Contrasting Models of Revolutionary Leadership
American Models of Revolutionary Leadership, Chapter 1
Daniel J. Elazar
No dimension of the revolutions of the modern world has been more
crucial to their outcome than leadership. Think of Cromwell,
Washington, Napoleon, and Lenin; of Samuel Adams, Robespierre,
and Trotsky. The mere mention of the names clarifies the
question. In an age of revolutions, in which every revolution at
least pretends to democratic ends, it is the leadership of each
that has made the difference.
In March 1783, George Washington assembled the officers of his
army at Newburgh, New York, in a manner that most clearly
expressed the standard for American revolutionary leadership. At
one time every American schoolchild knew the story and at least
the gist of Washington's words. The Continental Army, fresh from
its victory over the British and in the aftermath of the peace
treaty signed between the newly recognized United States of
America and Great Britain, was instructed to disband without
soldiers and officers receiving the pay due them. Feeling was
running high in certain circles in the army that the
Confederation Congress was unable to govern and that the only
way to save the country was for the army to take power and
install Washington as the head of a new government -- to
transform Washington into a Cromwell. Washington, rejecting all
such thoughts, used his farewell to his officers to drive the
point home, beginning so dramatically by pulling out his
spectacles to read his farewell address with the comment,
"Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I
have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my
country," thereby bringing tears to the eyes of his companions
and winning the day before he read a word of his text.1 The myth
alone has inspired generations of Americans to respect their
democratic institutions even when they seem to be functioning
less than adequately.
In every aspect of his career George Washington set a new and
special example of revolutionary leadership. His leadership was
assured through his commanding moral posture rather than through
any particular brilliance. His principal talent was in holding
together semi-voluntary coalitions, military and political.
Every office he held was gained through legitimate means, either
election or appointment. Although he was personally ambitious,
his ambitions were all directed to achieving position within a
constitutional framework. Radical in his opposition to British
encroachments on American liberties and in his advocacy of
American independence, he was conservative in his emphasis on
maintaining constitutional processes and institutional
continuity as far as possible. Perhaps the best single word to
describe his leadership is "sober." In this respect he is the
exemplar of Martin Diamond's definition of the American
Revolution as a "revolution of sober expectations.2
Unfortunately, Washington's standard for revolutionary leadership
has not been widely emulated outside the United States, just as
the American Revolution has been emulated far less than the
French Revolution by other modern revolutionary movements. The
standard for revolutionary leadership for most of the world has
been set by Robespierre and Napoleon, not by Washington and his
compatriots. Robespierre reflects the impatience of the
ideologist fanatically committed to his cause with any restraints
that might prevent him from achieving total social and political
revolution. Napoleon is the model opportunist of great ambition
and talent who emerges out of the wreckage of revolution to
inherit power by brilliantly combining a certain lip-service to
revolutionary ideals with implementation of those aspects of the
original revolutionary program that advance his popularity and
legitimacy while aborting all the others. What Robespierre and
Napoleon were to France, Lenin and Stalin were to Russia. And
the Russian Revolution is only the most prominent example of the
repetition of the French revolutionary pattern. In this contrast
the American Revolution gains even greater luster.
The Problem: Revolution and Great Ambition
Political ambition, like other kinds of ambition, is a basic
human appetite. John Adams went so far as to suggest that
ambition was the basic human appetite, which may have reflected
more upon him than upon humanity but is not entirely wide of the
mark.3 Like other human appetites, ambition is not evenly
distributed among the population, but enough people with
substantial political ambition are naturally drawn to political
careers to make the problem of controlling it a major aspect of
constitutional government. Indeed, the other founders of the
United States were as aware of this problem as was Adams and
devoted much of their concern for constitutional design to
dealing with it. The Federalist emphasizes that the American
Constitution is designed so that ambition will counteract
ambition, that being a basic reason for introducing checks and
balances into the political system.4
Revolutions by their very nature stimulate ambition and offer new
opportunities for its exercise, especially, but not exclusively,
for people new to the political arena. Moreover, revolutions are
particularly attractive to those very few who have extraordinary
political ambition. Such people are likely to exist in every
generation, and if they cannot capitalize upon a revolution not
of their own creation, they seek to generate one for their own
purposes. Abraham Lincoln was acutely aware of this problem and
provided one of the most felicitous discussions of it in his
well-known address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield:
That our government should have been maintained in its
original form from its establishment until now [1838], is not
much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it
through that period, which now are decayed, and crumbled
away. Through that period, it was felt by all, to be an
undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a
successful one. Then, all that sought celebrity and fame,
and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that
experiment. Their all was staked upon it: -- their destiny
was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to
display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration
of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been
considered, at best no better than problematical; namely, the
capability of a people to govern themselves. If they
succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to
be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and
mountains; and to be revered and sung and toasted through all
time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves and
fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be
forgotten. they succeeded. The experiment is successful;
and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so.
But the game is caught; and I believe it is true, that with
the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. This field of
glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.
But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field.
It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true,
to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue
to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as
naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as
others have so done before them. The question, then, is, can
that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an
edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it
cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for
any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose
ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a
gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to
the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle[.] What!
think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar,
or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten
path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no
distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of
fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is
glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in
the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It
thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will
have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or
enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect that
some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with
ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at
some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it
will require the people to be united with each other,
attached to the government and laws, and generally
intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.
Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he
would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good
as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left
to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to
the task of pulling down.5
Lincoln properly suggests that the principal leaders in
revolutionary times will not be people of ordinary political
ambition but are likely to be of the family of the lion and the
tribe of the eagle, who are potentially very dangerous to the
body politic -- certainly to republican institutions. Most civil
societies that have undergone revolutions have been unable to
control this product of revolution. Of the four great
revolutions of the modern epoch, only one, the American, was able
to do so.
