1831

by Louis P. Masur

  In passing an act that abolished imprisonment for debt as a civil procedure and established guidelines for the criminal prosecution and punishment of fraudulent debtors, the legislature acted on a growing consensus within the community. To be sure, the language of working-class radicalism found its way into the discussion, particularly where the writers of the Assembly report presented themselves as counterweights to the oppression of the poor and the weak by the wealthy and influential: “The cries of the slave will long be heard before the sympathies of the master will be awakened—the voice of the poor is feeble and petitioning, that of the rich, powerful and commanding.” But the creditors also saw their own interests advanced by abolition and a different line of reasoning swayed them. Not only did it cost time and money to pursue debtors, but many of these creditors were themselves in debt to others. Misfortune could visit anyone. It was the responsibility of the creditor to demand some collateral for the debt, because accidents were “among the ordinary occurrences of life.” The creditor “trusted to the good fortune of the debtor as the merchant to the prosperity of the voyage. If the one be unfortunate and the other unsuccessful, the loss must rest where the risk occurred. The debtor promises to pay if he has ability to do so; the creditor agrees to trust to his ability, consequently if the debtor has not the ability to pay, he has not forfeited his promise … . If a man agrees to go to London and dies before he can arrive there, it will scarcely be said he has violated his promise; and is it not equally impossible for a man to pay a debt, when he had nothing wherewith to pay it?”27

  The harsh winter in New York made abstract questions of misfortune palpable. Within a week’s span in February, more than three thousand people applied for poor relief. Philip Hone, the former mayor, noted, “The long continuance of extreme cold weather and the consequent difficulty of bringing wood to the city have occasioned great distress to the poor.” George Evans reported, “Poor creatures are to be seen at every corner, in every alley, shivering with cold and hunger, unable to procure employment, and doomed to utter starvation.” Frozen conditions clotted the commercial arteries of the city and the working classes suffered acutely. Whatever joy the Working Men’s Party felt over the abolition of imprisonment for debt, they lamented the little progress in other areas. The militia system, which required citizens to stop working and turn out for a three-day period every fall or pay a fine, remained intact; a lien law, to protect workers from builders who did not fulfill contracts, was not passed, although procedures for recovery were put into place; an attempt to organize public meetings to call for a ten-hour workday failed. Some workers feared it would lower wages, and others mocked the very idea that the expectation of twelve hours’ labor made the “employer … oppressive and the employed a slave.”

  The Working Men of New York, like similar groups in other cities, claimed not to be a political party (“they disclaim connexion and sympathy with all parties, except that great party which includes the nation”), but the factionalism of politics accelerated their demise. Two of the leaders of the movement that emerged in 1829, Thomas Skid-more and Robert Dale Owen, battled each other publicly in 1831 over the question of birth control. The men had already parted ways in their approach to Working Men’s activism. Skidmore, the author of The Rights of Man to Property (1829), called for the abolition of all inheritance laws and the reallocation of wealth. He rejected the concept of private property, seeing it as a violation of natural rights: “Why not sell the winds of heaven, that man might not breathe without price? Why not sell the light of the sun, that man should not see without making another rich?” Whereas Skidmore advocated redistribution, Owen stressed reform. The son of the famous utopian Robert Owen, who created a communitarian society at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, Owen came to New York in 1829 from New Harmony and joined Frances Wright, the advocate of free thought and women’s rights, whom he had met two years earlier. They published the Free Enquirer, a weekly paper devoted to rational inquiry and reform. Unlike Skidmore, who sought equal wealth, Owen and Wright stressed equal education. Sounding as much like middle-class reformers as like working-class radicals, they advocated the creation of nonsectarian state-run schools that would educate all children equally and inculcate the values of industry, temperance, and discipline. It was not that Skidmore did not believe in education, but, as one Owenite put it, “he thinks that if means were equal, education would be universal; I think if right education were universal, means would be equal.”28

