Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  “Rip Van Winkle” became the most popular of Irving’s many stories, for early nineteenth-century Americans could appreciate Rip’s bewilderment. Although superficially the political leadership seemed much the same—on the sign at the village inn the face of George Washington had simply replaced that of George III—beneath the surface Rip, like most Americans, knew that “every thing’s changed.” In a few short decades Americans had experienced a remarkable transformation in their society and culture, and, like Rip and his creator, many wondered what had happened and who they really were.2

  Before the Revolution of 1776 America had been merely a collection of disparate British colonies composed of some two million subjects huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast—European outposts whose cultural focus was still London, the metropolitan center of the empire. Following the War of 1812 with Great Britain—often called the Second American Revolution—these insignificant provinces had become a single giant continental republic with nearly ten million citizens, many of whom had already spilled into the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The cultural focus of this huge expansive nation was no longer abroad but was instead directed inward at its own boundless possibilities.

  By 1815 Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived themselves and the world around them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before urbanization, before railroads, and before any of the technological breakthroughs usually associated with modern social change. In the decades following the Revolution America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change but came to expect it and prize it.

  The population grew dramatically, doubling every twenty years or so, as it had for several generations, more than twice the rate of growth of any European country. And people were on the move as never before. Americans spread themselves over half a continent at astonishing speeds. Between 1790 and 1820 New York’s population quadrupled; Kentucky’s multiplied nearly eight times. In a single decade Ohio grew from a virtual wilderness (except, of course, for the presence of the native Indians, whom white Americans scarcely acknowledged) to become more populous than most of the century-old colonies had been at the time of the Revolution. In a single generation Americans occupied more territory than they had occupied during the entire 150 years of the colonial period, and in the process killed or displaced tens of thousands of Indians.

  Although most Americans in 1815 remained farmers living in rural areas, they had become, especially in the North, one of the most highly commercialized people in the world. They were busy buying and selling not only with the rest of the world but increasingly with one another, everyone, it seemed, trying to realize what Niles’ Weekly Register declared was “the almost universal ambition to get forward.”3 Nowhere in the Western world was business and working for profit more praised and honored.

  This celebration of work made a leisured slaveholding aristocracy in the South more and more anomalous. Slavery was widely condemned, but it did not die in the new United States; indeed, it flourished—but only in the South. It spread across the Southern half of the country, and as it disappeared in the North, it became more deeply entrenched in the Southern economy. In a variety of ways—socially, culturally, and politically—the South began to see itself as a beleaguered minority in the bustling nation.

  All these demographic and commercial changes could not help but affect every aspect of American life. Politics became democratized as more Americans gained the right to vote. The essentially aristocratic world of the Founding Fathers in which gentry leaders stood for election was largely replaced by a very different democratic world, a recognizably modern world of competing professional politicians who ran for office under the banners of modern political parties. Indeed, Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period’s political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was devoted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy. Most important perhaps, ordinary Americans developed a keen sense of their own worth—a sense that, living in the freest nation in the world, they were anybody’s equal. Religion too was democratized and transformed. Not only were most of the traditional European-based religious establishments finally destroyed, but the modern world of many competing Christian denominations was created. By 1815 America had become the most evangelically Christian nation in the world.

  Even Washington Irving, despite his deep affection for all things English and his anxiety over America’s national identity, had to concede that the United States was “a country in a singular state of moral and physical development; a country,” he said, “in which one of the greatest Political experiments in the history of the world is now performing.” Obvious to all was “our rapidly growing importance and our matchless prosperity”—due, he said, “not merely to physical and local but also to moral causes . . . the political liberty, the general diffusion of knowledge, the prevalence of sound moral and religious principles, which give force and sustained energy to the character of a people.”4 Americans knew they were an experiment, but they were confident they could by their own efforts remake their culture, re-create what they thought and believed. Their Revolution told them that people’s birth did not limit what they might become.

  Suddenly, everything seemed possible. The Revolutionary leaders were faced with the awesome task of creating out of their British heritage their own separate national identity. They had an opportunity to realize an ideal world, to put the broadminded and tolerant principles of the Enlightenment into practice, to become a homogeneous, compassionate, and cosmopolitan people, and to create the kind of free and ordered society and illustrious culture that people since the Greeks and Romans had yearned for.

  But little worked out quite as the Founders expected. Not only did their belief in the Revolution’s enlightened and liberty-loving principles, including their dedication to equality and popular government, contain within itself the source of its own disillusionment, but their high-minded promise to end slavery and respect the rights of the native peoples were no match for the surging demographic forces accelerated by the Revolution.

