Snapping the Lilliputian Cords: The Founders and Gulliver’s Travels

During his time in England prior to the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin often wrote letters to The Public Advertiser, a London newspaper. In one of them, published on August 22, 1766, Franklin mentioned in passing that among his old friends he counts Lemuel Gulliver.[1] Gulliver was renowned for his voyages around the world, in which he’d encountered tiny people, giants, anthropomorphic horses, and other wonders.

And of course, the preceding paragraph is mostly farce. Yes, Franklin was in England, but since he was a real person and Lemuel Gulliver, the protagonist of Jonathan Swift’s satire Gulliver’s Travels, was a fictional character, there is no way the two men could be actual friends. So, what was going on here?

We should note that the purported author of the letter was not Franklin; it was published under the penname “Americanus.”[2] Given Franklin’s wit and the points raised, we can consider the letter, composed to complain about obstructions to navigation in the Thames River, also as a satire, much like Gulliver’s Travels. Mention is made of Gulliver to mock the legal profession. Americanus wrote that he thought of formally protesting the obstructions to London’s lawyers, and that is where Gulliver came in. Gulliver assured Americanus that “Lawyers of this Country understood nothing else but Law; in other Respects they were of no real Use to Mankind.” This is a restatement of a point of conversation in Part 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. When a Houyhnhnms (one of the intelligent horses) laments that it is a pity that the English attorneys Gulliver describes do not use their wisdom and knowledge to instruct others, Gulliver responds that this would be of no use, because “in all Points out of their own Trade they were the most ignorant and stupid Generation among us.”[3]

The key point, however, is that by alluding to Gulliver’s Travels, Franklin/Americus showed his belief that most readers would understand the reference. And why not? The editor of a scholarly text of Swift’s book notes that upon its publication in 1726 it was not only “an instant best-seller” but also a “cultural event.”[4] That wide readership occurred on both sides of the Atlantic becomes apparent when we note the regularity of Gulliver references in the papers of America’s founders.

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Parliament’s passage of the Coercive Acts in the spring of 1774 led to what historian T.H. Breen called “a surge of civil disobedience [that] transformed the landscape of colonial America.”[5] John Trumbull, best remembered today for his historical paintings, wrote to John Adams in August of that fateful year, sharing his opinion that the British soldiers then stationed in Worcester County, Massachusetts, did not yet present much of a threat. “They are no more feared,” Trumbull wrote, “than if they were the troops of Lilliput.”[6] Lilliputians were the tiny people Gulliver encountered on his first voyage; Trumbull was thus stating that the British soldiers were of as little consequence as if they were only six inches high.[7]

Trumbull need not have worried that Adams might not understand the literary reference. John Adams clearly read Gulliver’s Travels intently, and in fact himself used the Lilliput analogy as a military description in the later war against Great Britain, although here it was his own country’s forces said to be deficient. Three days before the United States declared war in 1812, Adams confessed in a letter to one of his grandchildren that the Americans faced daunting odds—in part, because their country, with its meager navy, would be facing an aggressor with a massive military fleet. In an interesting combination of references to both Swift and classical literature, Adams wrote: “Our navy is so Lilliputian that Hercules after a hearty dinner would sink it by setting his foot on it.”[8] .

Adams wasn’t done. He slyly added, “I had Like to have said that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water in it.” This was a reference to an incident where a fire threatened to engulf Lilliput’s tiny imperial palace, but Gulliver saved the day, putting out the flames by urinating on them.[9] With this touch of sophomoric humor, Adams seems to imply that the American navy was unworthy as well as being small.

The Yahoos of Gulliver’s Travels clearly left a strong impression on Adams. In Part 4 of Swift’s book, Gulliver is stranded in the Country of the Houyhnhnms, inhabited, as we have noted, by intelligent, rational horses. Also native to the land are the Yahoos, humans characterized by pure brutishness and savagery. “Upon the whole,” Gulliver said of the Yahoos, “I never beheld in all my Travels so disagreeable an Animal, nor one against which I naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy.”[10] Swift presents here a land where horses are civilized, and humans are not.

