By way of offering a conclusion to
the present series – which has, as ever, gone on slightly longer than intended
– I would ask my readers to consider one final set of passages from George
Clinton’s Cato V. So far, in examining said document, we have discussed the purpose
and effects of different election intervals, the importance of education in a
democratic society, the nature and deficiencies of the 18th century
British House of Commons, and the many and various means by which outside
interests could, and did, and would, successfully gain control over bodies of
elected representatives between the time of Clinton’s writing in 1788 and the
present day of 2019. And while Clinton’s clarity of insight and expression have
been featured prominently throughout, thus far his perspective on the subject
at hand has tended towards keen observation rather than prophecy. That is to
say, though the author of Cato V was demonstrably a very astute individual who
readily grasped the nature of the relationship that exists in democratic jurisdictions
between political power and political institutions – and furthermore harbored
far from unreasonable ideas about how to improve democratic outcomes and stave
off potential subversion – he was also very much a man of his time and place.
He saw clearly and spoke shrewdly, no doubt, but within the intellectual and
socio-cultural confines of his era. This would hardly seem cause to find fault
with the man. No one should be thought less of for being unable to predict the
extraordinary, the unimaginable, or the unlikely, any more than they should be
castigated for failing to see around corners. What it does mean, however, is
that whenever one attempts to interrogate the wisdom of the past, one must keep
in mind what the subject in question did and didn’t know, could and couldn’t
know. George Clinton was a very wise man, but he could not know everything,
could not see everything, in his own time or in any other.
All that being said, people are
still capable of the rare stroke of intuition. Indeed, it is because they are
so rare that such insights are so impressive. It isn’t that they can literally
see into the future, such a feat at this point being practically impossible.
Rather, it’s that they are able to observe some aspect of their present
situation which to them seems likely to develop into a major factor of
historical change and that they proceed to call it out as such. There is luck
in this, of course, but also a degree of astute perception. Certain trends
which went on to reshape entire cultures over the course of decades or
centuries were not necessarily obvious to most observers in their early,
formative stages. No one, for example, seemed either willing or able to predict
the downfall of the French monarchy at the beginning of 1789. The French
economy was in dire straits, the people were hungry, and insurrectionary ideas
about absolutism and republicanism were circulating freely. Something was in
the offing, the more incisive onlookers would doubtless have agreed, but the
fall of the monarchy? The end of a line of kings that stretched back through
the houses of Bourbon, Valois, and Capet over a course of eight centuries? It
was quite simply inconceivable. That is to say, no one seemed willing or able
to conceive it. This is not always the case, of course. Sometimes, owing to
some innate capacity or a stroke of blind luck, someone is able to see what is
impending more clearly than all their contemporaries.
George Clinton, for all his aforementioned
limitations, did seem to possess this capacity himself. Not in all things,
mind, but in some things. For in the text of Cato V, armed with no more
knowledge than the wisest of his countrymen, he predicted something that hardly
any of his fellow Americans would then have had the stomach to admit. Namely,
that there might conceivably come a time when the American people ceased to
care any more about virtue, and liberty, and freedom, and justice, and that
they would substitute in their place a love of luxury and a lust for power.
Perhaps this seems too callous a description of what he American character has
become. Clinton did not seem to think so. Nor did he believe that Americans
were unique in their ability to shun virtue as their material circumstances
gradually improved. His contention, far from attempting to paint his countrymen
as unusual in their latent capacity for rapaciousness, was rather than
Americans were not half as special as they believed themselves to be. An ardent
love of virtue may have been the characteristic most widely embraced by the
inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies in response to the oppressions foisted on
them by the events of the 1760s and 1770s, but at some point this would almost
certainly cease to be the case. As the material, political, and social
circumstances of the American people changed – as they had begun to already
over the course of the 1780s – so too would their manners, interests, and
general character change in turn. And while no one could say for certain
whether this process would work out for better or for worse, Clinton was
adamant that his countrymen would only be deceiving themselves if they held to
the conviction that the latter outcome was impossible.
