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

by Gordon S. Wood

  Getting a corporate charter and building the road, of course, did not guarantee success for the developers. Many of the turnpike companies failed because too many farmers evaded the tolls by using local detours. So common was the evasion that some began calling the roads “shunpikes.”35

  In 1802 Congress authorized the building of the National Road that would run from the East Coast to the Ohio River. But disputes over the route of the road delayed action. Finally, in 1806, Congress authorized a middle route beginning in the town of Cumberland in western Maryland; it later extended what came to be called the Cumberland Road (now U.S. 50) beyond Cincinnati to the Mississippi River at St. Louis by way of Vincennes. “In this way,” President Jefferson told the Congress in February 1808, “we may accomplish a continued and advantageous line of communication from the seat of the General Government to St. Louis, passing through several very interesting points of the Western territory.” Actual construction of the road did not begin until 1811.36

  At the same time Americans were building roads, they were improving their rivers and constructing canals. Because Americans, as Pennsylvania-born Robert Fulton pointed out, had such a strong prejudice in favor of wagons, it took a while for canal-building to take off. Fulton himself did not begin his career interested in canals. Indeed, he began as an artist and moved to England in 1787 to study painting with Benjamin West, an ex-Pennsylvanian who was known for his support of aspiring American artists. Although Fulton exhibited two canvases at the Royal Academy in 1791 and four in 1793, he soon came to realize that his genius lay in other directions. Influenced by some English aristocrats and scientists and the reformer and manufacturer Robert Owen, Fulton became involved in the operations of canals. In 1796 he published A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation, which he enhanced with superb drawings of aqueducts, bridges, inclined planes, and other canal devices. Fulton envisioned a series of canals designed for small boats being built everywhere to tie people and trade together. The Burr conspiracy, which threatened “to sever the western from the eastern states,” convinced Fulton that canals could create a “sense of mutual interests arising from mutual intercourse and mingled commerce.”37

  Although Fulton eventually became preoccupied with various devices for conducting undersea warfare, he continued to stress the importance of canals to anyone who would listen. In 1811 he joined a commission, along with Mayor DeWitt Clinton of New York City, to explore the possibility of building a canal in the upper part of New York state.

  Most of Fulton’s many projects and proposals were ahead of their time. Only his development of the steamboat that traveled up the Hudson from New York to Albany in 1807 was well timed; this project, done in partnership with Robert R. Livingston, immortalized him.38 Fulton was able to succeed with his steamboat where his predecessors John Fitch and James Rumsey had failed; not only was his boat technically superior, but most of his connections and patrons were better than those his rivals could muster. In 1811 Fulton sent his steamboat the New Orleans from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the port for which the boat was named, the first such craft on these Western waters. At the same time, New York City already had Fulton-built steam ferryboats carrying commuters across both the Hudson and East rivers. Fulton’s first steam ferry on the East River, called Nassau, was a catamaran; it had a deck large enough to carry horses and wagons as well as foot passengers. People appreciated his time-saving inventions, and following his death in 1815 both the Manhattan and Brooklyn streets leading to his ferry slips were renamed Fulton Street in his honor.39

  As late as 1816 only a hundred miles of canals existed in the country. Yet these hundred miles were the products of at least twenty-five canal and lock companies. The two-and-one-half-mile-long canal at South Hadley Falls in western Massachusetts opened up in 1795 and took in over three thousand dollars in tolls the first year. In 1800 two more canals were built further north at Miller Falls and Bellows Falls, Vermont, making the Connecticut River navigable from the White River to the Atlantic. The most famous canal of the period was the Middlesex Canal that ran from Boston to the Merrimac River. It opened in 1804 and was twenty-seven miles long and thirty feet wide; it had twenty-one locks, seven aqueducts over rivers, and forty-eight bridges.

  The canal companies were chartered and financed the same way as the toll roads. Although many of the canals failed to earn profits for their investors, many Americans were willing to try anything if there was a possibility of making a little money. Low-cost transportation to extensive markets, usually by rivers and other inland waterways, was a key to both commercial prosperity and a proliferation of labor-saving inventions. In this respect in the period up to 1812 the areas that benefited most from cheap water transportation and had the most inventive activity (as measured by the number of patents issued per capita) were New York and southern New England.40

  Many saw the roads and canals not only as a means of making money for individual farmers but also, like Fulton, as devices for promoting union. In his 1806 message to Congress, President Jefferson foresaw the national debt soon being paid off, and thus he held out the prospect of using the federal surplus to support a system of internal improvements for the greatly enlarged nation. Since the federal funds, as Jefferson declared, came from duties on imports that were chiefly “foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them,” the taxes were justified in spite of their violation of republican principles. From the internal improvements, Jefferson promised, “new channels of communication will be opened between the States, the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties.”41

  President Jefferson, along with many other strict constructionist “Old Republicans,” always believed that a constitutional amendment was necessary to implement these plans, fearing that any implied enlargement of federal power over internal improvements would set a precedent for further federal growth. Although Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin was less scrupulous about the use of national power, he recognized the political necessity of a constitutional amendment. Nevertheless, with only the promise of a future amendment, he sought to get the process going in April 1808 with his Report on Roads and Canals.

