The Way Back. F. H. Buckley
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Название: The Way Back

Автор: F. H. Buckley

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9781594039607

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СКАЧАТЬ reform the state’s private laws, and he took particular aim at the system of primogeniture. This was a presumptive rule under which, if a person died without a will, all his property descended to his first-born son. The point was to preserve the integrity of family fortunes, and made an otherwise unappealing first-born son a very eligible bachelor in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Primogeniture was received in Virginia as part of its common law inheritance, even though it was much resented by younger sons such as Jefferson. Whether the rule really made a difference has been doubted, since a father could avoid it through an explicit devise in a will to his younger children.23 Nevertheless, default rules have an expressive effect, signaling what the state regards as a reasonable rule of succession, and it was this that Jefferson wished to change in 1776. What he sought, he later recalled, was a “republican” code of laws, one in which “every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy.”24

      Mason was a wealthy planter from Virginia’s Northern Neck, and a confidante of Washington. Jefferson’s father owned a smaller farm, but his mother was a Randolph and he was related to many of the First Families of Virginia. How was it, then, that the two were so hostile to aristocracy? It’s not as though we’d think either of them to be democrats today. The right to vote was severely limited, and Virginia adopted universal suffrage only in 1851, when landowning qualifications were abolished. Even then, women could not vote, nor could Mason’s and Jefferson’s slaves, of course.

      Voters could not elect governors either, since they were chosen by the legislators under the 1776 Virginia Constitution that Mason had drafted and for which Jefferson had signaled his approval. “It would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people,” said Mason, “as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”25 Madison proposed the same thing in his Virginia Plan at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. Senators would be chosen by the House of Representatives, and Presidents would be chosen from Congress, which Madison described as a “policy of refining the popular appointments by successive filtrations.”26 The lower orders would take their places in the state legislatures, while “the purest and noblest characters” in society would occupy the more senior places in the federal government.27 That indeed was how the Framers thought that presidents would almost always be chosen, in the Constitution they gave us.28

      All this would seem like an aristocratic form of government to us. But the Framers did not see themselves as aristocrats. They knew they would survive the filtration process, but they did not think their traits were heritable. Our own descendants, said George Mason, will in a short time be distributed “throughout the lowest classes of Society.”29 Those who wished well for their children would therefore want a constitution that worked for everyone, for the character and talents of one’s children were hidden behind a veil of ignorance.

      In the fullness of time, the Framers’ constitution would become democratic. The president would come to be popularly chosen, and after the Seventeenth Amendment senators also would be elected by the people. The 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration echoed the Declaration of Independence in its demand for equality for women,30 and the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence was the promissory note that Martin Luther King, Jr. presented for payment at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The Framers’ constitution was a sealed train, speeding through the night and emerging into the light on arrival.

       CHAPTER

       3

       The Invention of the American Dream

      NOT ALL OF THE DELEGATES TO THE 1787 PHILADELPHIA Convention were the demigods Jefferson took them to be, and George Mason looked down on some of them with the aristocratic disdain of a Virginia planter.

       You may have supposed they were an assemblage of great men. There is nothing less true. From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few.1

      That’s how people from other states have often seemed to Virginians. However, the delegates included sixteen lawyers, four judges, seven politicians, four planters, and two physicians.2 Twenty-nine of them had undergraduate degrees, nine from Princeton, four each from Yale and William and Mary, and three each from Harvard and King’s College (Columbia). Three had attended college in Great Britain, at Oxford, St. Andrews, and Glasgow. Six had been trained as lawyers at the Inns of Court in London.3 Half were on Mrs. John Jay’s dinner invitation list, the Social Register of the time.4 By any standard, most were the aristocrats of America.

      Did they know that the document they signed would sound the death knell for their class? Very likely not. They could not have imagined the changes in our politics, let alone the changes in our society, that would transform America.

      None of the Framers would have anticipated the social upheavals and political changes that have taken place since their day. They took aim at one kind of aristocracy, a hereditary one, but expected that a different kind of aristocracy would survive, an aristocracy of talent and republican virtue that would survive Madison’s process of filtration and ascend to the highest political offices. What such a “natural aristocracy” would look like was, famously, the subject of a series of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1813. Friends at first during the Revolution, then antagonists in politics, they were at last brought together in retirement through their mutual friend, Benjamin Rush.

      The reconciliation delighted Adams, who wrote long, teasing letters to his old friend. For his part, Jefferson wrote serious letters that acknowledged the differences that still separated them, taking up Adams’ hint “that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” The natural aristocracy, said Jefferson, was one of virtue or talents, and he contrasted this with an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth. The latter, he said, was a “mischievous ingredient in government,” which he trusted would be rejected in popular elections.5 All very well, replied Adams impishly, but “what chance have Talents and Virtue in competition with Wealth and Birth?” Or beauty, he added, no doubt recalling how he had been mocked as ‘His Rotundity.’ “Beauty, Grace, Figure, Attitude, Movement, have in innumerable Instances prevailed over Wealth, Birth, Talents, Virtue and every thing else.”6 Then there was the natural deference paid to eminent families.

       Our Winthrops, Winslows, Bradfords, Saltonstalls, Quincys, Chandlers, Leonards, Hutchinsons, Olivers, Sewalls etc are precisely in the Situation of your Randolphs, Carters and Burwells, and Harrisons. Some of them unpopular for the part they took in the late revolution, but all respected for their names and connections and whenever they fall in with the popular Sentiments, are preferred, ceteris paribus to all others.7

      Yet suppose, added Adams, that Jefferson’s natural aristocrats overcame all of the prejudices of family names, and the preference for beauty. Suppose that, as Jefferson imagined, voters would prefer genius to birth, virtue to beauty, and that a meritocracy of intelligence and character were chosen to lead the country. Even then, said the skeptical Adams, I would wish to place a check on their ambition. No class of people can safely be given unlimited power over others.

      More than Jefferson, the conservative Adams had a better grasp on what the future would hold. Where Jefferson foresaw the popular election of natural aristocrats, Adams understood that voters would be looking for things other than republican virtue in their politicians. СКАЧАТЬ