Kevin Gutzman: “Virginia's American Revolution"

In this KosmosOnline podcast I talk about Virginia‟s revolutionaries with with Professor Kevin Gutzman. Dr. Gutzman is a professor of history at Western Connecticut State university, and author of “Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840.”

Jeanne Hoffman: Welcome to this Kosmos online podcast. Today I am talking about Virginia’s revolutionaries with Professor Kevin Gutzman. Doctor Gutzman is a professor of history at Western Connecticut State university, and author of “Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840”. Welcome Dr. Gutzman and thanks for being on our podcast.

Professor Gutzman: I‟m very happy to be here.

Jeanne Hoffman: So the American Revolution is a popular and widely researched subject at a broad level, but you focus on a single Colony: Virginia. Could you describe your reasons for doing so?

Professor Gutzman: Well certainly. Actually beginning in the 1970‟s there were state studies and actually New England town studies of many, many towns done by historians at America’s leading universities. Particularly they were completing requirements for their PhDs. But, because of the high number of extremely famous early republican and revolutionary leaders who were from Virginia the same attention was not paid to what was at the time the most important state in the United States. And that’s why I thought the ground was opened for this kind of study.

Jeanne Hoffman: What’s the significance of Virginia and its ratification debates for the federalist and anti-federalist discussion?

Professor Gutzman: There has been a kind of consensus that there were essentially two approaches to the constitution. A federalist one and an anti-federalist one. The so called federalist one was the one that tended to find unlimited authority in Congress to legislate, wide discretionary powers in the executive to make war, and in general great power in the federal government. On the other hand if you argued, or you tried to identify people at the time who argued against these positions this was said to be an anti-federalist perspective. But the interesting thing that I discovered in writing Virginia‟s American Revolution was that in Virginia, the Federalists, that is the people who sold the US constitution at the ratification convention in 1788 where Virginia formally agreed to live under our constitution, it was the federalists who took the position that central government authority was going to be limited and argued strenuously that their opponents were mistaken in saying it wasn‟t. What is traditionally called an anti-federalist position is actually the position taken by leading federalist spokesmen like governor Edmond Randolph, and George Nicholas as well as James Madison in the ratification convention.

Jeanne Hoffman: So that’s in relationship to what the federalists believed. Do you think the anti-federalist tradition has also been inaccurately represented?

Professor Gutzman: Well certainly at the beginning. That is the time they were disputing this question whether to ratify the constitution. People who were federalists miss-characterized both their own and their opponent’s positions. And what do I mean by that? Well when it came to the federalists they commonly said, some of them at least said, that they were federalists even though they were nationalists. Another way to put that is: a nationalist is someone who wanted centralized authority and then believed in retaining the states in far as they might be subordinately useful, as Madison at one point put it. On the other hand a federalist, a lower-case f, is someone who thought that the federal government should have limited power. Well the federalists are the ones who mislabeled the two groups, so they called themselves federalists even though many of them were nationalists and wanted a centralized government with subordinate states. And the federalists were the ones that called their opponents anti-federalists even though their opponents favored the federal system. A decentralized system in which the central government had limited power.

Jeanne Hoffman: Wow, I didn’t even know that. So in regards to the ratification debates, you personally in your research, what are you seeking to address and correct within those debates?

Professor Gutzman: So the point was, in the chapter on ratification I was looking at it to see how Virginians discussed the problem. Now if you read most of the classic studies of the ratification debate what you find is that historians assume there was a national campaign to ratify the constitution. And that the opponents of ratifying the constitution without amending it first opposed this national campaign. But really what happened was that since each state was going to decide whether to ratify the constitution each state had an internal discussion. And that discussion was highly different from state to state.

So for example, in Massachusetts anti-slavery people were told this is an anti-slavery constitution, it allows us to ban slave imports beginning in 1808 for one thing and on the other hand in South Caroline pro-slavery people said this is a pro-slavery constitution. It guarantees that we will more representation, because we own slaves, and if your slave escapes to another state he will have to be sent back. And so you get highly varied descriptions of the constitution by its proponents from state to state. Well in Virginia the chief question people were considering in the ratification dispute was not what does this mean for America it was, and this isn’t going to surprise you when you hear it, it was what does this mean for Virginia. How will this shape Virginia, how will this effect Virginia’s economy, how will it affect Virginia’s political system, how will it affect freedom of religion in Virginia. And this isn’t surprising but what you find as you tease out the way people talk about and wrote about the constitution at the time is essentially they took contending positions on what the implications would be for Virginia.

