Henry Adams

“ Only with diffidence could history attribute to such a class of men a wider range of thought or feeling than they themselves cared to proclaim. Yet the difficulty of denying or even ig­noring the wider range was still greater, for no one questioned the force or the scope of an emotion which caused the poorest peasant in Europe to see what was invisible to poet and philosopher,—the dim outline of a mountain-summit across the ocean, rising high above the mist and mud of American democracy. ”

“ Then, no one could deny that the United States would win a stake such as defied mathematics. With all the advantages of science and capital, Europe must be slower than America to reach the common goal. American society might be both sober and sad, but except for negro slavery it was sound and healthy in every part. Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man. ”

“ The rawness of political life was an incessant torture to him, and personal attacks made him keenly unhappy. His true delight was in an intellectual life of science and art. To read, write, speculate in new lines of thought, to keep abreast of the intellect of Europe, and to feed upon Homer and Horace, were pleasures more to his mind than any to be found in a public assembly. ”

“ That all should be satisfied with any one order of things is not to be expected, but I indulge the pleasing persuasion that the great body of our citizens will cordially concur in honest and disinterested efforts, which have for their object to preserve the General and State governments in their constitutional form and equilibrium; to maintain peace abroad, and order and obedience to the laws at home; to establish principles and practices of administration favorable to the security of liberty and property, and to reduce expenses to what is necessary for the useful purposes of government. ”

“ With equal reason he might have taken the opposite view,—that the hard, practical, money-­getting American democrat, who had neither gener­osity nor honor nor imagination, and who inhabited cold shades where fancy sickened and where genius died, was in truth living in a world of dream, and act­ing a drama more instinct with poetry than all the avatars of the East, walking in gardens of emerald and rubies, in ambition already ruling the world and guiding Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had ever yet been felt in human history. ”

“ Thenceforward the mark of a wise and good man was that he abhorred the French Revolution, and believed democracy to be its cause. Like Edmund Burke, they listened to no argument: "It is a vile, illiberal school, this French Academy of the sans-culottes; there is nothing in it that is fit for a gentleman to learn." The answer to every democratic suggestion ran in a set phrase, "Look at France!" This idea became a monomania with the New England leaders, and took exclusive hold of Fisher Ames, their most brilliant writer and talker, until it degenerated into a morbid illusion. ”

“ What had the United States then to show in scenery and landscape more beautiful or more winning than that country of meadow and mountain? Patriotism was no ardent feeling among the literary men of the time, whose general sentiment was rather expressed by Cliffton's lines:—
"In these cold shades, beneath these shifting skies, Where Fancy sickens, and where Genius dies, Where few and feeble are the Muse's strains, And no fine frenzy riots in the veins, There still are found a few to whom belong The fire of virtue and the soul of song." ”

“ The Virginia gentleman, wherever met, was a country gentleman or a lawyer among a society of planters. The absence of city life was the sharpest character­istic of Virginia, even compared with South Carolina. In the best and greatest of Virginians, the virtues which always stood in most prominence were those of the field and farm,—the simple and straightforward mind, the notions of courage and truth, the absence of mercantile sharpness and quickness, the rusticity and open-handed hospitality, which could exist only where the struggle for life was hardly a struggle at all. ”

“ Domingo had successfully resisted the whole power of France, and that had he been truer to himself and his color he might have worn the crown that became the plaything of Christophe and Dessalines; but even when shivering in the frosts of the Jura, his last moments would have glowed with gratified revenge, had he known that at the same instant Bonaparte was turning into a path which the negroes of St. Domingo had driven him to take, and which was to lead him to parallel at St. Helena the fate of Toussaint himself at the Château de Joux. In these days of passion, men had little time for thought ”

“ Take Christians, Mohawks, democrats and all, From the rude wigwam to the Congress hall, ­From man the savage, whether slaved or free, To man the civilized, less tame than he: 'T is one dull chaos, one unfertile strife Betwixt half-polished and half-barbarous life; Where every ill the ancient world can brew Is mixed with every grossness of the new ”

“ The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one,—a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants. ”

“ He knew that the First Consul, by his instructions to Laussat, had given, so far as he could, the authority of both French and Spanish governments to the claim of the United States that Louisiana stretched westwardly to a line yet to be fixed. He knew that Laussat, who hated the Spaniards more than he did the Americans, had betrayed the secret. If Talleyrand hoped to repress American ambition, he must have calculated on the effects of force or fear, or he must have been overwhelmed by the immensity of the scale on which the Americans were acting. ”

“ The value of Pennsylvania to the Union lay not so much in the democratic spirit of society as in the rapidity with which it turned to na­tional objects. Partly for this reason the State made an insignificant figure in politics. As the nation grew, less and less was said in Pennsylvania of in­terests distinct from those of the Union. Too thor­oughly democratic to fear democracy, and too much nationalized to dread nationality, Pennsylvania be­came the ideal American State, easy, tolerant, and contented. If its soil bred little genius, it bred still less treason. ”

