The other scenario which George
Clinton painted for his countrymen in the text of Cato V – in addition to his
warnings as to the likely influence of America’s commercial development on the
morals and convictions of its inhabitants – had to do with what he perceived to
be the danger inherent in trusting American statesman not to abuse the
authority vested in them by their constituents under the proposed constitution
based solely on the assumption that Americans as a people were too virtuous by
nature to ever incline towards tyranny. Such a conviction, he warned, was
eminently foolish. Americans were not unique, he avowed. They did not possess
some kind of preternatural ability to resist the same temptations which had
been moving even decent individuals to commit egregious crimes against their
fellow men for centuries. “When the manners and opinions of the community are
changed by the causes I mentioned before,” he accordingly explained,
And your
political compact inexplicit, your posterity will find that great power
connected with ambition, luxury, and flattery, will as readily produce a
Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domitian in America, as the same causes did in the
Roman empire.
As with his
previous prognostications concerning the likely inability of his fellow
Americans to resist the temptations offered by an increasingly commercialized
economy – with its easy access to credit, varied opportunities for speculation,
and ample rewards for self-serving behavior – this kind of declaration was more
than slightly at odds with the prevailing mood of the post-Revolutionary
American community. Though the supporters and detractors of the proposed
constitution nurtured very different opinions as to the propriety of creating a
singular chief executive – the former believed Congress would offer sufficient
resistance to executive overreach, the latter doubted that such arrangement
would be sufficient – there nonetheless seemed to exist an undercurrent of
agreement about the fundamental virtue of the American people.
Anti-Federalists,
as aforementioned, tended to express this opinion in terms of the sacrifices
that had just been made during the late Revolutionary War and the vigilance
which the living owed to the dead. Patrick Henry, recall, stated in his address
to the Virginia Ratifying Convention in June of 1788, “That spirit which has
enabled us to surmount the greatest difficulties; to that illustrious spirit I
address my most fervent prayer to prevent our adopting a system destructive to
liberty.” In this same attitude, Mercy Otis Warren wrote in her Observations on the New Constitution
that, “On these shores freedom has planted her standard, dipped in the purple
tide that flowed from the veins of her martyred heroes; and here every uncorrupted
American yet hopes to see it supported by the vigour, the justice, the wisdom
and unanimity of the people [.]” In both of these cases, the evident intention
was to remind the American people that they were too virtuous to permit the
creation of a central government which would so obviously run counter to the
spirit that they had but recently been given to express. Federalists naturally disagreed
that the terms of the proposed constitution in any way stood counter to the
values that had underpinned the Revolution, though certain of their stated
explanations revealed an appreciation for the essential virtues of the American
people that was not so different from that which was expressed by their
opponents.
Yes, Alexander
Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 73, the President would act as
Commander-in-Chief of, “The army and navy of the United States, and of the
militia of the several States when called into the actual service of
the United States,” but this was, “So consonant to the precedents of the State
Constitutions in general, that little need be said to explain or enforce it.” As
the inhabitants of the various states trusted their elected legislators to
restrain the relevant chief executive from abusing his military authority, so it
seemed that Hamilton believed it entirely proper for the American people as a
whole to take comfort in the fact that the chief executive of the United States
of America would likewise be hampered in his ability to command the armed
forces by the particular Representatives which they chose for themselves. Just
so, writing in Federalist No. 74 of the treaty-making power to be wielded by
the President and the Senate, Hamilton expressed an opinion of the
trustworthiness of a singular executive which arguably would not have seemed
out of place coming from the pen of one of his opponents. Attempting to explain
why it was that the President was required to cooperate with the Senate in
forging binding treaties with foreign powers, he accordingly admitted that,
An
avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the State to the
acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the
aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The
history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue,
which would make it wise in a Nation to commit interests of so delicate and
momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the
world, to the sole disposal of a Magistrate created and circumstanced as would
be a President of the United States.
The Senate – to be
elected by the same legislatures of the various states in which so many of the
Anti-Federalists vested their confidence and trust – would therefore serve the
function of restraining the chief executive and guarding the interests of the
American people.
