A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.
This chapter reconstructs John Adams' understanding of aristocratic power. Adams' preoccupation with aristocrats alienated him from all but a few of his contemporaries. Few would insist as Adams did that social and economic elites would continue to endanger republican institutions long after the prohibition of aristocratic titles. Adams warned of a powerful aristocracy that if left unchecked would undermine the functions of republican government. The chapter revisits Adams' debates with Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Caroline in order to recover the reasoning behind his bleak prediction that wealth and birth—and not talent and virtue—would enjoy the preponderance of power in republican America.
