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

by Gordon S. Wood

  STUNNED BY THE JEFFERSONIAN TAKEOVER, many Federalists sensed that they had to change their ways. Their party, they said, lacked the kind of organization and newspaper support the Republicans possessed. And with Washington’s death in December 1799 they seemed to have no leader. “The Federalists scarcely deserve the name of a party,” lamented Fisher Ames in 1800. “Their association is a loose one—formed by accident and shaken by every prospect of labour or hazard.”88 While the Republicans were busy drawing up tickets and using all sorts of imaginative techniques to get out the vote, the Federalist gentry were writing letters to one another and addressing their political pamphlets to “the substantial (not the people) citizens.”89 The Federalists had no organized nominating process and often had multiple candidates for the same office who competed against each other, which allowed Republicans to win with less than a majority. Many of the old-school Federalists simply shook their heads and wrung their hands over the Republicans’ electoral successes. But in the aftermath of Jefferson’s election some Federalists sought to do things differently.

  The election of 1800 had a cathartic effect on many Federalists. It broke the tension between the politics of honor and the politics of party and prepared the way for the expansion of democratic politics. With the spread of popular politics, many of the Federalists, especially the younger ones, reluctantly concluded that if they were to win back power they would have to swallow their pride and adopt some of the electioneering techniques of the Republicans. Many now accepted the fact that they were indeed a party—to be sure, not a self-interested faction like the Republicans, but a party of principle. Beginning first in New York in 1801, groups of Federalist activists created networks of caucuses and committees in each state that reached down to the localities. These Federalist caucuses and committees picked candidates, disciplined party members, and organized for elections, just as the Republicans had been doing.

  The Federalist party created legislative programs and formed its own self-created societies to rival those of the Republican Tammany Societies. Most notable were the hundreds of Washington Benevolent Societies, which were ostensibly charitable organizations but in reality arms of the party. Some Federalists were now as determined to mobilize the people as the Republicans. “We must court popular favor,” concluded Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, “we must study public opinion, and accommodate measures to what it is and still more what it ought to be.”90

  Of course, many other Federalists, especially old-school Federalists, resisted these efforts to become a party. They saw themselves as the wise, natural rulers of the society, and thus found it virtually impossible to conceive of themselves as an opposition party. Parties were factious and seditious, and they wanted no part of them. Many of the older Federalists refused to electioneer or campaign for office and, like Gouverneur Morris, indignantly condemned “those brawlers, who make popularity a trade.”91

  No doubt these traditional views of politics hampered the ability of the Federalists to organize themselves. The party organization in Massachusetts, for example, remained strictly secret and designed only to carry out the decisions of its Boston leaders rather than mobilizing the statewide populace in the way the Republicans were doing. Not just the Federalists but many Republicans as well found it hard to accept the existence of competing parties.

  Despite appearances to the contrary—the party designations, the caucuses, and the many contested elections—this was not quite yet a modern party system. There were no nominating conventions, no formal platforms, no party chairmen, no national party committees, and, most important, no intellectual justification for party competition. Old ideals of the unity of the public interest died hard. Even Republican governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, of gerrymandering fame, came out against parties in 1810, declaring that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and urging each citizen to “determine for himself to relinquish the party system.”92

  Yet popular party politics of a new and distinctive sort did emerge, a kind of “celebratory politics,” as one historian has called it.93 Party tickets, party principles, and party loyalties developed, and partisan political activists sought to use every means they could to drum up popular support for their candidates. Anything and everything that was part of everyday popular culture—holidays, parades, barbecues, songs, sermons, toasts, funerals, militia meetings, and every conceivable form of print—was turned to partisan causes. The Republicans made the Fourth of July, with its celebration of Jefferson’s egalitarian Declaration of Independence, the paramount national holiday and used it to promote their party. The Federalists retaliated with celebrations of Washington’s birthday and any other local holiday, such as New York’s Evacuation Day, that they could employ to their advantage.

  Newspapers, which had begun to form the basis for party organization and identity in the 1790s, continued to grow in numbers and political significance in response to the competitive partisan atmosphere. Despite the arrests of printers and editors under the Sedition Act, the number of Republican newspapers suddenly exploded in 1800—with eighty-five Republican papers published in that year, two-thirds more than had existed before the act. All these partisan papers tended to create an informal network that connected Republicans throughout the country. News originating from William Duane’s Philadelphia Aurora, the ideological center of the party, could reach Pittsfield, Massachusetts, or Raleigh, North Carolina, in only a few days. Not surprisingly, people in both parties became convinced that the Republicans owed their massive victory in 1800 to the power of their greatly expanded and openly partisan press. A “mighty wave of public opinion,” said Jefferson in 1801, had rolled over the country.94

