Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (1776) claimed that businessmen could not be good political leaders. Smith thought that businessmen in a modern complicated commercial society were too engaged in their occupations and the making of money to be able to make impartial judgments about the varied interests of their society. Only “those few . . . attached to no particular occupation themselves”—by which Smith meant the English landed gentry—”have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”49
These independent gentlemen of leisure who were presumed to be free of money-grubbing were expected to supply the necessary leadership in government. This leisure was what gave the slaveholding Virginians such an advantage in holding public office. Since well-to-do gentry were “exempted from the lower and less honourable employments,” wrote the British philosopher Francis Hutcheson, they were “rather more than others obliged to an active life in some service to mankind. The publick has this claim upon them.”50 All the American Founders felt the weight of this claim, and they often agonized and complained about it.
The Revolutionary leaders did not conceive of politics as a profession and officeholding as a career. Like Jefferson, they believed that “in a virtuous government . . . public offices are what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss.” They did not like electioneering or political parties, and they regarded public office as an obligation required of certain gentlemen because of their talents, independence, social preeminence, and leisure. Benjamin Franklin never thought his accomplishments in science could begin to compare with the public’s demand for his service. He even went so far as to say that “the finest” of Newton’s “Discoveries” could not have excused the great scientist’s neglect of serving the commonwealth, if the public had needed him.51 Franklin had always stressed that he was an independent gentleman whose offices were obligations thrust upon him. In not one of fourteen elections, he insisted, “did I ever appear as a candidate. I never did, directly or indirectly, solicit any man’s vote.”52 Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.
Since politics was not yet regarded as a profession, the political office-holder was supposed to want to return to private life after serving the public; and this classical ideal remained strong. Washington’s fame as a modern Cincinnatus in the 1780s came from his eagerness to surrender his sword and return to Mount Vernon. In ancient Rome, declared James Wilson, magistrates and army officers were always gentlemen-farmers, always willing to step down “from the elevation of office” and reassume “with contentment and with pleasure, the peaceful labours of a rural and independent life.” John Dickinson’s pose in 1767 as a “Pennsylvania Farmer” is incomprehensible except within this classical tradition. Dickinson was in fact a wealthy and busy Philadelphia lawyer, but he needed to assure his readers that he was free of marketplace interests by informing them at the outset that he was a farmer, “contented” and “undisturbed by worldly hopes or fears.”53
Those who had worldly hopes and fears, especially men, in Melancton Smith’s words, who were “obliged to employ their time in their respective callings,” were presumed to have so many overpowering private interests as to be incapable of promoting the public interest. Prominent merchants dealing in international trade brought wealth into the society and were thus valuable members of the community; but their status as independent gentlemen was always tainted by their concern, as the distinguished Massachusetts minister Charles Chauncey once put it, to “serve their own private separate interest.”54 Wealthy merchants like John Hancock and Henry Laurens who wanted a role in politics had known this, and during the imperial crisis both had shed their mercantile business and sought to ennoble themselves. Hancock spent lavishly, bought every imaginable luxury, and patronized everyone. He went through the fortune he had inherited from his uncle, but in the process he became the single most popular and powerful figure in Massachusetts politics during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Laurens knew only too well the contempt in which trading was held in aristocratic South Carolina, and in the 1760s he had begun curtailing his merchant activities. During the Revolution he became president of the Continental Congress and was able to sneer at all those merchants who were still busy making money. “How hard it is,” he had the gall to say in 1779, “for a rich or covetous man to enter heartily into the kingdom of patriotism.”55
If successful tradesmen and mechanics, such as Roger Sherman of Connecticut, wanted high political office, they had to abandon their occupations. Only when wealthy Benjamin Franklin had retired from his printing business in 1748 did “the Publick,” as he wrote in his Autobiography, “now considering me as a Man of Leisure,” lay hold of him and bring him into an increasing number of important political offices.56 Thus, leisure in a classical sense was highly valued. In fact, the Virginia Revolutionaries in 1776 had originally adopted as the motto for the state seal Deus nobis haec otia fecit (God bestowed upon us this leisure). Only in 1779, after Jefferson and others protested that this was not the best message to set forth in the midst of a war, was the motto replaced by Perseverando (By persevering).57
Having sufficient leisure remained important for gentry status even in the North, which had far fewer slaves than the South. Members of the learned professions were usually considered gentlemen, particularly if they had been liberally educated in college. But were they impartial and disinterested? Were they free of the marketplace? Did they have enough leisure to be able to serve the public virtuously? The Philadelphia lawyer James Wilson thought so. So did Alexander Hamilton. In Federalist No. 35, Hamilton argued passionately that, unlike merchants, mechanics, and farmers, “the learned professions,” by which he meant mainly lawyers, “truly form no distinct interest in society.” Thus they “will feel a neutrality to the rival-ships between the different branches of industry” and will be most likely to be “an impartial arbiter” between the diverse interests of the society.58
BY THE 1780s all these classical ideals of political leadership were losing much of their meaning, particularly in the Northern states. The line between the gentry and the common people, never very strong to begin with in America, was becoming seriously blurred. The distance that traditionally had separated the social ranks from one another was collapsing, and subordinates no longer felt the same awe and respect in the presence of their superiors that they had in the past. Everywhere, but especially in the North, growing numbers of ordinary folk used the popular and egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolution to challenge their so-called gentlemanly superiors. If only acquired and learned attributes and not those of blood and birth separated one man from another, then these challenges were hard to resist. Although the aspiring commoners lacked many of the attributes of gentility, more and more of them were becoming quite wealthy, literate, and independent; and they were aping the gentry in a variety of ways, particularly by displaying consumer goods that had traditionally belonged exclusively to the gentry.59
So scrambled was the social hierarchy becoming that men struggled to identify the various degrees and ranks that were emerging. Most people did not yet think explicitly in terms of modern “classes”—those horizontal layers of income and occupation standing in an antagonistic relationship to one another that would become common forms of identity in the nineteenth century. Instead, most late eighteenth-century commentators talked about sorts—”the better sort,” “the meaner sort,” “the ruder sort,” “the lower sort,” and, increasingly, “the middling sort.”
