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

by Gordon S. Wood

  Economic historian Winifred Barr Rothenberg has dated the emergence of this market economy in New England in the several decades following the American Revolution. She has discovered that market integration, the price convergence of commodities, and the development of capital markets in rural New England took place in this period—brought about by the impersonal exchanges of the farmers themselves. In the 1780s and 1790s farmers were lending more money more often to ever more scattered and distant debtors and shifting more of their assets away from cattle and implements toward liquid and evanescent forms of wealth. At the same time as interest rates, or the price of money, began to float free from their ancient and customary restraints, agricultural productivity of all sorts began to increase rapidly. By 1801, for example, the output of grains in a sample of Massachusetts towns was nearly two and a half times what it had been in 1771. Only when these farmers increased their productivity to the point where an increasing proportion of them could engage in manufacturing and at the same time provide a home market for that manufacturing—only then could the takeoff into capitalistic expansion take place.23

  Since this remarkable increase in labor productivity occurred well before the availability of any new farm machinery or any other technological change, it can be explained only by the more efficient use and organization of labor. In 1795 a Massachusetts physician noted the changes taking place among the farmers of his little town. “The former state of cultivation was bad, but is much altered for the better,” he said. “A spirit of emulation prevails among the farmers. Their enclosures, which used to be fenced with hedge and log fences, are now generally fenced with good stone wall,” a sure sign, he suggested, that the farmers were using their land more intensively and more productively.24 Farmers were becoming more productive because they glimpsed the prospect of improving their standard of living by consuming luxury goods that hitherto only the gentry had consumed—feather instead of straw mattresses, pewter instead of wooden bowls, and silk instead of cotton handkerchiefs.

  “Is not the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur to labour and Industry?” Benjamin Franklin had asked in 1784—a question that flew in the face of age-old wisdom. For centuries it was assumed that most people would not work unless they had to. “Everybody but an idiot,” declared the enlightened English agricultural writer Arthur Young, in a startling summary of this traditional view, “knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.”25 But farmers now were working harder, not, as conventional thinking would have it, out of poverty and necessity, but in order to increase their purchase of luxury goods and become more respectable.

  ALTHOUGH MOST FEDERALISTS and even some Republican elites like Professor Mitchill, who later became a Republican congressman and U.S. senator from New York, were frightened by the growing mania for commerce and money, believing that it resembled people’s being at war with one another, most of the farmers and businessmen themselves welcomed this competitive scramble. Some of them, in the Northern states at least, used the competitive vehicle of the Republican party to challenge the static Federalist establishment. But others sensed, as John Adams had, that competition arose out of the egalitarianism of the society as people sought not just to keep up with the Joneses but to get ahead of them. And they came to see that a spirit of emulation was good for prosperity.

  Americans were in fact using competition to democratize ambition and make it the basis for a new kind of middling society. Other societies, said Noah Webster, trained their children in the occupations of their parents. But this European practice “cramps genius and limits the progress of national improvement.” Americans celebrated the “ambition and fire of youth” and allowed genius to express itself. Many cultures feared the expression of ambition because it was an aristocratic passion that belonged to the Macbeths of the world—great-souled individuals who were apt to be dangerous. Americans, however, need not have this fear, at least not to the same extent. In a republic ambition should belong to everyone, and, said Webster, it “should be governed, rather than repressed.”26