  Stimulated by the Republicans’ success, the Federalists sought to create rival newspapers. In 1801 Hamilton raised ten thousand dollars in just a few weeks and launched the flagship New York Evening Post. During the first decade of the nineteenth century the Federalists created dozens of papers, “igniting” what one historian has called “a journalistic arms race with the Republicans.” They now knew more clearly than ever before, as Fisher Ames put it, that “public opinion must be addressed; must be purified from the dangerous errors with which it is infected; and, above all, must be aroused from the prevailing apathy.”95

  BY THE EARLY DECADES of the nineteenth century Americans had come to realize that public opinion, “that invisible guardian of honour—that eagle-eyed spy on human actions—that inexorable judge of men and manners—that arbiter, whom tears cannot appease, nor ingenuity soften and from whose terrible decisions there is no appeal,” had become “the vital principle” underlying American government, society, and culture.96

  Nearly every educated person in the Anglo-American world believed in the power of public opinion and talked endlessly about it. Indeed, men were so preoccupied with their reputations and their honor precisely because of their intense concern for the judgment of others. By the word “public,” like the word “society,” however, eighteenth-century gentlemen usually had meant “the rational part of it” and not “the ignorant vulgar.”97 When Madison in 1791, echoing David Hume and others, said that public opinion was “the real sovereign” in any free government, he still conceived of it as the intellectual product of limited circles of “those philosophical and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.” Which is why he came to fear that the large extent of the United States made the isolated individual insignificant in his own eyes and made easier the fabricating of opinion by a few.98 Other Americans, however, were coming to see in the very breadth of the country and in the very insignificance of the solitary individual the saving sources of a general opinion that could be trusted.

  The Sedition Act of 1798 marked a crucial point in the development of the American idea of public opinion. Its passage provoked a debate that went far beyond the issue of freedom of speech or freedom of the press; it eventually involved the very nature of America’s intellectual life. The debate, which spilled into the early years of the
nineteenth century, drew out the logic of America’s intellectual experience since the Revolution, and in the process it undermined the foundations of the elitist eighteenth-century classical world on which the Founders had stood.

  In the Sedition Act of 1798 the Federalists had thought they were being generous by changing the common law conception of seditious libel and enacting the Zenger defense into law. They not only allowed juries to determine what was seditious, but they made truth a defense, stating that only those statements that were “false, scandalous, and malicious” would be punished. But staunch Republican polemicists would have no part of this generosity. In the debate over the sedition law the Republican libertarian theorists, including George Hay of Virginia and Tunis Wortman of New York, rejected both the old common law restrictions on the liberty of the press and the new legal recognition of the distinction between truth and falsity of opinion that the Federalists had incorporated into the Sedition Act. While the Federalists clung to the eighteenth century’s conception that “truths” were constant and universal and capable of being discovered by enlightened and reasonable men, the Republican libertarians argued that opinions about government and governors were many and diverse and their truth could not be determined simply by individual judges and juries, no matter how reasonable such men were. Hence, they concluded that all political opinions—that is, words as distinct from overt acts—even those opinions that were “false, scandalous, and malicious,” ought to be allowed, as Jefferson put it, to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”99

  The Federalists were dumbfounded. “How . . . could the rights of the people require a liberty to utter falsehood?” they asked. “How could it be right to do wrong?”100 It was not an easy question to answer, neither then nor later. “Truth,” the Federalists said, “has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.” Any notion of multiple and varying truths would produce “universal uncertainty, universal misery,” and “set all morality afloat.” People needed to know the “criterion by which we may determine with certainty, who are right, and who are wrong .”101

  Most Republicans felt they could not deny outright the possibility of truth and falsity in political beliefs, and thus they fell back on a tenuous distinction, developed by Jefferson in his first inaugural address, between principles and opinions. Principles, it seemed, were hard and fixed, while opinions were soft and fluid; therefore, said Jefferson, “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” The implication was, as Benjamin Rush suggested, that individual opinions did not count as much as they had in the past, and for that reason such individual opinions could be permitted the freest possible expression.102

  What ultimately made such distinctions comprehensible was the Republicans’ assumption that opinions about politics were no longer the monopoly of the educated and aristocratic few. Not only were true and false and even malicious opinions equally to be tolerated, but everyone and anyone in the society should be equally able to express them. Sincerity and honesty, the Republican polemicists argued, were far more important in the articulation of ultimate political truth than learning and fancy words that had often been used to deceive and dissimulate. Truth was actually the creation of many voices and many minds, no one of which was more important than another and each of which made its own separate and equally significant contribution to the whole. Solitary opinions of single individuals may now have counted for less, but in their statistical collectivity they now added up to something far more significant than had ever existed before, something that the New York Republican Tunis Wortman referred to as “the extremely complicated term Public Opinion .”103

