Fears of a Setting Sun by Dennis C. Rasmussen
Benjamin Franklin’s observation to a woman that the United States was “a republic, if you can keep it” has become so ubiquitous that its original foreboding tone has almost been lost entirely. The phrase in our own day has become almost a cheerful maternal admonition. Yet, the Revolutionary generation that wrote the United States Constitution and shaped the American republic’s regime treated the phrase not so much as a kindly or triumphalist admonition, but as a threat with consequences that were near at hand.
Though Americans no longer deify the “Founding Fathers” in quite the way they once did, they do still tend to exalt and even venerate what the founders founded, namely the Constitution and the American form of government. Few Americans would even contemplate jettisoning any of the basic features of the constitutional order: The separation of powers into three branches, the checks and balances among those branches, the bicameral Congress, the division of sovereignty between national and local authorities, and the Bill of Rights.
Thus, it may come as something of a surprise, then, to learn that the founders themselves were, particularly by the end of their lives, far less confident in the merits of the political system that they had devised, and that many of them in fact deemed it an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation.
The book, Fears of a Setting Sun, illustrates the story of the profound sense of disillusionment that plagued four of the preeminent figures of the period: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
These four lost their faith in the American experiment at different times and for different reasons, and each has his own unique story. George Washington became disillusioned above all because of the rise of parties and partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was not sufficiently vigorous or energetic, John Adams because he believed that the American people lacked the requisite civic virtue for republican government, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions that were laid bare by conflict over the spread of slavery. Whatever sense of hope the founders may have felt at the new government’s birth, almost none of them carried that optimism to their graves.
This book is a necessary corrective, and also offers a helpfully subtle and thoughtful criticism of the originalist dogmatism that typifies conservative intellectual, legal, and political thought in the United States. The generation of American politicians and thinkers who wrote the fundamental laws of the United States did not stop thinking about politics or the nature of the regime they created when the Constitution was ratified in 1788. The founders, argued the author, should be understood as statesmen who believed their regime would have to respond on some level to historic, political, and social developments. This did not mean they affirmed the notion of a living constitution a la the late twentieth century progressives; but neither did it mean they were constitutional or legal antiquarians. Their society had failings, and their politics had failings. Far from being triumphalist American exceptionalists, the founders believed their regime was always closer to destruction than moderns have realized.
Washington looms large in the book’s narrative. The first president shaped the office and by proxy the American regime in important ways. Washington created the presidency even if he was not its statutory progenitor. Washington never saw the regime he oversaw as safe, largely because he believed that the development of what he called “factions” would inevitably lead to the downfall of the republic. Factions, or parties, inflamed political passions and infected everything with their divisive spirit.
Washington’s long-term disillusioned began to set in during the election year of 1792. The prior autumn Jefferson and Madison had, unbeknownst to Washington, started taking steps to organize opposition to the Hamilton-led Federalist program. The Freneau launched the National Gazatte in October 1791, and within a few months it emerged as a fawning admirer of Jefferson and a vicious critic of Hamilton. Freneau was unrelenting in his attack: every aspect of Hamilton ‘s financial program was depicted as a deliberate ploy to fleece everyday Americans and further enrich greedy merchants, as well as a dangerous power grab on behalf of the federal government that would inevitably pave the road toward monarchy. In response, the pro-administration papers grew ever more strident and colorful in their denunciations of the emerging Republican party. The result was an increasing spiral of invective, scandalmongering, and bald-faced lies that makes much of today’s “fake news” appear rather tame by comparisons. The partisan newspapers were truly scandalous. Indeed, never in American history has the press been more vitriolic and more scurrilous than it was in the 1790s.
Washington’s two terms saw parties divide the American populace over everything from foreign policy to economics. The author is careful to note that Washington was not naïve. The first president did not believe that American politicians or their policies would be the province of pure-minded selfless individuals, nor did he think that corruption would be proscribed entirely. He did, however, assume that party conflict would be relatively short-lived, and that it would only define political life in the American republic at irregular intervals during times of acute political controversy. Parties would rise, fight out the issue that needed resolution, and then fade again quickly after. The fact that parties became permanent fixtures in the American political milieu worried Washington to the degree that he believed factional disagreements would kill the republic.