  In his report Gallatin laid out his grandiose plans for the building of roads and canals that would cement the parts of the country together, all coordinated and paid for by the national government at a cost of $ 20 million. Unfortunately for Gallatin, Congress, torn by Federalist opposition and Republican rivalries, was no more interested in his report than it had been earlier in Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures. It did nothing to implement Gallatin’s plan until 1817, when it pledged the bonus due the government from the new national bank for the improvement of the nation’s roads and canals. This Bonus Bill, however, much to the surprise of nearly everyone, including its principal sponsor, John C. Calhoun, ran into the strict constructionist scruples of President James Madison, who vetoed it, on the grounds that the idea of implied powers threatened the “definite partition” between the “General and State Governments” on which the “permanent success of the Constitution” depended.42

  PRECISELY BECAUSE REPUBLICS, as Benjamin Rush said, were naturally “peaceful and benevolent forms of government,” they inevitably promoted humane reforms in accord with their “mild and benevolent principles.”43 Jefferson thought that America was the most caring nation in the world. “There is not a country on earth,” he said, “where there is greater tranquillity, where the laws are milder, or better obeyed . . ., where strangers are better received, more hospitably treated, & with a more sacred respect.”44 In the several decades following the Revolution Americans took very seriously the idea that they were more honest, more generous, and friendlier than other peoples.

  Consequently, they were eager to create charitable and humanitarian societies. Indeed, more humanitarian societies were formed in the decade following the Revolution than were c
reated in the entire colonial period.45 New England saw a virtual explosion of philanthropic organizations in the post-Revolutionary years. During the colonial period and prior to the formation of the Constitution in 1787, New Englanders had founded only seventy-eight charitable associations, most of these located in Boston. But with the new emphasis on people’s moral sense and feelings of benevolence, things soon changed. In the decade following 1787, New Englanders formed 112 charitable societies; between 1798 and 1807, 158 more; and between 1808 and 1817, 1,101—creating in three decades nearly fourteen hundred benevolent organizations scattered in small towns all over the region.46

  These associations were self-conscious replacements for traditional acts of individual and private charity, which were now described as impulsive and arbitrary. By organizing “upon a system; which inquires, deliberates, and feels a responsibility to the public,” the charitable associations, declared the Reverend Edward Dorr Griffin of Massachusetts in 1811, were “the best repository of our gifts” and far more effective than the “little and widely scattered streams of individual munificence.”47

  Because the Federalist and Republican elites who created these institutions saw them as simply extensions of their public role as leaders of the society, they described them as public institutions designed to promote the public good. But as the state lost control of its creations and the idea of a unitary public good lost its coherence, these and other such organizations, like the chartered colleges, came to be regarded as private. These kinds of humanitarian and charitable associations represented the beginnings of what today is labeled “a civil society”—constituting the thousands of institutions and organizations that stand between the individual and the government. This emerging civil society in the early Republic was the major means by which Americans were able, to some extent at least, to tame and manage the near anarchic exuberance of their seething, boisterous society.

  Voluntary associations in the early Republic sprang up to meet every human need—from the New York “Society for the Promotion of the Manumission of Slaves and Protecting such of them that have been or may be Liberated” to the Philadelphia “Society for the Relief of the Poor and Distressed Masters of Ships, their Widows and Children.” There were mechanic societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphan asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance associations, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies, societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry, indeed, societies for just about anything and everything that was good and humanitarian.48

  Some of these organizations, like the many immigrant aid societies that emerged in the cities, had social as well as humanitarian purposes. But most were charitable societies initially organized by paternalistic urban elites like John Jay, Noah Webster, and Benjamin Rush to deal with all the human miseries their newly aroused benevolent consciences told them they had an obligation to ease. These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from “suspended animation,” that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like Washington on his deathbed, asked that their bodies not be immediately interred in case they might be suffering from suspended animation.