  Because American society was not the kind of organic hierarchy with “an intellectual unity” that the Federalists had wanted, public opinion in America, argued Wortman, the most articulate of the new Republican libertarians, could no longer be the consequence of the intellectual leadership of a few learned gentlemen. General public opinion was simply “an aggregation of individual sentiments,” the combined product of multitudes of minds thinking and reflecting independently, communicating their ideas in different ways, causing opinions to collide and blend with one another, to refine and correct each other, leading toward “the ultimate triumph of Truth.” Such a product, such a public opinion, could be trusted because it had so many sources, so many voices and minds, all interacting, that no privileged individual or group could manipulate or dominate the whole.104 Like the example of religious diversity in America, a comparison many drew upon to explain their new confidence in public opinion, the separate opinions allowed to circulate freely would by their very differentness act, in Jefferson’s word, as “a Censor” over each other and the society—performing the role that the ancients and early eighteenth-century Augustan Englishmen had expected heroic individuals and satiric poets to perform.105

  This vast, impersonal, and democratic idea of public opinion soon came to dominate all of American intellectual life. In all endeavors—whether art, language, medicine, or politics—connoisseurs, professors, doctors, and statesmen had to give way before the power of the collective opinion of the people. This conception of public opinion, said Federalist Theodore Sedgwick in disgust, “is of all things the most destructive of personal independence and of that weight of character which a great man ought to possess.”106 But no matter, it was the people’s opinion, and it could be trusted because no one controlled it and everyone contributed to it. “Public opinion,” said Harvard professor Samuel Williams, “will be much nearer the truth, than the reasoning and refinements of speculative and interested men.” Even in matters of artistic taste, declared Joseph Hopkinson before the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1810, “public opinion has, in more instances than one, triumphed over critics and connoisseurs.” Of course, the Federalists warned that a government dependent exclusively on public opinion was a mere “democracy,” in which “opinion shifts with every current of caprice.”107 But there was no turning back. In no country in the world did public opinion become more awesome and powerful than it did in increasingly democratic America.

  BECAUSE OF THIS RELENTLESS DEMOCRATIZATION, the Federalists were never again able to gather the kind of national electoral strength they had had in the 1790 s. In the off-year election of 1802 the Republicans increased their strength in the Congress. In 1804 the Federalists put up Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of XYZ fame for president, but he was able to garner only 14 to Jefferson’s 162 electoral votes. Jefferson took the electoral votes of all the states, except those of Connecticut and Delaware and two from Maryland. Even Massachusetts went for Jefferson. In 1808 Pinckney did better with 47 to Madison’s 122 electoral votes. Although the Federalists continued to put up presidential candidates through the election of 1816, their electoral strength was continually weak and confined to New England. But even in their New England stronghold cracks began to appear. The Republicans began winning local elections, and by 1807 Massachusetts had more Republican than Federalist congressmen.

  The party slowly withered. It was much too tainted with aristocracy and New England sectionalism to carry on as a national party. In the new Western states it virtually disappeared. One Republican reported from Ohio after the 1804 election that the Federalists “have dwindled to a number so inconsiderable that they are altogether silent on Politics.”108 Consequently, many Federalist gentry turned from party politics to the construction of civic institutions that could influence the culture—private libraries, literary and historical societies, art academies, and professional associations. By 1820 their party had become too weak even to nominate a presidential candidate, although the cultural authority of the Federalists, especially in New England, had grown substantially.109

  At first the Republicans were remarkably united. In 1804 the Republican congressional caucus nominated Jefferson for president and sixty-seven-year-old George Clinton of New
York for vice-president; no one at the meeting supported Vice-President Burr. By 1808 the party was faced with three candidates for the presidency—Secretary of State Madison, who was presumed to have Jefferson’s backing, Vice-President Clinton, who had strong support in New York and Pennsylvania, and James Monroe, who had recently returned from his ministry in England and had the backing of John Randolph of Virginia. Although Madison won the support of the congressional caucus (with Clinton as the vice-presidential candidate again), the supporters of Monroe and Clinton refused to recognize the right of the caucus to nominate candidates.

  It was obvious that the Republican party was coming apart. Since its creation, its unity had rested on the threat the Federalists had posed to the principles of free and popular government; thus the decline of the Federalists meant that the Republicans began, in Jefferson’s words, to “schismatize among themselves.”110 A variety of Republican factions and groups arose in Congress and in the several states. These divisions were organized around particular individuals (the “Burrites,” the “Clintonians”), around political and social distinctions (the “Pennsylvania Quids,” the “Malcontents”), around states or sections (the “Old Republicans” of the South), and sometimes around ideology (“the Principles of ’98,” the “Invisibles,” the “War Hawks”).