Many founders died in despair about the American experiment

In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.<br>Joanna Andreasson As a big, even-numbered anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rumbled into view, an inner-circle Founding Father gazed upon the man claiming to be his worthy successor and shuddered with revulsion.<br>"I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing Gen. [Andrew] Jackson President," Thomas Jefferson told Daniel Webster in 1824. "He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions….His passions are terrible. When I was president of the Senate, he was senator; and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage….He is a dangerous man."<br>People rightly marvel at the miracle that Jefferson and his longtime rival-turned-friend John Adams both perished on July 4, 1826. Less remembered is that the two otherwise ideologically and dispositionally opposed torchbearers for the flame of '76 had each soured on the fruits of their precious Revolution.<br>"Oh my country," Adams wrote in 1806 to Benjamin Rush. "How I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecility, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!"<br>Founder disgruntlement was the rule, not the exception (and the exception to that rule was James Madison). "Those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought," wrote the historian Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. "Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned."<br>Added the historian Dennis C. Rasmussen in Fears of a Setting Sun, about the only book-length treatment of the subject: "Most of the other leading founders—including figures such as Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush—fell in the same camp."<br>Some of the sources of their souring were one-offs: 18th century conditions that could not be replicated now, such as Napoleon marching through Europe, or just the concentrated creativity of the Founding itself. Others, though, resonate with the political anxieties of today.<br>Politics Ain't Beanbag<br>In his farewell address, as throughout his presidency, George Washington famously cautioned against the corrupting degradations of political parties and regional blocs, at a time when three far more powerful European empires still had extensive designs on North America.<br>"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissention, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism," Washington prophesized. "But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."<br>This was both warning and complaint. Washington hated the ugliness of 1790s politics, particularly (as in his second term) when gutter-press vituperations were aimed directly at the Father of Our Country. (His genteel way of putting it: "You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations: they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.")<br>Yet the first president himself was not above the political and ideological fray, as indeed one could not be while building a federal government and executive branch from scratch. By selecting and siding with his insanely industrious treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, Washington helped spur the very reaction he found so loathsome. Launching a national bank, ramming weak treaties with England through Congress, mustering armies to put down rebellions—these were greeted as traumatic events by the government/finance/England-fearing likes of Madison and Jefferson, who then (despite the latter serving as Washington's first-term secretary of state!) unhelpfully laundered their objections through vicious commentary in the anti-Federalist press.<br>After his high-minded farewell address, post-presidential Washington pickled into more of a paranoid partisan, at least privately. In letters, he began referring to Jefferson's Republicans as "the French Party" and "the curse of this country," who were "stimulating a foreign nation to unfriendly acts, repugnant...