  Elkanah Watson was eager to exploit this popular characteristic of American culture. Watson, the son of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, artisan and representative of the new breed of hustlers springing up everywhere, discovered that the earlier aristocratic and philosophical techniques of stimulating agricultural reform through scientific societies of gentleman-farmers would not work in America. Because Americans were too independent for such learned paternalism, Watson in 1810 devised for Berkshire County in western Massachusetts what soon became the familiar American county fair, with exhibitions, music, dancing, singing, and prizes awarded for the best crops and the biggest livestock. In 1812 “the female part of the community in a spirit of honorable competition” was allowed to demonstrate cloth, lace, hats, and other products of domestic manufacturing. Women began hanging their prizewinning certificates on the walls of their homes, where “they excite the envy of a whole neighbourhood.” Indeed, said Watson, producing “some tincture of envy” was crucial in calling forth “more extended efforts” by the farmers and their wives. The fairs, which Watson claimed were “original and peculiar,” were designed “to excite a lively spirit of competition” by exploiting the desire for “personal ambition” that he claimed was characteristic of all Americans. Watson knew, as the enlightened gentry apparently did not, that society had to be dealt with “in its actual state of existence,—not as we could wish it.” One of his fairs, he said, produced “more practical good” and more actual agricultural improvement “than ten studied, wiredrawn books” written by “scientific gentlemen farmers” settled in their Eastern cities. The only way of achieving public benefits in agriculture and domestic manufacturing, said Watson, was to create “a system congenial to American habits, and the state of our society,” and to incite the farmers’ “self-love,—self-interest, combined with a natural love of country.” Watson thought that his county fairs had produced “a general strife” among farmers and had done much to awaken the slumbers of husbandry in the United States.27

  Teachers in New England developed a new pedagogy based on ambition and competition instead of the traditional resort to corporal punishment. Many of the new academies that were springing up all over New England were doing with schoolchildren what Elkanah Watson was doing with his farmers and his county fairs—exciting among them “a spirit of emulation.” A schoolmaster in a tiny Massachusetts town discovered that he could get his male students to study hard by raising “their ambition to such a pitch that that their greatest thought was, who would perform the best.” Even the young women in the Litchfield Female Academy lived in a highly competitive atmosphere, with the girls repeatedly and publicly pitted against one another for awards, prizes, and credit marks. “Ambition has been raised to an uncommon degree, and our exertions have been wonderfully answered,” declared one of their teachers. Encouraging young people of all ranks to be ambitious in this manner was bound to have a powerful effect on the society.

  Many, of course, continued to urge patience and contentment with one’s lot and to raise fears that too much stress on ambition could arouse envy and other harmful passions. “A degree of emulation, among literary institutions, is proper,” warned a Calvinist preacher. “But when it goes to pull down one, in order to build another up, it is wrong.” Despite these sorts of misgivings, however, the traditional way of doing things could scarcely stand against the newly awakened sense of ambition among so many common folk.28

  Competition existed everywhere in America, even in the South, where it took a different form. Many Southern planters, even though they were good Jeffersonian Republicans, were just as contemptuous of crass money-making as Northern Federalists, but they did enjoy competing with one another. Of course, they valued hierarchy but, being uncertain of their position in it, were always eager to assert their abilities and status, often through horse racing, cockfighting, gambling, and dueling.

  Many Souther
n gentlemen possessed hair-trigger tempers and were acutely sensitive to any perceived insult, however slight.29 In 1806 Andrew Jackson, son of Scots-Irish immigrants from northern Ireland, a sometime congressman and U.S. senator from Tennessee, and a great lover of horse racing and cockfighting, ended up killing a man in a duel that began with a quarrel over a horse race wager. Duels growing out of the most trivial causes were not uncommon, especially on the frontier, where honor and gentlemanly status were especially vague and fluid and Celtic pride and touchiness were everywhere. Since Southerners bet on everything, they bet on the outcome of duels. In Nashville bets were freely made on Jackson’s duel, mostly against Jackson since his opponent was considered the better shot. Jackson took a bullet that remained lodged in his chest for the rest of his life.