  By 1815 the classical Enlightenment in America was over or popularized, and many of the ideals of the Revolution, including the hope of America’s becoming the repository of Western art and culture, had been modified or perverted. Yet the changes were so complicated, so indeliber-ate, so much a medley of responses to fast-moving events that Americans scarcely knew how they had progressed from one point to another.

  The transformation Americans had experienced was unintended, for the character they celebrated in Andrew Jackson and the Hunters of Kentucky—the romantic, undisciplined, and untutored heroes of the battle of New Orleans of 1815—was scarcely the character they had sought in 1789. The bumptious nationalism and the defiant abandonment of Europe expressed at the end of the War of 1812 were both repudiations of the enlightened and cosmopolitan ideals of the Revolution and attempts to come to terms with the largely unanticipated popular commercial society that had emerged from the Revolution.

  By the end of that second war against Britain in 1815, the central impulses of the Revolution had run their course. Americans believed that their Republic was at last secure and independent, free from hostile mercantile empires and the ravages of the European wars that had tormented them for over two decades. Democracy and equality were no longer problematic issues to be debated; they had become articles of faith to be ful-filled. Americans thought they had finally become a nation—the only one that was free and democratic in a world of monarchies. With nearly an entire continent at their disposal, they believed that they were at last ready to exploit the great possibilities that lay before them. At the same time, however, many of them had come to realize that their future as a united and freedom-loving people was being thwarted by the continuing presence of slavery in their midst. Their grand experiment in republicanism was not over after all and would have to be further tes
ted.

  1

  Experiment in Republicanism

  In 1788 the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, presented Thomas Lee Shippen, the son of a prominent Philadelphia family, to the French Court of Versailles. Young Shippen, who was studying law at the Inns of Court in London, was very excited; the young man, the nephew of Richard Henry and Arthur Lee of Virginia, was very socially conscious and, since he had “a little Vanity,” was apt to “run wild after the tinsel of life.” He had looked forward to his “Continental tour” with all its opportunities for cultivating “the acquaintance of titled men and Ladies of birth,” whose names,” a friend of the Shippen family regretfully observed, “he soon gets and . . . will never forget.”1

  Of course, nowhere in the world was there more tinsel and titles than at the Court of Versailles, more indeed than Shippen had ever imagined. The protocol was incredibly elaborate: arriving at half past ten, “we were not done bowing until near 2”; in fact, “the business of bowing” went on so long, Shippen told his father, that “any but a Scotchman would have been tired of [it].” So ceremonious and so luxurious was the French court that this pretentious Philadelphian could only gawk and feel himself a “stranger” in its midst. He could not help expressing amazement at the “Oriental splendor and magnificence” of it all. The riches, the sophistication, the pomp dazzled him. The pictures of the royal family were “larger than life.” The members of the court had “all separate households and distinct portions of the Palace allotted to them,” and “between them they expend 36,000,000 of livres a year.” And the royal gardens—“What walks! What groves! What water works!” The situation of the “superb building” of the palace was “worthy of its grandeur, and both well suited to the Court of a great Nation.” Versailles was an “enchanting paradise,” all “very splendid,” and filled with such ceremony and civility, said Shippen, as “I had never seen.” Overawed, he could only puff with pride at having “received very uncommon marks of politeness and attention” from the nobles of the court.

  Although Shippen “upon the whole . . . was well pleased with the day,” all the time he knew he was being snubbed. He sensed that the “oppressive . . . civilities” of the courtiers were condescending, that their polite questions only “served to shew rather a desire to be attentive to me, than to be informed of what they did not know already.” The American, something of an aristocrat in Philadelphia but hardly one at Versailles, could not help feeling his difference; and that difference became a shield for his self-esteem. He was, after all, he told his father, a republican: geographically and socially he was from another world. The magnificence and elegance of Versailles both impressed and repulsed him. How many thousands of subjects, Shippen wondered, had been doomed to want and wretchedness by King Louis XIV’s wasteful efforts “to shroud his person and adorn his reign” by building Versailles. He “revolted” at the “insufferable arrogance” of the present king, Louis XVI, and was even “more mortified at the suppleness and base complaisance of his attendants.” To witness “the file of ambassadors, Envoys Ministers &c. in full dress . . . prostrating themselves before him emulous of each other in demonstrating their obsequious adulation” was even more distasteful. He rejoiced that he was not the subject of such a monarchy but the citizen of a republic—“more great because more virtuous”—where there were no hereditary distinctions, no “empty ornament and unmeaning grandeur,” and “where the people respect sincerity, and acknowledge no other tyranny than that of Honor.” He was proud of Mr. Jefferson, who was “the plainest man in the room, and the most destitute of ribbands, crosses and other insignia of rank.” That America’s minister was the person “most courted and most attended to (even by the Courtiers themselves)” persuaded Shippen that good sense, merit, and integrity inevitably commanded respect “even among those who cannot boast of their possession.” He observed in the midst of all the splendor of the courtiers “an uneasiness and ennui in their faces which did not bespeak content or happiness.” The whole wonderful and eye-opening experience convinced him “that a certain degree of equality is essential to human bliss. Happy above all Countries is our Country,” he concluded, “where that equality is found, without destroying the necessary subordination.”2