  Birth control fit into Owen’s education scheme, and he raised the delicate subject in a work that quickly went through several editions, Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question. It was not a new issue. Political economists and philosophers such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo had shocked the post-Enlightenment world by arguing that population increased faster than society’s ability to provide sustenance; as a consequence, poverty and misery, not progress and happiness, would mark the future. Despairing that nations relied upon war, famine, and disease as checks upon unrestrained population growth, Owen sought rational measures that returned autonomy and control to the individual. He spurned celibacy as unnatural and unhealthy. Owen sympathized with the Shakers, a religious sect who had taken vows of celibacy and whose name came from an elaborate dance that was part of their service; he urged, however, that the reproductive instinct need not contribute to misery and profligacy but, rather, that “its temperate enjoyment is a blessing.” Though preferable to a life of dissipation, “a life of rigid celibacy,” Owen proclaimed, “is yet fraught with many evils. Peevishness, restlessness, vague longings, and instability of character are among the least of these.” The key was individual self-control, and Owen advocated “the desirability and possibility” of denial and restraint. Only by self-mastery over his instincts did man distinguish himself from “brute creation” and demonstrate the “power to improve, cultivate, and elevate his nature, from generation to generation.” To restrain population growth further, Owen recommended various measures for preventing conception—withdrawal, the insertion of a sponge, and the use of a covering. After reading Moral Physiology, one writer exclaimed, “A new scene of existence seemed to open before me. I found myself, in this all important matter, a free agent, and, in a degree, the arbiter of my own destiny.”29

  In Moral Physiology Exposed and Refuted, Thomas Skidmore denounced Owen’s proposals as an assault upon the working classes. Owen, in essence, argued that “the gratification of one of the most important appetites of our nature and the consequent production of beings like ourselves is a criminal act with all who have not a certain amount of property, [that] poor men may not have as large families as their wealthy neighbors.” Labeling Owen’s work “morose and chilling” and calling the author an “imposter-reformer,” Skidmore argued that a “life of unremitting toil and poverty is not the consequence of having a large family … . It is the effect, directly, immediately, and wholly, of an unjust and vicious organization of government.” With “meretricious sophistry,” Owen was “guilty of throwing out false lights to decoy the wretched from the discovery of the true remedy of their distresses”: the unequal division of property. “Better, far better, it appears to me,” proclaimed Skidmore, “to set about discovering the means of preventing the existence of enormous incomes, derived from the labor of others … . Destroy this, and it will be a long time before Robert Dale Owen, or any other man, will have any cause to complain of the number of mouths.”30

  With the debate over birth control, the Working Men’s movement in New York reached its denouement. At the end of the year, Owen left New York for a journey to Indiana and back. He married, traveled to Europe, and on his return settled at New Harmony. Skidmore, the oldest of ten children, died in 1832 in the cholera epidemic that ravaged the city. Evans maintained his ideals but, by 1833, folded the Working Man’s Advocate “because of insufficient patronage.” Elsewhere, the story was much the same. In Philadelphia, Stephen Simpson discontinued his Mechanics’
Free Press, changed political allegiances, and started the Pennsylvania Whig. Workers in New England, late to organize, never had as much impact as their brethren did elsewhere. The demise of the Working Men’s movement was symbolized by the closing of the Hall of Science in New York. Established by Wright and Owen when they came to the city, the Hall served as a lecture lyceum, printing office, and lending library for the advance of secular knowledge and free thought. For the price of three cents for men and no charge for women, visitors heard talks on astronomy, anatomy, and perspectival drawing as well as debates on such questions as whether “the light of reason is a trustworthy and sufficient guide to happiness.” But economic reality impinged on the pursuit of knowledge and, in a move that represented the triumph of religious revivalism over radical reform, Owen announced in November that he had sold the Hall to a Methodist congregation.31

