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

by Gordon S. Wood

  Although both masters and journeymen tried to maintain the traditional fiction that they were bound together for the “good of the trade,” they increasingly saw themselves as employers and employees with different interests. Observers applauded the fact that apprentices, journeymen, and masters of each craft had marched together in the federal procession in Philadelphia on July 4, 1788, yet some tensions and divergence of interests were already visible. By the 1780s and 1790s some journeymen in various crafts were organizing themselves against their masters’ organizations, banning their employers from their meetings, and declaring that “the interests of the journeymen are separate and in some respects opposite of those of their employers.”88

  In the eighteenth century artisans had participated in strikes, but these were strikes of the whole craft against the community, a withholding of their services or goods until some communal restriction on their craft was removed. Now, however, the strikes were within the crafts themselves, pitting journeyman-employees against their master-employers until their wages or other working conditions of the employees were improved. In 1796 in Philadelphia journeyman cabinetmakers successfully struck for a wage hike, which came out to be about a dollar a day and included a provision for cost-of-living increases. To add to worker solidarity, journeymen in one craft and city began calling on journeymen in other crafts and cities to come together in a union to protect their mutual interests against hostile masters. Between 1786 and 1816 at least twelve major strikes by various journeyman craftsmen occurred—the first major strikes by employees against employers in American history.89

  Despite these early incidents of clashing interests, however, the modern separation between employers and wage-earning employees came slowly. During the first several decades of the early Republic both masters and journeymen still tended to combine as artisans with similar concerns for the trade. At the outset most journeymen could look forward to becoming masters. In 1790 87 percent of the carpenters in Boston were masters, and most of the journeymen present in the city that year eventually became masters.90 In addition, masters and journeymen were brought together by their common status as tradesmen who worked with their hands. If anything, the contempt in which their labor had traditionally been held by the aristocratic gentry compelled their collaboration. So even those who differed from one other as greatly as did Walter Brewster, a young struggling shoemaker of Canterbury, Connecticut, and Christopher Leffingwell, a well-to-do manufacturer of Norwich, Connecticut, who owned several mills and shops and was the town’s largest employer, could join forces in the 1790s in a political movement on behalf of artisans against lawyers and other Connecticut gentry. Given their common lowliness as workers involved in manual trades, men like Brewster and Leffingwell were natural allies, and they understandably identified their “laboring interest” with “the general or common interest” of the whole state.91

  In time, of course, the distinction between rich capitalist employers and poor wage-earning journeymen-employees would become more conspicuous. By 1825 in Boston, for example, 62 percent of all carpenters in the city had become property-less employees; and only about 10 percent of the journeymen in that year were able to rise to become masters.92 By the third decade of the nineteenth century most of the crafts had begun splitting into the modern class division between employers and employees. But in the 1790s large-scale manufacturers like Leffingwell and small craftsmen like Brewster still shared a common resentment of a genteel aristocratic world that had humiliated them from the beginning of time. For the same reason Joseph Williams, a mule-trader, took up the same political cause of artisans and manufacturers as Brewster and Leffingwell. Although Williams was the richest man in Norwich and as a merchant had interests that were different from those of artisans and manufacturers, he nevertheless identified with their loathing of the Federalist aristocracy of Connecticut.93

  Despite all the apparent differences between wealthy mule-merchants, small shoemakers, and big manufacturers, socially and psychologically they were all middling sorts with occupations—sharply separated from gentlemen-aristocrats who did not seem to have to work for a living. In the eighteenth century, writes the premier historian of the emerging middle class in America, “the important hierarchal distinction was the one that set off the several elites from everyone else.” Thus in comparison with the great difference between the gentry and ordinary people, “differences between artisans and laborers were of no real consequence. The effect, needless to say,” says historian Stuart M. Blumin, “was to identify middling people much more closely with the bottom of the society than with the top.” What tied these disparate middling artisans and laborers together was their common involvement in manual labor. Mechanics and tradesmen considered “the farmers in the country” as “brethren,” for they “get their living as we do, by the labour of their hands.”94

