Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on American statesmen:

Perhaps the best, but certainly the most interesting way, to get a real understanding of the present occupant of the White House is to read a biography written more than sixty years before his birth, a biography of Andrew Jackson written in 1882 as part of a series on “American Statesmen.” The author, William Graham Sumner, who taught politics and economics at Yale, quotes without adverse comment Thomas Jefferson’s remark that Jackson had no business being President, that he was, in fact, “one of the most unfit men I know for the place,” a “dangerous man” who has “very little respect for laws or constitutions.” This was especially the case after Jackson lost the presidency in what he became convinced was a stolen election.

In the election of 1824 Jackson had finished first with 99 electoral votes, but three other candidates, led by John Quincy Adams, had a total of 166. The election went to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay, who had come in fourth, threw his support to Adams, who then won the vote of 13 of the 24 states. Jackson finished second with 7. Adams became President, and Clay became Secretary of State. For those who were most zealous in their support of Jackson this was all the proof needed that Adams had bought Clay, and that had it not been for this “corrupt bargain” Jackson would have been elected. This, Sumner is convinced, would have come to Jackson “like a revelation, and his mind would close on it with a solidity of conviction which nothing could ever shake.” Four years later, when Jackson ran again, he demanded a constitutional amendment prohibiting the appointment of any member of Congress to any federal office during, or for two years following, their term in Congress. Jackson won the election, did not pursue the amendment, and appointed in one year “more members of Congress to offices than any one of his predecessors in his whole term.”

Though the administration of John Quincy Adams was, in Sumner’s judgment, “more worthy of respectable and honorable memory” than any of those that had come before it, Jackson was not interested in an objective, dispassionate analysis of what the Adams administration had done. He believed he was elected to get rid of a “federalist administration which had encroached on the liberties of the people, and had aimed to corrupt elections by the abuse of federal patronage.” His election marked the beginning of a new era in American politics. The “presidency was no longer to be the crown of public service, and the prize of a very limited number of statesmen of national reputation.” Jackson had not been elected because of a long, distinguished career in government or because of the power of his mind and the depth of his understanding; his popularity was based entirely on his “military success.” The highest office in the land would now be “reserved for popular heroes, or, in the absence of such, for ‘available’ men, as the figureheads with and around whom a faction of party leaders could come to power.”

As a popular hero, Jackson viewed his re-election in 1832 as “a triumphant vindication of him on all the points in which he had been engaged with anybody, and a kind of charter to have, as representative, or rather tribune, of the people, to go on and govern on his own judgment over and against everybody, including Congress.” Everyone was either a friend or an enemy. “To offend him was to incur extraordinary penalties.” To make sure everyone understood what he expected from his friends, he issued a message every day through The Globe, a paper under his control, a paper to which every office-holder who wished to signal his allegiance subscribed. Every day, through the paper’s editor, Jackson gave warning of what had to be done to stay in his good graces and to avoid his displeasure. His “personality came more and more into play as a political force.” The laws, the Constitution, were simply set aside. In “the midst of a surging democracy,” only the Supreme Court under the guidance of the Chief Justice, John Marshall, held the country on the course of “constitutional liberty and order.” But Marshall died, and the justices Jackson had appointed to the court brought it all to ruin, a process that reached its climax “when the court went to pieces on the Dred Scott case, trying to reach a decision which should be politically expedient, rather than one which should be legally sound.”

If, as Sumner suggests, the court had saved the country from “surging democracy,” it did so by insisting that the Constitution gave far more power to the federal government than Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic party had originally believed. For Jefferson, and for Jackson, and for everyone who had fought against what Washington and Hamilton and John Adams had tried to do, the federal government had only those limited powers expressly given it in the Constitution; all other powers were left to the States. They believed this, believed it fervently, until they had power and suddenly thought themselves the only proper judge of the powers they should have. Jackson, as President, refused to acknowledge that the States had the power to nullify an act of Congress, but it was Jefferson who changed everything. He bought Louisiana, and with that single act put the original thirteen states, including especially the Southern states, on their way to becoming a distinct minority in the country they had started. How this happened, how Andrew Jackson became possible, is told in a different volume in the American Statesmen series, the biography of one of the strangest men ever to serve in Congress, a man who, even at the time, was thought an impossibility, a man brilliant, erratic and, eventually, almost certainly insane, John Randolph, one of Thomas Jefferson’s own relations.

We hear everywhere the insistence that what someone has done will go down in history, that what has happened will be judged by history, that someone is, or is not, on the right side of history, but someone has to write that history, and the way it is written may not be anything close to what we think it is going to be. The biography, the history, of John Randolph was written by Henry Adams, and unlike most of those who call themselves historians, Henry Adams, the great- grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, knew how to write. He knew something else as well, that the only way to understand the American past is to see things the way they were seen at the time, when, without the benefit of hindsight, without the easy comfort of a retrospective judgment, those with the responsibility of governing the nation had to make decisions.

