5 - Witch-Hunting and the Politics of Reason

Summary

In such [democratic] states therefore it is a thing inevitable, that the people should be beset by unworthy flatterers and be intoxicated with their philtres. Sudden, blind and violent in all their impulses, they cannot heap power enough on their favourites, nor make their vengeance as prompt and terrible as their wrath against those, whom genius and virtue have qualified to be their friends and unfitted to be their flatterers. … When therefore a demagogue invites the ignorant multitude to dwell on the contemplation of their sovereignty, to consider princes as their equals … is it to be supposed that aristocratic good sense will be permitted to disturb their feast or to dishonour their triumph?

– “Political Thoughts,” The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (1805)

Ratcliffe was exasperated at Carrington's habit of drawing discussion to this point. He felt the remark as a personal insult, and he knew it to be intended. “Public men,” he broke out, “cannot be dressing themselves today in Washington's cold clothes. If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose the next election. Only fools or theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.”

– Henry Adams, Democracy (1880)

Episodes such as the Pequot War and King Philip's War in early republican historical literature remade the Puritans into a model of patriotism.