As with the House
of Representatives in its role of restraining the use of the powers of
Commander-in-Chief, it was certainly possible that the membership of the Senate
– or a simple majority thereof – might seek to conspire with the President in
the furtherance of some shared objective. But just as the citizens of the various
states seemed to believe that the representatives which they chose to speak on
their behalf would act to prevent the relevant chief executives from abusing
the authority with which they had been trusted, so, too, did Hamilton seem to
believe that the two houses of Congress – their members also to be chosen by
some portion of the American people – would fulfill this same function within
the proposed national government. In this sense, while neither the critics nor
the advocates for the proposed constitution seem to have had much faith in the
ability of the individual to refrain from abusing whatever power happened to
fall within their grasp, both groups nevertheless maintained a certain amount
of faith in the American people as a whole – as well as in their chosen
representatives – to prevent such abuses from taking place. These two factions
may have disagreed as to the methods and mechanisms by which this sense of
equilibrium was achieved – indeed they did disagree, vehemently – but few of
people on either side seemed eager to deny that the surest guardians of the
liberties of the American people were the American people themselves.
The fact of this
apparent consensus is precisely what makes George Clinton’s commentary in the
cited passage of Cato V so interesting. While he certainly seemed to admire the
traits which the American people then believed that they possessed – “You are
characterised as cautious, prudent and jealous in politics” he accordingly
affirmed – he was also of the opinion that the American character was bound to
change in the course of time. As he had stated previously in the text of Cato
V, “Opinions and manners are mutable,” and in attempting to ascertain why it
was that anyone among his countrymen would have willingly agreed to submit
themselves to the authority of the proposed constitution when that selfsame
document appeared to him to be characterized by a dangerous inexplicitness he
pushed this same sentiment even further. “Is it because you do not believe that
an American can be a tyrant?” he asked. “If this be the case you rest on a weak
basis [.]” Without being able to say precisely why it was that Clinton was so
outwardly pessimistic about the long-term prospects of the American people
while most of his countrymen seemed comparatively quite hopeful – and leaving
off a discussion of whether or not he was correct in his assessment until a
point in the near future – it would seem worthwhile for the time being to delve
into just what exactly he was trying to communicate. Specifically, Clinton’s
references to “Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Domition,” and to the Roman Empire as
a whole, appear to bear at least some degree of explanation.
“Caesar,” of
course, was meant to refer to Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), a Roman soldier
and statesman whose boundless ambition ultimately brought about the collapse of
the ailing Roman Republic and the emergence of a vigorously autocratic empire
in its place. Owing to the speed with which he managed to bend the institutions
of Roman public life to his will, his often stunning military successes, his
dramatic demise at the hands of former allies, and the degree to which he rose
to a position of unparalleled power through a campaign of populism and
demagoguery, Caesar has understandably been a subject of both admiration and
admonition from almost the moment of his death over two thousand years hence. Subsequent
rulers of the Roman Empire turned his name into a title, thus bequeathing to
the Germans, Austrians, Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbians their Kaisers and
their Czars. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote a play in 1599 called Julius Caesar, though in point of fact
it was more concerned with the circumstances and aftermath of his assassination
than with the man himself. And many 18th century Americans, of
course, when attempting to exhort their countrymen to confront a given threat
to their rights and their liberties, used all that the name Caesar had come to
represent among contemporary admirers of the ancient Roman Republic as
shorthand for a kind of tyranny that derives its strength from popular
discontent.
Mercy Otis Warren
(1728-1814), for example, referred to Caesar in a negative light in her Observations on the New Constitution (1788)
and also built much of the atmosphere and flavor of her earlier satirical drama
The Adulateur (1772) on the
circumstances of his rise and fall. As it happened, her brother James Otis
(1725-1783), had also stated in his The
Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), in an attempt to
caution a British political establishment increasingly inclined to station
large numbers of regular troops in North America, that,
The danger
of a standing army in remote provinces is much greater to the metropolis, than
at home. Rome found the truth of this assertion, in her Sylla’s, her Pompey’s
and Caesar’s; but she found it too late: Eighteen hundred years have roll’d
away since her ruin.
