The Men Who Made the Nation by John Dos Passos

Author:John Dos Passos [Passos, John Dos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78704-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

4. The Appeal to the Reading Public

The Hamilton faction in Philadelphia immediately raised a hue and cry against Jefferson. Major Beckwith, with whom Hamilton was on confidential terms, suggested that the endorsement by a member of Washington’s administration of Paine, whom Pitt was treating as a dangerous subversive, would give offense at Westminster.

Now it was Jefferson’s turn to be offended. Publicola not only gave Paine a thorough dressing down but he dusted Jefferson’s jacket for endorsing him. Jefferson, like every other newspaper reader, had jumped to the conclusion that Publicola was the Vice President. It was Beckley who brought the news back to Madison from Boston that the articles were actually the work of John Adams’ precocious and scholarly son, John Quincy.

Madison pointed out sarcastically when he wrote Jefferson that they were too concisely written to be by John Adams himself. The articles restated in more compact form John Adams’ strictures on the danger of placing all the powers of government in the hands of a single body like the French Assembly. They advocated his theory of a balance of powers, and summarized effectively the heart of Burke’s position, which was that the unwritten British constitution, as the accretion of the habits and customs of centuries, was superior to any newfangled written constitutions whatsoever. In the latter part of the series, young Adams beat a retreat. Defending himself against a flock of letters to the editor from Brutuses, Agrícolas, and Republicans, he hastily explained that his criticisms were not intended to apply to the American written Constitution, which he loved and revered, but merely to that of the French.

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