  In the decades following the Revolution these middling workers in the Northern parts of the country—farmers, artisans, laborers, and proto-businessmen of all sorts—released their pent-up egalitarian anger at all those “aristocrats” who had scorned and despised them as narrow-minded, parochial, and illiberal—and all because they had “not snored through four years at Princeton.” They urged each other to shed their earlier political apathy and “keep up the cry against Judges, Lawyers, Generals, Colonels, and all other designing men, and the day will be our own.” They demanded that they do their “utmost at election to prevent all men of talents, lawyers, rich men from being elected.”95 In the 1790s they organized themselves in Democratic-Republican Societies, and eventually they came to constitute the bulk of the Republican party in the North. By the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, these ordinary working men had transformed what it meant to be a gentleman and a political leader.

  Although Jefferson was an aristocratic slaveholder, it was his political genius to sense that the world of the early Republic ought to belong to people who lived by manual labor and not by their wits. Cities, he believed, were dangerous and promoted dissipation precisely because they were places, he said, where men sought “to live by their heads rather than their hands.”96 But Jefferson was only expressing the views of his many Northern followers. In the decades following the Revolution living by one’s head became equated with leisure, which was labeled idleness and subjected to the most scathing criticism—criticism that went well beyond anything experienced in England or Europe in these years.

  Angry Democratic-Republicans, including Matthew Lyon, who moved to Kentucky and served as congressman there from 1803 to 1811, accused all those gentlemen who were “not . . . under the necessity of getting their bread by industry” of living off “the labour of the honest farmers and mechanics.” Those who “do not labor, but who enjoy in luxury, the fruits of labor,” these Republicans charged, had no right to “finally decide all acts and laws” as they had in the past. At the same time as the Northern Republicans assaulted the gentry’s idleness and capacity to govern, they emphasized and honored the significance and dignity of labor, which aristocrats traditionally had held in contempt.97

  Having to work for a living became the identifying symbol for all those common middling sorts championed by Jefferson and the other Republican leaders. America’s political and social struggle, said William Manning, an uneducated New England farmer speaking as “a Labourer” on behalf of many Northern Republicans, was between the many and the few; it was based on “a Conceived Difference of Interest Between those that Labour for a Living and those that git a Living without Bodily Labour.” Those who did not have to do bodily work were “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosipher and school master, the Juditial & Executive Officers, & many others.” These “orders of men,” once they had attained their life of “ease & rest” that “at once creates a sense of superiority,” wrote Manning in phonetic prose that was real and not some gentleman’s satiric ploy, tended to “asotiate together and look down with two much contempt on those that labour.” Although “the hole
of them do not amount to one eighth part of the people,” these gentry had the “spare time” and the “arts & skeems” to combine and consult with one another. They had the power to control the electorate and the government “in a veriaty of ways.” Some voters they flattered “by promise of favors, such as being customers to them, or helping them out of debt, or other difficultyes; or help them to a good bargain, or treet them or trust them, or lend them money, or even give them a little money”—anything or everything if only “they will vote for such & such a man.” Other voters the gentry threatened: “‘if you don’t vote for such & such a man,’ or ‘if you do’ and, ‘you shall pay me what you owe me,’ or ‘I will sew you’—’I will turne you out of my house’ or ‘off of my farm’—’I wont be your customer any longer.’ . . . All these things have bin practised & may be again.” This was how the “few” exerted influence over the many.

