Debating Constitutionalism: John Adams's Discourses on Davila

In 1758, a young John Adams writing in his diary posed to himself the question of what value, if any, the study of the distant past had for himself and his contemporaries. In considering the question, Adams soundly rejected any intrinsic value in the knowledge of what we might today call “factoids,” declaring, “I would pay no more Admiration to a man who could [tell] me the exact Highth [sic] of Cicero, or the Number of hairs that grew upon his Head…than I would to one could tell me the exact Number of Letters, Commas and semicolons that are in all his Works.” The objective of the study of history, Adams concluded, was not “naked Knowledge of great names and [Actions], but rather “personal Improvement in Virtue and Capacity, by imitating the Virtues and avoiding the Vices of great men, and by judging the Effects of Causes now at Work, by those Causes which have appeared heretofore.” The study of the past thus was only important in so far as it informed behaviour, and even political policy, in the present.

A little over thirty years later, in 1790, the then-Vice-President Adams began publishing in the Gazette of the United States a series of what ultimately numbered thirty-two columns, in which he offered a translation of, and commentary on, Enrico Caterino Davila's Dell’Istoria delle Guerre civili di Francia (1630), a popular and widely acclaimed historical work of the prior century. Adams owned a French translation of Davila, and envisioned his own Discourses as a sequel of sorts to his recent treatise, Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–1788), a wide-ranging work of political theory whose stated aim was to respond to criticisms levelled against American state constitutions by French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781). The later Discourses, in turn, provided a medium for Adams to expound on his personal (and controversial) brand of what some contemporary and later scholarly critics perceived as “aristocratic” republicanism. Indeed, some years later, when Adams published his columns in book form (1805), he acknowledged the controversy the articles had caused, as they appeared to some of his critics to expose the now-former President of the United States as a clandestine monarchist.

ON DECEMBER 9, 1874, an audience gathered at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City to witness the first English-language performance in the United States of Hervé's (1825–1892) opéra bouffe, Chilperic (1868). The opera first had been staged in New York five years earlier in its original French at the Théâtre Française. While historical exactitude probably should not have been expected from a work that begins with a druid chorus, Hervé's opera offered New York audiences a comical look at the marital travails of King Chilperic I. Originally recounted with no small amount of disdain by Gregory of Tours in the Decem libri historiarum, and later with dramatic flair by Augustin Thierry in his Recits, the machinations of Queen Fredegund at the expense of Chilperic's first wife, Galswinth, provided Hervé with more than sufficient (if surprisingly tragic) plot around which to weave his comedy.

In Hervé's version, Chilperic meets the shepherdess Fredegund while searching for the aforementioned druids in the forest, when both already are engaged to be married to others. Chilperic's brother Sigibert and sister-in-law Brunhild, not surprisingly, think very little of Chilperic's obvious romantic interest in the young peasant woman: “Never, never, I declare/Was such a stupid being seen,/to fall in love with the first he meets,/It clearly shows he's pretty green.” Chilperic does follow through with his marriage to Galswinth (whom he insists in the English translation on referring to as “Mrs. C”), however, enraging Fredegund, who in the meantime has returned with Chilperic to the palace. Her plan to have her rival disposed of is foiled, however (in all of five minutes, as Chilperic brags) and everyone improbably shares a (relatively) happy ending. In the space of three short acts bloody dynastic politics have been transformed into light musical comedy.

The opera was, by most measures, an international success, and the 1874 production was performed throughout the United States, including tour stops in Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, and Galveston. Not all American reviewers were impressed by the opera, however. One reviewer, for instance, dismissed the anglicized version as “tame, disjointed, and incoherent…A chorus of Druids in the opening scene that sounds like a gloomy reminiscence of ‘Norma’ seems to cast a shadow over the fun and frolic which the wit fails to dispel.”