The English Revolution (civil war), despite the great tradition
of the liberties of Englishmen and the extensive
institutionalization of that tradition over the previous 450
years or more, produced Oliver Cromwell, who seized power in the
name of the revolution and become a despot bound only by his
sense of God's expectations and his inclination to benevolence.
Neither was sufficient to prevent public dissatisfaction with his
rule and the ultimate restoration of the monarchy. However
lacking in character the Stuarts were, the institution of the
monarchy was preferable for Englishmen, even most of those of
the Puritan persuasion, to a despotism, however benevolent, that
seemed to be heading toward a new dynasty.
I have already suggested that the French and Russian revolutions
failed even more miserably from this perspective. The traditions
of English liberty rather quickly brought down Cromwell's regime
and in relatively short order transformed the monarchy as well.
The French Revolution produced its Robespierre as quickly as the
English civil war produced Cromwell. But since Robespierre
lacked all sense of restraint, neither bowing to God nor
possessing a spirit of benevolence, his excesses were
exacerbated just as quickly, and his downfall was more rapid and
painful. His fate did not dampen the ambitions of his
successors, since the situation was structurally oriented to
encourage similar excesses. Only their lack of talent prevented
them from achieving similar dominance until Napoleon, who was
both more talented and less principled than Robespierre, came
along. Although he captured the imagination of France and has
held the affections of his countrymen to this day, any objective
observer would have to rank him as an utter betrayer of the
revolution, even though he capitalized on revolutionary ideals to
bleed France on a hundred battlefields and to assert his own
absolute power as ruler of that hapless country.
Napoleon's ambition knew no bounds and was further fed by his
assessment that, as an upstart, he needed one success after
another to stay in power. As a result he overreached himself and
fell, not only bringing back the Bourbons, but starting a
tradition of French military defeat that has persisted ever
since. (Since the early days of his ascendancy, France has not
won a war against an equal power, except on the backs of its
allies.) Moreover, the struggle between those who desired
Napoleonic leadership and those who feared it kept France in
turmoil for the next 150 years until Charles De Gaulle, the first
French leader to follow the Washingtonian model, albeit with a
French style, brought the French Revolution to a successful
conclusion by securing the involvement of the full political
spectrum in the writing of the Constitution of the Fifth
Republic. Under his leadership a regime was inaugurated that had
the consent of virtually all the French people for the first
time since 1789.
The Russian Revolution brought an even worse result, since Russia
had even fewer institutional and cultural restraints on the
excesses of leaders than did France. When the Bolsheviks seized
power in an absolutist state their leader, V.I. Lenin, simply
used the existing absolutist tradition to become the Russian
Revolution's Robespierre without suffering the same consequences.
Lenin consolidated the power of his party and regime, leaving
both intact to be inherited by Joseph Stalin after a relatively
mild power struggle among possible successors.
Lenin destroyed any possibility of democratic republicanism and
the introduction of civil liberties through his ruthless pursuit
of revolutionary goals. Stalin reinforced the results and went
beyond Lenin for reasons more personal than ideological. Between
the two of them they generated quantitatively the greatest
bloodbath of the twentieth century and possibly of all time,
utterly aborting the ideals they presumably sought to advance and
imposing upon the peoples of the Soviet Union a despotism more
comprehensive and penetrating in its scope than any known before.
In each of these cases, the goals of the revolutionaries were
admirable enough (if in some cases too utopian to stand a chance
of success). They were perverted by the leaders spawned by the
revolutions themselves. To state that is not sufficient,
however, to explain why these revolutions spawned such leadership
and the American Revolution did not. However important,
leadership is but one factor in revolutionary situations. Two
other factors of equal weight are the character of popular
participation and the institutionalization of the results. Every
revolution could and should be assessed in terms of the action of
the public that made or joined it, in the character of its
revolutionary leadership, and in the way its goals were
subsequently institutionalized.
It is in the nature of revolutions that there will be popular
involvement. That is what distinguishes them from rebellions or
palace uprisings. So it is not the existence of popular
participation, but its character and quality that constitutes the
crucial question.
The characteristic manifestations of popular participation in the
American Revolution were the town meetings and the committees of
correspondence, the state militias and the Continental Line; in
other words, self-organized means of popular expression.
Contrast that with the principal image of the French Revolution,
the Parisian mob storming the Bastille or cheering on the reign
of terror; or the Russian Revolution with its "masses" storming
the Winter Palace and other institutions of the regime. In both
cases the reality matched the image. Mobs and masses were
important, and the successful leaders were those demagogues who
could capture them or manipulators who learned how to turn them
out. Only the English civil war, with its Puritan congregations
and New Model Army, presents an image similar to that of the
American Revolution.
This is not to say there were no mobs in the American Revolution.
There were some. The best known were relatively lighthearted,
like the highly organized "mob" that dumped the tea into Boston
harbor. Others -- those that attacked the Tories -- were far
more vicious. But such mobs as emerged were small and local;
their role was very minor in the overall scheme of things and had
no real political significance. Certainly they did not influence
the decisions of the governing bodies -- local, provincial or
state, or continental.6
So, too, it may be added, were there occasional mobs during the
English civil war, of the same relative unimportance. Cromwell
seized power with an army behind him. Before that, the king was
deposed, tried, and executed by Parliament.