The context in which George Clinton offered
this assertion naturally had everything to do with the proposed constitution
then under scrutiny across the length of the United States. Certain supporters
of this new compact, he alleged, were willing to overlook its obvious
deficiencies – the inexactness of its language, the opportunities it afforded
for the abuse of its various powers, etc. – because they believed that, “The
opinions and manners of the people of America, are capable to resist and
prevent an extension of prerogative or oppression [.]” It was not that the
document in question was perfect, but that the American people were virtuous
enough so that it didn’t have to be. This, Clinton unsurprisingly asserted in
the third paragraph of Cato V, was a painfully shortsighted argument. “You must
recollect,” he admonished his countrymen,
That opinion
and manners are mutable, and may not always be a permanent obstruction against
the encroachments of government; that the progress of a commercial society
begets luxury, the parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy to
restraint; and that ambition and voluptuousness aided by flattery, will teach
magistrates, where limits are not explicitly fixed, to have separate and
distinct interests from the people [.]
Clinton went on to
very succinctly sum up his impression of the probable consequences of this
trend further on in the same section of Cato V. “Americans are like other men
in similar situations,” he thus affirmed,
When the
manners and opinions of the community are changed by the causes I mentioned
before, 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.
Obviously, there is
a great deal to unpack in these statements, not the least of which is what they
seem to say about George Clinton’s perception of the fundamental character of
the American people.
Far from
trumpeting the manifest virtues of his countrymen as reason enough to reject
the proposed constitution – as certain of his fellow Anti-Federalists most
certainly did – Clinton seemed to believe that it was in fact the probable
inability of the American people to maintain themselves in a perpetual state of
virtue that made the political compact on offer such a dangerous idea.
“Americans,” he declared accordingly, “Are like other men [;]” their manners
and opinions could change in time, become softened by prosperity, warped by
luxury, and at length no longer serve to prevent the reappearance of the worst
abuses that the species had been made to suffer in the context of political
society. Keen though this reasoning may have been, it was also an exceptionally
sober evaluation of the moral disposition of the American people. Consider, by
way of comparison, the manner in which Clinton’s aforementioned Anti-Federalist
colleagues spoke or wrote of the American character at around the same time.
Patrick Henry
(1736-1799), referring to that selfsame subject in his address to the Virginia
Ratifying Convention a few months earlier in 1788, stated that, “The time has
been when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I
believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American [.]” Granting
that the originator of the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death” here
seemed to be referring to the “pulse of liberty” in the past tense – as if to
say that he felt himself now alone in experiencing it – later passages in the
same address do show him attempting to rouse this same sentiment in his
listeners there and then. The American spirit, he stated accordingly, was,
“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 essence, it seemed, Henry was
trying to goad his countrymen into rejecting the proposed constitution by
telling them, last he had checked, that Americans were too virtuous, too fond
of liberty, and too jealous of their rights to allow them to be so easily
subverted or forgotten. If he did not believe that they would respond
accordingly – that they yet held fast to the spirit he was seeking to invoke –
one imagines that he would not have bothered.
Robert Yates (1738-1801) – writing as
Brutus – similarly affirmed in one of his own anti-constitutional missives
that,
I
need say no more, I presume, to an American, than that this principle is a
fundamental one, in all the Constitutions of our own States; there is not one
of them but what is either founded on a declaration or bill of rights, or has
certain express reservation of rights interwoven in the body of them. From this
it appears, that at a time when the pulse of liberty beat high, and when an
appeal was made to the people to form Constitutions for the government of
themselves, it was their universal sense, that such declarations should make a
part of their frames of government.
Again, the impression which Yates seemed
eager to convey was that his countrymen were, at base, too attached to the
liberties for which they recently fought to give them up so casually to the
kind of powerful central government described in the text of the proposed
constitution. Doubtless he would not have attempted to rouse what he did not
believe was there, or indeed would continue to be there for the foreseeable
future.
Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), in her Observations on the New Constitution,
meanwhile seemed to be of much the same opinion as Henry and Yates. Namely, she
affirmed that the supporters of the proposed constitution represented an
ambitious and self-interested cabal whose character and interests set them
almost completely apart from the bulk of the American people. “On these shores freedom has planted her standard,” she thus
affirmed,
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 spite of the deep-laid
plots the secret intrigues, or the bold effrontery of those interested and
avricious adventurers for place, who intoxicated with the ideas of distinction
and preferment have prostrated every worthy principle beneath the shrine of
ambition.
Granting that the
language which she sought to deploy was a fair bit more visceral than was
favored among her fellow Anti-Federalists, the sentiment Warren was attempting
to communicate was entirely typical of that selfsame cohort. Americans, she
asserted, were better than this. They had sacrificed too much, loved justice
too dearly to turn over their rights to the custodianship of a small group of
powerful magistrates, elected or otherwise. Their liberties were better left in
their own hand; the same hands that had wrested them from the covetous grasp of
tyranny.
Clearly, though he was in agreement
with his fellow Anti-Federalists that the proposed constitution represented a
mortal danger to the American people – and should accordingly have been
rejected – Clinton did not endorse this course of action because he believed
that the mass of his fellow countrymen were more virtuous as a whole than their
prospective governors were likely to be. On the contrary, he opposed the
ratification of the proposed constitution because he believed that its deficiencies,
while perhaps rendered moot in the interim by the virtuousness of the
contemporary American character, would at length fall prey to the changing
attitudes of a people no more capable of indefinitely shrugging off the
temptation of self-interest and the softening influence of luxury than were any
other. Far from attempting to rouse his countrymen to action, then, by
reminding them that they were too attached to liberty as a fundamental aspect
of their character to submit themselves to as powerful a government as
described by the proposed constitution, Clinton rather seemed intent on
disabusing his fellow Americans of any notion they may have formed as to their
collective ability to rise above the kinds of petty impulses that had heralded
the destruction of other peoples at other times. Americans, he thus affirmed,
were not better than their counterparts in contemporary Europe or Ancient Rome.
They were not more virtuous, more selfless, less given to corruption or
egotism. Rather, as with any people, they were the product of their
environment, their resources, and their experiences. Privation and oppression –
in the form of Britain’s heavy-handed treatment of the Thirteen Colonies in the
1760s and 1770s – had taught them to prize liberty and justice, but prosperity
and luxury might yet teach them to prize other things entirely.
While the 1780s had certainly not been all
that kind to the fledgling United States of America – between a nationwide
credit crisis, concomitant economic instability, and periodic civil
disturbances – this kind of dour attitude towards the prospects facing the
American people most definitely set George Clinton apart from the majority of
his countrymen. The Revolutionary War had ended scarcely five years prior with
Britain’s defeat and recognition of the sovereignty of the American republic.
Having thus defeated one of the most powerful empires the world had ever known
with a hastily-assembled army and a collection of local militias – and, yes,
French, Spanish, and Dutch assistance – the inhabitants of the United States
yet had every reason to continue basking in the exaltation of what they had
accomplished and to continue justifying their success as stemming chiefly from
their superior virtue vis-à-vis their British counterparts. America’s future,
in the eyes of those who held to these sentiments despite the difficulties that
the United States was presently experiencing – and the need which some of them
felt to draft an entirely new national charter – was accordingly very bright.
As their collective behavior over the previous decade-and-a-half had shown,
Americans met the most trying challenges imaginable with righteousness,
dignity, and perseverance. Whatever the future might cast into their path –
including economic crises, civil conflicts, and even an attempt by some
self-interested cabal to bamboozle the people into giving up their rights – the
American character would surmount every obstacle so long as it stayed true to
its nature. That Clinton disagreed with
this assessment should by now be quite clear. What remains to explore, then, is
precisely why. Fortunately, the cited text of Cato V would seem to contain the
beginnings of an answer.
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