Distilling whiskey was good business because, to the astonishment of foreigners, nearly all Americans—men, women, children, and sometimes even babies—drank whiskey all day long. Some workers began drinking before breakfast and then took dram breaks instead of coffee breaks. “Treating” with drink by militia officers and politicians was considered essential to election. During court trials a bottle of liquor might be passed among the attorneys, spectators, clients, and the judge and jury.
Whiskey accompanied every communal activity, including women’s quilting bees. But since manliness was defined by the ability to drink alcohol, men were the greatest imbibers. And taverns, unlike tea parties and assemblies, were exclusively male preserves. Taverns existed everywhere; indeed, most towns, even in staid New England, had more taverns than churches. By 1810 Americans were spending 2 percent of their personal income on distilled spirits, a huge amount at a time when most people’s income went to the basic needs of food and shelter. One quarter of the total sales of an ordinary New Hampshire store was alcohol.66
The social consequences of all this drinking were frightening—absenteeism, accidental deaths, wife-beating, family desertion, rioting, and fighting. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was a temperance reformer, outlined a number of diseases that he believed were aggravated by heavy drinking, including fevers of all sorts, obstructions of the liver, jaundice, hoarseness that often terminated in consumption, epilepsy, gout, and madness. In addition to diseases, said Rush in 1805, poverty and misery, crimes and infamy, were “all the natural and usual consequences of the intemperate use of ardent spirits.” Washington, who himself had a distillery, thought as early as 1789 that distilled spirits were “the ruin of half the workmen in this Country “The thing has arrived to such a height,” declared the Greene and Delaware Moral Society in 1815, “that we are actually threatened with becoming a nation of drunkards.”67
EXCESSIVE DRINKING MIGHT HAVE AGGRAVATED much of America’s licentious behavior, but many observers believed the ultimate source of the social disorder lay with the family. Charles Janson, for example, thought that all the intoxicated boys he had seen resulted from indulgent parents’ allowing their children to do whatever they wanted. John Adams went further and held parents responsible for all the social and political disorder in America. “The source of revolution, democracy, Jacobinism . . .,” he told his son in 1799, “has been a systematical dissolution of the true family authority.” Patriarchy was in disarray, and that had affected all authority, including that of government. In fact, said Adams, “there can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mother and children to the father.”68
Without clearly understanding what was happening, fathers, husbands, ministers, masters, and magistrates—patriarchy everywhere—felt their authority draining away. Stephen Arnold’s trial for beating his adopted daughter to death attracted so much attention in upstate New York in 1805 precisely because people had become unsure of the proper relationship of children to their parents.69
The spectacular movement of people did not help matters any. Strangers were now everywhere, and no one was quite certain of who owed deference to whom. Children in greater numbers left their homes for new land, in most cases never to see their parents again. Because so many of their male citizens had set out in search of new opportunities in Vermont, Maine, or the West, the older states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had a majority of females—which may help account for their relative Federalist stability. But even in New England more sons and daughters asserted their independence from their parents in courtship and in choosing their marriage partners. Daughters in wealthy families tended to delay marriage, to marry out of birth order, or to remain single—all of which imply less parental involvement and greater freedom of choice for young women in marriage.
The Revolutionary War had relaxed the traditional norms of sexual behavior, particularly in the city of Philadelphia, which had been occupied by British soldiers. Not only did more women leave their marriages than ever before, but in the post-Revolutionary period the rate of bastardy nearly doubled, accompanied by a noticeable increase in prostitution and adultery, involving all ages and all social classes.70 With the dramatic slackening of laws against moral offenses in post-Revolutionary America, women began to experience unprecedented social and sexual freedom. Indeed, this new freedom accounts for the sudden flood of didactic novels and pedagogical writings warning of the dangers of seduction and female sexuality. Novels, such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Samuel Relf’s Infidelity (1797), and Sally Wood’s Darval (1801), assumed the responsibility of policing female sexuality that hitherto had been left to parents and legal authorities. Some physicians like Dr. Rush even began warning that guilt resulting from adultery, or any failure to control the passions, almost always ended in insanity. Leaders in the early Republic offered so many prescriptions for discipline precisely because there were so many frightening examples of disorder and indiscipline.71
For many observers it seemed as if sexual passions were running amuck. Premarital pregnancies dramatically increased, at rates not reached again until the 1960 s. In some communities one third of all marriages took place after the woman was pregnant. Between 1785 and 1797 Martha Ballard, a midwife in Lincoln County, Maine, delivered 106 women of their first babies; forty, or 38 percent, were conceived out of wedlock. All these statistics suggest that many sons and daughters were selecting their mates without waiting for parental approval.72
Everywhere traditional subordinations were challenged and undermined. America “is the place where old age will not be blindly worshipped,” promised one writer in 1789. Aged persons began to lose much of the respect they had commanded, and young people began asserting themselves in new ways. Seating in the New England meetinghouses by age was abandoned in favor of wealth. For the first time, American state legislatures began requiring that public officials retire at a prescribed age, usually sixty or seventy. By 1800 people were representing themselves as younger than they actually were, something not done earlier. At the same time, male dress, especially wigs, powdered hair, and knee-breeches that had earlier tended to favor older men (the calves being the last to show age), began giving way to styles, particularly hairpieces and trousers, that flattered young men. In family portraits the fathers traditionally had stood dominantly above their wives and children; now, however, they were more often portrayed alongside their families—a symbolic leveling.73
YOUTHS’ DEFIANCE OF TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY and hierarchy showed up dramatically in the colleges. It began on the eve of the Revolution when Harvard and Yale abandoned the ranking of entering students on the basis of their families’ social position and estate. Then in the aftermath of the Revolution distinctions between upper and lower classmen began to break down. And as the Revolutionary message of liberty and equality spread throughout the country, all distinctions were brought into question.