Thus the American Revolution had a precedent for organized
popular action, but the Americans carried it to new heights in
scope and spread. This in turn ensured that all revolutionary
leaders were, from the first, representative of organized bodies
of citizens and were empowered to act through legal and orderly
processes of election or appointment. Leaders did not rise to
power through usurpation because they could not. There never was
a stage of anarchy in the American Revolution; power was
transferred in an orderly fashion; often the same bodies
previously authorized to govern under the British simply
disbanded within that framework and reconstituted themselves
within the new one on the basis of local and statewide political
compacts. Delegates to the Continental Congresses were elected
by those in similar bodies, and the congresses were never rump
forums.
The American revolutionaries went to great lengths to develop or
sharpen a theory of popular sovereignty through political compact
to ensure the legitimacy of their actions.7 But even more than
theory, they maintained regular and proper procedures throughout
the Revolution. Indeed, due process became a principal means of
legitimization that was carried over into post-revolutionary
American constitutionalism to maintain standards of right action
by governments and legitimate channels for political and social
change.
Stated in so few words, no doubt the picture seems prettier than
it was in reality. There were, after all, Tories who were driven
out of the country. Still, the American Revolution is the only
one in which no one was executed for his political stance. While
there might have been excesses in one locality or another, the
overall picture presented here is the most accurate one.
The initial institutionalization of popular participation
continued throughout the revolutionary period, from its
pre-revolutionary stages beginning in 1763 through the writing
and ratification of the 1787 Constitution and the organization
of the new federal government in 1789. It occurred in every
arena, from the most local to the national, and moved forward as
the Revolution progressed and then had to be consolidated.
Moreover, there were consistent and continuous relationships
between the institutions of each arena that interacted with one
another to empower each other to act. To an extraordinary degree
what formally became the American political system after
completion of the adoption of the Articles of Confederation in
March 1781 was a political system from the first, from 1763
onward. Elsewhere I have discussed and documented some of the
patterns of interaction leading up to the Declaration of
Independence.8 Historians of the period have done the same in
far greater depth with regard to the adoption of the Articles of
Confederation and the Constitution of 1787. In the past few
years there has been a spate of excellent studies on the
interplay between local and state bodies with regard to the
formation of the individual states and the adoption of their
revolutionary era constitutions.9 In sum, American revolutionary
leaders had to function not only within the context of ordered
popular control, but within an institutionalized framework that
protected the Revolution and did not allow counterrevolutionary
leaders even to appear.
Contrast this with the other three great revolutions. The
English civil war, which did quite well in popular participation
and produced good leadership in the first stages of the conflict
with the king and for the war itself, failed in its efforts at
institutionalization almost from the first. Although the
existing institutions, both governmental and religious, prevented
any serious manifestations of anarchy, they were unable to work
out either the additional institutional apparatus or the
inter-institutional relationships necessary to create a new
overarching framework. This led to the collapse of the
revolutionary movement within half a generation of the outbreak
of civil war and to the restoration of the old Stuart regime.
Without proper institutionalization in the countrywide arena,
national leadership became a matter of usurpation, however fine
its motive, and ultimately a betrayal of the revolution.
The French Revolution began with a variety of efforts to
institutionalize the popular uprising, but all failed until
Napoleon usurped power and imposed an institutional structure on
the country. In the interim, France went through a period of
virtual anarchy for nearly ten years. There is a school of
American historiography that is fond of referring to the middle
years of the 1780s as years of anarchy in the United States, but
in fact even the occasional rebellion of debtors was localized
and sort and did not lead to a breakdown of the institutions of
government anywhere -- a great contrast to the French situation,
where successive governmental experiments had virtually no
staying power during the country's period of anarchy. While
institutions were formally established, the struggle for their
control was so violent on every level that their existence became
almost meaningless.
Napoleon, like Cromwell before him and Stalin after, usurped
power from within, after being chosen for a revolutionary office
in a legitimate way; but it was usurpation all the same, carried
further than by either Cromwell or Stalin in the sense that
Napoleon finally abolished the revolutionary regime and
established an empire in its place. The Napoleonic regime also
was brief; in the end the old regime was restored and the
revolution substantially aborted until a lesser revolution took
place half a generation later. Napoleon's great legacy to France
was the internal institutional structure he imposed on the
country in both the governmental and the religious spheres.
Apparently the French were so shaken by anarchy that they
preferred to preserve Napoleon's hierarchical structure rather
than try any further efforts to diffuse power broadly among the
citizenry.
The Russian Revolution was even more substantially dominated by a
period of anarchy than was the French Revolution, albeit for a
shorter time. The Russian revolutionaries had no state or local
institutions to build upon or that they could even capture and
turn to their own ends. In effect, they had to build the country
from the bottom up, which they claimed to do through the various
levels of soviets serving the different arenas within the Russian
empire. But the extent of the Bolshevik revolution was such that
these soviets themselves were ultimately repressed and replaced
by Bolshevik institutions bearing the same name but without the
popular base.
The Russian case is almost the reverse of the English; popular
participation was anarchic, and institutionalization came at the
end of the revolution in the most heavy-handed manner. The prior
anarchy enabled a small but very determined elite, capable of
being far more ruthless than Napoleon, not only to impose on the
country their own will and a regime of their design, but
essentially to exterminate or expel all possible threats to that
regime. In Russia, the ancien regime did not come back; instead
there was usurpation from within, with Stalin seizing power from
his revolutionary colleagues. The result was not a reactionary
but reformable regime, as in England, or a slower process of
consolidation of the revolution's gains, as in France, but a
totalitarian police state.
