Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
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Feelings of equality spread throughout Northern society and even began to be expressed in dress. Unlike in the eighteenth century, when gentlemen often wore varied and colorful clothes, nineteenth-century men began dressing alike, in black coats and pantaloons, as befitting solid and substantial businessmen who considered themselves the equals of every other man.44
By the first decade of the nineteenth century many gentlemen like Benjamin Latrobe, President Jefferson’s surveyor of public buildings, thought that democracy was getting out of hand. Although Latrobe was a good Republican, he nonetheless complained in 1806 to the Italian patriot Philip Mazzei that too many representatives in America’s national government resembled their constituents and were ignorant and “unlearned.” Philadelphia and its suburbs sent to the Congress not a single man of letters. One congressman was indeed a lawyer, “but of no eminence.” Another congressman, said Latrobe, was a clerk in a bank, and “the others are plain farmers.” From the county was sent a blacksmith and from just over the river a butcher.45
The butcher Latrobe referred to was probably the congressman who used his generous congressional franking privileges in Washington to send his linen home for laundering. It was not much of an abuse, critics said, since the butcher-congressman “was known to change his shirt only once a week.” When invited to President Jefferson’s dinner at the White House, the butcher, noted a British witness, “observing a leg of mutton of a miserably lean description,. . . could not help forgetting the legislator for a few moments, expressing the feelings of his profession and exclaiming that at his stall no such leg of mutton should ever have found a place.”46
Latrobe believed that the “ideal rank” of gentlemen “which manners has established” had virtually disappeared, even in the city of Philadelphia. Latrobe admitted that there were “solid and general advantages” to this kind of egalitarian society. “But to a cultivated mind, to a man of letters, to a lover of the arts,” in other words, to someone like him, “it presents a very unpleasant picture.” American society, based as it was on “the freedom which opens every legal avenue to wealth to everyone individually,” made “all citizens rivals in the pursuit of riches,” which in turn weakened the ties that bound them to one another and rendered them indifferent as to how they made their money.47
THE SPREAD OF EQUALITY and changing conceptions of political leadership generated intense partisan passions. The Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans may not have been modern parties, but they increasingly acted like parties, and they produced powerful loyalties among large numbers of the population, especially among the Republicans. In 1809 the Republican minister William Bentley in Salem, Massachusetts, declared that the “parties hate each other as much as the French and English hate each [other] in time of war.” Families broke up over politics, and employers dismissed their employees because of party differences. Political passions, noted an English visitor, even reached into the grave. In 1808 Jeffersonian Nathaniel Ames refused to attend the funeral of his brother Fisher Ames after the Massachusetts Federalists “snatched” the “putrid corpse” and turned the burial into one of their “political funerals.”48 In Ohio in 1804 Republican animosity toward the Federalists led some of them to want to change the names of Hamilton and Adams counties—”republicanism . . . run mad,” admitted a moderate Republican. The Federalists’ feelings ran just as high. Upon learning of the death of a Republican, a Federalist in 1808 exclaimed, “Another God Damned Democrat has gone to Hell, and I wish they were all there.”49
Partisanship sometimes resulted in violence. “Three-fourths of the duels which have been fought in the United States were produced by political disputes,” claimed a South Carolinian in 1805; such fights were inevitable as long as “party violence is carried to an abominable excess.”50 But since dueling required the participants to think of themselves as gentlemanly equals, many Federalists often resorted to caning their Republican enemies.
During an 1807 election campaign in Albany, New York, a Republican meeting issued a resolution on April 17 questioning the integrity of General Solomon Van Rensselaer, a prominent Federalist. On April 21 Van Rensselaer sought out Elisha Jenkins, the author of the provocative resolution, and beat him with a heavy cane and then stomped on him with his feet. Partisans on each side joined in the fray and turned the city, according to one observer, into “a tumultuous sea of heads, over which clattered a forest of canes; the vast body, now surging this way, now that, as the tide of combat ebbed or flowed.” Nine days later an Albany newspaper gave thanks for the end of an election campaign that had resulted in violence that was “little short of insurrection and blood.”51
The most well known episode of partisan violence in the period took place in Massachusetts in 1806 when the state was torn apart for months by what was called a “political murder.” Benjamin Austin, a prominent and zealous Republican editor, noted for his sharp tongue and his vigorous attacks on the Federalists, made some public reference to “a damned Federalist lawyer.” In response, that lawyer, a young man named Thomas O. Selfridge, arrogantly called for a retraction and, when Austin ignored him, publicly posted Austin as “a coward, a liar, and a scoundrel.” To revenge this insult to his father, Austin’s son, an eighteen-year-old senior at Harvard, sought out Selfridge in the streets of Boston and struck him with a cane; Selfridge pulled a pistol he had been carrying and shot and killed the young man. Selfridge quickly turned himself in, in order, as he later said, “to escape into prison to elude the fury of democracy.” Selfridge’s trial, at which he was finally acquitted, further inflamed partisan passions. Selfridge himself added to the ugly atmosphere by publishing an extraordinarily offensive pamphlet. The hostility the case aroused lingered on for years.52
