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

by Gordon S. Wood

  But by the second decade of the nineteenth century in America, in the North at least, the ambitious, go-getting middling sorts were collapsing into themselves all levels of income and all social ranks and had come to dominate American culture to a degree that the middle class in England never achieved. It was as Franklin in the 1780s had predicted: “the almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America” had obliged “its people to follow some business for subsistence,” turning America into “the land of labour.”17 The growing numbers of commercial farmers, mechanics, clerks, teachers, businessmen, and industrious, self-trained would-be professionals could scarcely think of themselves as the “middle” of anything; they considered themselves to be the whole nation and as a consequence gained a powerful moral hegemony over the society, especially in the North.

  When Noah Webster later came to define “gentleman” in his Dictionary, he saw it simply as a courtesy title, of general address, applied most appropriately to “men of education and good breeding, of every occupation.” “Of every occupation”—that was the key to the changes taking place. By the early decades of the nineteenth century many lawyers could no longer think of themselves merely as gentlemen who sometimes practiced some law. Law, at least for those who did not use it merely as a stepping-stone to politics, was becoming a technical and specialized profession that wholly occupied the person engaged in it, making it no different really from the occupations of artisans and tradesmen. Much to the chagrin of aristocratic Federalists, not just law but all the professions had become income-producing occupations. “Our Lawyers are mere lawyers, our physicians are mere physicians, our divines are mere divines,” complained John Sylvester John Gardiner, perhaps Boston’s most distinguished man of letters in the first decade of the nineteenth century. “Everything smells of the shop, and you will, in a few minutes conversation, infallibly detect a man’s profession.”18

  The distinction between gentlemen and commoners did not entirely disappear, but it was buffeted and further blurred. When working with one’s head became no different from working with one’s hands, then the distinction between gentlemen and commoners became less and less meaningful. As early as 1802 the buyer of a church pew in a New England meetinghouse called himself a “gentleman,” but the seller labeled him a “blacksmith.” Visiting foreigners were amazed to find so many adult white males, including draymen, butchers’ boys, and canal workers, being addressed as gentlemen. Outraged Federalists tried to make fun of the vulgar for claiming to be equal to gentlemen and men of education. But such satire rang hollow when no one felt embarrassed over such claims.

  Since the 1790s American leaders had yearned to make their society more homogeneous, but they had hoped that that homogeneity would come from raising ordinary people to their level of gentility and enlightenment. Instead, ordinary folk were collapsing traditional social differences and were bringing the aristocracy down to their level. The many academies and colleges that were sprouting up everywhere, especially in the North, were not enlightening the society as expected; instead, they were annually producing “multitudes of half-educated candidates for public confidence and honor,” which accounted for so many trying “to crowd themselves into the learned professions.”19 Many foreigners were surprised to discover that the social and cultural distinctions common to the nations of Europe seemed in America, as Tocqueville later put it, “to have melted into a middle class.”20 Although the upper ranks of Americans may have lacked the elegant manners and refined courtesy of the European aristocracy, ordinary Americans were far less vulgar and uncultivated than their European counterparts.

  Crossing the Allegheny Mountains westward in 1815, the English immigrant Morris Birkbeck was struck by “the urbanity and civilization that prevail in situations remote from large cities.” Americans, said Birkbeck, “are strangers to rural simplicity: the embarrassed air of an awkward rustic, so frequent in England, is rarely seen in the United States.” Birkbeck attributed the social homogeneity of the Americans to “the effects of political equality, the consciousness of which accompanies all their intercourse, and may be supposed to operate most powerfully on the manners of the lowest class.” It was as if the sharp distinction between politeness and vulgarity that characterized European society had in America somehow become mingled and made into one—creating, said an unhappy James Fenimore Cooper, the “fussy pretensions” of the “genteel vulgar” who got their manners “second hand, as the traditions of fashion, or perhaps the pages of a novel.”21

  American society, or at least the Northern part of American society, was coming more and more to resemble what Franklin and Crèvecoeur had imagined in the 1780s, a society that seemed to lack both an aristocracy and a lower class. “Patrician and plebeian orders are unknown . . .,” wrote the Federalist-turned-Republican Charles Ingersoll in 1810, drawing out the logic of what had been conventional American wisdom since the mid-eighteenth century. “Luxury has not yet corrupted the rich, nor is there any of that want, which classifies the poor. There is no populace. All are people. What in other countries is called the populace, a compost heap, whence germinate mobs, beggars, and tyrants, is not to be found in the towns; and there is no peasantry in the country. Were it not for the slaves of the south,” wrote Ingersoll, “there would be one rank.”22

  The exception is jarring, to say the least, but no more jarring than Ingersoll’s larger generalization. By modern standards his judgment that America had become classless and composed of one rank seems absurd. From today’s perspective, the distinctions of early nineteenth-century society are vivid, not only those between free and enslaved, white and black, male and female, but also those between rich and poor, educated and barely literate. Despite the celebration of commerce, the many participants in business may have failed as often as they succeeded. People talked about being “busted” or of “going to smash”: one out of five householders could expect to become insolvent at least once.23 Yet understanding the wonder and the astonishment of observers like Ingersoll requires taking seriously the ways in which the Northern society of the early Republic concocted the myth of a new middle-class society that celebrated its homogeneous egalitarian character.

  To be sure, there were great discrepancies of wealth in the early Republic. The South had its great slaveholding planters while most farmers had few or no slaves. Even in the North wealth was far more unequally distributed in the decades following the Revolution than it had been before.24 Yet not only did Republican political leaders continue to hold out the vision of an egalitarian society of small producers, but many Northerners felt they were in fact living in a more egalitarian society; and in a strange way they were correct. After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.

  From this point of view the popular myth of equality in the early Republic was based on a substantial reality—but a psychological more than an economic reality. British traveler John Melish thought that most Northern states in 1806 resembled Connecticut, where, he said, “there is no feudal system, and no law of primogeniture; hence there are no overgrown estates on one hand, and few of those employed in agriculture are depressed by poverty on the other.” Despite this celebration of Connecticut’s equality, however, Melish went on to say that the farms in the state were very unequal in size, ranging “generally from 50 to 5000 acres.”

  Still, Melish emphasized, Americans felt remarkably equal to one another. They “have a spirit of independence, and will brook no superiority. Every man is conscious of his own political importance, and will suffer none to treat him with disrespect. Nor is this disposition confined to one rank; it pervades the whole and is probably the best guarantee for the continuance of the liberty and independence of the country.”25

  IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY and legitimate their claim to be all the people, these egalitarian-minded middl
ing sorts needed, above all, to link themselves to the greatest event in their young history, the Revolution. Since most of the political elite who had led the Revolution were gentlemen-aristocrats, and slaveholding aristocrats at that, they had little to offer the burgeoning groups of enterprising artisans and businessmen as models for emulation or justification. If the middling artisans and entrepreneurs who were coming to dominate Northern American culture in the early nineteenth century were to find among the Revolutionary Founders a hero they could relate to, only Benjamin Franklin, the former printer who had risen from the most obscure origins to worldly success, could fulfill their needs. Only Franklin could justify the release of their ambition.

  Franklin died in 1790, and his Autobiography was not published until 1794. Between that year and 1828 twenty-two editions were published. After 1798 editors began adding the Poor Richard essays, and especially The Way to Wealth, to editions of the Autobiography . Franklin’s life became an inspiration to countless young men eager to make it in the world of business. Reading Franklin’s life and writings at age eighteen, Silas Felton of Marlborough, Massachusetts, was encouraged to change his life. Since, as he said in his memoir written in 1802 at age twenty-six, “Nature never formed me to follow an Agricultural Life,” he did not pursue his father’s farming career but instead turned to teaching and then to storekeeping, at which he was successful. He was interested in politics and was an insatiable reader, devouring not only newspapers and “many volumes . . . that contained true genuine Republicanism” but also Franklin’s writings and indeed everything he could lay his hands on that would improve his mind and refine his manners—all of which he dutifully listed in his memoir. Like Franklin founding his Junto for ambitious artisans in early Philadelphia, Felton in 1802 helped to organize the Society of Social Enquirers in Marlborough, a group of twelve middling men who met monthly in order to improve themselves and their society. The group debated the amount of wealth people needed and the importance of credit in the economy; it devised a plan for reforming the town’s schools, and some of the society served on the local school committee. Nothing was more important to these middling men than “a good education.”

  Felton was a good Jeffersonian Republican. He harbored a deep resentment toward the local “priests” and “other Aristocrats,” that is, the Federalist Calvinist clergy and their lay supporters. These Federalists tried to keep people like him down and were always “discouraging Learning, among the lower Class of people.” By “lower class” he meant that large deferential majority who had lived too long under patriarchal rule. The “bigoted” and “sour-hearted” priests preached pessimistic sermons about depravity and sin and sought to destroy the kind of youthful and middling ambition that he and countless others in the North were expressing.26

  Although Felton never became very rich or famous, he did eventually become a substantial member of his modest community—a town clerk, a selectman, a justice of the peace, and a representative to the General Court for three terms. He epitomized, in other words, the kind of self-improving sort who hated the Federalists for “conspiring against reason and republicanism,” and in reaction he celebrated the dynamic and middling Northern society composed of “probably the happiest people upon the earth.”27

  Other Franklin readers were even more successful. In 1810 sixteen-year-old James Harper left his father’s farm on Long Island for New York City after reading Franklin’s Autobiography . Eventually he founded one of the most successful publishing firms in the country and became mayor of New York. Chauncey Jerome was another success story. The son of a blacksmith, he became a prosperous clockmaker in New Haven, with three hundred men in his employ, and mayor of the city; indeed, he was one of those enterprising individuals who turned Connecticut into the clockmaking center of the world. In his memoir he marveled at how far he had risen and could not help describing his arrival in New Haven in 1812 as a nineteen-year-old just as Franklin had, wandering alone “about the streets early one morning with a bundle of clothes and some bread and cheese in my hands.”28