  So barbarous was the fighting among commoners in the South that some observers, including New England Federalists and visiting foreigners, thought the white Americans’ behavior was “worthy of their savage neighbors.”30 Men on the frontier often fought with “no holds barred,” using their hands, feet, and teeth to disfigure or dismember each other until one or the other surrendered or was incapacitated. “Scratching, pulling hair, choking, gouging out each other’s eyes, and biting off each other’s noses” were all tried, recalled Daniel Drake, growing up in late eighteenth-century Kentucky. “But what is worse than all,” observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, “these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other’s testicles.”31

  Most of these practices of rough-and-tumble fighting had been brought over from the Celtic borderlands of the British Isles—Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall. Indeed, some historians have persuasively argued that most of the characteristics of the Southern “rednecks”—including their indolence, the making of “moonshine,” fiddling and banjo-playing, chewing tobacco, hunting, and hog-raising—can be traced back to their Celtic ancestors. This is especially true, they say, of the hot-headedness and propensity to personal violence of backcountry Southern “crackers,” with someone like Andrew Jackson being a prime representative.32

  But what were occasional practices of personal violence in Britain became a unique fighting style in the American South, and gouging out the eyes of one’s opponent became the defining element of that style. Although the acerbic Englishman Charles Janson may have been exaggerating in claiming that “this more than savage custom is daily practiced among the lower classes in the southern states,” he was not wrong in suggesting that it was common. Not only had the Reverend Jedidiah Morse in his American Geography confrmed the prevalence of the practice of gouging, but many early nineteenth-century travelers besides Janson witnessed examples of these gouging matches.33

  The fighters became heroes in their local communities, and their success in these rough-and-tumble matches generated its own folklore. Eventually these matches became part of the exaggerated boasting and bombast that came to characterize Southwestern humor. At the same time, the prevalence of such personal violence convinced many observers, Federalists and European travelers alike, that as Americans moved westward and down the Ohio River they were losing civilization and reverting to savagery.34

  Barbarism was not confined to the rural South and Southwest but seemed to be spreading even to the urban North and Northeast. Philadelphia in the 1790s was full of cockfighting, gambling, and quarreling that often led to fistfights.35 Despite all the rhetoric promoting politeness and civility, Americans by 1800 were already known for pushing and shoving each other in public and for their dread of ceremony. Foreigners thought the Americans’ eating habits were atrocious, their food execrable, and their coffee detestable. Americans tended to eat fast, often sharing a common bowl or cup, to bolt their food in silence, and to use only their knives in eating. Everywhere travelers complained about “the violation of decorum, the want of etiquette, the rusticity of manners in this generation.”36

  ALL THIS VULGARITY was changing the character of political leadership. With self-interested behavior becoming so common, the classical republican conception of governmental leadership that the Founders had extolled was rapidly losing its meaning. It became increasingly clear that society could no longer expect men to sacrifice their time and money—their private interests—for the sake of the public. It was said that John Jay had hesitated to accept a position in the new federal government because he was “waiting to see which Salary is best, that of Lord Chief Justice or Secretary of State.” If this were the case with someone as wealthy and prominent as Jay, public office could no longer be regarded merely as a burden that prominent gentlemen had an obligation to bear. If anything, holding office was becoming the source of that wealth and social authority.37

  Many Americans of the early Republic, with varying degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm, came to believe that what they once thought was true was no longer true. Government officials were no longer to play the role of umpires, standing above the competing interests of the marketplace and making impartial judgments about what was good for the whole society. The democratic nightmare that had been first experienced in the 1780s was becoming all too pervasive and real. Elected officials were bringing the partial, local interests of the society, and sometimes even their own interests, right into the workings of government. The word “logrolling” in the making of laws (that is, the trading of votes by legislators for each other’s bills) began to be used for the first time, to the bewilderment of the Federalists. “I do not well understand the Term,” said an Ohio Federalist, “but I believe it means bargaining with each other for the little loaves and fishes of the State.”38

  Under such circumstances partisanship and parties—using government to promote partial interests—became increasingly legitimate. As property as a source of independence and authority gave way to an entrepreneurial idea of property, as a commodity to be exchanged in the marketplace, the older proprietary qualifications for officeholding and the suffrage existing in many of the states lost their meaning and soon fell away. Property that fluctuated and changed hands so frequently was no basis for the right to vote. When Republicans, such as those of New York in 1812, claimed that the mere owning of property was no “proof of superior virtue, discernment or patriotism,” conservative Federalists had no answer.39 In state after state the Democratic-Republicans successfully pushed for an expansion of the suffrage. By 1825 every state but Rhode Island, Virginia, and Louisiana had achieved universal white manhood suffrage; by 1830 only Rhode Island, which had once been the most democratic place in North America, retained a general freehold qualification for voting.

