Section V: What the Founders Showed Us

Return for a moment to where this paper began. The founders did not give us a country without quarrel. They gave us, instead, a set of habits and institutions for quarreling without dissolving the union — and a sober understanding that the union was more important than any single quarrel.

Washington's Farewell Address of September 1796 is the operating manual we never quite read. Washington warned, in language that now reads almost as if written for our moment, against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party," against the geographic and partisan factions that distract from the common cause, and against the temptation to view foreign powers through the lens of domestic faction. He warned, most pointedly, that the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, was itself a frightful despotism. The man who could have been king turned down a third term in part to make exactly this point: that the institution outranks the man, every time, without exception.

Jefferson's First Inaugural of March 1801 was the first peaceful transfer of power between rival parties in modern democratic history. Standing in the half-finished Capitol — many of the rooms still unplastered — Jefferson chose conciliation over revenge. "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," he said. He did not mean that the partisan differences were trivial. He had spent the previous four years insisting they were enormous. He meant that beneath the partisan label was a common political principle — republican self-government — that both sides shared and neither owned. That insistence on a shared foundation, even in the immediate aftermath of a bitter election, is the move modern American politics most needs to relearn.

The Adams-Jefferson reconciliation, 158 letters across fourteen years, is the most moving private chapter in American political history. The two had spent the election of 1800 destroying each other in the public prints. They had not spoken for eleven years. When Benjamin Rush, the physician and signer of the Declaration, brokered the reopening of correspondence in 1812, the first letters were tentative. By the second year, they were writing each other essays. By the fourth, they were arguing again — but now as old friends, on paper, with the violence of the public quarrel long behind them. They wrote about Bonaparte, about the future of the republic, about how books should be read and what religion might mean to a republican citizen. They quarreled and they softened and they quarreled again. And on July 4, 1826 — exactly fifty years after the Declaration they had drafted together — they died within hours of each other. Adams's last reported words were that Thomas Jefferson still lived. The historical timing is so symmetric it almost reads as fiction, but it is sober record.

Madison's Federalist No. 10 and No. 51, written in November 1787 and February 1788, are the philosophical foundations the founders left us for living with faction. "Liberty is to faction what air is to fire," Madison wrote. Since the only way to abolish faction was to abolish liberty itself, the proper response was to design institutions that channeled factional conflict rather than suppressing it. A large, diverse republic, Madison argued, was less vulnerable to faction than a small one — because no single faction could easily achieve a national majority. Federalist No. 51 supplied the operative mechanism: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." Madison did not promise us a country without political ambition. He promised us a country whose constitutional architecture would set each ambition against another, channeling private appetite into public balance.

The founders' lesson is not that they were better people than we are. They were not. They held slaves, fought duels, defamed each other in print, and signed the Alien and Sedition Acts under which Federalist prosecutors jailed Democratic-Republican editors for criticism of the government. Their institutional framework ultimately failed the most consequential test it faced — the Civil War cost approximately 620,000 American lives and remains the bloodiest single failure of decency across difference in our history. The founders are not a perfect model. They are a useful one — useful precisely because they show what is possible even when the temptations of faction are at their most ferocious.

Lincoln stood in the same tradition. His First Inaugural Address, delivered March 4, 1861, with seven states already in declared secession, made what was perhaps the last great public appeal to a common American foundation before the guns of Fort Sumter went off. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature" (Lincoln, 1861). The appeal failed in the short run. The war came. But the language survived, and every American political effort since 1865 that has tried to lower the temperature has reached for some version of Lincoln's vocabulary. Reagan reached for it when he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate. JFK reached for it in his inaugural. Obama reached for it in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote. They were not the same men, did not believe the same things, would not have voted for each other. They all understood that the country survives only when the political opponent is recognizable as a fellow citizen.