None of the Framers would have anticipated the social upheavals and political changes that have taken place since their day. They took aim at one kind of aristocracy, a hereditary one, but expected that a different kind of aristocracy would survive, an aristocracy of talent and republican virtue that would survive Madison’s process of filtration and ascend to the highest political offices. What such a “natural aristocracy” would look like was, famously, the subject of a series of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1813. Friends at first during the Revolution, then antagonists in politics, they were at last brought together in retirement through their mutual friend, Benjamin Rush.
The reconciliation delighted Adams, who wrote long, teasing letters to his old friend. For his part, Jefferson wrote serious letters that acknowledged the differences that still separated them, taking up Adams’ hint “that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” The natural aristocracy, said Jefferson, was one of virtue or talents, and he contrasted this with an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth. The latter, he said, was a “mischievous ingredient in government,” which he trusted would be rejected in popular elections.5 All very well, replied Adams impishly, but “what chance have Talents and Virtue in competition with Wealth and Birth?” Or beauty, he added, no doubt recalling how he had been mocked as ‘His Rotundity.’ “Beauty, Grace, Figure, Attitude, Movement, have in innumerable Instances prevailed over Wealth, Birth, Talents, Virtue and every thing else.”6 Then there was the natural deference paid to eminent families.
Our Winthrops, Winslows, Bradfords, Saltonstalls, Quincys, Chandlers, Leonards, Hutchinsons, Olivers, Sewalls etc are precisely in the Situation of your Randolphs, Carters and Burwells, and Harrisons. Some of them unpopular for the part they took in the late revolution, but all respected for their names and connections and whenever they fall in with the popular Sentiments, are preferred, ceteris paribus to all others.7
Yet suppose, added Adams, that Jefferson’s natural aristocrats overcame all of the prejudices of family names, and the preference for beauty. Suppose that, as Jefferson imagined, voters would prefer genius to birth, virtue to beauty, and that a meritocracy of intelligence and character were chosen to lead the country. Even then, said the skeptical Adams, I would wish to place a check on their ambition. No class of people can safely be given unlimited power over others.
More than Jefferson, the conservative Adams had a better grasp on what the future would hold. Where Jefferson foresaw the popular election of natural aristocrats, Adams understood that voters would be looking for things other than republican virtue in their politicians. And where Jefferson thought that his natural aristocrats would promote the public interest, Adams predicted the rise of modern interest group politics in which everyone looks out for number one. Most of all, Adams expected that a form of hereditary aristocracy would survive, in the country’s leading families.
Adams’ Boston is more democratic today than in his day, or in the recent past. Cleveland Amory’s Proper Bostonians told of a letter of recommendation written a hundred years ago for a scion of the city. “You will be more than satisfied with him. His father was a Cabot, his mother a Lowell, and further back there were Saltonstalls and Peabodys.” From Chicago the prospective employer wrote back “unfortunately we were not contemplating using Mr. ______ for breeding purposes.”8 Even today, however, dynasties may still be found, for who can doubt that family connections matter in a country whose leaders bear names such as Clinton and Bush, and where the Kennedys and Pauls begin with a leg up. We like to think we live in an egalitarian society, but there’s less social mobility than we imagine, and less we can do to change this than we think.
Neither Adams nor Jefferson anticipated how democracy would transform America in the nineteenth century. While both men still lived, states began to depart from the system of filtering presidential candidates by letting state legislators pick the electors. In the 1824 election, only a quarter of the states chose electors in this way, and four years later only two states did so. The 1824 election was also the last one in which the House of Representatives chose the president because no candidate obtained a majority of votes in the Electoral College. The prescient George Mason had predicted the rise of democracy. “Notwithstanding the oppressions & injustice experienced amongst us from democracy; the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the genius of the people must be consulted.”9 But even Mason failed to anticipate just how profoundly America would change over the next 50 years.
American society had indeed begun to change with the Revolution. An early effort to create a hereditary social elite amongst members of the Revolution’s officer class proved to be a major embarrassment for George Washington. After surrendering his sword in 1783, Washington enjoyed the company of his old comrades and allowed himself to be elected the president of their group, the Society of the Cincinnati. The problem, however, was that its members were seen to constitute an American aristocracy. Writing from France, Jefferson warned Washington that a single fiber left of the Society “will produce an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”10 Jefferson’s fears proved unfounded, however. Today the Society’s Washington headquarters, largely unused, may be seen across Massachusetts Avenue from the considerably more popular and meritocratic Cosmos Club, whose walls are graced with the pictures of members who have won Nobel or Pulitzer prizes or Presidential Medals of Freedom, people such as Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, people not to be found in the club across the street. The Founders’ descendants had returned to the general mass, as George Mason had predicted.
The change was most obvious to foreigners. Before the Revolution, English visitors to colonial America felt very much at home, especially when they came to Virginia. Its people, reported a British officer, were well-bred, polite, and affable.11 By the 1830s, however, American society had radically changed, as a new set of visitors discovered. Now Americans seemed to embrace the world of business with an eagerness that appalled the European. Captain Marryat, the author of popular novels such as Mr. Midshipman Easy, visited America in 1836–37 and observed that “time to an American is everything, and space he attempts to reduce to a mere nothing. . . . ‘Go ahead’ is the real motto of the country.”12 It was democracy that had made the difference, said Alexis de Tocqueville. “In democracies there is nothing greater or more brilliant than commerce; it is what attracts the regard of the public and fills the imagination of the crowd; all energetic passions are directed toward it.”13
Commerce had made ordinary Americans wealthy, but to the European visitor this had seemed a Faustian bargain, where culture and refinement had been traded away for money. The mother of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope lived for several years in the States, and reported that the “polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of” in America.14 Marryat had no better opinion of Americans. “Honours of every description, which stir up the soul of man to noble deeds—worthy incitements, they have none,” he observed.15 All of that had been bartered away in the pursuit of wealth. Politicians were the worst. “No high-minded consistent man will now offer himself” for public office, said Marryat. “The scum is uppermost. . . . The prudent, the enlightened, the wise, and the good, have all retired into the shade, preferring to pass a life of quiet retirement, rather than submit to the insolence and dictation of a mob.”16 Themselves the product of an aristocratic age, the Founders had created a society that had little use for men like themselves.
Not every American celebrated what had happened to their country, and the revolt against the new commercial democracy was nowhere stronger than in the South, especially when slavery was in question. Beginning with John C. Calhoun in 1837, southerners argued that poor northern workers, though free, were nonetheless “wage-slaves” of their employers. The slaveholders’ scorn for northern life came naturally to them, and its roots maybe found in