As Samuel Stanhope Smith of Princeton explained in 1785 to Charles Nisbet, who was about to leave Scotland to become the first president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, “our freedom certainly takes away the distinctions of rank that are so visible in Europe; and of consequence takes away, in the same proportion, those submissive forms of politeness that exist there.” Although suitably warned, Nisbet was nevertheless stunned by what he presumed the Revolution on behalf of liberty had done to American society. It had created “a new world . . . unfortunately composed . . . of discordant atoms, jumbled together by chance, and tossed by unconstancy in an immense vacuum.” Nisbet had bumbled into a society that “greatly wants a principle of attraction and cohesion.”74
The unruly students Nisbet encountered only deepened his despair. Indeed, when college students, like those of the University of North Carolina in 1796, could debate the issue of whether “the Faculty had too much authority,” then serious trouble could not be far away.75
Between 1798 and 1808 American colleges were racked by mounting inciden
ts of student defiance and outright rebellion—on a scale never seen before or since in American history. At Brown in 1798 the students protested commencement speaking assignments and the price of board and brought the college to a halt. Eventually, Jonathan Maxey, the president of Brown, was forced to sign a “Treaty of Amity and Intercourse” with the rebellious students, offering amnesty to the protesters and establishing procedures for legitimate protest. At Union College in 1800 students petitioned that a professor be fired. Although the authorities dismissed the petition, the professor resigned, giving the students a victory.76
These incidents only foreshadowed much more extensive and violent student protests. In 1799 University of North Carolina students beat the president, stoned two professors, and threatened others with injury. In 1800 conflicts over discipline broke out at Harvard, Brown, William and Mary, and Princeton. In 1802 the rioting became even more serious. Williams College was under siege for two weeks. According to a tutor, Yale was in a state of “wars and rumors of wars.” After months of student rioting, Princeton’s Nassau Hall was mysteriously gutted by fire; the students, including William Cooper’s eldest son, were blamed for setting it a flame. As with other sorts of rioting, alcohol was often present. One student informed the president of Dartmouth that “the least quantity he could put up with . . . was from two to three pints daily.”77
Finally, college authorities tightened up their codes of discipline. But repression only provoked more student rebellions. In 1805 forty-five students, a majority of the total enrollment, withdrew from the University of North Carolina in protest over the new disciplinary rules, crippling the university. In 1807 Harvard students rioted over rotten cabbage and the general quality of food served in the commons; but, as a professor noted, complaining about the food was merely “the spark to set the combustibles on fire.” When the Harvard Corporation expelled twenty-three of the rebels, nearly two dozen other sympathetic students refused to return to the college. In the same year, student unrest at Princeton led to rioting and the calling out of the local town militia. Fifty-five students out of the 120 attending the college were expelled. In 1808 a student insurrection closed Williams for a month and forced the college to recruit a new faculty. Finally, college authorities up and down the continent began getting together and blacklisting the rebellious students, preventing them from enrolling in another college.78
People had a wide variety of explanations for the extraordinary student unrest. Some thought the students had read too much William Godwin and Thomas Paine and that French revolutionary principles of Jacobinism and atheism had infected their young minds. Others assumed that all these rich sons of elites were spoiled brats with too much money to spend, especially on whiskey and rum. Others reasoned that these mostly Federalist sons of the Founding generation were simply anxious to assert their manhood and prove their patriotism, citing especially the Quasi-War of 1798 for leaving these young men “panting for war.” Others believed that the rebellious students were simply reliving their fathers’ Revolution. As a Brown student wrote of the 1800 uprising: “Nothing but riot and confusion! No regard paid to superiors. Indeed, Sir, the Spirit of’ 75 was displayed in its brightest colors.”79
But still others supposed that the student disorder came from deeper evils in the society, from everything that the Jeffersonian Republican takeover of the government in 1801 had come to represent socially and culturally. It came, as the president of the University of Vermont declared in 1809,
from deficiencies in modern, early parental discipline; from erroneous notions of liberty and equality; from the spirit of revolution in the minds of men, constantly progressing, tending to a relinquishment of all ancient systems, discipline and dignities; from an increasing desire to level distinctions, traduce authority and diminish restraint; from licentious political discussions and controversies.80
THE REVOLUTION HAD REPRESENTED an attack on patriarchal monarchy, and that attack began to ramify throughout the society. In vain did conservatives complain that too many people had been captivated by “false ideas of liberty.” By collapsing all the different dependencies in the society into either freemen or slaves, the Revolution made it increasingly impossible for white males to accept any dependent status whatsoever. They were, as they told superiors who paternalistically tried to intervene in their private affairs, “free and independent.”81 Servitude of any sort in the early Republic suddenly became anomalous and anachronistic. In 1784 in New York a group, believing that indentured servitude was “contrary to . . . the idea of liberty this country has so happily established,” released a shipload of immigrant servants and arranged for public subscriptions to pay for their passage. As early as 1775 in Philadelphia the proportion of the workforce that was unfree—composed of servants and slaves—had already declined to 13 percent from the 40 to 50 percent that it had been in the middle of the eighteenth century. By 1800 less than 2 percent of the city’s labor force remained unfree. It was not long before indentured servitude, which had existed for centuries, disappeared altogether.82
