had been willing to understand them as a Republican. But it is becoming increasingly clear that he didn’t fail at all. As President, he held the balance of power, and he used it. Washington had held the government together by the towering pre-eminence of his place in American hearts. Adams held it together by the power of the office itself, used courageously. The respect he gained for the Presidency belonged, when he finished, to the office itself; and it is due to him, more than to Washington, that Americans think of any President, whatever his party, as the President of all the people; and due to him also that every . President worth his salt—including Jefferson—has been pushed toward becoming, and has been able to become, just that when he stepped into Adams’ shoes.
Although he has written a fine biography—from which Adams emerges as a more appealing and attractive personality than either Jefferson or Hamilton—and has redressed the balance in Adams’ favor, Professor Smith has missed much of this drama. But in seeing that Adams’ view of government was basically a religious one, he has brought to the fore a third important point that is now receiving something like its proper emphasis. To Adams, Jefferson’s belief that the common man, freed of crippling restraints and given education, would naturally rule himself well, smacked of atheism; and Hamilton’s view that an elite, if finally at several removes responsible to the people, would rule in their interests, of nonsense. If Jefferson never understood his reasons, neither did Hamilton. Hamilton did come around to Jefferson’s wisdom and decide—too late for it to help him—that the Federalists had neglected propaganda and grass-roots organization; but his belief that the nation’s problems were, initially, economic rather than moral (Adams said Hamilton resembled Ben Franklin more than anyone else) caused him in his way to fail, as Jefferson failed, to understand the little Puritan from Braintree and his theory of government.
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