WRITING AS SILENCE Dogood in the New-England Courant in 1722, a young Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) articulated a traditional view of historical writing as essentially a didactic genre: “Histories of lives are seldom entertaining, unless they contain something either admirable or exemplar.” While history as a literary genre by no means had shed its ostensible raison d’être by the century's end, its allure certainly was not predicated solely on its ability to instruct. Its growing popularity among American readers was concurrent with an expanding number of historical institutions (local and national) as well as a frequency of allusions to historical events and persons in both art and literature. Indeed, it has been estimated that in the first half of the nine-teenth century over one-third of all bestsellers were historical in focus, with leading magazines devoting roughly the same percentage of their space to historical content. Nevertheless, the historical bestsellers of the era—which included such popular titles as William Robertson's History of Scotland (1759) and David Hume's History of Great Britain (1754–1762)—do not suggest any special public interest in France's early medieval past specifically, or even French history in general. Among contemporary American historians too it is difficult to detect anything approaching a collective preoccupation along the lines of concurrent scholarly trends in continental Europe.

The Availability of Sources: Libraries, Reprints, and Imports

If, indeed, American readers and writers were somewhat detached from the ongoing European scholarly discourse regarding the early history of the regnum Francorum, partial blame would seem to lie with a basic lack of accessible source material, especially primary. In 1826, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1779–1845) delivered an oration at Harvard University on behalf of the Phi Beta Kappa Society on the theme of “Characteristics of the Age.” Bemoaning the sorry state of classical learning in his own country, compared to what could be found in European universities, Story asserted that “There is not, perhaps, a single library in America sufficiently copious to have enabled Gibbon to verify the authorities for his immortal History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” While Story exaggerated slightly the sorry state of America's libraries, which numbered more than seven hundred at the time he delivered his oration, his observation vis-à-vis primary sources was not entirely unjust.

Writing in The American Merchant in 1859 Buffalo, New York, businessman, author, civic leader, and scholarly dilettante Roswell Willson Haskins (1796–1870) ambitiously offered to readers his personal “Philosophy of History.” “By nature a democrat” politically, as his biographer later noted, the lessons of the French Revolution had inspired in Haskins an entrenched scepticism of both religion and monarchy. He brought these and other prejudices to bear in his undoubtedly quixotic, and ultimately ignored, efforts to set aright American historical studies. Observing among his countrymen the enormous popularity of historical writing, second only to fiction, Haskins critiqued those “standard” histories then available to American readers, claiming that they gave the false impression of history as “narratives of rule—of mere domination” rather than “what was dominated, what was governed.” According to Haskins, history, when pursued properly, should focus on “the people,” while also considering the ostensible divisions between races.

The history of early France, for Haskins, served as an ideal case in point, despite what he perceived as a relative indifference on the part of his fellow Americans towards that nation's history: “If, from recent events in Europe, or from whatever other cause any one should be singular enough…to wish some knowledge of early France—a wish, by the way, that is not often manifested—he would of course, resort to what are known as the standard histories of that county.” But these standard sources, Haskins suggested, provided only “dead and soulless” antiquarian details that ultimately told readers very little of real importance. In contrast, modern fiction and poetry by the likes of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) gave a far better impression of the national character and spirit of the French kingdom's founders. The true story of France's origins, according to Haskins, was one of diverse “races” gradually, and not without violence, congealing into a single nation.

There was, needless to say, no small amount of personal hubris underlying Haskins's assumption that the bulk of his fellow citizens might not, like himself, find their interest in early French history piqued by recent and dramatic events across the Atlantic.

AMONG THE MOST significant publishing phenomena of the first half of the nineteenth century was a veritable explosion in the production of books aimed at juvenile readers. History and social studies schoolbooks were among those juvenile publications being printed at an accelerating rate, at the same time that these subjects’ essential place within American elementary and especially secondary education—following European trends—became more firmly established in curricula. Whereas for much of the preceding colonial era, history as a discrete subject area had not played a significant role within writing and grammar school courses-of-study, its presence gradually expanded from the late-eighteenth century into the first half the nineteenth, initially within the contexts of private tutoring and academies. But by mid-century history had become an entrenched part of the curriculum within public high schools too—the first of which opened in Boston in 1821. While, not surprisingly, books that taught basic literacy skills dominated the schoolbook market, between 1816 and 1840 seven percent of all editions of American schoolbooks published were works of history.

