Oliver Wolcott Quotes

The stress placed upon the Adams-Hamilton feud pointed up a deeper problem in the Federalist party, one that may explain its ultimate failure to survive: the elitist nature of its politics. James McHenry complained to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of their adherents, “They write private letters to each other, but do nothing to give a proper direction to the public mind.”50 The Federalists issued appeals to the electorate but did not try to mobilize a broad-based popular movement. Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter.

It is strange that we cannot be contented with our lot, which is certainly a good one, but must raise disquiets out of the quarrels of other nations.

to all government, even ours, which is certainly the best.” Better that the United States be “erased from existence than infected with French principles,” declared a rather hysterical young Oliver Wolcott, Jr. Yet by the early nineteenth century, that seemed to many to be precisely what had happened. French Jacobinical principles, spouted by “Voltaire, Priestley and Condorcet and that bloody banditti of atheists,” had poisoned the American mind and perverted the rational principles of the American Revolution. So convinced was John Quincy Adams on this point that in 1800 he translated and published in Philadelphia an essay by the German scholar Friedrich von Gentz contrasting the American and French Revolutions—promoting the pamphlet on the grounds that it rescued the American Revolution “from the disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as the French.”5