With the republican culture talking of nothing but liberty, equality, and independence, maintaining even hired servants who worked for wages became a problem. Eighteenth-century advice manuals had not devoted much space to the proper behavior of masters toward servants, since dependency and servitude had been taken for granted. But the new nineteenth-century masters, especially those in middling circumstances, had become self-conscious about the relationship and needed advice on how to treat people who were supposed to be their inferiors in a culture that prized equality. “Servitude being established contrary to the natural rights of man,” declared one such manual in 1816, “it ought to be softened as much as possible, and servants made to feel their condition as little as may be.” Many middling masters were not all that sure of their own status, yet they had to deal with servants who may have not been all that different in origin. Hence they needed advice on how to talk to their servants, how to ask them to do tasks, and how to maintain a distance, without being unkind or contemptuous toward them.83
Controlling or even finding servants was difficult in this egalitarian atmosphere. With some Americans concluding that the practice of keeping servants was “highly anti-republican,” servants resisted the implications of the status. They refused to call their employers “master” or “mistress”; for many the term “boss,” derived from the Dutch word for master, became a euphemistic substitute. A minister in Maine favored the euphemism “help” applied to a domestic maid he admired because, unlike the word “servant,” it implied “a sense of independence and a hope of rising in the world”—something that the young woman and many other Americans were increasingly capable of doing.84
With the disappearance of indentured servitude, black slavery became more conspicuous and more peculiar than it had been in the past, and hired white servants resisted any identification with black slaves. A foreign traveler was startled to discover that a white female domestic refused to admit that she was a servant and that she lived in her master’s home. She was simply “help,” and she only “stayed” in the house. “I’d have you know, man,” she indignantly told this foreigner, “that I am no sarvant; none but negers are sarvants.” White servants often demanded to sit at the table with their masters and mistresses, justifying their demand by claiming they lived in a free country, and that no freeborn American should be treated like a servant. William Cooper’s daughter-in-law could not believe the bold behavior of servants. She blamed it all on notions of “Yankee dignity and ideas of Liberty—which is insolence only.” Since early nineteenth-century Yankees were not at all eager to become someone’s flunky, Bostonian Harrison Gray Otis had to make do with a series of French-speaking Germans, who soon picked up New England ways and rebelled at being servants. In 1811 John Jay’s son, in a common complaint, reported that his uncle was having problems with his servants, who had “become more and more ungovernable.”85
Since the slave-ridden South scarcely needed h
ired servants, the servant problem was largely confined to the North. Desperate would-be masters in several Northern cities were eventually compelled to form organizations for the encouragement of faithful domestic servants. These organizations were especially designed to reduce the servants’ incessant mobility and eliminate the insidious practice of masters’ enticing someone else’s servant to join their household. Despite all these efforts, however, the problem of getting and keeping good servants persisted and would continue to bother many Americans throughout the nineteenth century.
Because of the servant problem, Americans in the 1790s began to build hotels as public residences. The New York City Hotel, built in 1794, contained 137 rooms and many public spaces. These hotels combined both eating and lodging, provided private sleeping quarters, prohibited tipping, and were often occupied by permanent boarders. Many found this arrangement cheaper than setting up a household with servants who were so hard to acquire and deal with. Foreigners found such hotels and boardinghouses to be peculiarly American institutions.86
BY THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY much of what remained of traditional eighteenth-century hierarchy was in shambles—broken by social and economic changes and justified by the republican commitment to equality. No longer were apprentices simply dependents within a family; they had become trainees within a business that was increasingly conducted outside the household. A master became less of a patriarch in the craft and more of an employer, retail merchant, or businessman. Artisans did less and less “bespoke” or made-to-order work for particular patrons and instead produced more and more ready-made goods for mass distribution to impersonal markets of consumers. Cabinetmakers began stocking warehouses with a variety of pieces of furniture for ready sale in a modern manner. Impersonal cash payments of wages replaced the older paternalistic relationship between masters and journeymen, which resulted in these free wage-earners moving about in increasing numbers. Six months, for example, was the average time of employment for journeymen in one Philadelphia cabinet shop between 1795 and 1803.87
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