In contrast, colleges, which serviced only a minority of the population, proved to be outliers in this curricular trend, for it was there that “history began earliest, but developed slowest,” as “colleges tolerated history…as a literary amusement for the students, taught by a professor whose major concern was languages or philosophy.” The sub-field of medieval European history was particularly ill-served; Henry Adams (1838–1918), in reflecting back on his appointment in 1870 as the first professor of medieval history at Harvard University—an institution whose curriculum at time of his hire contained “a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill”—had to admit that “down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.” Indeed, until the late nineteenth century, little in the way of serious, sustained attention to the medieval period could be found within America colleges and universities.

A Cloud of Witnesses

In 1853, British Quaker and abolitionist Wilson Armistead (1819–1868) published a brief work entitled A “Cloud of Witnesses” Against Slavery and Oppression, which, as its title suggested, was less a treatise than a sourcebook intended for use by his fellow abolitionists in their campaign against slavery. Marshalling quotations from authorities ranging from Christ to Homer to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Armistead's source-book included passages from two early medi eval hagio graphies: the vitae of two early sixth-century Gallo-Roman contemporaries, Bishops Caesarius of Arles and Remigius of Rheims. As early medi eval historians are well aware, neither of these important texts is a straightforward, purely factual bio graphy of its dedicatee. Moreover, while the Vita Caesarii was written by the subject's ecclesiastical colleagues within a decade of his death, the Vita Remigii was written centuries after Remigius's death by Bishop Hincmar of Rheims. But as is the case with his quotations from other “witnesses,” Armistead himself provided no introduction or contextualization, let alone critical analysis, for either vita excerpt. Their authority as “witnesses” is taken for granted. Both quoted passages deal with a common theme: the Church's redemption of captives destined for unfreedom. In the case of the Vita Caesarii, the passage describes the saint's nour-ishment of prisoners in the aftermath of the siege of Arles (507–508), and his use of the wealth of his church to pay their ransom. The Vita Remigii passage, in turn, relates Remigius's (successful) intervention with Clovis I to request of the king that he help to facilitate the redemption of captives, even using his personal wealth to do so.

Armistead's hope that other abolitionists might be able to profit from his research was soon realized. Only two years after the publication of A Cloud of Witnesses, Massachusetts abolitionist Edward Coit Rogers published Letters On Slavery: Addressed to the Pro-Slavery Men of America (1855), which quotes the same hagiographical passages excerpted by Armistead. Unlike Armistead, however, Rogers subsumed this cited evidence within a broader discussion of “the common right of all men” that he argued was “universal, equal, opposed to the assumed right of the few.” This common right, Rogers asserted, had once been enshrined in Roman law, but was allowed to decay, and when the empire “had become rotten with this sin [of slavery], the barbarians came forth and dragged her carcase [sic] to the pit.”

IN 1860, A reviewer of Parke Godwin's History of France writing in the National Quarterly Review addressed directly the longstanding historiographical debate surrounding the impact of the Franks’ arrival on the native Gallo-Romans. Inclined to see this meeting of peoples as a peaceful amalgamation rather than a violent conquest, the reviewer concluded, “It is idle, then, to believe that Clovis and his ragged followers were able to subdue the Gauls. It is far more likely that the latter were desirous of a change; and that the establishment of the Frankish empire was just as much a Gallic revolution as that which made Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul, and subsequently Emperor.” That meaningful equivalencies might be found between the early Frankish regnum and recent revolutionary and imperial French politics was taken for granted by many Anglophone writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who conceived of national histories as longue durée narratives in which individual participants came and went, but continuities and historical parallelism were perceptible. Samuel Goodrich, as noted above, in one of his many publications, informed his young readers that a contemporary equivalent to Charlemagne might be found in Napoleon, another “prince…seemed born for universal innovation.”

Such ostensibly analogous parallels between the French present and the Frankish past by no means appeared solely within the instructional frameworks of schoolbook narratives, nor were they always intended as flattering to either epoch: their purported significance was dictated in no small part by a writer's political orientation and attitude towards the revolutionary and later imperial regimes in France. While American sceptics of these regimes were more often associated with the Federalist party, and supporters with the (Democratic-)Republicans, attitudes did not neces-sarily break down consistently along party lines, especially as French radicalism and militancy became increasingly unpalatable to even previously sympathetic American observers. As historian Seth Cotlar has observed in regards to Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration in his inaugural address (1801) that “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” implicit in this statement was the message that “while the new American leaders were now all Republicans and Federalists, they were adamantly not Jacobins.”