  Franklin emerged for businessmen everywhere as the perfect model of the “self-made man,” struggling by himself to rise from humble origins in order to achieve wealth and respectability. Haughty Federalists could only shake their heads in disgust at all those vulgar sorts who had come to believe “that there was no other road to the temple of Riches, except that which runs through—Dr. Franklin’s works.”29

  The “self-made man” became such a familiar symbol for Americans that its original novelty has been lost.30 Of course, there had always been social mobility in Western society, at some times and in some places more than others. Eighteenth-century Americans had always experienced a good deal of it. But this social mobility in the past generally had been a mobility of a peculiar sort, an often sponsored mobility in which the patronized individual acquired the attributes of the social status to which he aspired while at the same time he tried to forget and disguise the lowly sources from whence he had come. As indicated by the pejorative terms—“upstarts,” “arrivistes,” “parvenus”—used to disparage those participants unable to hide their rise, social mobility traditionally had not been something to be proud of. Hamilton certainly did not brag about his obscure background; indeed, most of the Founders did not like to talk about their humble origins. But by the nineteenth century many of those new middling sorts who had risen were boasting of their lowly beginnings in imitation of Franklin. Washington Irving mocked the “outrageous extravagance” of the manners and clothes of the wife of a nouveau riche Boston tradesman. Yet Irving could not help admiring her lack of “foolish pride respecting her origins”; instead of being embarrassed by her background, she took “great pleasure in telling how they first entered Boston in Pedlars trim.”31

  Early nineteenth-century England was experiencing extensive social mobility, but it was nothing compared to the rate of upward mobility among contemporary Americans. Already, independent mobile men were bragging of their humble origins and their lack of both polish and a gentleman’s education. They had made it, they said, on their own, without family influence, without patronage, and without going to Harvard or Princeton or indeed any college at all. For many Americans the ability to make and display money now became the only proper democratic means for distinguishing one man from another.

  Of course, most Federalists were outraged by these attempts to make wealth the sole criterion of social distinction. The socially established families of Philadelphia looked down upon the nouveau riche businessman John Swanwick even though he was one of the wealthiest men of the city; they regarded him as “our Lilliputian, [who] with his dollars, gets access where without them he would not be suffered to appear.”32 Catharine Maria Sedgwick, author and daughter of an esteemed Federalist family, spoke for all of the old aristocracy when she said of the emerging nineteenth-century money-based hierarchy, “wealth, you know, is the grand leveling principle.”33

  Some of the ambitious middling sorts declared that they did not need formal educational institutions to learn about the world and get ahead. Like William Findley, they “prefer[red] common sense and common usage” to pompous theories and pretentious words picked up in college classrooms. Through newspapers, almanacs, tracts, chapbooks, periodicals, lectures, novels, and other media, those who were eager to improve themselves sought to obtain smatterings of knowledge about things that previously had been the exclusive property of college-educated elites—learning to write legibly, for example. Niles’ Weekly Register became a regular source of information for these striving middling people, and no one was a more devoted subscriber than William Findley. Near the end of Findley’s life the personal property he had accumulated was very modest, appraised at less than five hundred dollars; but it contained a large number of books, including Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, with which he had educated himself.34

  Others, however, like Jedediah Peck, who had begun their assaults on the aristocracy by ridiculin
g fancy book-learning and genteel manners, ultimately accepted the need for educational institutions. Peck, for example, eventually became the father of the common school system of New York. In the end many of the new middling sorts did not repudiate the politeness and learning of the Enlightenment; instead they popularized and vulgarized that politeness and learning and turned both into respectability. Reacting to the Federalists’ many snubs and jeers, many of the middling people began seeking to acquire some of the refinement of the aristocracy, to obtain what the leading historian of this process has nicely called “vernacular gentility.” Americans socially and culturally set about constructing what one observer astutely noted was “a most uncommon union of qualities not easily kept together—simplicity and refinement”—the very qualities that came to constitute the nineteenth-century middle class.35

  In seeking to become genteel, many of these wealthy middling sorts came to resemble the “molatto gentleman” that Benjamin Franklin had mocked—a “new Gentleman, or rather a half Gentleman, or Mungrel, an unnatural Compound of earth and Brass like the Feet of Nebuchad-nezzar’s Image.” These were the people who bought the increasing numbers of books and manuals to teach themselves manners and politeness, including various abridged editions of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son . Daniel Drake, a famous physician in the West, recalled growing up in late eighteenth-century Kentucky, where books were scarce, reading Chesterfield’s Letters, which “fell in mightily close with my tastes, and not less with those of father and mother, who cherished as high and pure an idea of duty of good breeding as any people on earth.”36 But, as one young woman recognized, in the struggles of those seeking to become refined “an easy unassuming politeness . . . is not the acquirement of a day.”37 For some of these new middlebrow Americans, buying a tea service or placing a piano in their parlor came to be the mark of being cultivated and genteel. Out of these efforts was born the middle-class Victorianism of the nineteenth century.