Looking at this quote from Adams:
“Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide…"
What democracies did he, and other founders, know about or study? I assumed that there were very few democracies in the history books. Here Adams may be referring to direct democracies and not representative ones. Regardless, what democracies, other than Ancient Athens, were there prior to the late 18th Century?
Studying pre-Babylonian Mesopotamia, Thorkild Jacobsen used Sumerian epic, myth, and historical records to identify what he has called primitive democracy…
Another claim for early democratic institutions comes from the independent “republics” of India, sanghas and ganas, which existed as early as the 6th century B.C. and persisted in some areas until the 4th century…,
What about the Roman Republic? Adams would certainly know of that. That wasn’t a direct democracy, more of an oligarchy, but the counsuls were elected by the Senate.
There were some Italian city-states that had democratic governments in the late middle ages and Renaissance eras. Educated Americans of Adams’ generation would have been familiar with their histories.
There was the Republic of Corsica. I don’t recall too much about it, but there was a man named Paoli who was involved. I assume the revolutionaries were at least aware of it because there is a town in PA maybe 25 miles west of Philly called Paoli and that seems like an unlikely name to me. Somehow Napoleon’s father was involved in the destruction of the republic.
The most obvious example of a failed republic was ancient Rome. The Greek city-states also provided lots of examples of how democracies could be very unstable. Similarly, there were quite a few medieval Italian city-states which had not survived as republics, including Siena, Pisa, Amalfi and, most famously, Florence. Nor were the three major Italian republics which had survived into the eighteenth century - Venice, Genoa and Lucca – especially positive models. Venice had had reputation for factional infighting and skulduggery and, like Genoa, had been in economic decline. Genoa had been unable to prevent the breakaway of the Corsican Republic. None of those were still republics in 1814. Nor was the Dutch Republic, which had also clearly declined as an international power during the eighteenth century. And although the Swiss cantons had survived as republics, the Swiss Confederation hadn’t. Adams would certainly have had the English Commonwealth in mind as well.
Moreover, the decades immediately before 1814 (i.e. after 1789) had seen numerous new republics created, mostly inspired by the new French Republic. In Italy alone there had been the Cisalpine Republic, the Transpadine Republic, the Ligurian Republic, the Parthenopean Republic and the Roman Republic. Elsewhere there had been the Helvetic Republic, the Batavian Republic and the Cisrhenian Republic. But none of those had survived for long, usually because they had been suppressed by Napoleon.
So there was no shortage of historical examples. But it is important that they were historical. Outside of Switzerland, there were no independent republics in Europe in 1814.
Don’t underestimate the influence of Roman history in an age where every educated person learned Latin and read Roman history in the original texts.
Today people are more familiar with the the Roman Empire, but at that time people were more familiar with the Republic, and the transition to Empire in the time of Cicero, Caesar, and Augustus.
In particular, the histories of Livy show the Roman Republic in a very positive light, and have many inspiring stories of good government and self-sacrifice during the Republic.
It’s not for nothing that the US upper house is called the Senate, and the government buildings are in classical Roman style.
Don’t forget that most of the models available at the time were of rule by relatively limited propertied oligarchies - the Roman Republic and the Greek city states excluded slaves, Magna Carta is about safeguarding established property rights, especially of established powers in the land (barons, Church, City of London merchant guilds, etc), and likewise the English civil wars were about preserving the privileges of a parliament made up of the landed gentry and city merchants. One of the problems of the Commonwealth was precisely how closely suffrage should be restricted, likewise the French revolutionary regime was limiting participation even before Napoleon’s takeover.
“Democracy” (literally, rule by the mob, or at least common folk, rather than people who had inherited or built up a major interest in society, and the responsibilities that went with that) remained a generally negative or dismissive word until much later into the 19th century.
My guess is that Adams, who was still culturally English, was thinking of the various British radical political organizations and Christian sects of the preceding century - the Levellers, the Diggers, the Shakers and so on. All of them preached various forms of democracy, and none of them were particularly successful.
Following up on **Patrick London’s ** point, how specific was Adams being? Did he include republics like Rome, which had a popular element, but also an oligarchic element, or was he thinking only of direct democracies, like the Greek city states? If the latter, then Rome would not be an example.
Indeed. The Roman republic lasted longer than any republic currently in operation (other than San Marino), including a longer life than the United States.
Switzerland? Wasn’t that essentially democratic at the canton level?
Who was it - de Toqueville? - who famously pointed out that full democracies last only until the electorate realizes they can vote themselves riches from the public purse?
But I agree, the classic Latin education of the day consisted of reading the writings of the late Republic and early Empire, so the founding fathers would have a fairly extensive education in the history of the Roman Republic. Also note that in those days, there was a limited quantity of reading material available, unlike today. We can follow a few websites and have more material that we could ever hope to read; we can sit back and fill our minds with drivel from the vast array of TV channels. I assume in 1776 a man who encountered 1,000 books in his life would be incredibly lucky; and beyond a few newspapers - painstakingly typeset by hand - his verbal input would be his circle of repetitive acquaintances. So when we say “familiar with these writings” the founding fathers, like many of the educated class of the time, probably had read some of these things multiple times and it was a regular topic of discussion, unless there was more juicy gossip like who was knocking up their slave.