  The expansion of the suffrage and the celebration of ordinary people meant that ordinary people might even become government officials, as many increasingly did in the Northern states in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Republican leaders in the North repeatedly appealed to mechanics, laborers, and farmers to elect men of their own kind. “Does a nobleman . . . know the wants of the farmer and the mechanic?” asked a New York broadside in 1810. “If we give such men the management of our concerns, where is our INDEPENDENCE and FREEDOM?” Republican spokesmen warned the common people not to elect “men whose aristocratic doctrine teaches that the rights and representative authority of the people are vested in a few proud elites” and used the Revolutionary idea of equality to justify electing ordinary men to office. To the surprise of many, Jonathan Jamison of Indiana Territory, a former clerk in the Land Office, openly and successfully campaigned for office in 1809 and continued to use his new brand of popular politics to become the state’s first governor when Indiana was admitted to the Union in 1816.40

  Even parts of the South, as a North Carolinian complained in 1803, were not immune from the new egalitarian politics. “The charge of aristocracy, fatal in America, was pressed against him,” he explained, in accounting for the defeat of former governor and Federalist-leaning William Davie in his 1803 bid for Congress, “and the radicalism of the people caused a revolt against their ancient leader.” Naturally
the Old Republican John Randolph was disgusted at what was happening. The affairs of the nation, he told his fellow congressmen, had been “commit ted to Tom, Dick, and Harry, the refuse of the retail trade of politics.”41

  Even when political candidates were not ordinary, many now found it advantageous to pose as such. In the campaign for governor of New York in 1807 Daniel Tompkins, successful lawyer and graduate of Columbia College, was portrayed as a simple “Farmers Boy” in contrast to his opponent, Morgan Lewis, who was an in-law of the aristocratic Livingston family. Of course, the New York Federalists in 1810 tried to combat Tompkins and the Republicans with their own plebeian candidate, Jonas Platt, “whose habits and manners,” said the Federalists, “are as plain and republican as those of his country neighbors.” Unlike Tompkins, Platt was not “a city lawyer who rolls in splendor and wallows in luxury.”42 In trying to out-popularize the Republicans, however, the Federalists could only ultimately lose, for most Republicans, in the North at least, did in fact come from lower social strata than the Federalists.

  The common people increasingly seemed to want unpretentious men as their rulers, men who never went to college and never put on airs. Such a man was Simon Snyder, son of a poor mechanic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Snyder began his career as a tanner and scrivener and acquired what education he had by attending night school taught by a Quaker. He eventually became a storekeeper, mill owner, and successful businessman, so successful in fact that he was soon appointed justice of the peace and judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Entering the Pennsylvania assembly in 1797, Snyder moved up to become the speaker of the state’s house of representatives in 1802 and then governor in 1808, but he never shed his lowly origins. When he was elected governor, he refused an honor guard at his inauguration. “I hate and despise all ostentation—pomp and parade as anti-democratic . . .,” he said. “I should feel exceedingly awkward” with such pretension. When opponents mocked Snyder’s obscure origins and called him and his followers “clodhoppers,” he and his supporters quite shrewdly picked up the epithet and began proudly wearing it. Being a clodhopper in a society of clodhoppers was the source of much of Snyder’s political success. The snobbish Philadelphia-based American Philosophical Society responded to Snyder’s election by quietly dropping the office of patron, which the incumbent governor had always held.43