Often in the letters Adams and Thomas Jefferson exchanged after the two had retired from public life, the men shared notes about the books they had read.[11] In one letter, Adams reported perusing the classics and thus gaining knowledge of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and others. But the exercise left him rather dismayed about the human condition. He told Jefferson:

The vast prospect of Mankind, which these Books have passed in Review before me, from the most ancient records, histories, traditions and Fables that remain to Us, to the present day, has Sickened my very Soul; and almost reconciled me to Swifts Travels among The Yahoo’s.[12]

In at least two other letters, Adams again used Yahoos as a metaphor for the worst failings of humanity.[13]

Apparently, Adams believed himself to be so familiar with Gulliver’s Travels that on occasion he made an error best explained as a case of him thinking he knew the text so well that he did not actually need to consult it before referencing it. In two letters, written thirty years apart, by way of analogy Adams mentioned, “the flying Island of Lagado.”[14] But the flying island in Part 3 of Travels was called Laputa, not Lagado. There was a Lagado in the book, but it was the primary city of Balnibarbi, the stationary, earthbound island that Laputa hovered over and around.[15] The similarity of names understandably seems to have left an ambiguity in Adam’s mind.

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We noted that John Trumbull and John Adams used “Lilliputian” to describe inferior military forces. Using that adjective to describe things slight or small resonated among the Founders. James Madison, for example, in two letters referred to the Appalachian Mountains as “our Lilliputian Andes.”[16]

That same word of Swiftian origin was used by Thomas Jefferson in one of the most famous—or perhaps infamous—letters he ever wrote. In 1796, frustrated by the condition of American politics, Jefferson expressed his dismay to his longtime friend and correspondent Philip Mazzei:

an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance as they have already done the forms of the British government . . . It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.[17]

That “Samson in the field” Jefferson wrote of was George Washington; the “Solomon in the council” was John Adams. This criticism of other American statesmen would not have caused Jefferson anguish if Mazzei had only kept the letter confidential. But as one account put it, “Mazzei hardly ever resisted indiscretion.”[18] Mazzei shared this portion of the letter with others, as a result it wound up in the French press and later found its way back to America where it was published in several newspapers.[19]

This letter is frequently discussed because it played a key role in the rift that developed between Jefferson and Washington.[20] Less often appreciated is that Jefferson expressed optimism that whatever damage the Federalists might do could readily be undone—and it was here that the reference to Gulliver’s Travels appeared. Jefferson insisted that the “monarchical and aristocratical” party would fail because, “The main body of our citizens . . . remain true to their republican principles.” And to restore the political situation to what Jefferson desired, “We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the first sleep which succeeded our labors.”[21] Jefferson’s analogy was to perhaps the most famous image from Gulliver—arriving exhausted in Lilliput after swimming for his life, Gulliver falls asleep in the grass, awakening to find that the tiny Lilliputians have tied him to the ground. But the ropes with which they have bound him are little more than threads to Gulliver, thus he is readily able to “snap the Lilliputian cords.” Jefferson was suggesting to Mazzei that opposition to the Federalists would be just as simple.[22]

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Noting the frequent occurrence of Gulliver’s Travels references in the writings of the Founders is intriguing, but doing so gives us no more than a list. More engaging of our attention is recognizing certain themes or anecdotes in Swift’s book comparable to assertions made by American statesmen of the early days of the republic. In the cases we shall examine here Gulliver’s Travels was not cited directly; for this reason, we should take care not to declare that the Founders specifically had that book in mind when they made these points. Furthermore, we should remember that Swift was just one of a large number of writers read by revolutionary era Americans; it would be misguided to elevate the impact of Gulliver beyond reasonable bounds.[23] Here, we are merely noting similarities, sometimes striking, that could indicate a conscious or unconscious influence. Let us consider three examples of political thought—one by Jefferson, one by Madison, one by Washington—that are reminiscent of scenes and ideas from Gulliver’s Travels.