The English could gain from a situation in which there was proper
popular participation but insufficient institutionalization even
though it took a little longer to do so and the revolution itself
failed. The French could survive in a situation in which there
was neither proper popular participation nor proper
institutionalization; it simply took them much longer to gain the
results of the revolution. The worst result was in Russia, where
there was a lack of proper popular participation but rapid
institutionalization by a small elite to achieve the formal goals
of the revolution, yet in such a way as to produce an utterly
contrary actual result.
The Varieties of American Revolutionary Leadership
and Their
Common Denominator
The major figures of the American Revolution can be classified
into four categories: the revolutionaries, exemplified by Samuel
Adams and Patrick Henry; the statesmen, exemplified by Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; the constitutional architects,
exemplified by John Adams and James Madison; and the father of
his country, George Washington -- in a class by himself. While
each category reflected the application of somewhat different
talents to different tasks, what is most interesting for our
purposes is the common denominator that kept them all within the
American style of revolutionary leadership. Let us look at each
in turn.
Revolutionaries
Revolutions are made by people, but people are made willing to
initiate or join a revolution by a very select group of
individuals capable of finding reasons why a revolution is
necessary and then taking the action necessary to foment it. Two
of the most prominent such figures in the American Revolution
were Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry.
Samuel Adams (1722-1803), who lived to be eighty-one, was a
professional politician throughout the revolutionary generation.
He was the chief organizer of the opposition to the Stamp Act in
Massachusetts and managed the Boston Tea Party. He is generally
characterized as a "born revolutionary." He was a delegate to
the Continental Congress throughout the active period of the war
and signed the Declaration of Independence. At the same time he
helped frame the Massachusetts constitution and was the author of
its bill of rights. Although he opposed the federal
Constitution, he did not retire from state politics, being
elected lieutenant governor in 1789 and becoming governor in
1794, an office he held for three years.
The contrast between Samuel Adams as a revolutionary and
revolutionary ideologist and similar figures from other major
modern revolutions is striking in every respect. He was
convinced of the rightness of his cause and the need to promote
it with all the political and propaganda skills at his disposal.
Adams did so because he viewed the people as capable of knowing
their own interests, not as chained by habit and custom so that
they had to be forcibly led to the right path even against their
will, as is the view of most other revolutionaries. A clever
user of mass action, he rejected mobs and carefully staged even
his "mob" scenes so that those involved in them would maintain
their control. He utterly rejected the notion of concentrating
all power in the hands of the revolutionary elites, vigorously
supporting checks and balances, federalism, and constitutionally
protected rights. Adams' thought linked that of the Old Whigs or
Commonwealthmen with Massachusetts Puritanism and the ideas of
the Enlightenment. He and his fellow revolutionaries were as
much bound by the political compact, indeed by the moral
obligations of covenant, as anybody else, no matter how just
their cause.10
Patrick Henry (1736-1700) was somewhat more incongruous as a
revolutionary. Although he, like Adams, came from a modest
background, early in his career he became a wealthy trial lawyer.
He too was revolutionized by the Stamp Act and soon came to be
considered the most dangerous demagogue in Virginia. Like Adams,
he was uncompromising toward the British. He became the first
governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia and served from 1776 to
1779. Subsequently he led the opposition to Virginia's
ratification of the federal Constitution, for the same reasons as
Adams, namely that it concentrated too much power in the hands of
a distant government. Nevertheless, he also supported checks and
balances, federalism, and individual rights as key elements in
his political thought. Unlike Adams, Henry was not enamored of
the details of politics, nor did he enjoy the routines of office.
After 1794 he rejected a number of high offices offered to him,
but in the year of his death he returned to the state
legislature, this time as a Federalist, to support the new
federal government against the Virginia Resolves. In his case
too the combination is clear: a revolutionary in the American
context meant one who stimulated popular action and then took on
his responsibilities within the institutionalized framework of
popular government.11
What is characteristic of both Adams and Henry is that both men
not only encouraged popular action leading to revolution but made
the transition to become major officeholders, in both cases
governors of their commonwealths, during the revolutionary period
and after the result was already institutionalized. They were
very different from the kind of "professional revolutionaries"
encountered in other modern revolutions (or in the American, in
the person of Thomas Paine), whose talent was fomenting
revolutions. Although both opposed the federal Constitution of
1787, they did so not because they were opposed to the
institutionalization of the results of the Revolution, but
because they were convinced that a different mode of
institutionalization was more faithful to the revolutionary goals
they espoused. Both men died peacefully after illustrious
careers, honored by their fellows.
What was the fate of the revolutionaries who sparked the other
great revolutions? The list of those who met violent deaths in
the throes of revolution is not only long but comprehensive. Who
among them died in bed? Indeed, who among them even made the
transition to power for other than a brief revolutionary moment
before being led off to the guillotine or the firing squad?
Statesmen
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) is the archetypal statesman of the
American Revolution in myth and in reality. He played a
prominent role in both the domestic and the foreign affairs of
the fledgling republic and in the governance of his adopted
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was also the most famous
American in the world at that time. As America's premier
revolutionary diplomat, he too reflected a very different model
than was to be found in other revolutions. In most of the other
revolutions, professional diplomats with great personal ambition
but no particular loyalty to any particular regime were co-opted
by the revolutionary leadership to fulfill the tasks that
Franklin took upon himself. As ideologists, the revolutionary
elites were not prepared to trust anyone other than those
entirely without ideas or convictions, mouthpieces who would
serve any master. Franklin was anything but that.
Franklin's watchword was prudence, well-tuned to a revolution of
sober expectations. One of his major domestic roles was to see
to it that the Revolution's expectations remained sober. There
too his skills were principally diplomatic, whether in the
Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, in the
drafting of Pennsylvania's first constitution, or in daily
political affairs.