These “middling sorts” were middling because they could not be classified either as gentlemen or as out-and-out commoners. They could not be gentlemen, because they had occupations and worked for a living with their hands; even artisans who employed dozens of journeymen-employees were regarded as something less than gentlemen. At the same time, howe
ver, these middling sorts, such as the petty New York merchants Isaac Sears and John Lamb, were often too well-off or too refined and knowledgeable to be placed among “the lower sort” or “the meaner sort.” Of the three thousand adult males in Boston in 1790, for example, eighteen hundred or 60 percent made up the middling sort; they were the artisans or mechanics, the laboring proprietors, who held 36 percent of the taxable wealth of the city and constituted the majority of its property-holders.60
From the beginning of the eighteenth-century thinkers like Daniel Defoe had tried to explain and justify these emerging middling people, including the “working trades, who labour hard but feel no want.”61 These well-to-do working people with property, like the young printer Benjamin Franklin, increasingly had prided themselves on their separation from the common idleness and dissipation of the gentry above them and the property-less poor beneath them. “It was, in fact, the unique combination of work and property,” as one perceptive scholar of this social group has put it, “that distinguished the ‘middling sort’ from the elite who owned but did not engage in productive labor, and from the wage earners who labored but did not own.” These were the beginnings of what would become the middle class of the nineteenth century.62
Although the gentry still tended to lump these middling sorts who had occupations and worked openly for money with the lower orders of wage-earners in the single category of commoners, many of these middling people saw themselves as the equals of the so-called aristocracy or gentry and were eager to use the republican emphasis on equality to contest those above them. Many of them had wealth enough, and they could not see why they should not be regarded as gentlemen too. Or if they themselves were not to be considered gentlemen, then they hoped, as one Pennsylvania radical put it in 1775, to bring “gentlemen . . . down to our level,” and ensure that “all ranks and conditions would come in for their just share of the wealth.”63 Other middling sorts were becoming increasingly self-conscious of their separate but equal status and began, for example, to contest the right of the gentry to sit in separate boxes in the theaters. Some of them even took to writing plays and building theaters designed for their own middling kind.64
Of course, there were immense differences among these middling sorts. The artisans or mechanics, for example, ranged from the very wealthy to the marginally poor. Some, such as bakers and bricklayers, required large amounts of capital for entry into the trade and thus were richer than most. Others, such as goldsmiths and clockmakers, required specialized skills that restricted their numbers and raised their incomes. And still others, such as weavers and shoemakers, were more lowly and poorer. But all these tradesmen and other middling persons tended to be united in a common antagonism to the would-be aristocracy above them.
The social struggle that took place during the three or four decades following the Revolution, especially in the Northern states of America, was essentially between these middling people and the gentry-aristocracy who claimed to be “exalted above the rest.”65 Everywhere, but particularly in the North, tens of thousands of ambitious middling men—commercial farmers, master artisans, traders, shopkeepers, petty merchants, and all those who later came to be called businessmen——were acquiring not only considerable wealth but also some learning, some politeness, and some awareness of the larger world.