1. In Chapter 7 of Part 2 of the Travels, Gulliver discusses English politics with the King of Brobdingnag. He tells the monarch that “there were several thousand Books among us written upon the Art of Government.” His Majesty is unimpressed. Gulliver reports that the King:

gave it for his Opinion, that whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two Blades of Grass to grow upon a spot of Ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential Service to his Country than the whole Race of Politicians put together.[24]

Writing in 1787 to his college-bound nephew, Peter Carr, Thomas Jefferson advised the young man not to bother attending lectures on moral philosophy. Such instruction was unnecessary, Jefferson asserted, because man is by his nature endowed with a sense of right and wrong to which nothing learned in a college classroom could add. He added:

State a moral case to a ploughman & a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.[25]

Jefferson regularly extolled the virtues of agriculture over any other pursuit.[26] In the Carr letter, Jefferson, like the King of Brobdingnag, held the “ploughman” up to men ostensibly possessing more learning—politicians in one case, professors in the other—and found farmers far superior in comparison.[27]

2. The twentieth century literary scholar Irvin Ehrenpreis, a leading expert on Swift, described the “central argument” of Gulliver’s Travels as: “men are ridiculously perverse, and prefer vices that make them miserable to virtues they know would give them serendipity.”[28]
A keen sense of man’s difficulty remaining virtuous, and his tendency to veer into vice, was a paramount feature of founding era thought. Historian Gordon Wood noted that the architects of the new American republic were convinced that it depended on the virtue of the people to survive. At the same time, they were aware that men could be “racked by the selfish passions of greed, envy, and hate.”[29] In the new government, how could virtue be maximized and vice minimized?

Writing in The Federalist #51, James Madison acknowledged this problem and argued that it would be mitigated as well as it could be by the Constitution’s structure of government.[30] In so doing, it might be said that he was accepting the same assumptions of human nature that Professor Ehrenpreis identified at the core of Gulliver’s Travels, although Madison’s take on this in #51 was less cynical.

Madison there famously addressed the foibles of man by admitting that if not for human vice, there would have been no point having a constitution in the first place. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”[31] So if man is not heavenly, how can his dark side at least be held back?

Madison argued that the Constitution’s system of checks and balances between the branches of government would curtail humanity’s flaws as best as anything could. By creating distinct legislative, executive, and judicial branches, “those who administer each department (would have) the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others . . . Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”[32]

If we accept Professor Ehrenpreis’s “central argument” of Gulliver’s Travels, we should consider that Jonathan Swift, who died over four decades before the U.S. Constitution was written, might chuckle a bit at Madison’s words. Swift could argue that excessive ambition is a vice, and that by saying ambition would counteract ambition Madison was proposing that when two vices clash, you can somehow arrive at virtue. But of course, if man truly is “ridiculously perverse” Madison and the other Framers can at least be credited with doing the best they could with the massively imperfect source material nature provided!

3. In his thorough study of George Washington’s reading habits, historian Kevin J. Hayes concludes that Washington almost certainly read Gulliver’s Travels in his youth.[33] Hayes furthermore stresses that the books Washington read in his youth are a rich resource to understand “his life, his mind, and his spirit.”[34]
In Part 1 of Travels, Gulliver has a conversation with Reldresal, Lilliput’s Principal Secretary of Private Affairs. Reldresal tells Gulliver that Lilliput is burdened by “a violent Faction at home.”[35] Elaborating, Reldresal reports that the nation has “two struggling Parties . . . under the Names of Tramecksan, and Slamecksan.” It is generally accepted that the Tramecksan represents the Tories and the Slamecksan the Whigs, the antagonistic political parties of early eighteenth-century Britain.[36]

Possibly when he read this, the adolescent George Washington encountered for the first time a description of the bitterness between members of rival political parties. He retained an apprehensiveness over the detrimental effect of party squabbling his entire life, even believing that it might irrevocably fracture the nation he helped create.[37] In his Farewell Address, Washington warned his countrymen of “the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally,” declaring that:

It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection.[38]

This aligns with the conditions Reldresal reports as to the hostility between the Tramecksan and Slamecksan:

The Animositys between these two Partys run so high, that they will neither eat nor drink, nor talk with each other.[39]

That Washington and Swift both latched onto the word animosity to describe political parties is likely coincidental; that they both were repelled by this animus is clear.

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In his essay “Politics,” written decades after the Founding era, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that of all debts incurred, taxes are the ones people are least willing to pay, because there more than elsewhere we don’t think we get our money’s worth. “What a satire is this on government!” Emerson exclaimed. For this reason, he concluded, “the less government we have the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power.”[40]

Emerson’s argument for limited government would no doubt have struck a chord with many of the Founders. But it is his description of taxpaying as a satire on government that resonates here. Based on the regularity of references to Gulliver’s Travels in the writings of the Founders, and the similarity of some of their beliefs and actions to themes expressed in that book, we might say that, in part, the American government they created was itself influenced by a satire.