  IN A BASIC SENSE the importance of the American Revolution was summed up in Thomas Shippen’s day at Versailles. For nearly all Americans, as it was for Shippen, becoming republican was the deeply felt meaning of their revolution. They knew that by overthrowing monarchy and adopting republican governments in 1776 they had done more than eliminate a king and institute an elective system of government. Republicanism gave a moral, even utopian, significance to their revolution that had made their separation from Great Britain much more than a simple colonial rebellion. They were keenly aware that by becoming members of thirteen republics they had undertaken a bold and perhaps world-shattering experiment in self-government.

  At the moment of independence that was how they thought of themselves—as thirteen separate republics. No American revolutionary even imagined the possibility of creating a strong continental-sized national republic similar to the one that was established by the Constitution a decade later in 1787–1788. In 1776 the only central authority that most Americans could conceive of was “a firm league of friendship,” or a confederation, among the thirteen individual states, similar in many respects to the present-day European Union, held together by a kind of treaty in which each state retained “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” This treaty of thirteen states held out the possibility and hope of other British provinces—Canada and East and West Florida—joining the Union. The treaty—the Articles of Confederation, as it was called—gave the United States of America a literal plural meaning that has since been lost.

  Maintaining this confederation of republics would not be easy. Americans knew only too well that republics were very delicate polities that required a special kind of society—a society of equal and virtuous citizens. By throwing off monarchy and becoming republics, declared South Carolina physician and historian David Ramsay, Americans had “changed from subjects to citizens,” and “the difference is immense.” “Subjects,” he said, “look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others.”3 Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force, by patronage or honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately, from their citizens’ willingness to take up arms to defend their country and to sacrifice their private desires for the sake of the public good—from their “disinterestedness,” which was a popular synonym for virtue. This reliance on the moral virtue of their citizens, on their capacity for self-sacrifice and impartiality of judgment, was what made republican governments historically so fragile.

  Theorists from Plutarch in antiquity to Machiavelli in the Renaissance to Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century had argued that republics dependent upon the virtue of their citizens had to be small in size and martial in character; otherwise their citizens would have too many diverse interests and would not be able to cohere, defend themselves, and develop the proper spirit of self-sacrifice. The only republics existing in the eighteenth century—the Netherlands, the Swiss cantons, and the Italian city-states—were small and compact and no models for the sprawling United States of America. Large and socially diverse states that had tried to become republics—as England had in the seventeenth century—inevitably had ended up in military dictatorships like that of Oliver Cromwell.

  As Shippen had suggested, republics were also supposed to have citizens who were more or less equal to one anther. They could have no legal or artificial aristocracies, no privileges conferred by governments, no positions based on social connections, marriage, or parentage. The social hierarchies that republics would permit would be based sol
ely on individual merit and talent. Distinctions that did emerge would presumably have no time to harden or be perpetuated across generations. Consequently, this equality of opportunity, with individuals of successive generations rising and falling, would sustain a rough equality of condition.

  Such an equality of condition was essential for republicanism. Since antiquity, theorists had assumed that a republican state required a general equality of property-holding among its citizens. Although most Americans in 1776 believed that not everyone in a republic had to have the same amount of property, a few radicals in 1776 did call for agrarian laws with “the power of lessening property when it became excessive in individuals.”4 All took for granted that a society could not long remain republican if a tiny minority controlled most of the wealth and the bulk of the population remained dependent servants or poor landless laborers. Equality was related to independence; indeed, Jefferson’s original draft for the Declaration of Independence had stated that “all men are created equal & independent.”5 Since owning property made this independence possible, all the states retained some kind of property qualification for voting or for officeholding.