In the summer of 1815, former president John Adams mused in a letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Adams raised the same rhetorical question to other correspondents that same summer, in one case explicitly identifying the recipient of the mystical ordination: the Merovingian king Clovis I (d. 511). Clovis, for Adams, was far from an epitome of enlightened rule: in a letter written that same summer to Dutch émigré François Adriaan Van der Kemp, the former president characterized the king as “a more cruel tyrant than Frederick or Napoleon.”

Adams had referred in print to the general incompetency of the Merovingians as early as 1790. For support, he needed only to consult his personal library, which contained a number of learned volumes detailing the early history of the regnum Francorum: François-Eudes de Mézeray’s Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire de France (1676), Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers’s État de la France (1727–28), Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix (1748), Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s Observations sur l’histoire de France (1765), and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). These writers were by no means unified in their interpretations of early medieval history, including in their relative positions on the question of whether the authority of the Frankish monarchy was constitutionally limited by an equality ostensibly enjoyed by all Franks. Nevertheless, Adams would have found more than a few disapproving, even contemptuous, assessments of Clovis and his successors in those volumes contained within his library. In Boulainvilliers, for instance, Adams would have read of a Clovis who was “a heroic figure, though not a particularly likeable one.” While, in Montesquieu’s words, “Those princes were murderous, unjust and cruel because the whole nation was. If Christianity sometimes seemed to soften them, it was only through the terror that Christianity gives the guilty.”

The history of conciliarism during the first millennium is also the story of episcopal corporatism. During this period, hundreds of episcopal councils assembled throughout the Latin West. Primarily regional meetings, these defy easy generalizations as regards their priorities and agendas and their influence on religious policy and practice. Despite their diversity, however, they constituted an institutional mechanism for bishops to craft rules whose authority was predicated chiefly on the consensus of the bishops as legislators. Collectively, bishops contributed to a growing body of ecclesiastical norms, which had yet to be fully delineated or codified. While promulgating policies for their immediate context, bishops consciously grounded their work in authoritative precedent, reaffirming both their shared corporate identity and authority and their role in the continuation of the apostolic tradition.

In his recent major reevaluation of Jewish social and economic history, Michael Toch identifies frequent appearances of Jeremy Cohen's ‘hermeneutical Jew’ in the documentary record of early medieval Western Europe. According to Cohen's classic paradigm, textual references to individual Jews, and even to entire communities, do not necessarily refer to actual human beings but rather represent fictional straw-men created for polemical purposes by Christian authors. Sermon and hagiographical texts, in particular, demand a skeptical reading due to their entangled spiritual and rhetorical programs. In his own study, Toch concludes that due to the polemical nature of much of our documentation for a Jewish presence in early medieval Western Europe it is necessary to dismiss all but the most certain evidence for Jewish habitation, an approach that naturally leads to a minimalist view of Jewish demography.

Those scholars who do not share this same degree of skepticism argue that is it possible for a text to have a polemical intent while still reacting to, and thus reflecting, a historical reality. This is particularly true of normative legal sources, including both secular and ecclesiastical legislation. For his part, Toch rejects much of this material, too, as reliable evidence for Jewish life in the Early Middle Ages, concluding, ‘This is largely literary evidence of a predominantly ideological nature that reveals more about the expectations of a society and its view of itself than about what actually happened on a day-to-day basis. In many cases it does not reflect actual encounters with Jews but should be read as rhetorical exercises.’

Toch, of course, is not alone in reading ecclesiastical legislation as more reflective of episcopal ideology than of real-world circumstances, particularly where Jews are concerned. Such a reading, however, is based in part on the erroneous assumption that ecclesiastical councils simply repeated normative and formulaic proscriptions with minimal variation and without specific consideration. Yet legislative continuities in early medieval conciliar legislation lay not so much in verbatim repetition of canonical precedent as in the reiteration of broad legal principles that informed the composition of new, and contextspecific, decrees. The considerable expense and effort required to organize an ecclesiastical synod encouraged a practical and productive legislative agenda. While new legislation was expected to be grounded in the regulae of the past, conciliar canons were written for immediate application, not as vague statements of ideological intent.