[1] Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press, 1969) 13:382-383.

[2] Note that while Verner Crane, editor of Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press 1758–1775 (The University of North Carolina Press,1950) and the editors of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin agree that this letter was probably written by Franklin, this is a likelihood not a certainty.

[3] All citations from Gulliver’s Travels used here are from the Norton Critical edition of the text, Albert J. Rivero, ed. (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,2002). The lampooning of attorneys is at 211-212 of this edition.

[4] Ibid, vii.

[5] T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots (Hill and Wang, 2010), 52.

[6] Robert J. Taylor, ed., The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams (Harvard University Press, 1977), 2:128-129 (PJA).

[7] Rivero, ed., Gulliver’s Travels, 17, on height of Lilliputians.

[8] John Adams to John Adams Smith, June 15, 1812, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-03-02-2156. I’ve modernized Adams’s spelling.

[9] Rivero, ed., Gulliver’s Travels, 46.

[10] Ibid, 149-50.

[11] Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford University Press, 2008), 532-545.

[12] Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6744.

[13] Adams to Thomas McKean, November 26, 1813, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6205; Adams to Jefferson, July 16, 1814,” founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6321.

[14] PJA 16:367-369; Adams to William Plumer, December 4, 1814,” founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6361.

[15] Rivero, ed., Gulliver’s Travels, 142.

[16] David B. Mattern, et al., The Papers of James Madison, Retirement Series (University of Virginia Press, 2013), 2:329-330 (PJM); James Madison to Robley Dunglison, February 23, 1829, founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-02-02-1709.

[17] Barbara B. Oberg, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Original Series (Princeton University Press, 2002), 29:81-83 (PTJ).

[18] Fred Kaplan, His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer (Harper Collins, 2022), 419.

[19] Hayes, The Road to Monticello, 438-439

[20] Kaplan, His Masterly Pen, 420; Hayes, The Road to Monticello, 438-439.

[21] PTJ, Original Series 29:81-83.

[22] Rivero, ed., Gulliver’s Travels, 17-18; Hayes, The Road to Monticello, 430-431.

[23] See Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 14, noting that Americans of the time, “cited and borrowed promiscuously from almost every conceivable English writer—from Locke, Blackstone, Addison, Swift, Hale, Hume, and James Thompson, from everyone and anyone a good Englishman might read.”

[24] Rivero, ed., Gulliver’s Travels, 113.

[25] PTJ, Original Series, 12:14-19.

[26] E.g., he also wrote, “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” William Peden, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson (The University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 164-165.

[27] In Jefferson’s time it was common for a man to be both a farmer and a politician, as Jefferson himself was. See Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (University of Kansas Press, 1985), 220; historian Forrest McDonald counted twenty-seven farmers among the fifty-five men attending the 1787 Constitutional Convention—including nine who were lawyers as well as farmers.

[28] Irvin Ehrenpreis, “Show and Tell in Gulliver’s Travels” in Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Rivero, 454.

[29] Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 68-69.

[30] To this point, see especially Michael I. Meyerson, Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World (Basic Books, 2008), 175-180.

[31] Federalist No. 51, PJM 10:476-480. This paper is sometimes attributed to Alexander Hamilton, but the weight of evidence strongly suggests Madison was the author; see ed. note, Harold C. Syrett, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Columbia University Press, 1962), 4:497-502.

[32] Federalist No. 51, PJM 10:476-480.

[33] Kevin J. Hayes, George Washington: A Life in Books (Oxford University Press, 2017), 118.

[34] Ibid, 1.

[35] Rivero, ed, Gulliver’s Travels, 39.

[36] J.A. Downie, “The Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Rivero, ed, Gulliver’s Travels, 344.

[37] Dennis C. Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders (Princeton University Press, 2021), 17-58.

[38] David R. Hoth and William M. Ferraro, eds., The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series (University of Virginia Press, 2019), 20:703-722. Much of the speech was written by Alexander Hamilton, and he in turn consulted an earlier potential farewell address written by Madison four years earlier when Washington considered not seeking a second term. But see Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun, 45: “Though many of the words of the Farewell Address are Hamilton’s, the message is pure Washington.” See also Hayes, George Washington: A Life in Books, 287-298.

[39] Rivero, ed, Gulliver’s Travels, 40.

[40] Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Modern Library, 2000), 376.