Franklin was another long-lived revolutionary. Already prominent
and in his sixties at the beginning of the revolutionary
generation, he spent the first third of that generation in London
representing Pennsylvania and other colonies, and there he became
convinced that revolution was inevitable. So he returned home to
serve in the Continental Congress and as a member of the
committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, where he
played his usual bridging role. He was sent back to Europe for
the duration of the war and the peace negotiations, where he used
his considerable diplomatic skills to become the architect of the
crucial alliance with France. He returned in time to serve as a
member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, helping to
negotiate the acceptance of its compromises. He died in 1790 at
the age of eight-four, at once distinguished and beloved.12
If Franklin fairly reeked of prudence, Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826) presented himself as a radical. He was perhaps the
most extremely ideological figure among the top leadership of the
American Revolution, the only one to suggest semi-utopian
programs for restructuring society. The very use of the term
sounds out of place in comparison with other revolutions -- that
too tells us something about the state of the American
experience. Nevertheless, the two men had much in common besides
their commitment to the cause of American liberty and the fact
that they lived to almost the same age and died in pleasant
surroundings after illustrious careers. Franklin was the prudent
man who was a radical in the pursuit of liberty. Jefferson was
the radical who was prudent in the pursuit of a stable republic.
In today's terms, somewhat anachronistically, we can refer to
both as "liberals." Both were Deists whose early training was
within the framework of Calvinism or Reformed Protestantism --
Franklin was a descendent of Massachusetts Puritans and Jefferson
a descendant of Scots from Ulster. To use another anachronism,
both were intellectuals in public affairs.
Jefferson entered political life in 1769, while the revolutionary
generation was still in its formative stage, and stayed active
politically until the end of his presidency forty years later.
He rose to national prominence in 1774 on the very eve of the
Revolution and was sent to the Continental Congress the next
year, where, as we all know, he was the principal author of the
Declaration of Independence. He returned to Virginia almost
immediately thereafter to participate in the restructuring of his
native commonwealth along republican lines, serving in the state
legislature and then as governor from 1779 to 1781. He left the
governorship only because of his wife's illness and death.
Jefferson returned to the Confederation Congress two years later
and played a major role in shaping the legislative landmarks of
the confederation era, from the plan for decimal coinage through
the Northwest Ordinance of 1784. He spent the five years from
1784 to 1789 representing the United States in France and hence
missed the Constitutional Convention. This experience gave him a
firsthand view of prerevolutionary France and the beginnings of
the French Revolution.
Jefferson came back to the United States to serve as the first
secretary of state in Washington's cabinet, then resigned when
Washington opted for Hamiltonian policies. In cooperation with
James Madison, he founded the Democratic Republican party, today,
the Democratic party, the longest-lived popular political party
in the world. He became his party's candidate for the presidency
against John Adams in 1796. Although he lost to Adams, under the
original terms of the federal Constitution he became
vice-president. Since he was in the opposition, he spent little
time in Washington, working instead to organize the party for the
1800 elections that brought him to the presidency, in which he
served two terms, retiring in 1809 to Monticello. He remained
there as an elder statesman until his death on July 4, 1826, the
fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.13
Significantly, Jefferson was highly disposed to support the
French Revolution, not only in its earlier stages but through the
1790s. Indeed, he was accused by the Federalists of being a
jacobin, and he did have strong sympathies in that direction, at
least intellectually and from a distance. Like Franklin, he
liked France, even if he was appalled by the poverty in French
cities and the reactionary ways of the ancien regime. As an
intellectual, he was attracted to French culture. His sympathies
for the French Revolution, however, were manifested in most
un-Jacobin ways. Thus his opposition to the Federalist
administration of John Adams with regard to the undeclared sea
war with France was expressed through the Virginia Resolves,
which claimed that states could prevent the enforcement of
federal laws they deemed unconstitutional, a position that went
against the Jacobin spirit in every respect. Moreover, he was a
most un-Jacobin president; the biggest "usurpation" he undertook
was the Louisiana Purchase, for which he himself wanted to obtain
a constitutional amendment. Fortunately his sagacity won the
day, and he decided that it was too good a bargain to pass up,
so he exercised the executive powers of his office to complete
the purchase.
There was indeed a moment when the Federalists assumed that his
election to the presidency meant a Jacobin takeover. Jefferson's
victory was labeled by his supporters "the revolution of 1800."
Discussion was rife in the country suggesting that the transfer
of administration from the Federalist party to the Democratic
Republicans would bring a Jacobin-style revolution in its train.
Jefferson made deliberate efforts to disabuse people of any such
notions, just as Washington had earlier rejected suggestions that
he lead a military coup. In his first inaugural address he
summarized his position, stating, "We are all Federalists, we are
all Republicans." Thus Jefferson, supposedly the
arch-revolutionary, first inaugurated the party system, which
institutionalized ways to achieve change without revolution, and
then presided over the transition of federal administrations from
party to party with no disruption of the processes of government
-- two of the crucial inventions of modern democracy.
As was noted above, none of the other three revolutions came
close to succeeding in either regard. The English civil war
offered a dynastic transition that failed because of the
inappropriateness of Cromwell's son and heir, Richard, and the
overall rejection of the Cromwellian dictatorship. The French
Revolution went from one bloody change of regime to another. It
is to Napoleon's credit that once he seized power, he stopped the
purges; but still, seizing power is not orderly succession, now
as the counterrevolution of the Bourbons who came after him, or
the subsequent revolutions of 1830 and 1848, or the Paris Commune
of 1870. It was not until the establishment of the Third
Republic that peaceful transition from government to government
became a reality in France, and even De Gaulle staged a kind of
palace revolution 170 years later to finally bring the French
Revolution to completion (or so it seems at this point).