Adams begins at the beginning. John Randolph, he tells us, was born June 2, 1773, “into a world of cousins, a colonial aristocracy all its own, supported by tobacco plantations and negro labor, by colonial patronage and royal favor, or, to do it justice, by audacity, vigor, and mind.” His father died two years later, in 1775; his mother remarried three years after that, in 1778, “and meanwhile the country had plunged into a war which in a single moment cut that connectionr with England on which the old Virginian society depended for its tastes, fashions, theories, and above all for its aristocratic status in politics and law. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that America was no longer to be English, but American, that is to say, democratic and popular in all its parts, - a fact equivalent to a sentence of death upon old Virginian society, foreboding dissolution to the Randolphs with the rest, until they should learn to master the new conditions of American life.”

Randolph’s early education reflected the standard then in place. He read Shakespeare, Homer, Don Quixote, Plutarch’s Lives, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, and Tom Jones before he was eleven; Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon a few years after that. He had, from birth, as it were, “aristocratic prejudices” and “democratic theories.” When he made his first public speech, speaking after Patrick Henry, he was said to have held his audience for not less than three hours on the question whether it was right to resist the federal government. He was, like most Virginians, convinced that every government had a tendency toward despotism, and that only the States could provide protection against the central government.

Elected to Congress when he was only twenty-six, the Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Macon, was so fascinated by “this young Virginian Brutus, with eyes that pierced and voice that rang like the vibrations of glass,” that he made him chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Randolph had the “intense self-confidence of the Virginian…a moral superiority which became disastrous in the end from its very strength.” He could not, he would not, change his mind about anything that had to do with what he thought first principles. He became, not just disenchanted, he became an anachronism, a man without serious political support, a man thought too fanatical to trust or have anything to do with, when Thomas Jefferson decided to buy Louisiana, and with that purchase “completely changed the condition of the constitutional compact; rendering the nation, independent of the States, master of an empire immensely greater than the States themselves.” New states would have more power than the old. The federal government would now be “the measure of its own powers.”

There was one last chance to right the balance, one last chance to bring the nation back to its senses and stop the movement of power from the States to the federal government, one last chance to put an end to what the Supreme Court under John Marshall was trying to do. The impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice would force the court to change direction, to respect the sovereignty of the States and recognize that the Constitution was a compact of the States and not a contract the people had made with themselves. Samuel Chase, who had, among other misdeeds, instructed a grand jury that Jeffersonian democracy was a serious threat to liberty seemed an easy target.

Jefferson was the moving force behind Chase’s impeachment, but it was Randolph who, on January 5, 1804, made the motion for an inquiry into the conduct of Judge Chase, and when the trial finally got under way in the Senate, Randolph led the prosecution. It was his misfortune that the defense was led by “the notorious reprobate Luther Martin.” There was no comparison between them. It was the difference “between show and strength, between intellectual brightness and intellectual power.” Martin destroyed Randolph’s “indictment and humiliated his pride” to such an extent that during closing arguments, Randolph seemed “more like a criminal fearing sentencing than like a tribune of the people dragging a tyrant to his doom.” Randolph lost more than the trial. It was the end of the Jefferson republicans; it was here that they “fought their last aggressive battle, and, wavering under the shock of defeat, broke into factions which slowly abandoned the field and forgot their discipline.”

Impeachment had failed, and so had almost all those who had sworn allegiance to what, for Randolph, remained an article of faith. Two years later, in 1806, Randolph “saw, what so few Virginians were honest enough to see, that the Virginian theory had been silently discarded by its own authors, and that through it pure government could never be expected.” Randolph had wanted to be a Pericles, a Caesar, someone who had done, not just great things, but things that made a country, a nation, what it was supposed to be. He had instead achieved nothing. He had fallen back “among common men with vulgar aims and mean methods.” He had “failed as a public man and had dragged with him in his failure all his friends and all his principles.” He knew it, “and it drove him mad.”

At the end of the War of 1812, “Mr. Jefferson’s party was still in power, but not a thread was left of the principles with which Mr. Jefferson had started on his career in 1801.” The South became the friend of centralized power, and, especially when it was a question of extending or protecting slavery, was not afraid to use it. Randolph’s failure was the failure of the South altogether, the failure of an aristocracy with its inherent belief in inequality to adapt to a set of governing principles completely different than its own. Randolph could never understand that democracy “was a force against which mere individuality strove in vain.” It only needed the presidency of Andrew Jackson to prove it.

Toward the end of his life, in a rare moment of lucidity, Randolph remarked with sad regret: “Time misspent, and faculties misemployed, and senses jaded by labor or impaired by excess, cannot be recalled.”

It is a fair summary, not just of the history of John Randolph, but of the South, and even, perhaps, of more than that.