BUT IT WAS NOT JUST PARTISAN POLITICS that generated violence. Personal violence was more common in America than it was in England. During the second half of the eighteenth century, Pennsylvania’s murder rate was twice that of London. In the newer counties of Pennsylvania assaults in the 1780s and 1790s made up over 40 percent of all allegations coming before grand juries. Complaints of personal violence in the state rose precipitously in the decades following the Revolution. Homicide rates in the Chesapeake and in the backcountry of the South reversed a century of decline and increased dramatically among both blacks and whites in the turbulent decades following the Revolution. In 1797 New York City saw a sudden rise in its homicide rate. During the twenty-six years between 1770 and 1796 the city experienced only seventeen homicides, including four that occurred during the chaotic years of 1783–1784 following the British evacuation. In 1797 the number of homicides went up and stayed there over the subsequent decades, resulting in a total of eighty homicides in the eighteen years between 1797 and 1815, including eleven in the single year of 1811. Equally alarming, especially to New Yorker Samuel L. Mitchill, was the high suicide rate in the city. Between 1804 and 1808 seventy-five adults killed themselves—a consequence, Mitchill concluded, of something “morbid in the mental constitution of the people.”53
By the late 1790s Americans sensed latent violence everywhere. News of reciprocal brutality and violence between whites and Indians on the frontiers gave people the uneasy sense that civility in America was becoming paper-thin and could be punctured by acts of barbarism at any time. Incidents of multiple family murders dramatically increased, with one of them becoming the basis for Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland.54 Even civilized and stable areas in New England seemed to be regressing. In 1796 and 1799 local authorities in rural areas of Massachusetts and Connecticut independently indicted two elderly men for bestiality, a crime that had not been prosecuted in New England for nearly a century.55 By modern standards murder was still rare, but nevertheless Americans expressed a fascination with horrific murders, especially those of passion. News of notorious trials of domestic violence, including cases of fathers raping their daughters, like the case of Ephraim Wheeler in western Massachusetts in 1805, were deeply unsettling and often blended into
the partisan atmosphere of the time. Wheeler’s execution for his crime, for example, became a means by which the Massachusetts Republicans could accuse the Federalists in power of being proponents of “the sanguinary principles of a monarchical system.”56
Urban rioting became more prevalent and destructive. Street, tavern, and theater rowdiness, labor strikes, racial and ethnic conflicts—all increased greatly after 1800. Of course, mobbing and rioting had been common in the eighteenth century, but these nineteenth-century mobs were different. They were uncontrolled and sometimes murderous, and no longer paid tribute to paternalism and hierarchy as the relatively restrained mobs of the eighteenth century had done. Unlike the earlier colonial mobs, which were often made up of a cross-section of the community more or less under the control of elites, the mobs and gangs of the early Republic were composed of mostly unconnected and anonymous lowly people, full of class resentment, and thus all the more frightening. Indeed, Republicans in New York City played upon such resentment in 1801 by telling people in election handbills that the Federalist mayor “hates you; from his own soul he hates you . . .; do your duty and . . . you will get rid of a mayor who acts as if he thought a poor man had no more right than a horse.”57
The growing urban societies appeared to have lost all sense of cohesion and hierarchy; they had become, in the words of a longtime New York police magistrate, but “a heterogeneous mass” of men with “weak and depraved minds” and an “insatiable appetite for animal gratification.” Indeed, the population of the cities was now “so numerous that the citizens are not all known to each other,” thus allowing “depredators [to] merge in the mass, and spoliate in secret and safety.” Mounting fear of disorder compelled New York City to increase the numbers of watchmen from fifty in 1788 to 428 by 1825, which was nearly double the proportionate growth in population; and still the murderous rioting continued.58
The most serious rioting in the period took place in Baltimore during the opening weeks of the War of 1812. Since Baltimore was the fastest-growing city in the United States(its population of 46, 600 in 1810 made it the third-largest city in the country), it was being torn apart in every conceivable way—by politics, class, religion, ethnicity, nativist fears of immigration, and race. Between 1790 and 1810 the city’s percentage of blacks grew from 12 percent to 22 percent, with the proportion of free blacks among the African American population growing even faster, from 2 percent to 11 percent of the total population. Anglicans of English ancestry, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, and large numbers of Irish Catholics jostled with one another, all trying to fend off the astonishing growth of the Methodists. The occupational makeup of the city was less diverse but still mixed. Mechanics composed half the population, and merchants made up 15 percent. As masters turned into employers and journeymen became employees, the mechanics were at each other’s throats, especially as the master-employers began replacing the skilled journeymen with unskilled laborers, many of them blacks. Draymen, dock workers, sailors, and laborers, constituting perhaps another 15 percent of the population, composed the lowest ranks of the city’s society. The Republican-dominated city was a tinderbox, not needing much to touch it off.59
