No End of It

The men who made the American order were not naive about it. In letters, debates, and public addresses they said what their principle would do to the household, the vote, the courts, and the people’s morals, and they said that the order could stand only on a virtue it had no power to produce. This paper lets them speak, sets each warning beside what came, and adds as little as possible. It ends with what the record says about men who saw the cost and built anyway.

Their own words

Our paper Lightning and Thunder Take Time quoted John Adams’s letter of May 1776 warning that the principle of consent would leave “no end of it.” Adams was not alone. Nearly every leading founder left a warning of the same kind, and most of them left it in the same breath as a vote, a signature, or a speech for the order they were warning about.

The entries below are grouped by what the warning concerned. Each gives the words, the occasion, and what followed. Where a warning has not come to pass, we say so.

The household

In March 1776 Abigail Adams asked her husband to “remember the ladies” in the new code of laws. He answered on April 14, from Philadelphia.

Her letter, he wrote, was the first sign that “another tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest” had grown discontented. He told her that he could not but laugh at her code, and that “we know better than to repeal our masculine systems,” and he admitted that they were already “little more than theory.”

Six weeks later he told James Sullivan that the principle of consent gave him no answer to the question “Whence arises the right of the men to govern women, without their consent?”

The vote

Eleven years later the Constitutional Convention debated who should elect the House of Representatives. Gouverneur Morris, who would write the final text of the Constitution, spoke on August 7, 1787.

He predicted a country of “mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers.” James Madison agreed the same day.

A virtue they could not supply

Two days after laughing at Abigail’s code, Adams wrote to the historian Mercy Otis Warren about the kind of government the colonies were about to form.

He told her he had seen such selfishness even in New England that he sometimes trembled to think the prospect of success was doubtful, “not for want of power or of wisdom but of virtue.” In June, the month he was named to the committee to draft the Declaration, he wrote to his cousin Zabdiel Adams, a minister: “Statesmen my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution, is pure virtue.”

Liberty as the gift of God

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson asked a question about slavery whose premise reaches past it.

“Indeed I tremble for my country,” he went on, “when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” Washington made the same claim in his first inaugural address: “the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” In the same sentence he described the republic as an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

The courts

Thirty-one years later Jefferson, writing to the Virginia judge Spencer Roane, said what Hamilton had missed.

He added “an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes.”

The end of it

On the last day of the Convention, September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin asked the delegates to sign. His speech was read for him by James Wilson.

Washington warned in his Farewell Address that the alternate domination of one faction over another, “sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” is itself “a frightful despotism,” and that it “leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.” Adams, in retirement, put it most plainly.

Why they built anyway

The warnings above were not written by the order’s enemies. They were written by its authors, most of them in the same months they were building it, and each man answered his own warning in one of three ways.

Some laughed. Adams told his wife he could not but laugh at her code, and that the men knew better than to repeal their masculine systems. He had granted the principle that would repeal them, and he trusted that the men who held power would decline to let it work.

Some trusted the people. In the Farewell Address, the counsel Washington gave right after calling religion indispensable was to “promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.” Jefferson told William Jarvis in 1820 that he knew “no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves,” and that if they lacked the discretion to use it, the remedy was to inform them. Each answer placed the hope of the republic in the people it was meant to govern.

Some signed with all its faults. Franklin told the Convention how the order would end and asked the delegates to sign it. Washington called it an experiment and staked liberty on it.

Christ described this kind of builder. “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish” (Luke 14:28–30). The founders sat down and counted. Adams wrote that the foundation was virtue, Madison that the form presupposed more of it than any other, Washington that it could not be had without religion, and Adams again that the Constitution was inadequate to any other people. They knew the order could not produce what it required, and they built on what they had inherited from the order they were setting aside.

Scripture calls that trust in man. “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, and will lean his arm of flesh upon him, while his heart departs from the Lord” (Jer. 17:5). “Trust not in princes, nor in the children of men, in whom there is no safety” (Ps. 145:3). The founders did not trust princes. They trusted the children of men to govern themselves, and they said in their own letters that it would hold only as long as those children stayed better than the principle required them to be.

Where the argument stops

It does not judge their souls. Several of these men were devout, all of them were brave, and the record here concerns their judgment about government, not their standing before God.

It does not claim they wanted what came. Every one of them would have opposed most of it. The point is that they saw it and went ahead.

It does not claim every government is free of the same dependence. Every order needs a virtuous people. The founders’ order made the people the source of its authority and then said it could not survive them unless they were better than its principle asked them to be.

It quotes them fairly. Jefferson’s question in Query XVIII was asked about slavery, Adams’s letter to his wife was partly in jest, and Franklin expected the Constitution to be well administered for years. The words stand as they were written, and the sources are listed below.

Texts and editions

Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint with Apocrypha (London, 1851), for the Old Testament.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776. Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 16 April 1776, in Warren-Adams Letters 1:222–23.

John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, in Papers of John Adams 4:208–12.

John Adams to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence 2.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Query XVIII.

James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, 7 August and 17 September 1787.

James Madison, The Federalist No. 55 (1788). Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 78 (1788).

George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 30 April 1789. Farewell Address, 19 September 1796.

John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798.

John Adams to John Taylor, 17 December 1814. Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819, in Works 12:135–38.

Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 28 September 1820. Library of Congress.

Constitution of the United States, Amendments XIX (1920) and XXVI (1971).

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947).

Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).

Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966).

California Family Law Act of 1969.

Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 450 U.S. 455 (1981).

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), opinion of the Court and dissent of Roberts, C.J.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. The Old Testament is quoted from Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint and the New Testament from the King James Version. Founders’ spelling, capitalization, and ampersands are modernized except in Franklin’s speech and the letter to John Taylor, which follow the editions cited. Jefferson’s letter to Jarvis is partly paraphrased. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com