  ANTI-MASONS AND NATIONAL REPUBLICANS

  As a political party, the Working Men’s movement could not sustain itself. But political frenzy pulsated through the nation like an electrical force. “Party politics and prices current,” lamented Owen, “are the alpha and omega of men’s thoughts.” Most foreign travelers thought it remarkable that Americans agreed on the basic principles of government, but as a result “it was not easy to become master of the distinctions” on which parties rested. “America has had great parties,” proclaimed Tocqueville, “but there are not any more now.” He thought that the Federalists and the Republicans of the Revolutionary era held to high moral principles but he did not recognize in the National Republicans and Democrats, the immediate descendants of these parties, similar virtues. “In the whole world,” declared Tocqueville, “I do not see a more wretched and shameful sight than that presented by the different coteries (they do not deserve the name of parties) which now divide the Union. In broad daylight one sees all the petty, shameful passions disturbing them which generally one is careful to keep hidden at the bottom of the human heart.”32

  Whatever one called them—coterie, faction, or party—one group that galvanized American politics was the Anti-Masons, who became the first third party in American history and invented the presidential nominating convention. As their name disclosed, the Anti-Masonic Party set itself against Masonry, a private, fraternal organization that originated in England early in the eighteenth century. At the time of the Revolution, there were some one hundred lodges and several thousand members in America, including Ben Franklin and George Washington. Freemasonry continued to expand as entrepreneurs, professionals, and artisans sought social camaraderie and business connections. In January, the New York Register posited the existence of two thousand fraternities with a hundred thousand members. Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, among many other leading statesmen, belonged at one time or another to a Masonic lodge. Though its exclusive membership, private oaths, and hierarchical orders may have seemed anathema to republican America, Masonry stirred little controversy until 1826, when one mason, William Morgan, disappeared.

  Morgan, a fifty-two-year-old artisan in western New York, had planned to publish a pamphlet, Illustrations of Masonry, that exposed the secret rituals of the Masonic order. Local officials, many of them Masons, used all means possible to prevent publication: they burned down the shop that intended to print it and arrested Morgan, first for theft and then for a small debt that he owed. Morgan was languishing in a chilly prison cell in Canandaigua, New York, when someone paid his debt of $2.69 and carried him off in a carriage. They carried him to Rochester and Lewiston and Fort Niagara and, ultimately, to someplace where secrets are never revealed and silence is permanent.

  Investigators never found Morgan’s body. Between 1826 and 1831, New York launched over twenty grand-jury investigations and at least eighteen trials but never secured a conviction. Each indictment and trial served only to inflame passions. It seemed that judges, lawyers, and jurors were all Masons; with each acquittal came a new chorus of denunciation for what could only be seen as a conspiracy against liberty. Masonry became a dividing line in American politics, and local candidates in New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, and eventually across New England and the Midwest, gained office by running against the seemingly antidemocratic fraternal organization.

  Morgan’s was not the only story that roused suspicions that Masonry was akin to tyranny. The case of Pastor George Witherell, a Mason who sought to leave his Masonic temple, was widely discussed throughout the spring of 1831. A Knight Templar in the Masons, Witherell decided he would no longer attend meetings or abide by the oaths and signs that bound members to each other. One evening while the pastor was away, Lucinda Witherell and her son heard footsteps in the darkened house. “Father, have you got home?” the son called. Suddenly, two men with black silk handkerchiefs covering their faces cried out: “Now you damned, perjured rascal, we will inflict upon you the penalty of your violated obligations.” They seized Mrs. Witherell by the throat, but fled when the son came at them.

  Investigations failed to identify the culprits, though most citizens suspected they were two Masons seeking to silence the apostate pastor. Shortly after the incident, newspapers throughout western New York printed a bogus trial transcript that purported to be the testimony of the Witherells before a magistrate. Lucinda comes across as little more than a prostitute, and the pastor incriminates himself in the planning and execution of the assault. The forged transcript outraged the community as much as the original assault. Here was deviousness at its worst, accusing Anti-Masons of feigning the assassination in order to win adherents to their cause. “To what acts of depravity,” people wondered, “will not Masonry descend to be revenged on Seceders?”

