Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021
288 pp. $9.99 (Kindle)
Is America on its last leg? Will some Edward Gibbon of the next generation be writing The Rise and Fall of the American Empire? And if so, will the knockout punch come from the “woke” left—or from reactionary national conservatives; from a Chinese social media company—or from WWIII? Or more pathetically, will it go out in a chorus of “c’mon man” answered with self-aggrandizing superlatives?
In Fears of a Setting Sun, Syracuse University political science professor Dennis C. Rasmussen doesn’t weigh in on whether the sky is falling or how. He provides something significantly more valuable: historical perspective. Throughout the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin had looked at the sun painted on the back of Washington’s chair and wondered if it was rising or setting. When the founders adjourned on September 17, 1787, with a workable constitution in hand, he pronounced it a rising sun—a symbol of promise for the new republic.
But, notes Rasmussen, Franklin was the eldest there (age eighty-one) and did not live to see many depressing developments that followed. In time, such optimism would become the minority opinion among America’s founders. Almost to a man, they came to despair that things had gone dreadfully awry and that their creation would soon crumble. In lucid prose rare among academics, Rasmussen paints the scene, showing that although every founder had highs and lows, almost all ended in a trough of dashed hopes for the new nation.
Washington—ever the portrait of stoic resolve—was, in fact, seething with frustration over the partisanship that reared its ugly head in newspapers, popular opinion, and even within his own cabinet. Jefferson and Hamilton, in particular, were like oil and water. Detailing their conflicts—stemming from Hamilton’s “liberal reading of the nation’s fundamental charter” and his constant push “to strengthen the government in every way that he could think up”—Rasmussen observes, “The fact that Washington managed to keep them together in the administration for as long as he did—nearly four years—was itself a noteworthy accomplishment; one can only imagine how vitriolic the enmity between them would have grown without his steady presence at the helm” (78, 64, 31–32). Distraught, Washington told Jefferson in 1792,
Without more charity for the opinions & acts of one another in Governmental matters . . . it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the Reins of Government or to keep the parts of it together: for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way & another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must, inevitably, be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness & prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever! (29)
The “dangers of factionalism” were to become “the great theme” of one of the greatest political documents in American history—Washington’s Farewell Address, which disclosed his “most ardent wish,” that Americans set party disputes aside and “banish those invectives which proceed from illiberal prejudices and jealousy.” In other words, as Rasmussen states, Washington’s “most heartfelt wish . . . was that the very nature of American politics would change in a fundamental way” (46–48). Until his final days, the great man’s worries would rarely abate. “I have, for sometime past, viewed the political concerns of the United States with an anxious, and painful eye,” he wrote, just weeks before his death. “They appear to me, to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis” (58).
Hamilton, who drafted Washington’s address, came to agree. In fact, as Rasmussen points out, he “was among the most disappointed in the national charter even at the outset,” largely for fear that “the federal government would not have sufficient vigor or ‘energy,’ particularly in relation to the state governments” (61). Thus, even though he worked as hard as anyone defending the Constitution, he viewed it as a shadow of what it could have been, and he worked tirelessly as secretary of the treasury to rectify this.
Despite largely succeeding in cementing his quasi-mercantilist vision into the American bedrock, he never thought the federal government was strong enough. And though he was cut down by Aaron Burr’s bullet at age forty-seven, he nonetheless lived long enough to see his arch-nemesis in the highest office, dismantling aspects of his work. “Though he lived only a few years into Jefferson’s presidency, by the time of his premature death Hamilton was convinced that the Republicans had already done irreparable damage to an already-weak government and that little but disorder and dissolution could be expected thereafter” (64). Jefferson’s presidency did, in fact, prove to be a deathblow for Hamilton’s influence and that of his Federalist party, which would limp on almost exclusively via the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.
Thus, John Adams would be that party’s last president, and his pugnacious adherence to his own conscience often put him at odds with his fellow Federalists. He feared for America’s future for many of the same reasons as Jefferson, disapproving of Hamilton’s financial programs, his “desire to cozy up to Britain in foreign affairs,” and his undying wish to lead a large standing army (93). He also shared Washington’s distaste for the rampant “party spirit.” In Adams’s view, though, at the root of this and every other folly plaguing the new nation was a lack of “civic virtue”: the willingness to put the nation’s best interests over any short-term gain for oneself or one’s party. Rasmussen deftly captures the second president’s constant agonizing.
Whenever Adams read or heard of Americans not living up to the high expectations that he had set for them—every time a merchant or artisan showed greater concern for making money than for the public good, every time a housewife evinced a weakness for luxury, every time a soldier demonstrated a lack of discipline or abandoned the army, every time an election was decided through intrigue or demagoguery rather than true merit—he was shocked and appalled all over again. “There is one Enemy, which to me is more formidable, than Famine, Pestilence and the sword,” he remarked to William Gordon, a minister and chronicler of the Revolution; “I mean the Corruption which is prevalent in so many American Hearts, a Depravity that is more inconsistent with our Republican Governments, than Light is with Darkness.” Similarly, he commented to his cousin Zabdiel Adams that if a sense of virtue “cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.—They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.” (111)
Adams’s apprehensions only grew with time. Yet, the Alien and Sedition Acts, which he signed into law, not only were among the new nation’s most prominent lapses of civic virtue, they also led to dissensions that pushed the country toward its most harrowing trial. The first enabled the president to deport foreigners with little cause, and the second—in flagrant violation of the First Amendment—made it a crime to criticize federal officials.