  Those who “live without Labour” (the phrase that Manning used over and over to identify the gentry) managed the government and laws, making them as “numerous, intricate and as inexplicit as possible,” controlled the newspapers, making them as “costly as possible,” and manipulated the banks and credit, so as to make “money scarse,” especially since “the interests and incomes of the few lays chiefly in money at interest, rents, salaryes, and fees that are fixed on the nominal value of money.” In addition these “few,” by which he meant the Federalists of New England, were “always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national academyes & grammer schools, in order to make places for men to live without work, & so strengthen their party.” In fact, wrote Manning in 1798, “all the orders of men who live without Labour have got so monstrously crouded with numbers & made it fashanable to live & dress so high, that Labour & produce is scarse.” Manning ended his lengthy diatribe against all gentlemen of leisure by proposing to form “a Society of Labourers to be formed as near after the order of Cincinnati as the largeness of their numbers will admit of.”98

  Some historians have thought of Manning as just a simple farmer in his little developing town of Billerica, Massachusetts. But in fact he was much more of a middling sort—an improver and a small-time entrepreneurial hustler, or what later would be called a petty businessman. He ran a tavern off and on, erected a saltpeter works making gunpowder during the Revolutionary War, helped build a canal, bought and sold land, constantly borrowed money, and urged the printing of money by state-chartered banks, seeking (not very successfully, it seems) every which way to better his and his family’s condition. By themselves Manning’s commercial activities may not be much, but multiply them many thousandfold throughout the society and we have the makings of an expanding commercial economy.

  If anyone in the North was opposed to the developing market society, it was not the likes of Manning and other Northern Republicans; in fact, it was many of the traditional-minded Federalists who tried to stand in the way of the middling paper-money world that was taking over the society of the North. But the passions that divided Republicans and Federalists went beyond economic issues and political ideas. Manning and the Northern Republicans knew only too well the kind of society the Federalists favored—a hierarchical one held together by patronage and connections and dominated by a leisured few who used the mysteries of the law and their proprietary wealth to lord it over the many. The Democratic-Republicans feared and hated the English monarchy so much because it symbolized that kind of privileged aristocratic society.

  MOCKING IDLENESS AND TURNING LABOR into a badge of honor made the South, with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery, seem even more anomalous than it had been at the time of the Revolution, thus aggravating the growing sectional split in the country. Many Southern aristocrats began emphasizing their cavalier status in contrast to the money-grubbing northern Yankees. They were fond of saying that they were real gentlemen, a rare thing in America.

  But even the Southern cavaliers were not entirely immune to the changing culture. Indeed, so prevalent did the scorn of gentlemanly leisure become that some Southern slaveholding aristocrats felt compelled to identify themselves with hard work and productive labor. As good Jeffersonian Republicans, some of these Southern planters contended that they, like the ordinary working people in the North, were involved in productive labor in contrast to all those Northern Federalist professionals, bankers, speculators, and moneyed men who never grew or made a single thing.

  The Southerners could even respond to the marvelous manner in which Parson Mason Weems, author of the most popular biography of George Washington ever written, turned the aristocratic father of his country into someone who worked as diligently for a living as an ordinary mechanic. By conceiving of Washington as an industrious businessman, Weems spoke for the new rising generation of middling entrepreneurs and others eager to get ahead. He was determined, he said, to destroy the “notion, from the land of lies,” which had “taken too deep root among some, that ‘labour is a low-lived thing, fit for none but poor people and slaves! and that dress and pleasure are the only accomplishments for a gentleman!’” Weems urged all the young men who might be reading his book, “though humble thy birth, low thy fortune, and few thy friends, still think of Washington, and HOPE.”99

  Of course, since more than anyone in the society the Southern slave-holding aristocrats depended on the labor of others, honoring themselves as workers was awkward, to say the least. In fact, once the planters invoked this celebration of productive labor, they discovered it could be readily turned against them. Professional lawyers in Virginia, struggling to gain control of the county courts from gentlemen-amateurs, accused the planter-aristocrats of being men raised to no “pursuit of honest industry.” All a member of this idle gentry had ever done, charged the lawyers, was “learned to dress, to dance, to drink, to smoke, to swear, to game; contracted a violent passion for the very rational, elegant and humane pleasures of the turf and the cock-pit, and was long distinguished for the best horses and game-cocks in the country.” Then again, the lawyers found themselves open to the same accusation: that they were unproductive parasites who lived off the cares and anxieties of others.100 Everyone in America, it seemed, was expected to be a worker or businessman—an expectation that was not matched to the same extent by any other country in the world.

