The Federalist Fourth of July

By Alexander Hughes

Monday, July 03, 2023

 

Our historical remembrances on Independence Day, insofar as we bother with them in between hot dogs and fireworks (both of which, to be clear, I heartily endorse), usually focus on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson. After all, Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence; he defined the American creed by the self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

 

But if Jefferson was the poet of the early republic’s civic identity, John Adams was its driving force. It was Adams who was indispensable in convincing the Second Continental Congress that the time had come for American independence. It was also Adams who gave the task of writing the document to Jefferson and whom Jefferson called its “ablest advocate.”

 

Of course, Adams and Jefferson grew to be bitter rivals, only reconciling after both had largely retreated from public view. They grew apart in large part because they disagreed profoundly on the nature of the great task they had undertaken in 1776. Without Adams, our understanding of the Fourth is, at best, incomplete. I defer to Russell Kirk’s magnum opus The Conservative Mind to explain the Adamsian understanding of the Founding:

 

By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives—as Burke puts it, “A revolution not made, but prevented.” Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonies felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence hardly anticipated. It was a profound problem: the Republicans, Jefferson and Madison chief among them, endeavored to solve it by the application of a priori concepts, and came to sympathize with French equalitarian theories. Their opponents, the Federalists, appealed to the lessons of history, the legacy of British liberties, and the guarantees of prescriptive constitutions.

 

The Jeffersonian approach to human rights was essentially universal; it posited that man need only throw off his chains to enjoy the fruits of freedom. George III and his Parliament were odious not because they upset the ways early Americans traditionally governed themselves but because they infringed on their rights as individuals. But this view leads to instability when it comes to actual governance; one can only imagine the direction of American history had Jefferson’s proposal that the Constitution be rewritten every 20 years been adopted.

 

It also led him to support the French Revolution, at least in its early stages, an event that Adams was intensely skeptical of. Conservatives should follow Adams’s example in recognizing the American Founding as a unique event in world history. The truths of the Declaration may be “self-evident,” but the form of a functioning government that recognizes them is not. The institutions that allow men to live freely and peaceably as equals hold strongest among a people out of whom they have organically grown. Those institutions also depend for their perpetuation on people with the strength of character to avoid abusing the liberties they provide. I return to The Conservative Mind:

 

Adams preferred the concept of virtue to the concept of freedom. But he did not think the first excluded the second; on the contrary, enduring liberty is the child of virtue. Liberty is not to be got by simple proclamation; it is the creation of civilization and of heroic exertions by a few brave souls.

 

In his work for the Continental Congresses and in writing a constitution for Massachusetts that became a model for the federal Constitution, Adams did his part to create American civilization. He also practiced what he preached. Many people know that he faced widespread public condemnation for representing in court the Redcoats involved in the Boston Massacre on the grounds that the accused deserve a defense; fewer are aware of the long years he spent away from his wife and home to serve as America’s ambassador to foreign lands and the dangers he faced in crossing the seas to get there. It was because of the prudence and self-sacrifice of men like Adams that the world took seriously the words of Jefferson. In that spirit, we ought rededicate ourselves today to living the lives of dignity and principle that will revive the spirit of liberty for another generation.