When Jefferson read these acts, his blood boiled. As Rasmussen shows, until his final decade, Jefferson was an inveterate optimist for America’s future, but his ever-present worry was that the federal government was too powerful. In response to this massive overreach of federal power, he wrote what became the Kentucky Resolutions, and James Madison wrote corresponding Virginia Resolutions; they voiced, in the names of the respective state legislatures, that these federal acts were unconstitutional. Jefferson, always more passionate and less measured than Madison, went further, declaring the acts null and void, essentially claiming for the states the right to overturn federal legislation. This was a precedent Madison would try to walk back after Jefferson’s death when John C. Calhoun and others voiced a doctrine of state’s rights that would fan the flames of civil war.
Ironically, Jefferson was the most prescient among the founders regarding the likelihood of such a war, thinking it the inevitable result of a metastasizing federal government and divisions over slavery. As Rasmussen shows, Jefferson’s letters sweat with anxiety over the potential breakup of the union—fears, of course, vindicated by history. Although commentators endlessly debate Jefferson’s mixed legacy on slavery, he clearly thought it a great moral evil that would come back to haunt America with vengeance. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia.1
Nonetheless, in his view, the Constitution did not give Congress the power to condition the admission of new states into the union upon their outlawing slavery, an issue that came to the fore when Missouri sought admission as a new slave state. He told one correspondent that “this mementous [sic] question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” “In explaining why he saw the conflict over Missouri as the union’s death knell,” writes Rasmussen,
Jefferson all but prophesied the path to the Civil War: “a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved [sic] and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Jefferson concluded the letter with an unforgettable expression of regret: “I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ’76. to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.” (175)
The bright spot in Rasmussen’s study is the one founder never mired in overwhelming doubts about the nation’s future: James Madison. The cause was, in part, a difference in temperament. Even as the British were burning the executive mansion during the War of 1812, Madison “remained almost maddeningly unperturbed. . . . Edward Coles, Madison’s private secretary for most of his presidency, remarked that ‘nothing could excite or ruffle him’ and that he never heard Madison ‘utter one petulant expression, or give way for one moment to passion or despondency’” (218). He seems to have been even delusionally optimistic about averting racial conflict via his scheme for resettling former slaves in a new Caribbean or African colony.
His lowest point came during the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when Calhoun attempted to leverage Madison’s words to promote the idea that state legislatures had the right to nullify federal legislation—in this case, a tariff intended to protect northern manufacturers. “Calhoun and his followers presented themselves as following in the footsteps of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions,” and Madison—long retired and now in his eighties—“felt compelled to wade into the controversy in order to set the nullifiers straight” (213). Ultimately, the tariff was lowered, and the nullifiers stood down—making it just another in a line of crises Madison had seen the new nation avert. This helps to explain what made his outlook so much more beneficent than that of the other founders: If the nation could survive the Alien and Sedition acts, the War of 1812, the controversy over the “Missouri question,” the Nullification Crisis, and the many other challenges thrown at it in its first fifty years, then what could kill it? “The longer the nation endured, the more durable it seemed” (221).
Further, “Madison had lower expectations than most of the other founders regarding what was politically possible, and he pointedly refused to let the perfect be the enemy of the good” (219). He had no illusions that the American form of government would somehow eliminate partisanship, nor did he rest his hopes for its preservation on the prevalence of civic virtue. He didn’t think the federal government should be quite so limited as Jefferson wanted, nor nearly so strong as Hamilton did. Like virtually every founder, even the so-called Father of the Constitution thought it was far from perfect. But he was the last of his generation to go (in June 1836), and his experience suggested that what they’d built would continue standing.
Thus, Rasmussen’s lesson is that although we ought not be complacent, we’d be wise to adopt a bit of Madison’s equanimity. Most of his contemporaries predicted a worse fate for America than all but the most alarmist of today’s commentators, and they had seemingly better reasons to do so. Yet, “that level of pessimism now appears to have been unwarranted,” writes Rasmussen. “If Madison could find solace in the fact that America’s constitutional order had managed to weather nearly a half century’s worth of storms by the time he reached old age, perhaps we should be cheered to recall that it has now survived for more than two hundred and thirty years” (228).
It’s a comforting message. But was that “level of pessimism” really unwarranted? Jefferson was certainly right in predicting a war over slavery—still the bloodiest in American history—whereas Madison’s views on the subject were, Rasmussen acknowledges, “driven by something like blind faith” (214). And although not all of Jefferson’s worries were sound—for instance, those regarding “stockjobbing” and the ascendance of commerce over agriculture—his misgivings over the centralization of political power in the federal government seem to have been thoroughly vindicated. Madison himself repeatedly warned against such concentrated power, writing in Federalist 48, for instance, that “The legislative department is every where extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”2 But as Chief Justice John Roberts observed nearly two and a half centuries later, the “Framers could hardly have envisioned today’s ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ and the authority administrative agencies now hold over our economic, social, and political activities.”3 (Set aside what someone like Washington or Adams would have thought about the moral character of America’s recent leaders; it’s too depressing a topic.)
It is certainly wise to temper one’s forecasts with historical perspective, of which Fears of a Setting Sun offers much. Doing so highlights the many ways in which America today is immeasurably better than it was at the founding—most notably, thanks to protection of the rights of black people and women. But there is nothing inevitable about the nation’s continued existence. And in many important ways, what our founders created—“a wise & frugal government,” as Jefferson put it, “which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, & shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned”—is already long gone.4
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1. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, edited by Robert Pierce Forbes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 250.
2. James Madison, The Federalist Papers: No. 48, February 1, 1788, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed48.asp#:~:text=The%20legislative%20department%20is%20everywhere,into%20which%20they%20have%20fallen.
3. Quoted in Oliver Dunford, “State of the Modern Administrative State,” Pacific Legal Foundation, March 5, 2024, https://pacificlegal.org/state-of-the-modern-administrative-state/.
4. Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 33 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 148–52, https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/first-inaugural-address-0.