Transition in the Soviet regime started bloody, led to
dictatorship, continued bloody, and now seems to be
institutionalized in a less bloody but utterly undemocratic way.
Jefferson's own sense of his greatest accomplishments is
reflected in the epitaph he chose for himself: "Author of the
Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for
Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." He
was indeed a revolutionary, but a sober one, in the American
mold, who gloried in the proclamation of human liberty and
equality, the constitutionalization of individual rights, and the
founding of a public university.
Constitutional Architects
For the two exemplary leaders in this category, I have chosen John
Adams, the author of the Massachusetts Constitution -- the model
for state constitutional design -- and James Madison, the
principal author and expositor of the United States Constitution.
John Adams (1735-1826) lived to be ninety-one, dying in bed on
the same day as Jefferson, the fiftieth anniversary of the
Declaration of Independence, equally venerated. He entered
politics during the struggle over the Stamp Act and remained
active until the end of his presidential term in 1801. He was a
member of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1778 and was one
of the architects of the intersectional compromise that brought
George Washington to the command of the Continental Army. With
Jefferson and Franklin, he served on the committee to draft the
Declaration of Independence and led the debate on its adoption.
Adams served in three capacities as an American diplomat: as
commissioner to France, as a member of the commission that
negotiated the peace treaty with Great Britain, and as the first
envoy to that country. In 1779/80 he was the principal
author of the Massachusetts Constitution, his most enduring
constitutional work. He was the country's first vice-president,
serving under George Washington for both terms and then being
elevated to the presidency in his own right. He served only one
term, being defeated by Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans.
Though he was strongly anti-Jacobin, his prudent behavior as
president kept the United States from declaring war on France as
most of his Federalist colleagues wished. He managed to confine
hostilities to an undeclared sea war until differences between
the two countries could be negotiated away.14
Adams' great constitutional monument, the Massachusetts
Constitution, combines within it the principal dimensions of
American constitutionalism -- the constitution as political
covenant and compact, a constitutionalized declaration of rights,
and a frame of government resting upon checks and balances and
separation of powers, all within a solidly republican framework.
It was the first constitution to be put directly to the people
for approval. That it remains the constitution of that
commonwealth over two hundred years later, with only the most
minimal changes, is a reflection of its enduring value.15
James Madison (1751-1836) can be said to have been the first
political scientist to have served the American people and, in a
certain sense, the founder of American political science. He
lived to be eighty-five. Graduating from Princeton on the eve of
the Revolution, his first major political role was participation
in the drafting of the Virginia Constitution in 1776. He served
in the Confederation Congress from 1780 to 1783, where he
advocated strengthening the powers of the federal government. He
was the author of the Virginia Plan presented to the federal
Constitutional Convention in 1787, and his leadership in the
convention led to his being acknowledged as the "father of the
Constitution." Once the convention ended, he helped lead the
battle for ratification and was the principal author of The
Federalist. However, he accepted the popular demand for the
inclusion of a bill of rights in the federal Constitution as the
price of ratification and submitted the principal draft for it
when the First Congress convened.
Madison served in Congress from 1789 through 1797. With
Jefferson, he founded the Democratic Republican party that won
the "revolution of 1800," thereby introducing the principle of
orderly change in control of the federal government. He was
secretary of state during both terms of Jefferson's presidency
and with Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury, was part
of the triumvirate that headed the executive branch in those
years.
Madison succeeded to the presidency after Jefferson and served
two terms. Like Adams, he was not a particularly successful
president, being better at designing constitutions that at
operating them. Also like Adams, he was a true federalist,
concerned with a properly governed nation and properly governed
states, and with a proper relationship between them. Thus,
despite his strong nationalist tendencies, he could join with
Jefferson in authoring the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves to
interpose state law against federal legislation on constitutional
grounds.
Unlike Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, who saw the states as the
organic polities and the confederation as a perpetual league of
quite limited powers, John Adams and James Madison saw the system
as an integral whole having a number of working parts -- federal
and state, executive, legislative, and judicial. In that sense
Madison was the first to formulate the idea of the United States
as a political system, complex and intricate, but a single whole
nonetheless. Subsequent students of Madison's thought who are
less attuned to the theory of federalism than he have assumed
that he was either a frustrated centralizer or else inconsistent,
since he sometimes supported strengthening the powers of the
federal government and sometimes those of the states. What they
have failed to grasp is that he wanted to do both, as
appropriate.16
It was Madison's intricate institutional design, as modified by
other prudent revolutionaries of the Constitutional Convention,
that provided a basis for consolidating the gains of the American
Revolution and ensuring what has been, with one exception (the
Civil War), and orderly yet dynamic government of a continental
nation for nearly two hundred years. It is significant that we
can point to no figures similar to Adams and Madison in any of
the other three revolutions. None had constitutional architects,
since none were even constitutionalized in the same way, if at
all.
Father of His Country
If James Madison was the father of the constitution, George
Washington (1732-1799) was clearly the father of his country.
Although his life was shorter than that of the others discussed
here, he too died peacefully in bed -- in fact, soon after he had
accepted a commission as lieutenant general (then the senior
rank) in the United States Army to prepare it for the incipient
struggle with France. Washington's great skill was to be the
exemplary leader who by moral example and prudent action could
both lift the spirits of those he was leading and guide them to
right action. He knew how to make the most of scarce resources
and hence did not build any aspect of the Revolution on
exploitation of the public he was serving. His compatriots and
subsequent historians have agreed that his outstanding talent was
the force, even majesty, of his personality. That, coupled with
his moral commitment to a republican revolution, made him what he
was.