“ Having found from experience that impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scarecrow, they consider themselves secure for life; they skulk from responsibility; . . . an opinion is huddled up in conclave, perhaps by a majority of one, delivered as if unanimous, and with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty chief-judge who sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning." The acquittal of Chase proved that impeachment was a scarecrow; but its effect on impeachment as a principle of law was less evident. ”

“ Nay, even should the new experiment succeed in a worldly sense, what was a man profited if he gained the whole world, and lost his own soul? The Lord God was a jealous God, and visited the sins of the parents upon the children; but what worse sin could be conceived than for a whole nation to join their chief in chanting the strange hymn with which Jefferson, a new false prophet, was deceiving and betraying his people: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods or no God!" ”

“ We listen to the clank of chains, and overhear the whispers of assassins. We mark the barbarous dissonance of mingled rage and triumph in the yell of an infuriated mob; we see the dismal glare of their burnings, and scent the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice." In theory the French Revolution was not an argument or a proof, but only an illustration, of the workings of divine law; and what had hap­pened in France must sooner or later happen in America if the ignorant and vicious were to govern the wise and good. ”

“ There is one single trait which attaches me to the people I live with more than all the virtues of New England,—they love money less than we do; they are more disinterested; their patriotism is not tied to their purse-strings. Could I only take from the Virginians their sensuality and their slaves, I should think them the greatest people in the world. As it is, with a few great virtues, they have innumerable vices. ”

“ To the world at large nothing in the relations of the United States with England, France, or Spain seemed alarming. The world knew little of what was taking place. Only men who stood between these forces could understand their movements and predict the moment of collision; but if these men, like Merry, Turreau, and Yrujo, had been asked March 3, 1805, to point out the brightest part of Jefferson's political horizon, they would probably have agreed with one voice that everything in Europe threatened disaster, and that the only glimpse of blue sky was to be seen on the shores of Africa. ”

“ New York was indifferent whether the nature of the United States was single or multiple, whether they were a nation or a league. Leaving this class of questions to other States which were deeply interested in them, New York remained constant to no political theory. There society, in spite of its aristocratic mixture, was democratic by instinct; and in abandoning its alliance with New England in order to join Virginia and elect Jefferson to the Presidency, it pledged itself to principles of no kind, least of all to Virginia doctrines. ”

“ The self-deception inherent in every struggle for personal power was not the kind of immorality which characterized Colonel Burr. Jefferson, if his enemies were to be believed, might occasionally make misstatements of fact; yet he was true to the faith of his life, and would rather have abdicated his office and foregone his honors than have compassed even an imaginary wrong against the principles he professed. His life, both private and public, was pure. His associates, like Madison, Gallatin, and Monroe, were men upon whose reputations no breath of scandal rested. ”

“ The essence of Virginia republicanism lay in a single maxim: The Government shall not be the final judge of its own powers. The liberties of America, as the Republican party believed, rested in this nutshell; for if the Government, either in its legislative, executive, or judicial departments, or in any combination of them, could define its own powers in the last resort, then its will, and not the letter of the Constitution, was law. To this axiom of republicanism the Federalist Judiciary opposed what amounted to a flat negative. ”

“ The House chose for Speaker Nathaniel Macon, a typical, homespun planter, honest and simple, erring more often in his grammar and spelling than in his moral principles, but knowing little of the world beyond the borders of Carolina. No man in American history left a better name than Macon; but the name was all he left. An ideal Southern republican, independent, unambitious, free from intrigue, true to his convictions, a kindly and honorable man, his influence with President Jefferson was not so great as that of some less respectable and more busy politicians. ”

“ Neither aristocratic like Virginia and South Carolina, nor turbulent like Georgia, nor troubled by a sense of social importance, but above all thoroughly democratic, North Carolina tolerated more freedom of political action and showed less fam­ily and social influence, fewer vested rights in political power, and less tyranny of slaveholding interests and terrors than were common elsewhere in the South. Neither cultivated nor brilliant in intellect, nor great in thought, industry, energy, or organiza­tion, North Carolina was still interesting and respect­able. ”

“ History is not often able to penetrate the private lives of famous men, and catch their words as they were uttered. Although Lucien Bonaparte’s veracity was not greatly superior to that of his brother Napoleon, his story agreed with the known facts. If his imagination here and there filled in the gaps of memory,—if he was embittered and angry when he wrote, and hated his brother Napoleon with Corsican passion, these circumstances did not discredit his story, for he would certainly have told the truth against his brother under no other conditions. ”

“ The roar of the steam-engine had never been heard in the land, and the carrier's wagon was three weeks between Philadelphia and Pittsburg. What need for haste when days counted for so little? Why not lounge about the tavern when life had no better amusement to offer? Why mind one's own business when one's business would take care of itself?
Yet however idle the American sometimes ap­peared, and however large the class of tavern loafers may have actually been, the true American was active and industrious. No immigrant came to America for ease or idleness. ”