Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States

by Martin Van Buren

"The proposition, that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties, is not true; they are the worst conceivable; they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will as a political body."

"If it is meant by our author a representative assembly, they are not still the best keepers of the liberties of the people; at least the majority would invade the liberty of the minority sooner and oftener than an absolute monarchy."

"A great writer has said that a people will never oppress themselves, or invade their own rights. This compliment, if applied to any nation or people in being or memory, is more than has been merited."

"Aristides, Fabricius, and Cincinnatus, are always quoted, as if such characters were always to be found in sufficient numbers to protect liberty; and a cry and show of liberty is set up by the profligate and abandoned, such as would sell their fathers, their country, and their God for profit, place, and power. Hypocrisy, simulation, and finesse are not more practiced in the courts of princes than in popular elections, nor more encouraged by kings than people."

"The real merit of public men is rarely known and impartially considered. When men arise who to real services add political empiricism, conform to the errors of the people, comply with their prejudices, gain their hearts and excite their enthusiasm, then gratitude is a contagion—it is a whirlwind."

The same volume (of Randall's Work) contains copious extracts from the letters of Fisher Ames and a number of other leading Federalists, derived from Hamilton's recently published papers and other sources. They breathe in general the same spirit, hankering after pre-revolutionary institutions and systems, though less boldly expressed than was done by Hamilton and Adams, and the same distrust of the sufficiency of the Constitution and above all of the capacities and dispositions of the people, the latter exhibited in assaults upon democracy and the democratic spirit of the country.

John Adams was in every sense a remarkable man. Nature seems to have employed in his construction intellectual materials sufficient to have furnished many minds respectably. It would not be easy to name men, either of his day or of any period, whose characters present a deeper or a stronger soil, one which during his long and somewhat boisterous public life was thoroughly probed by his enemies without disclosing any variation in its depths from the qualities and indications of its surface. Still more deeply was it turned up and exposed to the light by himself with the same result. His writings, which have been more extensive and more various than those of any of his contemporaries, have been given to the world apparently without reserve. These, with his diaries and autobiography, have turned his character inside out and shown us, without disguise of any sort, the kind of man he was: and the representation is invariably that of the same "always honest man" that he was three quarters of a century ago when that high praise was accorded to him by his not too partial friend, Benjamin Franklin, in a communication not designed to be over civil.

Whatever diversities may have arisen in the opinions of men in relation to the merits or demerits of his after conduct, all agree in conceding to him credit for patriotic and useful services in the times which have been happily described as those which tried men's souls. Mr. Jefferson, but two years before the death of both of them, on referring to that period, and to Mr. Adams's great services, in my presence, was warmed by the subject, and spoke of him as having been the mainmast of the ship—the orator of the Revolution, &c. It is in all probability no exaggeration of his merits to assume that there was no man in the United States, (perhaps, but not without doubt, excepting Samuel Adams,) who, before he was sent abroad in their service, did more than himself in a civil capacity to promote the cause of the Revolution. This is a high distinction—one which entitles his memory to the perpetual reverence of his countrymen. No subsequent errors of opinion, nothing short of personal dishonor and degradation, of which he was incapable, could extinguish a claim to the enduring gratitude and respect of a nation founded on such services.

He left our shores upon his foreign mission a noble specimen of a republican statesman—his heart and mind filled to overflowing with right principles, and capable of vindicating them whenever and wherever they might stand in need of support or defense. He performed his public duties with fidelity and honor, but in respect to his political opinions he returned an altered man. His "Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America," written and published in England whilst representing his country there, notwithstanding an imposing title, though agreeable to some excited painful emotions in the breasts of most of his Revolutionary associates. The dissatisfaction of the latter was not a little increased by the circumstance that sentiments and opinions, so disparaging to a form of government which had been the unceasing object of their desire, should have been ostentatiously promulgated in a country and in the presence of a government from which the right to establish it had been wrested by arms, and on the part of which the most unfriendly feelings in respect to our advancement were still entertained. It was, nevertheless, true that no circumstance contributed more toward his selection by the Federal party as their candidate for the office of Vice-President than these very avowals. His own sense of their efficacy in that respect is clearly to be inferred from the fact that he devoted the first moments of his time, whilst occupying that station, to the prosecution of the same general object, with less disguise and increased boldness, through his "Discourses on Davila."

Jefferson and Samuel Adams and others of their stamp, who had embarked in the Revolution with a spirit that could neither be appalled by danger whilst the battle raged, nor seduced by considerations of any description after it had been fought, were not slow in perceiving that Mr. Adams had not only deserted from the cause of free government, but that he regarded his first success under the new system and aspired to the still higher honor in the gift of his countrymen as fruits of his desertion. Whilst his early and best friends felt that the fabric, the erection of which had cost them so much labor and so many sacrifices, had lost one of its strongest pillars by his falling off, they were neither dismayed nor did they despair of its safety. They met his second attempt to bring free governments into disrepute with an energy that drove him, as he himself admits, stubborn and inflexible in his purposes as he always had been, to discontinue, at least in that form, assaults upon a political faith, once the object of their common devotion. This desertion on the part of one in whom they had confided so fully, and upon whose coöperation, in securing to them the full enjoyment of the political rights for the acquisition of which they had endured so many perils, they had largely depended, sank deeply into the hearts and minds of the people. The spirit of discontent was naturally much increased by the discovery that Hamilton, who had done himself so much honor, and who had raised such favorable anticipations by the chivalrous spirit and gallantry with which he had embraced and sustained the national cause was, after all, irreconcilably hostile to that system of republican government which they so highly prized, and upon the ultimate enjoyment of which they had so long meditated; that his opposition was not only open and unreserved, but that he assigned as a reason for it their incapacity and unfitness for the support and enjoyment of free institutions.