Because his success
was so often attributed to the popularity he enjoyed among the soldiers under
his command, and to his use of populist reforms to curry favor with the masses,
Caesar served a very useful symbolic purpose for 18th century
Anglo-Americans seeking to discredit what they perceived as either rampant
militarism or the rise of political strongmen. And Caesar was very much the
archetypal strongman. His strength was rooted in the armies he had under his
command, he never seemed to fear using force to get what he wanted, and he
sought legitimacy by adopting and promoting popular causes like land reform and
lower taxes. By combining these characteristics, Caesar essentially made
himself an object of both fear and seduction. He was feared because he was
popular, and because he could use that popularity to rally the masses against
whomever he identified as his enemy. And he was seductive because, owing to his
habitual disregard for established laws and customs, he could give to his
allies a great deal more than they could ever have expected if they chose to
uphold the status quo.
Granted, there hadn’t really been a
figure in American history up to the late 1780s that much resembled Caesar,
notwithstanding the warnings of people like the Otis siblings. James had warned
of the emergence of a Caesar-like figure in North America resulting from
Britain’s decision in the 1760s to station a large force of British regulars in
the colonies. The person to which the elder Otis was referring was probably
Thomas Gage (1718-1787), Commander-in-Chief of British forces in America from
1763 and colonial governor of Massachusetts from 1774. But while Gage certainly
possessed some of the means to act in a Caesar-like fashion – inasmuch as he
commanded a large military force at a significant distance from the authority
to which he owed his allegiance – he lacked the popularity, the motive, or the
opportunity. If he had sought to use his position to take control of British America
at the point of a bayonet – an outcome for which, again, he showed no
inclination – and then marshalled the resources newly at his disposal in order
to invade and conquer Britain proper, it is doubtful he would have made it very
far at all. Unlike in Caesar’s day, when politics and the military were
essentially two sides of the same career path, military service wasn’t really
seen as a viable avenue to political power in 18th century Britain.
On the contrary, a person tended to join the officer corps of the British Army
or the Royal Navy because, as the second or third son of an otherwise prominent
family, the military seemed like the only way to secure a position of honor and
dignity for oneself while the elder sibling pursued a career in Parliament.
This was not the
only factor preventing the likes of Thomas Gage from following the path to
power laid out by Julius Caesar, of course. There
were the differences in costs – Roman legionaries were paid out of the plunder
secured by their general; British regulars were paid a salary supplied by the
Treasury. And there were the differences in logistics – Caesar only had to move
his invading army from Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy) to Rome; Gage would have
had to cross the Atlantic. And there were the differences present in the larger
political circumstances – the Roman Republic had been in the midst of a period
of political instability since about 146 BC, punctuated by the rise of
strongmen like Gaius Marius (157-86 BC), Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BC),
and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106-48 BC); Great Britain had been enjoying a
period of stability and prosperity unseen since the early 17th century.
Thomas Gage, in short, was no kind of Caesar because the 1760s British Empire
was no kind of Rome. And while James Otis was likely correct in assuming that
he could arouse the attention of those of his countrymen who, like him, were
familiar of the history of the Roman Republic by deploying the name of Caesar
in his polemic assertion of the rights of the British colonists in America, the
comparison which he was attempting to draw was demonstrably a rather tenuous one.
Mercy Otis
Warren’s attempts to deploy the specter of Julius Caesar in her aforementioned
satirical drama, The Adulateur (1772),
while perhaps theatrically effective, were in point of fact about as apt as her
brother’s. The villain of the piece, Rapatio, Governor of Servia, is a vain and
ruthless character based on the contemporary chief executive of colonial
Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780). Though a native of Servia
himself, Rapatio seems to care nothing for his country or its people, dreaming
only of the rewards which he might reap by quashing all resistance to his
absolute authority. Rapatio never compares himself to Caesar, however, nor
indicates with his actions that Caesar’s is the model that he is seeking to
emulate. That task is instead left to the characters of Gripeall, ruthless
captain of the Servian military, and Hazelrod, Lord Chief Justice of Servia and
Rapatio’s most outwardly sycophantic acolyte. In Act IV, Scene I, responding to
Raptio’s elation at the prospect of crushing his adversaries and rewarding his
faithful servants – “Hah, halcyon days!” he exclaims, “When
every flying moment/Affords new scenes of joy; what though the soldier/True to
my purpose hurls promiscuous slaughter” – the former responds by saying, “‘Twas
nobly spoken -- there breathed the soul of Caesar.” Shortly thereafter, in Act IV, Scene III, the latter attempts to explain the regard he
feels for his master Rapatio by declaring of him that,
When the ties of virtue and thy country,
Unhappy checked thy lust for power – like Caesar,
You nobly scorned them all and on the ruins,
Of bleeding freedom, founded all thy greatness.