After an early military career, Washington entered politics as
part of his responsibilities as a country squire. He served in
Virginia's House of Burgesses from 1759 to 1774, throughout the
whole period of the buildup toward revolution. There he was one
of the first to resist the British policy designed to impose
England's authority on the colonies and thus became an early
leader of the revolutionary party. Sent as a delegate to the
Continental Congress in 1774, he hoped and subtly campaigned for
command of the revolutionary armies after the battle of
Lexington, and he was chosen commander-in-chief of the
Continental forces on June 15, 1775.
From the time he assumed command on July 3 of that year until he
relinquished it in December 1783, he was the preeminent soldier
of the American Revolution. Often criticized for lack of
military aggressiveness, he understood the nature of the campaign
he was obliged to wage, given his scarce resources and the
strength of his British opponents. He waged that campaign
brilliantly, wearing down the British until French reinforcements
helped him defeat them in the decisive battle of Yorktown.
Washington comes down to us as a grand commander, when in fact he
fought a semi-guerrilla war, maintaining organized formations but
after the first year rarely engaging the British in head-on
combat. Between Monmouth in June 1778 and Yorktown in September
1781, he did not fight a single full-scale battle. Rather, he
directed strategy for campaigns in other fields that were
increasingly of a guerrilla character. Given the military
tactics of the time, his thrusting and parrying were inventive
and extraordinarily ;successful departures from the accepted
modes.
It was natural for Washington to be chosen to preside at the
federal Constitutional Convention. There the same personal
qualities and skills that enabled him to lead the revolutionary
army so successfully served him in good stead and made him the
crucial figure in bringing together the different individuals
with their positions so that a document emerged that was both
acceptable and inspired. As in his role as commander, it was not
the brilliance of his ideas but his sense of timing, his ability
to conciliate people of strong views, and his sheer presence that
made the difference.17
Unanimously elected first president of the United States,
Washington proceeded to preside over the translation of the U.S.
Constitution into a working government. As Leonard D. White has
shown in his study The Federalists, in some respects this was his
most brilliant achievement.18 He gave meaning to the concept of
chief magistrate as head of the executive branch of government,
establishing in the process precedents that have endured to this
day in a whole range of fields.
What is extraordinary about Washington is the degree to which he
set the tone for the new United States of America in so many
fields, from religious freedom to foreign affairs, from
civil-military relations to the presidential management of the
cabinet. Not the least of his contributions was teaching us and
his successors that what generals and presidents should not do as
well as what they should. In essence, he embodied and helped
shape the political culture of the United States as well as its
institutions. That is what puts him in a class by himself.
Canonized by the generations immediately after his own, he was
then treated to a major debunking when later historians
discovered that he was indeed human. Now that we have survived
his humanization and indeed benefited from it, his true greatness
is becoming more apparent on every level. He was indeed of the
family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle.
The other great revolutions had figures of the same family and
tribe but whose behavior and contributions were very different.
Perhaps the most inspiring of them was Cromwell, who had many of
the positive characteristics of Washington but neither his
moderation nor his self-restraint. In the French Revolution,
Robespierre was more like Samuel Adams gone mad, and Napoleon was
Washington in reverse. In certain technical respects they had
parallel careers. Both rose through the army; both presided over
efforts to institutionalize the revolution, and both played major
roles in the administrative organization of a new government.
But those comparisons serve only to point up the differences
between the two men rather than their similarities. Washington
was the quintessential republican, conciliating, working within
the public framework of shared powers an authority, great because
he could get men to work together, not because he could impose
his will by gaining control of the top of the pyramid. Napoleon
was the quintessential modern dictator, inspiring to his
followers and his people, but in a coercive way and only from the
top.
What is one to say about the Russian Revolution? There the tasks
of Washington were shared by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The
first, ruthless in his ideological commitment, functioned in ways
diametrically opposed to the American. the second was a
commander of armies like Washington but remained an outsider
otherwise. And the third consolidated like Washington but was
his very antithesis in moral qualities and personal
self-abnegation.
What is common to all the Americans (and many others who could
have been mentioned) is that they played several roles. Though
their classification as models here has not been arbitrary, it is
not as though Jefferson were not a constitutional architect, John
Adams not a revolutionary, Madison not a statesman, and so forth.
Indeed, what is characteristic of them all is that all served in
both the executive and the legislative branches of the government
of their respective states or the United States or both, and in
no case did they ever confuse the responsibilities of one branch
with those of the other. In general it can be said that neither
did they confuse the responsibilities of the state and federal
governments, though there the issue is less clear-cut. In some
respects this is the best indicator of the special quality of
American revolutionary leaders -- their sense of what was
appropriate in the institutional context as well as what was
necessary to achieve the revolutionary goal.
The Problem Resolved: A Different Model of Revolutionary
Leadership
I have already suggested that it is the combination of proper
modes of popular involvement, political institutionalization, and
leaders committed to prudence that produced the different model
of leadership characteristic of the American Revolution. Eric
Hoffer summed up the matter: "Precisely a society that can get
along without leaders is the one that's producing leaders." It
is fitting to sum up by retelling Hoffer's story of his
experience during the Great Depression with a work gang in the
San Bernardino Mountains.19
During the Depression, a construction company had to build a
road in the San Bernardino Mountains, and the man who was in
charge, instead of calling up...an employment agency...sent
out two trucks to skid row....Anybody who could climb up on
that truck was hired, even if you had only one
leg....They...drove us out to the San Bernardino Mountains,
and...dumped us on the side of the hill. The company had
only one man on the job, and he didn't even open his mouth.