By the 1780s the would-be aristocrats were finding it difficult to resist such challenges. In his debate with some middling sorts in the New York ratifying convention in 1788, Alexander Hamilton conceded that in America every governor, every member of Congress, every magistrate, and every militia officer, indeed, “every distinguished man was an aristocrat.”66 If this were the case, then anyone elected or appointed to these offices thereby became a gentleman-aristocrat. The problem had become evident during the Revolutionary War. Much to the chagrin of the more established gentry, such middling sorts—”the Sons of Farmers or Mechanicks, who had quit the Plow or Workshop” to join the army as officers—had tried to use their commissions as junior officers to claim the status of gentlemen. Middling men elected to political office in the 1780s were doing the same: they were asserting their gentry status by the fact of election alone, without having acquired all the cultural attributes of gentlemen.67
These middling sorts launched the momentous social struggle that eventually turned them into the dominant “middle class” of the nineteenth century. When men at the time talked about the contest between the few and the many, or the aristocracy and the democracy, taking place in the society of the early Republic, it is this social struggle they are referring to.68
Historians have interpreted this complicated social struggle in very different ways. Some have denied that there was a social contest at all, contending that the Revolution had no social causes or consequences whatsoever and was simply a war for independence. Others have agreed that there was a struggle but have seen it in exclusively economic rather than social terms, with a few moneyed men exploiting the common workers. And still others have differed over who the contestants were and who was oppressing whom.69 Yet the struggle was very real, and it fundamentally changed American society in the decades following the Revolution, particularly in the North.
THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION of 1787 was designed in part to solve the problems created by the presence in the state legislatures of these middling men. In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures. But could that be done within a republican framework? Some thought not. “You may think it very Extraordinary,” Joseph Savage of New Jersey told his son in July 1787, “but the better sort of people are very desirous of a Monarchical government and are in daily Expectation of having it recommended by those Gentlemen in Philadelphia.”70 Of course, the middling sorts in the states did not think there was too much democracy in the various legislatures; on the contrary, because of the heavy taxes they were paying, they thought there was not enough democracy.
Certainly no one described the crisis of American politics in 1787 more acutely than did the thirty-six-year-old Virginian James Madison. Madison had become a member of the Continental Congress at age twenty-eight and was thoroughly familiar with the Confederation’s weaknesses. Indeed, throughout the middle 1780s he, along with other national leaders, had wrestled with various schemes for overhauling the Articles of Confederation. But it was his experience serving in the Virginia assembly in 1784–1787 that convinced him that the real problem of American politics lay in the state legislatures. During the 1780s he saw many of his and Jefferson’s plans for reform mangled by factional fighting and majoritarian confusion in the Virginia assembly. More than any other Founder, Madison questioned the conventional wisdom of the age concerning majority rule, the proper size for a republic, and the role of factions in society. His thinking about the problems of creating republican governments and his writing of the Virginia Plan in 1787, which became the working model for the Constitution, constituted one of the most creative moments in the history of American politics.
Yet Madison’s conception of a proper national government expressed in his Virginia Plan was very different from that of many of his fellow supporters of the Constitution. Although Madison very much desired to transcend the states and build a nation in 1787, his idea of the role of the proposed central government was very judicial-like.
No government, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, could be just if parties, that is, people with private interests to promote, became judges in their own causes; indeed, interested majorities in the legislatures were no better in this respect than interested minorities. Madison’s solution to this problem was to create a national government that he hoped would be a kind of impartial super-judge over all the competing interests in the society. The new Constitution would create, he said, a “disinterested & dispassionate umpire in disputes between different passions & interests” in the various states.71 In fa
ct, he hoped the new government might play the same super-political neutral role that the British king ideally had been supposed to play in the empire.
Madison had little or no interest in creating the sort of modern European-like war-making state with an energetic and powerful executive that other nationalists such as Alexander Hamilton wanted. In fact, Madison seems to have never much valued executive authority as a means of countering legislative abuses, even in the states, and his conception of the executive in the new national government remained hazy at best. As late as April 1787 he told Washington that he had “scarcely ventured as yet to form my own opinion either of the manner in which [the executive] ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed.”72
Through much of the Convention he assumed that the powers over appointment to offices and the conduct of foreign affairs would be assigned to the Senate, not the president. Only in mid-August 1787, three months into the Convention, when Madison and other nationalists became alarmed by the states gaining equal representation in the Senate, were these powers taken away from the state-dominated Senate and granted to the president. Madison and others so feared the state legislatures, each of which would elect two senators under the “Connecticut Compromise,” that they no longer wanted the Senate to have the degree of power earlier granted to it when it would have been proportionally elected and would not have represented the states.
Although the final version of the new Constitution eliminated what Madison regarded as essential parts of his Virginia Plan, including proportional representation in both houses of Congress, it did retain the tripartite structure of an executive, a bicameral legislature, and a judiciary. The Constitution corrected the deficiencies of the Confederation by granting the new national government some extraordinary powers, powers that ambitious state-builders could exploit. The Convention, however, rejected Madison’s impractical plan for a national congressional veto over all state laws, a rejection that Madison feared would doom the Constitution to failure. Instead, the Convention in Article I, Section 10, prohibited the states from exercising a remarkable number of powers, including levying import or export duties, printing paper money, and enacting various debtor relief laws and laws impairing contracts. But if these prohibitions were not enough to prevent the excesses of localist and interest-ridden democracy in the states, then the expanded and elevated structure of the federal government itself was designed to help.
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