The road taken: A reinterpretation of Jeffersonian ideology in the context of the John Taylor-John Adams debate

摘要

In 1814, John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia, published An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, a response some twenty years in the making to John Adam's A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Adams responded to Taylor in a set of thirty-two letters. Historically celebrated as the philosopher of Jeffersonianism, Taylor provides access to the dominant American political ideology of the early nineteenth century, and a contrast to the discredited vision of Adam's federalism. An examination of Taylor's thought demonstrates a political vision which represented a reaction to Lockean atomism and a cooption of the rising tide of democracy in America. Taylor's promotion of an organic vision of society, sanctified by a historicism of three ages, rationalized the rule by southern planters. By tarring Adams with the stigma of Hamiltonianism, monarchism, and an aristocracy of bankers and stock manipulators, the Jeffersonians, were able to discredit a political vision, with a puritan ancestry whose manifestation in Massachusetts was decidedly democratic. At its core, Taylor's thought justified a society which was not only built on the back of slaves, but one which presumed a deference of the yeoman to the planter. As a result of this study, the democratic mantel traditionally associated with Jeffersonianism can be seen as successful rhetoric whose focus was power rather than the principles celebrated in the Declaration of Independence.