The rioting, which began on June 22, 1812, was sparked by the declaration of war against Great Britain and the long-existing division between the city’s Federalists and Republicans. A mob of thirty to forty Republican stalwarts dismantled the offices of a much-hated Federalist newspaper, which had been publishing vicious attacks on the Republicans and their unnecessary war. When the mayor, himself a Republican, tried to intervene, he was told by members of the mob that they knew him “very well, no body wants to hurt you; but the laws of the land must sleep, and laws of nature and reason prevail; that house is the Temple of Infamy; it is supported with English gold, and it must and shall come down to the ground.”60 This mob behaved in a traditional eighteenth-century manner, enforcing what it took to be natural standards of the community; indeed, according to a newspaper account, the members of the mob went about tearing down the building in a workman-like way, “as regularly as if they contracted to perform the job for pay.”61
This traditional mob action seemed to unleash emotions throughout the city. Protestants and Catholics and whites and blacks turned on one another. But it was the Federalists who aroused the most anger. On July 27, 1812, the Federalists, some of whom were ensconced in a house with guns and power, issued their newspaper once again. This provoked another Republican mob, largely composed of militant journeyman mechanics unrestrained by master artisans and other social superiors. The two dozen Federalists in the house were mostly members of Maryland’s elite, and they included two Revolutionary War generals; they thought that if they stood firm, the riffraff in front of their house would defer to their betters and melt away. The Federalists first fired warning shots, but when the mob persisted and stormed the house, they fired and killed two persons. When the mob set up a cannon in front of the house, the city authorities finally acted and negotiated the surrender of the Federalists.
The Federalists requested that they be taken to the jail in carriages—their usual aristocratic mode of transportation—but the mob wanted them conveyed in carts, the way criminals were transported. The Republican authorities finally insisted that they walk to the jail, where presumably they would be safe. But the Republican mob was not satisfied. The next night it attacked the lightly guarded jail and beat the Federalist prisoners, some of them senseless, stabbing them and tearing off their genteel clothes, the most conspicuous symbol of their aristocratic status. One Revolutionary War veteran, General James N. Lingan, died of his wounds, and the other, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee and the celebrated eulogist of Washington, was crippled and never fully recovered. James Monroe was alarmed enough by the mobbing to warn President Madison of the “danger of a civil war, which may undermine our free system of government.”62
Still, the threat of mobbing in Baltimore continued. In early August the Federalists tried to send their newspaper through the mail to Baltimore; but when crowds threatened the U.S. Post Office, the city’s magistrates had enough, and the militia dispersed the mob.63
The summer’s bloody rioting in Baltimore, the worst in the history of the early Republic, was over, but mobbing was not. Mobs became more ferocious, more willing to engage in personal violence, and more ready to burn property than dismantle it. Such mobs were now prepared to act without elite participation or sanction, indeed, even to act against elites precisely because they were elites. By the second decade of the nineteenth century more and more political leaders were understandably calling for the creation of professional police forces to curb the increasing urban disorder. The social authority and the patronage power of individual magistrates and gentry were no longer able to keep the peace.
ONE EXPLANATION OFTEN OFFERED at the time for all this violence was the sudden rise in the drinking of hard liquor. Both the rough-and-tumble fighters and members of the urban mobs were often drunk. But such ordinary and lowly people were not the only ones drinking too much. The distinguished physician and professor of materia medica at Columbia College Dr. David Hosack complained that forty of the hundred physicians in New York City were drunkards. Even the misbehavior of children was blamed on too much alcohol. Charles Janson reported that he often had, “with horror, seen boys, whose dress indicated wealthy parents, intoxicated, shouting and swearing in the public streets.”64
Certainly the American consumption of distilled spirits was climbing rapidly during this period, rising from two and a half gallons per person per year in 1790 to almost five gallons in 1820—an amount nearly triple today’s consumption and greater than that of every major European nation at that time. If the 1,750,000 slaves, who did not have much access to alcohol, are excluded from these figures of 1820, then the Americans’ per capita consumption was even more remarkable—higher than at any other time in American history.
From the beginning of the Republic American
grain farmers, particularly those of Celtic origin in western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Tennessee, had found it easier and more profitable to distill, ship, and sell whiskey than to try to ship and sell the perishable grain itself. Consequently, distilleries popped up everywhere, their numbers growing rapidly after the 1780s, reaching ten thousand by 1810. In 1815 even the little town of Peacham, Vermont, with a population of about fifteen hundred persons, had thirty distilleries. According to Samuel L. Mitchill in 1812, American stills were producing 23,720,000 gallons of “ardent spirits” a year—an alarming amount, said Mitchill, that was turning freedom into “rudeness and something worse.” He estimated that some workers in the country were consuming up to a quart of hard liquor every day.65