FOR GOD AND COUNTRY

It is with the words “This is a book of advice” that William J. Bennett opens Our Sacred Honor, his new collection that seeks, by quoting America’s founders, to recreate their moral world. The advice to which Bennett refers is really about one topic only: how to become, in public and private, the manner of people the founders were. Members of one of the most stunning political cohorts ever to appear, they managed with no training, and often no grand plan or purpose — to launch a startlingly new species of government that has since been endorsed by the entire civilized world.

In this group, and this book, appear Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, cabinet member Alexander Hamilton, first Chief Justice John Jay, Constitutional Congress member Gouverneur Morris, and the whole complex crowd of their friends, rivals, enemies, lovers, and wives. Together they represent a cross-section of colonial culture: Adams, the prickly son of a Massachusetts small farmer; Morris, the bon vivant son of a rich family in New York; Washington, the insecure, ambitious first son of the second marriage of a marginal Tidewater planter; Jefferson, the rebellious heir to a Charlottesville fortune, irked by the airs of his royalist mother; Madison, the frail, possibly epileptic son of a wealthy Virginian; and Hamilton, “bastard bratt of a drunken Scots pedlar,” who came from the West Indies on charity scholarships and had of all of the founders the most extreme trajectory and died the most heart-breaking death.

They were an unlikely cluster of great politicians, and the clue to their success lies not so much in their different backgrounds as in the beliefs they held in common. These beliefs had to do with Providence, God, self- control, and virtue as the key to republican government.

Much involved in modern battles over such issues, Bennett poses the founders simply as heroes for our own time — a time that tends to deny the possibility of heroism. And yet, though they may be effective witnesses against his many political enemies, Bennett’s technique raises several complex questions that will not find simple answers. What is the role of religion in statecraft, and how can it be used with propriety? What is it that government ought to be doing? How do private morals affect public virtue? And what makes a great public man?

Morality, as Bennett knows, does not mean an absence of sin. But though he acknowledges some of the founders’ failings — Washington’s quick temper, for example, and Benjamin Franklin’s fondness for “intrigues with low women” — it soon becomes obvious that he has seriously understated the large amounts of lust, greed, jealousy, bile, and general malice that surrounded the founders. Great as they were, they were much less virtuous in practice than Bennett lets on.

Our Sacred Honor correctly praises the fortitude of Gouverneur Morris — ambassador to France, friend to Hamilton and Washington, and senator from New York — when told at twenty-seven he must lose his leg below the knee. But though Bennett tells us that this sad event came as the result of a carriage accident, he does not tell us that the carriage was fleeing from the home of a lady whose husband had unexpectedly returned. (Morris was famous for this sort of exploit. “Poor Gouverneur’s leg is a tax on my heart,” his good friend John Jay wrote. “I could wish he had lost something else.”) Morris’s later life was just as interesting. Bennett describes his younger wife, married when Morris was fifty-six, merely as “haunted by scandal,” but in fact she had stood trial for the murder of the infant she had borne to her sister’s husband when the three of them lived in one house.

Alexander Hamilton’s famous affair with the wife of a blackmailer is briefly mentioned in Bennett’s book, together with the rumored liaison of Thomas Jefferson with the slave-housekeeper who was his dead wife’s half- sister. (Hamilton was accused as well of an interest in his own wife’s sister. Incest, it seems, was in the air.)

All of this would keep today’s tabloids busy, as would the murder in 1806 of George Wythe, the great law teacher and Jefferson’s mentor, when he, his housekeeper, and their mixed-blood son were poisoned by a rapacious and venomous grandnephew who somehow managed to be acquitted. Two of John and Abigail Adams’s sons were drunken and dissolute — one dying, estranged, before age thirty. And the pattern repeated itself in the children of John Quincy Adams, the older couple’s one sober son.

Bennett is famous for his work with the “virtuecrats” — those contemporary commentators and politicians who insist upon family values and public civility. But “family values” is not much of a description of the lives of the founders, and “civility” does not begin to express their public lives. Adams once ascribed the ambitions of a political rival to “an excess of secretions, which he could not find whores enough to draw off.” When the cabinet feud between Hamilton and Jefferson broke out in the early 1790s, the first instinct of both men was to hire editors to print lies about the other, professing all the while great innocence. The name of James Callender the notorious promoter of scandalous stories, who once worked for Jefferson and later turned against him — does not appear in Bennett’s version, though he too is part of the story of the founders’ era.

The point of mentioning all this, however, is not to join the contemporary chorus of historical debunkers and deconstructors. Flawed as Bennett doesn’t quite tell us the founders were, they nonetheless lived in a moral climate considerably better than our own. In the framework of their lives, the sins they often committed were acknowledged as the sins they were — violations of an overriding ethic of self-discipline. However often it occurred, indulgence was the exception, not the rule.

In sanitizing the lives of the founders, Bennett misses what may be his best possible argument: that the founders stressed self-control precisely because they knew the power of self-indulgence and the disorder it could bring. Despite all their disagreements, they were unified in stressing both the necessity of moral awareness and the necessity of religion for maintaining a free political system.

The signature tropes of all the great founders would enrage today’s secular Left. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” Washington said in his Farewell Address. John Adams would put it even more pungently: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. . . . We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break through the strongest chords of our Constitution, as a whale breaks through a net.”

The founders refer to religion deliberately, for it is the key to the matter. It poses a God who stands above all human authority as the author of ” inalienable” liberties that therefore no power of the state can remove. And it defines a moral order in which man is not the center of his moral universe, but merely part of a plan that transcends his own interests — and thus forces him to obligations other than himself.

Religion plays the central role in making us fit for self-government. If we respect the rights and the interests of others, we cannot be predators. If we are not predators, we will not threaten others and thus not require supervision from the state. It is by placing man rather than God at the heart of the moral universe that secular liberalism poses its great public danger: Those whose only concern is personal interest have little cause to regulate themselves.

The liberal Democrats want controlled markets and uncontrolled morals, while the libertarian Republicans want uncontrolled everything, and William J. Bennett — squarely in the moralist wing of the conservative movement — is at odds with them all. But he need not take us back as far as the founders to teach us the hopelessness of both radical liberalism and libertarianism. The Left’s pattern of economic controls and free-market morals has since the 1960s brought our great cities to ruin. And an amoral culture eventually creates a huge state. Crime requires police, jails, and courts, all of which cost money. Illegitimacy is very expensive, as the state tries with great expenditures of money and effort to take the place of missing parents. The giant explosion in the state’s cost and activity took place in step with the decay in morals and was a consequence of it: the state trying to do, very badly, what individuals failed to do for themselves and their families. Unwilling to suffer the public disorder that comes with moral breakdown, people look to the government to contain it.

It is no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that moral and social implosion appeared in the 1960s and ’70s, just as it is no accident that the contemporary programs that deal most effectively with the social debris left by those decades are largely church-run and faith-based. The founders knew they must never enshrine one religion, favor one above others, or dictate one manner of worship. But at the same time, they knew that without the values that underlie religion, they could not maintain a limited government. And thus of necessity they endorsed the politics of religion as a public and civil necessity.

We might note that they endorsed as well the religion of politics: statecraft as a Godly endeavor through which one could participate in God’s work. America was the founders’ one shared religion, and when we think of the idea of the nation that they bequeathed to subsequent generations, theological parallels come inevitably to mind. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution became our secular covenant. The Gettysburg Address was inscribed as our Sermon on the Mount. Washington appeared as our Mosaic lawgiver. Lincoln stood (in the words of the historian Clinton Rossiter) as “the martyred Christ of the passion play of Democracy” who died, as it were, for our sins. Americans, who are proudly not subjects, are not merely citizens either, but communicants in a continuing national rite. “The Nation Spirit,” Gouverneur Morris declared, is “the Inspiring Soul of Heroes, which rises men above the Level of Humanity. . . . It is high . . . above all low and vulgar considerations. . . . It is generous. . . . It is noble — dreading Shame and Dishonor as the Greatest Evil, esteeming Fame and Glory beyond all things human. . . . It is that high, haughty, generous, and noble Spirit, which prizes Glory more than Wealth, and holds Honor dearer than Life. “

The founders, in other words, believed that America was not merely another country joining the community of nations. To be an American means to want to be glorious and noble as an individual: honest, generous, and brave. It means belonging to a glorious and noble state: expanding freedom and dignity at home, and inspiring others abroad. From the original settling of the New World by religious people, it was sensed that this land was different: not an outpost of the old world, but something akin to the New Jerusalem, a shining ” city on a hill.”

For over two hundred years, the founders’ religious vision of America has given us a moral vocabulary with which to express our history. With it, we have understood the original settlers’ flight from religious oppression and creation of a new life in an alien land. With it, we have grasped the Revolution of 1776 and the establishment of a constitutional government, the Civil War and the ending of slavery, our role in two great world conflagrations, and our victory over the Communist antithesis of democratic government.

In Our Sacred Honor, Bennett proves his understanding that this moral vocabulary — or, more particularly, the founders’ vision of true moral greatness on which the vocabulary rests — is under attack at present from both the libertarian Right (which thinks the government exists to get out of the way and let people make money) and the entitlement Left (which thinks government exists only to give people money). It is under attack as well from the Clintons, at the head of a cohort of self-obsessed boomers, who see themselves at the vortex of all human endeavor and think history exists to shine flattering spotlights on themselves.

The Clinton generation, in fact, makes an interesting contrast with the founders’ generation, replicating all their sins with none of their grandeur or ideals. The founders were skeptics about the nature of human beings (including themselves), but not about their country. They had ambition and ego, but no self-absorption. They were obsessed with “reputation,” but what they meant was their standing as people of honor — and when they used the words “sacred honor,” that was just what they meant. There is not much room for honor or anything else sacred in today’s tiny politics.

Neither, for that matter, is there much room for what the conservative columnist George Will has called “the exhilaration of collective achievement through government,” in projects designed to “elicit nobility” in the state and the people at large. Portions of the Right want to demolish the government, while the Left wants to encrust it in byzantine layers of state intrusion into private life. Will quotes the poet Stephen Vincent Bent calling America “This thing, this dream, this land unsatisfied with little things.” But these days, small things and small people are all we seem to see. William J. Bennett’s advice is to recall the words of the founders, as fast as we possibly can.

Noemie Emery, the author of books on Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, is a writer living in Fairfax, Virginia.