The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ U.S. CONSTITUTION, with its presidential system and separation of powers, was sold as an anticorruption covenant, and that is how the convention delegates understood it. But just what did the Framers think corruption meant? The answer is several quite different things, but the simplest explanation is that it referred to how the British were governed.

      The Framers may have recalled, for example, how James I plundered the Royal Treasury to give presents to his favorites. David Hume tells how James once observed a porter bearing £3,000 on his way to the Treasury. “How happy would that money make me!” said one of James’s handsome courtiers, whereupon the king gave it to him. “You think yourself very happy in obtaining so large a sum,” said James. “But I am more happy, in having an opportunity of obliging a worthy man, whom I love.”¹ James subsequently ennobled the favorite as the Earl of Holland, a title he would bear until he died on the scaffold in 1649 at the hands of a vengeful Puritan Parliament.

      Not all the gifts were so conspicuously without merit, however. One cannot read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets without being struck by how many of England’s greatest writers were sustained by the patronage of the king or the nobility. When he wrote The Old Bachelor, the twenty-three-year-old William Congreve was made one of the commissioners for licensing coaches, and soon afterward he was given places in the Pipe Office and the Custom House. Johnson himself held a pension from the king. Nor did contemporary Britons see themselves as especially corrupt. When George III ascended to the throne in 1760 promising a reign of virtue, free of corruption, no one thought he meant a government from which the tools of influence had been banished. Whig politicians, beginning with Robert Walpole (prime minister 1721–42) and continuing with the Pelham brothers (Henry Pelham, prime minister 1743–54; Thomas Pelham, 1st Duke of Newcastle, prime minister 1754–56, 1756–57), had perfected a patronage machine through which the government could rely on the support of a majority in the House of Commons. The king held important cards as well, in his control of the civil list of paid government appointees and his ability as the fount of honor to ennoble his supporters. With these instruments at his disposal, he could rely upon his allies in the House of Commons, the “King’s Friends.”

      All sides thought it legitimate to offer plums to political friends and to feast on whatever was sent their way. “Men . . . no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity,” observed Sir Lewis Namier, “than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it.”² David Hume thought the king’s patronage powers had even served a useful purpose in preserving the balanced British constitution, which had been undermined by the rising power of the House of Commons. Formally, the king could veto legislation, but his power to do so had fallen into abeyance and could not be revived. What he retained was the ability to rally the King’s Friends in Parliament through the favors he could grant, and this permitted him to shape ministries to his liking. “The crown has so many offices at its disposal, that, when assisted by the honest and disinterested part of the house, it will always command the resolutions of the whole; so far, at least, to preserve the ancient constitution from danger.” Call this “corruption and dependence” if you will, said Hume, but it was “necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.”³

      In America, the Patriots weren’t buying this. They had read of British corruption from John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Cato’s Letters, 1720–23) and from Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), and they wanted no part of it. American visitors to Britain had brought back reports of the mother country’s appalling level of public vice. As John Adams saw it, both electors and elected in Britain had “become one mass of corruption.”⁴ John Dickinson, “the penman of the American Revolution,”⁵ was the strongest Anglophile at the Philadelphia Convention, but when he had visited England earlier he was shocked by how the British conducted their elections.

      It is astonishing to think what impudence & villainy are practizd on this occasion. If a man cannot be brought to vote as he is desird, he is made dead drunk & kept in that state, never heard of by his family or friends till all is over & he can do no harm. The oath of their not being bribd is as strict & solemn as language can form it, but is so little regarded that few people can refrain from laughing while they take it. I think the character of Rome will equally suit this nation: “Easy to be bought, if there was but a purchaser.”⁶

      It was bad enough that Britain was so corrupt, but worse still that the British were exporting their corruption to America through the officers they appointed. Royal governors such as Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts (Anne’s great-great-grandson) had created a system of dependents through their placemen, which John Adams thought amounted to a tyranny.⁷ “Cæsar, by destroying the Roman Republic, made himself perpetual dictator,” and likewise “Hutchinson, by countenancing and supporting a System of Corruption and all Tyranny, has made himself Governor.”⁸ Adams’s obsession with Hutchinson bordered on neurosis, but it wasn’t entirely divorced from reality. At one point Hutchinson was simultaneously the colony’s lieutenant governor, a member of its house of representatives and its chief justice. The tea that the Sons of Liberty threw into Boston Harbor had been intended for delivery to Hutchinson’s sons.

      Whether or not the British system of government and the royal governors it gave America were as corrupt as all that, many of the colonists (anticipating Henry James) subscribed to a notion of American innocence versus European experience. Like George Mason,⁹ they may have admired the British constitution but detested British corruption, and that was an argument for Americans to have a different kind of government.¹⁰ They would build a republic of virtue.

Republican Virtue

      In the eighteenth century there was a special understanding of disinterested republican virtue, the virtue of patriots who scorned corruption and championed the general good. In Britain it was represented by a “Country party,” whose members detested Walpole and were avid readers of Cato’s Letters and of Bolingbroke, and who stood in opposition to a “Court party” that was more comfortable with corruption. In France, republican virtue found its most striking expression in the paintings of Jefferson’s friend Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), where it reached repellant heights.

      Jefferson and David belonged to the same radical-chic set, the seedbed of revolution in a Paris where the line between art and politics was thin.¹¹ Just a few years after Jefferson returned from France, David would sign the death order for Louis XVI and would become a close political ally of the sea-green incorruptible Robespierre. Jefferson greatly admired The Oath of the Horatii when he was in Paris. “I do not feel an interest in any pencil but that of David,” he wrote.¹² It wasn’t simply the stunning tableaux that drew him to the artist, for both men shared Robespierre’s belief that “immorality is the basis of despotism, as virtue is the essence of a republic.”¹³ Both yearned for a reign of virtue clothed in classical republican garb, as seen in the painter’s subversive The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons.

      David took his inspiration from Livy’s account of how Lucius Junius Brutus established a Roman Republic by expelling the last king in 509 BC. The king, Tarquin the Proud, had outraged his subjects but was nevertheless supported by a class of courtiers who knew that “as long as there was a king, there was a person from whom they could get what they wanted, whether lawful or not.”¹⁴ That didn’t save him, however. After the revolt had succeeded and Brutus became the first leader of the Republic, he provided the supreme example of self-sacrifice and republican virtue by having two of his own sons executed for conspiring to restore the monarchy. David’s painting portrays the moment when the bodies are brought home. Brutus sits in the shadows, his back to his sons, his face stern and grim, the picture of republican self-sacrifice and a reproach to the weeping women of the family on his left. If the symbol of the frivolous ancien régime was the feminine salon, republican virtue was a distinctly masculine trait.

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