  In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, “you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals,” and “from the success or failure of your exertions in the cause of virtue, we anticipate the freedom or slavery of our country.” It was a message repeated over and over during the subsequent decades. Faced with such an awesome responsibility to inculcate morality, religious groups and others responded to the cause with an evangelical zeal and clamor that went beyond what Rush or anyone else in 1788 could have imagined. All the clergy came to realize that they could no longer rely on exposing the community’s guilt through jeremiads; they could no longer count on reforming merely the “better part” of the society in the expectation that it would bring the rest along; and they could no longer just use government to create the right “moral effect.” Ordinary people themselves had to be mobilized in the cause of virtue, through the creation of local moral societies, which in 1812 the great New England evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher labeled “disciplined moral militia.”49

  Middling members of these multiplying moral societies, which were at first often confined to rural villages, relied essentially on observation and the force of local public opinion. Members who were eager to support “the suppression of vice,” such as the members of the Moral Society of the County of Columbia in New York in 1815, united to achieve that goal. They collected “the lovers of virtue of every name” and presented “a bold front to the growing licentiousness of the day”; and then, by erecting “a citadel, from which extended observations may be made,” they exerted their “influence over the moral conduct of others,” first by friendly persuasion, and then, if that did not work, by exposing the moral delinquents “to the penalties of law.” The hopes were high: “character, that dearest earthly interest of man, will thus be protected, and thousands who are now settling down into incurable habits of licentiousness, will by these means be reclaimed.”50

  The growing and sprawling cities, however, needed more than moral societies to watch over and intimidate people. They needed new and substantial institutions, such as relief societies, hospitals, free schools, prisons, and savings banks, to improve the character of the weak and vicious of the society. The proliferation in the early nineteenth century of these new institutions eventually transformed and often eclipsed the humanitarian societies that enlightened gentry had formed in the immediate post-Revolutionary years in response to feelings of republican benevolence. All of these new institutions became parts of an expanding civic society.

  By the second decade of the nineteenth century the goals and social complexion of these earlier urban philanthropic endeavors were changing. Ordinary middling sorts of people, usually pious newcomers from rural areas, were replacing the older paternalistic gentry as leaders of these charitable societies. In doing so, they transformed the emotional bonds tying them to the objects of their benevolence, substituting moral rectitude for gratitude.

  The patrician gentry in the 1780s and 1790s had organized charitable societies for treating the sick, aiding widowed mothers, housing orphans, feeding imprisoned debtors, or resuscitating drowning victims out of a sense of Christian stewardship and paternalistic compassion befitting their genteel social position. They often seemed more interested in what their benevolence could do for their own feelings than for what it could do for the objects of their compassion. “How glorious, how God-like, to step forth to the relief of . . . distress,” declared the twenty-four-year-old DeWitt Clinton, a Columbia graduate, newly installed Freemason, and nephew of the governor of New York, in a 1793 oration. Enlightened caring gentry like Clinton wanted nothing more than “to arrest the tear of sorrow; to disarm affliction of its darts; to smooth the pillow of declining age; to rescue from the fangs of vice the helpless infant, and to diffuse the most lively joys over a whole family of rational, immortal creatures.”51 Paternalistic acts of charity by gentry like Clinton were disinterested deeds of sympathy for people whose character or behavior they did not expect to change fundamentally. All they expected was feelings of dependency and gratitude on the part of the recipients.

  It was not gratitude, however, that the middle-class founders of the new reform institutions were interested in or expected. The new reformers wanted to imbue people not with deference and dependency but with “correct moral principles”; they aimed to change the actual behavior of people. These middling reformers had transformed themselves, often by strenuous efforts at self-imp
rovement and hard work. Why couldn’t others do the same? The compassionate charity of the paternalistic gentry, they believed, did not get at the heart of the problem of poverty. Indeed, in some cases they thought it aggravated the problem; many claimed, for example, that giving charity indiscriminately to the poor only perpetuated poverty. “Do not give to persons able to work for a living,” declared a critic of the traditional paternalistic charity in 1807. “Do not support widows who refuse to put out their children. Do not let the means of support be made easier to one who does not work than to those who do.”52

  Instead of merely relieving the suffering of the unfortunate, as the earlier paternalistic gentry and benevolent associations had done, the new middle-class reformers sought to create institutions that would get at the sources of poverty, crime, and other social evils, mainly by suppressing the vices—gambling, drinking, Sabbath-breaking, profanity, horse racing, and other expressions of profligacy—that presumably were causing the evils. The middle-class moral reformers sought to remove the taverns and betting houses that tempted the weak and impressionable and to create institutions, such as schools and reformatory-type prisons, that would instill in people a proper respect for morality. Many of the middling reformers began attacking the sexual license and the spread of bastardy that had characterized the immediate post-Revolutionary decades. “The prostitution of women, which prevails to a high degree in all large cities,” wrote publisher Mathew Carey in 1797, in one of the first writings on behalf of prostitution reform, “might be lessened by giving them encouragement to enter into various occupations which are available to them.” But, said Carey, even more important than jobs in keeping women from prostitution was religion, especially “instruction of First-day or Sunday schools.”53