No Federalist politician defined Washington’s administration more than Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and no prominent politico had graver concerns over the very nature of the American republic from the outset of its creation. Hamilton feared as early as the 1780s that the newly created central government that succeeded the Articles of Confederation would not have sufficient energy, or vitality. Hamilton’s dispositions, Rasmussen noted, ran counter to the intellectual and political mood of the Federalist Era. Federalism—the states retaining a significant measure of power vis a vis the central government—of some sort remained the goal of most congressmen in the last decade of the eighteenth century; Hamilton’s robust nationalism found its outlet in financial and economic policy.
Hamilton’s nationalism stemmed from his own massive personal ambition and his ambitions for the United States. More so than any other member of the founding generation, Hamilton used the language of empire in its traditional sense. The model state in his mind remained Great Britain. An American republic that never developed in to anything more than a North American confederation of loosely-joined states would never achieve the type of greatness that would allow the United States to eventually compete on the world state with the great empires of the day: Britain, France, Spain, and Russia, all of which retained territorial ambitions on the North American continent in 1790. Nationalism, and the centralizing of control of the republican empire in the federal government, fixed Hamilton’s political mind on the role of state authority in the early national United States. That his fellow Americans worried more about the potential rise of monarchy, and seemed blissfully unconcerned about anarchy, drove Hamilton’s disquiet to the point where he flirted with notions of militarism and other forms of authoritarianism in the years following Washington’s death in 1799.
Hamilton’s bête noire when he left power in 1797 was not Thomas Jefferson or other prominent followers of Jefferson. Rather, Hamilton clashed most prominently with Washington’s successor, John Adams. The second president, unlike Washington or Hamilton, worried more over the moral and social condition of the American people than the potential structural or institutional weaknesses in the republic’s political framework. Adams famously insisted that the United States’ constitution was only fit for a religious people. The tie between religion and virtue was never very far from Adams’ mind, and he seemed unconvinced that Americans exemplified the appropriate degree of virtue to maintain republic government. Adams warned particularly about American avarice. Certain classes of men slouched towards penury almost by nature, and this sort of greed and social climbing eventually could overwhelm the constitutional framework. Like classical Rome, the United States could be subverted by designing men who used the greed and class resentment of the masses against the natural aristocrats that Adams believed should rightly rule the United States. His solution was, the author notes, to institutionalize potential class conflict in respective federal institutions and give them a voice—a political release valve—that ensured their concerns might be addressed before they metastasized into a grave social ill that threatened the republic.
Thomas Jefferson didn’t share Adams’ low view of humanity, but he did share an ominous sense that the republic he worked so long to create in the American Revolution was not long for this world. Jefferson in particular worried that the agrarian republic he hoped the Constitution might sustain was being quickly turned into a crass society of urban bankers, lawyers, and capitalists who would import all the vices of the British Empire that the War for Independence had just thrown off. Jefferson is often portrayed as a silent brooding presence in American politics, but the author notes that in some ways Jefferson’s despair for the American republic was interrupted more regularly than other figures analyzed in the book. Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 and the United States’ victory in the War of 1812 provided evidence for the Virginian that all was not lost for the republic. The main source of fear for Jefferson in his last years was not Hamiltonian Federalists—they had been thoroughly vanquished by 1820 and his Republicans ruled the American republic—but the status of slavery and how it might affect the Union. The controversy over slavery, the third president prophesied, would be the death knell of the Union.
To summarize, Fears of a Setting Sun has offered a valuable and important volume not only for scholars, but for interested laypeople and religious ministers as well. The men who very literally created the American political order did not view American politics as static or sacrosanct. Changes, and significant changes, might be needed from time to time to keep the republic from falling into anarchy and its people into license. The founders, to their credit, didn’t sacralize their moment in history; they saw the social and political ills of their time with eyes wide open. So too should their successors in American politics and intellectual life.