And besides that they took different positions, the federalists and their opponents whom they called the anti-federalists took different positions on what is the current state of Virginia. People who opposed ratifying the constitution without first amending it generally said Virginia is a healthy society. Unlike Massachusetts we haven‟t had a rebellion since the revolution, unlike some other states we don‟t have grim economic problems, unlike other states we have made serious efforts in reforming our state government that was their position. And on the other hand the federalists said no no no currently in Virginia the economy is just at a stop and the criminal law is up in the air, and the public morality is on the decline. And so they are arguing not about America, but about their own state and how they think that joining this federation with the other states is going to shape their experiment with republicanism.

Jeanne Hoffman: Now you are also known for your scholarship on James Madison and the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798. Could you just briefly tell our listeners what that was about and why they were adopted?

Professor Gutzman: Well, if you are interested in that subject chapter four of Virginia’s American Revolution actually was originally an article in the journal of Southern history. Which is the second most cited journal in American history. And in general what I describe in chapter four of Virginia’s American Revolution is the crisis that Virginia Republicans thought they faced in the 1790‟s. They ultimately concluded that the federalists and the Hamiltonians who controlled the government of the 1790‟s had decided that the new constitution gave them unlimited power.

Ultimately by 1798 they even adopted a law, the sedition act, that made it a crime to criticize the president. And literally a couple dozen people were tried and ten people were convicted, sent to prison, given serious fines for criticizing John Adams. One of those was the leading republican newspaper editors in the country. One of them was a Vermont congressman. And so what ended up happening was that Virginians, of course Virginia was the center of the Republican Party, and the Virginia Republican Party decided, well we can‟t rely on any of the three branches of the federal government to oppose this, because they are the ones that adopted it and are implementing it. So what we can do is as Jefferson says we can fall back on the states as the last ditch.

So his feeling was this was a last extreme expedient we are taking here. We are going to rely on our state legislators to oppose what the federal government is doing. In fact in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798 they are essentially warning the federal government that we are not going to allow you to make Virginia and Kentucky into police states where it‟s a crime to criticize the federalists. It‟s not going to happen. And at the same that position was being staked out by the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky by adoption of resolutions written by Madison and Jefferson. At the same time that was going on Virginia built a new state armory in Richmond, began drilling militia units began buying new weapons and so on. It was very clear at the time to people what this meant. In fact one Virginian congressman, William Branch Jiles, who was kind of a second tier republican leader, that is below Jefferson and Madison, he was a very important member of congress from Virginia. He publicly said that he favored secession at the time.

So this was a warning from the republicans to the federalists at the time, and besides that Jefferson believed that the political program of the federalists with a pugnacious approach to foreign policy that the federalists were taking would ultimately mean such high taxes that their popularity in Virginia would plummet. Before 1800 he told his allies that's why we are going to win. Now after 1800, after the republicans won the election, Jefferson didn‟t explain it that way. Instead he always said that this had been the revolution of 1800. In fact at one point when he was an old man he wrote that the revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of „76 was in its form. So in other words, before the election he said they were gonna win because of the federalist tax burden, but after he won he said that the people favored our constitutional principles, not theirs.

Jeanne Hoffman: You mentioned Thomas Jefferson before; most people would know Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, or George Washington. Who would you say are some lesser known figures, or maybe even forgotten figures from the founding era of Virginia that we should be aware of?

Professor Gutzman: Well to the extent that I have given the impression that the book is about the famous federal office guys that's been misleading. Actually one goal of writing this book was to explore the question: what other people were doing in Virginia politics when we had these famous presidents, the general, and the chief justice coming from Virginia. Other famous people, well other prominent people in Virginia state level politics, certainly one very important person was John Tyler, whose son would ultimately be president of the United States John Tyler Jr.