  THE CULTURE WAS CHANGING RADICALLY, especially in the North, and many Americans, older generations in particular, became frightened that the young Republic was caught up in a carousal of getting and spending. As Benjamin Rush lamented in 1809, the values of the Founders were being replaced by the “love of money.”101 Too many of the American people seemed absorbed in the selfish pursuit of their own interests. Americans, in what Federalist Joseph Dennie called this “penny-getting pound-hoarding world,” were always looking to bargain; they treated everything they owned, even their homes, as merchandise.102 English travelers were stunned to see Americans selling their landed estates in order to go into trade—the reverse of what Englishmen sought to do. Nothing was beyond the lure of cash. In the heart of Federalist New England an enterprising Yankee even saw a way to make money out of the gruesome Baltimore riots. Within weeks after the riots, this New Haven hustler established a museum exhibit of the “Cruelties of the Baltimore MOB” in “a group of WAX FIGURES as large as life” and charged twenty-five cents admission.103

  Many, of course, even some Federalists, wanted to put the best face on what was happening. In his publications President Timothy Dwight of Yale, for example, was eager to counter foreign criticism of American materialism, and thus in his published comments, though not in his private notes, he always tried to emphasize the positive aspects of American behavior. Americans may have been restless adventurers, he wrote in his Travels in New England and New York, but they were also enterprising and versatile, “ready when disappointed in one kind of business to slide into another, and fitted to conduct the second, or even a third, or fourth, with much the same facility and success as if they had been bred to nothing else.”104

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bsp; James Sullivan, a Maine-born lawyer who became Republican governor of Massachusetts in 1807, tried to justify all the scrambling for money, especially since most of the hustlers were members of his own party. In an extraordinary argument that marked the passing of the aristocratic passions of power and glory and the coming of the harmless and humdrum interests of ordinary money-making, Sullivan suggested that a man who sought only to acquire property “is not, perhaps, the good man for whom ‘one would dare to die’; but he is a character whom no one need to fear.” Indeed, by advancing his own particular interest in an innocuous piecemeal way, he even “advances the interest of the public.” Sullivan was celebrating the fact that the older aristocratic world of the great-souled and ambitious Hamiltons and Burrs, who were heroic but dangerous, was giving way to a new world of ordinary middling businessmen, who were mundane but safe. Ambition, which hitherto had been associated with the desire for aristocratic distinction, was becoming tamed and domesticated. Common people were now capable of ambition—the desire for improvement or gain—without necessarily being thought selfish or self-seeking, an endorsement of a peculiar kind of success that had extraordinary cultural power.105

  Many others, however, were frightened and confused by what seemed to be a whole society being taken over by money-making and the pursuit of “soul-destroying dollars.” Too many were racing ahead in search of success without regard for the collective good or for those who failed and were left behind. Literati of varying tastes—ranging from Philip Freneau to Charles Brockden Brown to Washington Irving—filled the air with satirical complaints or hand-wringing analyses of what was happening. “This is a nation of peddlers and shopkeepers,” Brown complained of his countrymen in 1803. “Money engrosses all their passions and pursuits.” Such imaginative writers wanted nothing to do with men, as one Baltimore editor put it, “who are immersed in business, whose souls are exclusively devoted to the pursuit of riches, who suffer no ideas to intrude upon their speculations, or to disturb their calculations on exchange, insurance, and bank stock.”106 Although authors, professors, and poets were eager to be patriotic, many of them feared that a society so absorbed in business and money-making not only would contribute nothing to the arts and the finer things of life but would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness.