Franklin died only a year into the new regime, so he went out still satisfied with the Constitutional order and the government it created. But he was one of the only ones. Nearly all of the American founders, from the august figure of George Washington on down through John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush, would conclude by the ends of their lives that their “great experiment” had failed. Fears of a Setting Sun is the story of their disillusionment, disappointment, and despair.
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[W]hen I say “the founders blackpilled,” I really mean it. Here, for example, is Jefferson in 1820: “I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ‘76, to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.” Or Hamilton in 1802, earlier but no less dire: “In vain was the collected wisdom of America convened at Philadelphia. In vain were the anxious labours of a Washington bestowed. Their works are regarded as nothing better than empty bubbles…” Most dramatic of all, see Dr. Benjamin Rush, who wrote to Adams that he now felt “shame for my zeal in the cause of our Country” during the Revolution and in the drafting of the Constitution, and that “I…sometimes wish I could erase my name from the declaration of Independence.”
Why did they despair? Different reasons for different men, obviously, but they fall into four main categories: political partisanship, the relative power balance between the states and the federal government, the poor moral character of the American people, and the sectional divisions that arose over the question of slavery. Rasmussen frames the book as a discussion of the four most famous Founding Fathers, each of whom exemplified one of these reasons (in order: Washington, Hamilton, John Adams, Jefferson), but the lesser lights of the revolutionary generation fell into the same buckets. Samuel Adams, for instance, was disappointed by America’s failure to be a “Christian Sparta.” Gouverneur Morris predicted the Union would split over slavery and looked forward to the day that the North could leave the South to “exercise the privilege of strangling commerce, whipping Negroes, and bawling about the inborn inalienable rights of man.” And Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the 1830s that “I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our constitution cannot last… The union has been prolonged thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.”
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Adams mused in 1811: “Have I not been employed in Mischief all my days? Did not The American Revolution produce The French Revolution? and did not the French Revolution produce all the Calamities, and Desolations to the human Race and the whole Globe ever Since? I meant well however.”
From the review:
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