Russell Kirk greatly admired the mind and temperament of John Adams. He exemplified the Federalist party’s temperate response to a crisis of radicalism. Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall similarly opposed the American Jacobins. In large measure, the Federalists aimed to shore up the authority of the federal government. While committed to America’s republican forms, Kirk wrote that they sought “to oppose local radicalism by means of conservative consolidation.” They believed a stronger government could provide material prosperity to help the new United States achieve that “separate and equal station” on the world stage and security against domestic uprisings such as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Insurrection. On the whole, the Federalists were afraid of popular revolution and thought that the leadership of men such as George Washington was necessary for a flourishing Republic.
Despite the successes of Washington’s administration, Kirk wrote that the conservative mind of the Federalists was somewhat sepulchral. Many who looked abroad saw the terror of the Jacobin Republic as democracy’s inevitable destiny; the rising support for Jefferson at home inspired even more desperation and fear. Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts statesman, became what Kirk called “the gloomiest and most eloquent of the Federalists” by “prophesying mediocrity in spirit, anarchy in society” should democracy triumph.
Ames was an early supporter of the Constitution and an advocate of the Bill of Rights, but something about his politics resembled the old Toryism that had fallen out of fashion. He believed in what David Hackett Fischer described as a “deferential spirit,” the notion that society ought to be governed by an aristocracy of virtue. Of course, Ames and his fellow Federalists were still committed republicans and by no means had dreams of reinstalling a king or introducing titles of nobility. But they believed that too much democracy would lead to moral degradation; firm leadership enabled by talent, education, and gentlemanliness was the only thing that could make a government like America’s work. Ames was more extreme than other prominent Federalists, filled with a despairing sense that the Republic was “doomed to destruction,” Kirk wrote, almost as though his conservatism was “born with the sardonic grin of death upon its countenance.” Powerful as the New Englander’s writing was, it is evidence of why the Federalists failed as a national party.
Read more in The University Bookman from the Russell Kirk Center.
