The New York Times – Opinion
The Founders Were Afraid for the Country, Too
Jamelle Bouie – March 15, 2025
While writing my column this week, I was reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip about the outcome of the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia. As the story goes, Franklin was leaving the hall after signing the Constitution when he approached by Elizabeth Powel, a close friend of George Washington’s. She asked whether the delegates had decided on a monarchy or a republic.
“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
This anecdote comes to us by way of James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland who later served as the United States’ third secretary of war. It was recorded in “The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787” and has had remarkable staying power in the decades and centuries since it entered popular memory.
The reason, I think, is that it captures better than almost anything else the apprehension and uncertainty that marked the first decade of the American republic.
Somewhat lost to history in our memory and mythology of the founding fathers is the fact that their optimism regarding their capacity to make the world anew was tempered by a deep pessimism born of past precedent and their own experiences as statesmen and politicians.
The framers were more than aware of the fragile and short-lived nature of republican government. “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy,” Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist No. 9, voicing the conventional wisdom of many of his peers. “If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed.”
Accordingly, their own choices were informed by the examples of the past. They would avoid the direct democracy of Athens in favor of a system of representation; they would blend representation with the aristocratic elements of the Roman republic; and they would create a new office, the presidency, that would tether the executive power to the rule of law.
The product of human failings and human frailties, despotism could not help but lurk around every corner. The best the framers could do was to design their new government to be as resilient as it could be in the face of ambition and the will to power.
But, of course, there was no guarantee that it would work.
There is a wonderful book by the political scientist Dennis C. Rasmussen, titled “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders,” that both captures and explains the pessimism of the revolutionary generation.
George Washington, for instance, feared that the nation would be pulled apart by faction and partisanship. “I have, for sometime past, viewed the political concerns of the United States with an anxious, and painful eye,” wrote Washington near the end of his life in a letter to none other than the aforementioned McHenry. “They appear to me, to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis; but in what they will result — that Being, who sees, foresees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”
Hamilton, who devoted his life in politics to building a strong national government, feared that the political system was too weak to secure a strong future for the nation. “Truly, My dear Sir, the prospects of our Country are not brilliant,” he wrote to Rufus King after Thomas Jefferson took office, complaining that the new president pushed a vision of “No army, no navy, no active commerce … as little government as possible.”
John Adams saw a lack of virtue among the people and feared that they would not be able to resist the temptations of a demagogue. “If there is any Thing Serious in this World, the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholy, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe,” he wrote to his son, John Quincy Adams,. “You have seen much of it. I have seen more.…The distemper in our Nation is so general, and so certainly incurable.”
Interestingly, the founding father who lived longest into the 19th century, James Madison, retained a great deal more optimism about the future of the American Republic. “A Government like ours has so many safety valves, giving vent to overheated passions,” he wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, commenting on the Missouri crisis, “that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions cannot be exempt.”
To take the pessimism of the founders seriously — to really engage with their fears — is to see the extent to which they weren’t all wrong.
Washington’s warnings about the dangers of faction are, these days, well taken, especially as we observe in real time the ways that narrow political allegiance and fear of party censure can supersede a lawmaker’s commitment to anything broader than immediate partisan interest. How might Republicans in Congress deal with the illegal, unconstitutional and anti-constitutional actions of the White House if they weren’t so concerned with winning the next primary or raising money for the next campaign?
We can both recognize that modern democracy is inconceivable without the political party — it is a necessary coordinating institution — while also giving due credit to Washington who could see, even in those early years, the dangers that factional behavior and blind partisanship could pose to even a well-ordered political system.
Adams’s warnings about the consequences of a lack of virtue land especially hard in light of the rampant dishonesty that almost defines American politics at this moment in time. This isn’t the more ordinary fudging of truth that attends politics in most places and at most times; no, this is the kind of blatant and unapologetic lying that degrades public life itself. This is going before the American people and telling them things you know are not true to gain power, and then using that power to pursue your own interests against the public good.
Or look at the extent to which too many Americans indulge the worst forms of conspiratorial thinking, who indulge the worst fantasies about their political opponents and believe anything they’re told, as long as it flatters their prejudices and preconceptions about people on the other side of a political or cultural divide. This, too, is a rejection of civic virtue, of the good faith and good will that we ought to show our fellow citizens because we are not engaged in a winner-take-all struggle as much as we are a collective effort to live together as peacefully as we can.
Hamilton’s fears about anarchy were mostly about his disdain for democracy. And yet, as we bear witness to an aggressive attempt to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, we may find that he was right about the dangers of a weak state for the peace and security of the nation.
Against all of this, there is Madison’s optimism. And I have to say that I am inclined by disposition to stand with Madison.
Many groups of Americans — especially those who, because of race or religion, have found themselves outside the so-called mainstream — have faced challenges far worse than those at hand. They have had to survive as second-class citizens under authoritarian rule, or as supposed enemy nationals confined to internment camps, or as dangerous radicals suppressed and surveilled by their government.
The United States, it suffices to say, has been far from benign toward many of its own citizens. But even in the face of real oppression, those Americans (and their allies) had the capacity to fight for equality, to fight for democracy, to fight to make this country so much more than what it is often content to be.
After surveying the many difficulties facing the country, Madison wrote, at the very end of his life, that he was “far however from desponding, of the great political experiment in the hands of the American people.” Madison had seen and experienced a lifetime’s worth of political turmoil. Through it all, however, the republic endured. And as his time on this earth came to a close, he still believed in the strength of the system he had helped to create.
I’m not so sure about the strength of that system. (It should be said that a generation after Madison’s death, his Constitution collapsed under the weight of the slave system that gave him his livelihood.) I’m a little more optimistic about the American people themselves. Democracy is our birthright — it’s part of who we are. At our best, we are jealous of our freedom and eager to expand our collective liberty for the sake of a more egalitarian society.
We have a would-be despot in the White House. But even with a rotting Constitution on the verge of crisis, this is still a Republic, and the people are still sovereign. The task, then, is to make this clear to those in power who would like to pretend otherwise.