close to attacking that myth, and without that myth we’re just another country.

Rasmussen suggests we might find the founders’ disillusionment heartening: after all, almost 250 years later we’re still here, so maybe we shouldn’t fret so much ourselves! But on the other hand, well — “we” is sort of a strong word to use. Today’s United States of America is a very different country, inhabited by a very different people, than in 1789. Yes, the names, the documents, the general structures have lasted (which is more than you can say for most regimes extant in 1800). But how many of the founders would consider their experiment a success? Certainly not Jefferson: we’re all “stockjobbers” and “moneymen” now. Hamilton, I think, would approve: his dreams of empire, powerful central government, and a financialized economy have all surpassed the High Federalists’ wildest expectations. But our public life is as degraded as ever it was in the 1790s, our elections are almost entirely concerned with party affiliation, and our citizenry as vicious and consumed by luxury as Adams feared. There is no real sense in which we govern ourselves: we vote for those who pick the people who rule us and that’s not really the same thing at all.

Hamilton set the stakes in Federalist 1: “[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Jefferson worried that if the union shattered, “…the predictions of our enemies will be fulfilled, in the estimation of the world, that we were not wise enough for self government. It would be said that the fullest and fairest experiment had been made—and had failed; and the chains of despotism would be rivetted more firmly than ever.” And lo, they have: the failure is not complete (at least not yet — there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation!),¹³ but the early American republic went the way of all the other crazy Enlightenment projects.

And yet almost 250 years later, here are its remnants still visible within the most powerful country in the world, like the capitals of Corinthian colonnade repurposed into the walls of a cathedral (or a cowshed). “A republic if you can keep it,” Franklin said of the new nation — but if we haven’t, well, there’s something still here. You can love America without buying into the myth of her exceptionalism. Does that make her “just another country”? Only a moral cripple would describe his own mother as “just another woman.” America is, as John Adams wrote in 1808, “as worthy as any other Country. Our people are like other People. Our Obligations to our Country never cease but with our Lives. We ought to do all We can. Instead of being Frenchmen or Englishmen; Federalists or Jacobins, We ought to be Americans.”

1. Known as the “American Chippendale.” Not those Chippendales. This Chippendale.

This review may be the first time that my neoclassical furniture Thing and my political philosophy Thing have crossed paths and you better believe I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth. More about the chair here, from the blog of a cabinetmaker commissioned to produce a replica, and if “the grandson of Italian immigrants produces a replica of George Washington’s chair from the Constitutional Convention” doesn’t sum up a particular period of American history I don’t know what does.

2. Pun intended.

3. Ironically, he’s writing about Jefferson.

4. Here and throughout, please assume any apparent irregularities in spelling, punctuation, etc. in the quotations are accurate reproductions of the original. We typically capitalize Union, Constitution, etc. but many of the founders didn’t; Adams in particular likes to capitalize common Nouns in his Letters; Jefferson consistently uses “it’s” as the possessive. But I decided it would be both distracting and tacky to [sic] all over the place.

5. Ah, the tale of pretty much every single political movement, whether or not it ever turns violent — though some of them take a shortcut and decide start fighting each other before they win.

6. This is a gross oversimplification and elides the differences between Hamilton’s “High Federalists” and Adams’s wing of the party, among many other issues, but please just go with it.

7. You could do worse, as a summary of the parties, than this clip from the John Adams miniseries.

8. He also had the most Yankee solution possible. From his draft of the Massachusetts state constitution:

The Encouragement of Litterature Wisdom and Knowledge, as well as Virtue, diffused generally among the Body of the People, being necessary for the preservation of their Rights and Liberties; and as these depend on Spreading the Opportunities and Advantages of Education in the various parts of the Country and among the different orders of the People, it Shall be the duty of the Legislatures and Magistrates in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherrish the Interests of Litterature and the Sciences, and all Seminaries of them; especially the University at Cambridge, public Schools and grammar Schools in the Towns; to encourage private Societies and public institutions, by rewards and immunities for the promotion of Agriculture, Arts, Sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures and a natural History of the Country; to countenance and inculcate the Principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private Charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; Sincerity, good humour and all Social Affections and generous Sentiments Among the People.

9. Yeah, yeah, the King of England but come on, not really.

10. Hamilton in Federalist 9:

It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage. If momentary rays of glory break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time admonish us to lament that the vices of government should pervert the direction and tarnish the lustre of those bright talents and exalted endowments for which the favored soils that produced them have been so justly celebrated.

11. Adams mused in 1811: “Have I not been employed in Mischief all my days? Did not The American Revolution produce The French Revolution? and did not the French Revolution produce all the Calamities, and Desolations to the human Race and the whole Globe ever Since? I meant well however.”)

12. Since Hamilton actually spent the entire speech advocating for elective but absolute monarchy, we can only assume that

Curtis Yarvin

has already developed this technology.

13. I’ve repeated this quote for a long time but I finally looked it up and discovered it was Adam Smith’s consoling advice on receiving news of Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga. We come full circle!