Anyone even broadly
familiar with either the history of the Roman Republic or William Shakespeare’s
aforementioned presentation of the same would surely have been able to gather
the significance of lines such as these. Rapatio, by the acclamation of his
subordinates, was as ruthless as Caesar, as willing to draw the blood of his
countrymen in the cause of personal enrichment, and as unmoved by the dictates
of virtue or honor. But while Warren’s purpose in having characters close to
Rapatio glowingly compare him to Julius Caesar would seem to be clear enough
from a rhetorical standpoint, the connection between Caesar and Rapatio’s
real-world counterpart, Thomas Hutchinson, is somewhat less distinct.
Hutchinson, recall, was a native of
Boston who succeeded to the governorship of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in
1769 at the conclusion of a lengthy course of service in both the legislative and
executive branches of the contemporary colonial government. In 1737 he became a
Boston selectman, in 1738 he was elected to a seat in the Massachusetts General
Court, in 1754 he attended the Albany Convention– during which time he worked
with Benjamin Franklin on an ultimately unsuccessful plan for a union of the
Thirteen Colonies under continued British authority – and in 1758 he became
Lieutenant Governor under the newly-appointed Thomas Pownall (1722-1805).
Granted, the next dozen or so years saw Hutchinson’s popularity among his
fellow colonists decline precipitously as time and again he sided with the
Crown amidst the mounting crisis that came to dominate relations between
Britain and the Thirteen Colonies during the 1760s and 1770s. Still, for all that
his actions began to meet with popular discontent, neither his relationship
with the Massachusetts General Court nor his relationship with Parliament much
resembled that which existed in the final years of the Roman Republic between
Julius Caesar and the Roman Senate. Caesar was a strongman, as aforementioned;
a rabble-rouser who was perfectly willing to throw his weight around to get
what he wanted. The Senate being at that time a bastion of conservative social
and political thought, it members accordingly tended to balance indulging
Caesar – given his undeniable military and popular strength – and keeping him
at arms’ length. Thomas Hutchinson, by comparison, was a temperate,
steady-minded public servant who never seemed particularly inclined to threaten
anyone, almost always deferred to the authority of Parliament, and seemed to
prefer sober discussion to radical action of any kind. It might be argued,
perhaps, that he shared with Caesar an underlying intention to betray the best
interests of Massachusetts in favor of enhancing his own position. But if
Hutchinson was indeed a traitor to Massachusetts – and this is arguable at best
– he was simultaneously an ardent loyalist in the eyes of Parliament and the
Crown. No such plaudits could be laid at the feet of Caesar, whose highest
loyalty seemed always to be to himself.
In point of fact – and
notwithstanding what the Otis siblings were inclined to say on the matter – the
single person in the late 18th century United States whose situation
most closely resembled that of Julius Caesar was almost certainly George
Washington. He was not much of a strongman, to be sure, being far too cautious,
restrained, and outwardly humble to demand much in the way of autonomy or power
from either Congress or the American people. Indeed, whereas Caesar actively
pressured the Roman Senate to enlarge and extend the terms of his military governorship
in Gaul following his first year as Consul in 59 BC, Washington made a point of
resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army at the
earliest possible moment after the final evacuation of British troops from
American territory in the waning months of 1783. Likewise, Washington resisted
being made the first President of the United States in 1789 – preferring, by
his own affirmation, to spend his remaining years amidst the “domestic
felicity” of Mount Vernon – and being re-elected to that same office in 1792.
Notwithstanding such a well-attested aversion to the approbation of his
countrymen and the authority that often came with it, however, the primus inter parus of the Founding
Generation would nevertheless have been well-suited and well-equipped to
overturn the legitimacy of Congress and the sovereignty of the states by way of
appeals to military might and popular affection.
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