But John Tyler Senior was an important leader in the revolution, he voted no on ratification in the ratification dispute, he was a close personal friend of Thomas Jefferson from their youth. And John Tyler Junior the president said he grew up with Thomas Jefferson at the family dinner table. When he was advanced in politics a couple of decades after the ratification debate, he became governor of Virginia. There he worked to have Virginia adopt a public education system. Which he failed to get. He wrote letters to Jefferson lamenting the fact that Virginia’s legislature wouldn’t pay for public schools. He thought what had happened in the American revolution is that a reform of the laws had meant that there would not be a continuation of the old landed families that had ruled Virginia in the colonial period. He said to Jefferson we needed to replace the landed families with something else. He said it seems to me that a republican education system would allow us to identify able common people, but the legislature won’t fund a public education system so we are left with no new families and no new republican elite. We don’t have anybody to run the state, and in fact at one point he wrote to Jefferson „if I had known this is how the revolution would turn out I wouldn’t have worked for it I wouldn’t have fought it.‟

So he thought the revolution had been a failure. By Jefferson’s death in 1826 he was despondent over the outcome of the revolution too. He had similar feelings about this education issue and he had grave forebodings about the future of the federal union in light of the Supreme Court’s recurrent Hamiltonian decisions. After the republicans won those elections in 1800 the Federalist Party never came back into power in the federal government. But, John Marshall, the last Federalists chief justice used the supreme court as a kind of redoubt from which he could defend Hamiltonianism. So he wrote Hamiltonian views into our constitutional system of law that are still there today even though republicans are winning all of the elections.

So you might say this is a perfect example of winning all of the battles and losing the war. That is, the Jeffersonians won the elections in 1800 2 4 6 8 10 all the way down to 24, and yet today we live under John Marshall‟s Supreme Court decisions which stand for Hamilton‟s principles. The people rejected Hamilton‟s principles but that‟s what we live with. So Jefferson saw this happening, and he repeatedly wrote letters to people saying „oh I can‟t believe the federal judges are a core miners and sappers who are working always to undermine our republican edifice. Another thing he said is that the constitution has been made into a thing of wax that they played with as they liked. And he couldn‟t figure out a way under the constitutional system to correct this glaring flaw in the constitutionally system. He was very unhappy with the outcome of the revolution too.

In fact by the time my book ends with the passing of the last of the founding fathers around 1840, this was a general feeling in Virginia. Virginia was no longer the leading state in 1840; they no longer were providing all of the presidents and all of the military leaders and so on. Eight of the first nine presidential elections were won by people from Virginia. And the one they didn’t win, their guy game in second. But after that, that was the end of it, and Virginians saw that part of the reason was economics, their state was in terrible decline. They were far poorer than they had been before. And so it seemed to all be related to the question how we reformed our state during the revolution. As I said Tyler’s conclusion was partly „well didn’t create public education, but that wasn’t the only thing. They were unhappy with other elements of their republican experiment too.

So you have not only Tyler, but there is another fellow John Taylor of Caroline, who is known to people who study federal politics and Jeffersonianism. But what really was important was in Virginia, his warning was about the way the federal system was working to undermine agriculture, and the agricultural economy. Which were classic Virginia positions by the time he died in the early 1820s. This was going to be the way that Virginians understood the federal government. They are very suspicious of it by the 1820s and they continue to have this attitude that I have described before with Patrick Henry saying in the 1790‟s we’re going to keep an eye on you people. We only gave you a few powers, and if you try to take more we are going to resist. But if you hear Patrick Henry saying that in the 1790s that was 25 years after he had said the same thing to King Georg’‟s men. So the attitude remains similar, but because of economic decline and political weakness that develops over time the Virginians were in the end very unhappy with how their revolution had turned out.

Jeanne Hoffman: So among our listeners there is a graduate student contingent, what advice would you give to those among them who want to study the American founding or history in general?

Professor Gutzman: Well, you have to do it because you love it. There’s no other reason to do it, and it’s certainly not remunerative enough that you would choose it over some other path because you were looking to become rich and famous. You know, I myself was an attorney and when I quit that and moved into the history profession wealth and fame weren’t my chief goals in life. If they are definitely don’t go into history. That’s my chief council. But beyond that once you decide that’s what you’re going to do, stand four square for what you think, for what you find. And if people call you names because of it, and that’s happened to me. Well that’s what you found! What else are you going to do, you’re not going to lie. I insist that especially people who have tenure should use tenure as a sort of fortress in which they are free to say the truth whether people like it or not. On the other hand when it comes to a career in Academia you have to pick your battles, you have to know when to keep your mouth shut. It’s true that taking public stands against the reigning orthodoxy can cost you in academia, so you have to know when the time to speak is there, and when it‟s time to keep your mouth shut. That’s at least my experience.

Jeanne Hoffman: Well thanks very much for joining us Dr Gutzman.

Professor Gutzman: You welcome.

Jeanne Hoffman: Again his book is “Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840” and for more interviews with leading scholars visit KOSMOS online.org connecting the network of liberty advancing academics and this is Jeanne Hoffman signing off.