We found there bundles of equipment and supplies and then we
started to sort ourselves out.
...it's the most glorious experience I ever had. We had so
many carpenters, so many blacksmiths, so many cooks, so many
foremen, so many men who could drive a bulldozer, handle a
jackhammer....We put up the tents, put up the cook's shack,
the toilet, the shower bath, cooked supper.
Next morning, we went out and started to build a road. If we
had to write the Constitution, there would have been somebody
there who knew all the "whereases" and the "wherefores." And
we could...have built America. We were just a shovelful of
slime scooped off the pavement of skid row, yet we could have
built America on the side of the hill in the San Bernardino
Mountains. Now you show me people anywhere in the world with
such diffuse competence. It's fantastic. In other words,
when I talk about Americans being a skilled people, I don't
mean only technical skills, I mean social and political
skills.
The vigor of a society should be gauged by its ability to get
along without outstanding leaders. When I said that at the
University of Stanford, all the young intellectuals...ran
after me...and said, "Mr. Hoffer, the vigor of society should
be gauged by its ability to produce great leaders." And then
I stood there and I said, "Brother, this is just what
happened. Precisely a society that can get along without
leaders is the one that's producing leaders."
Hoffer may have exaggerated somewhat, especially since he spoke
only of the first dimension: popular involvement. The founding
fathers understood that with it there had to be political
institutionalization as well. They devoted themselves as much to
that end as to making the Revolution in the first place.
One final note: it remained for Abraham Lincoln to sense and
consider the one problem that transcends both the character of
popular involvement and the nature of the political institutions.
Let us return to his address before the Young Men's Lyceum:
In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we,
the American People,...find ourselves in the peaceful
possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards
extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of
climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system
of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the
ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the
history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the
stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of
these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement
or establishment of them -- they are a legacy bequeathed us,
by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and
departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly
they performed it) to possess themselves, and through
themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its
hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and
equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these, the former,
unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed
by the lapse of time, and untorn by usurpation -- to the
latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.
This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves,
duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all
imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
Lincoln continues by raising the question:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?
I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us.
It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we
must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of
freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Lincoln suggests that internal disorder is the only possible way
to bring down the American polity, because sooner or later
internal disorder will bring down
the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of
those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down
and destroyed -- I mean the attachment of the People....At
such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient
talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the
opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric,
which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope of
the lovers of freedom throughout the world.
Lincoln in his address focused on the question of the mob's
taking the law into its own hands -- in other words, improper
popular involvement. His response to that was to endorse the
maintenance of the political institutions bequeathed the
Americans by the founders:
Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher
to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never
to violate in the last particular, the laws of the country;
and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the
patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration
of Independence, so to the support of the Constitutions and
Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and
his sacred honor -- let everyman remember that to violate the
law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the
character of his own and his children's liberty. Let
reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother
to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap -- let it be
taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; -- let it
be written in Primers, spelling books, and Almanacs; -- let
it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative
halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let
it become the political religion of the nation.
But Lincoln knew that proper popular involvement and
institutionalization are not enough, for they will not
necessarily control those who belong to the family of the lion or
the tribe of the eagle. His answer is perhaps less than fully
satisfying, returning as he does to a reliance on a proper
political religion. We are left to rely upon that, to which we
can add the fostering of a proper political culture of the kind
that animated George Washington and his compatriots.
Notes
1. The full story of Washington's gesture is told in John C.
Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931-44), 26:222-229.
2. Martin Diamond, A Revolution of Sober Expectations
(Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1976).
3. See Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1976).
4. The Federalist, No. 51.
5. As cited in Abraham Lincoln, Works (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:108-115.
6. On American revolutionary mobs, see Moshe Hazani, "Samuel
Adams and Saint-Just: Contrasting Examples of Professional
Revolutionaries," in this volume.
7. Neil Riemer, The Democratic Experiment: American Political
Theory, vol. I (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967); Clinton Rossiter,
Seed Time of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition
of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).
8. Daniel J. Elazar, "The States and the Congress Move toward
Independence, 1775-1776," Publius 6, No. 1 (Winter 1976): 135-143
(see Appendix A).
9. Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican
Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the
Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1980); Donald S. Lutz, Popular Consent and Popular
Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Ronald M.
Peters, Jr., The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: A Social
Compact (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978).
10. Hazani, "Samuel Adams and Saint-Just."
11. Robert D. Meade, Patrick Henry, 2 vols. (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1957-59).
12. Carl Becker, Benjamin Franklin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1946); Paul W. Conner, Poor Richards Politicks:
Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order (New York:
Greenwood, 1980).
13. Dumas Malone, Jefferson in His Times, 6 vols. (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1948-82); idem, Thomas Jefferson as Political
Leader (New York: Greenwood, 1979).
14. Catherine D. Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950); Page Smith, John Adams, 2 vols.
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962).
15. Peters, Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.
16. Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 vols. (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1941-61); Marvin Meyers, The Mind of the Founder
(Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and University
Press of New England, 1981).
17. Forrest Macdonald, E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the
American Republic, 1776-1790 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965);
James T. Flexner, George Washington, 3 vols. (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1968-72).
18. Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative
History (New York: Greenwood, 1978); Douglass Southhall Freeman,
George Washington, 7 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1948-57).
19. Eric Hoffer in an interview with Eric Sevareid on CBS
television (September 19, 1967).