  7. Anti Masonic Almanac for the Year 1831 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

  Political Anti-Masonry flourished from the cultural anxieties that had been unleashed. In local elections in western New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont, more than 80 percent of the electorate turned out to vote. Anti-Masonic candidates won seats in state assemblies and helped send candidates to Congress. More than a hundred AntiMasonic newspapers sprouted across the nation. With an eye toward nominating a candidate for president, Anti-Masons began soliciting the opinions of leading politicians. Deeming Freemasonry “dangerous to our political and moral welfare,” the Anti-Masonic Committee of Correspondence for York County, Pennsylvania, asked Richard Rush if he was a member. On May 4, Rush, who at various times held the positions of attorney general, secretary of state, minister to England, and secretary of the Treasury, published a response. He offered a lengthy denunciation of the place of secret societies in America:”Of all governments existing, ours is the one, which would be most justified in watching, with constant and scrupulous care, the conduct of societies profoundly secret.” He expressed shock that Morgan’s murderers remained free and outrage”at seeing human life and liberty so sported with, by a power [that] rides in darkness.” “A secret combination,” capable of thwarting the law, contaminated “the heart of the republic.” Rush condemned the editors of newspapers for failing to uphold the role of a free press “to raise and keep up the alarm.” “Silence,” he believed, “is participation,” but “the press on this occasion has fallen into stupefaction, or turpitude.” Had the press done its duty, “this conspiracy against Morgan would long since have been laid bare, and public justice been vindicated.” Rush concluded by complimenting the Anti-Masonic movement for the efforts they were making against Masonry,”to root out its bad influence from the face of our land.“33

  Rush would have made an ideal Anti-Masonic candidate for president, but he privately declined any nomination. John Quincy Adams, the former president who at the end of the year took a seat in the House of Representatives, also entered into Anti-Masonic politics. On July 11, he attended an Anti-Masonic oration at Faneuil Hall in Boston. Lyman Beecher opened the meeting with a prayer, but Adams was struck by how few of his Boston friends were in attendance, evidence of how Anti-Masonry brought new faces into the political arena. Adams declared tha
t he would not take part in the next presidential election but acknowledged that “the dissolution of the Masonic institution” was the most important issue facing “us and our posterity.” In September he allowed a series of letters against Masonry to be published, and for several years he continued to decry the institution. He even ran as Anti-Masonic candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 1833. As a “zealous anti-mason,” Adams made his position clear: because of the atrocious crimes committed in the Morgan affair, it was the duty either of every Masonic lodge to dissolve itself or of respectable Masons to repudiate all “vices, oaths, penalties and secrets.”34

  Throughout the winter of 1830—31, state conventions elected delegates to attend a national Anti-Masonic convention in Baltimore in September. One skeptic observed that the meetings, filled with delegates from the burned-over districts where Anti-Masonry had first ignited, resembled revivalist gatherings: “They all become fanatic or like all new converts manifest an extraordinary degree of Zeal—They break at once from all political ties & associations.” “Disclaiming all association with Jacksonism and Clayism,” with the Democrats and the National Republicans, Anti-Masons decided to build on their success in local elections and nominate candidates for president and vice-president of the United States. “The course we espouse,” declared delegates at the Massachusetts Anti-Masonic convention, “has been driven by necessity to the BALLOT BOX.”35

  On September 28, on a motion from Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, delegates nominated William Wirt of Maryland for the presidency. But the nomination did not come easily. Stevens had zealously supported Supreme Court Justice John McLean, who toyed with the idea of accepting the nomination before finally turning it down. McLean’s refusal, recalled William Seward of New York, “fell as a wet blanket upon our warm expectations.” Stevens and Seward roomed together in Baltimore, and the two spent much of the night discussing the nomination. By morning, Stevens had agreed to support Wirt. An exhausted Seward wrote his wife, “If it were an agreeable subject, I would describe to you all the bustle, excitement, collision, irritation, enunciation, suspicion, confusion, obstinacy, foolhardiness, and humor, of a convention of one hundred and thirteen men, from twelve different States, assembled for the purpose of nominating candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States.”36