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

by Gordon S. Wood

  Honor—that aristocratic sense of reputation—decreased in significance for the new middle-class society. Except for the South and the military, which retained many aristocratic values, the concept of honor was attacked as monarchical and anti-republican. As honor came under assault, so too did dueling, which was the special means by which gentlemen protected their honor. Although Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in 1804 in a duel led to much condemnation of the practice, it was the spread of egalitarian sentiments that most effectively undermined it. When even servants began challenging others to duels, many gentlemen realized that the code of honor had lost its cachet.

  As Tocqueville later pointed out, Americans, in the North at least, came to replace aristocratic honor with middle-class morality. Virtue lost much of the rational and stoical quality befitting the antique heroes the Revolutionary leaders had emulated. Temperance—that self-control of the passions so valued by the ancients and one of Cicero’s four cardinal virtues—became mainly identified with the elimination of popular drunkenness—”a good cause,” declared the Franklin Society for the Suppression of Intemperance in 1814, in which “perseverance and assiduity seldom fail of securing the denied object.” The hustling entrepreneur Parson Weems labeled a republic “the best government for morals,” by which he mainly meant “the best remedy under heaven against national intemperance”; it “imparts a joy that loathes the thought of drunkenness.”38

  If indeed the Americans had become one homogeneous people and the people as a single estate were all there was, then many Americans now became much more willing than they had been in 1789 to label their government a “democracy.” At the time of the Revolution, “democrat” had been a pejorative term that conservatives leveled at those who wanted to give too much power to the people; indeed, Federalists identified democracy with mobocracy, or, as Gouverneur Morris said, “no government at all.” “Simple democracy,” declared a Federalist editor in 1804, was even more abhorrent than “simple monarchy.” Even Madison in Federalist No. 10 had said that pure democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they been violent in their deaths.”39

  But increasingly in the years following the Revolution the Republicans and other popular groups, especially in the North, began turning the once derogatory terms “democracy” and “democrat” into emblems of pride. Even in the early 1790s some contended that “the words Republican and Democratic are synonymous” and claimed that anyone who “is not a Democrat is an aristocrat or a monocrat.”40 The Democratic-Republican Societies disappeared, but their name lingered on; and soon many of the Northern Republicans began labeling their party the Democratic-Republican party. Early in the first decade of the nineteenth century even neutral observers were casually referring to the Republicans as the “Dems” or the “Democrats.”41

  With these Democrats regarding themselves as the nation, it was not long before people began to challenge the traditional culture’s aversion to the term “democracy.” “The government adopted here is a DEMOCRACY,” boasted the populist Baptist Elias Smith in 1809. “It is well for us to understand this word, so much ridiculed by the international enemies of our beloved country. The word DEMOCRACY is formed of two Greek words, one signifies the people, and the other the government which is in the people. . . . My Friends, let us never be ashamed of DEMOCRACY!”42

  In 1816 many members of Congress discovered just how powerful the people in this democracy could be. In March of that year Congress passed a Compensation Act, which raised the pay of congressmen from six dollars per diem to a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. The vote in the House was eighty-one to sixty-seven, and in the Senate, twenty-one to eleven—with both Federalists and Democratic-Republicans on both sides of the vote. Congress had not received a raise since 1789 and had repeatedly complained that the per diem set at the beginning of the government was no longer adequate. Robert Wright, a Maryland congressman and former governor of the state, argued in the House that in the old days the representatives “lived like gentlemen, and enjoyed a glass of generous wine, which cannot be afforded at this time for the present compensation.”43

  Some analysts figured out that the new salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year came out to be about twelve dollars a day: Congress had thus doubled its pay. The press, both Federalist and Democratic-Republican, picked up on the issue and fanned the passions of people to heights rarely seen. Kentucky congressman Richard M. Johnson declared that “the poor compensation bill excited more discontent” than any other bill or event in the history of the young Republic—more “than the alien or sedition laws, the quasi war with France, the internal taxes of 1798, the embargo, the late war with Great Britain, the Treaty of Ghent, or any other one measure of the Government.” Jefferson agreed. “There has never been an instance before of so unanimous an opinion of the people,” he observed, “and that through every State in the Union.”44 If he had still been president, he said, he might have vetoed the bill. Earlier he had pointed out that the “drudgery” of office and the bare “subsistence” provided for officeholders in a republic were “a wise & necessary precaution against the degeneracy of the public servants.” Such parsimonious views, which were actually aristocratic in nature, had inevitably increased Jefferson’s popularity among Republican plebeians who resented paying taxes to pay for what seemed to be the high salaries of their public officials.45

  Now the people had a chance to make their resentment felt. Throughout the country public meetings composed of both political parties denounced the law that had raised the salaries of congressmen. Several state legislatures along with Fourth of July orators bitterly condemned it. Glasses were raised in criticism; the compensation law, noted one New York editor, was “toasted until it is black.” In Georgia opponents even burned the members of Congress in effigy.46

  Critics of the raise were especially incensed at Congressman Wright’s indiscreet comment about not being able to enjoy a good glass of wine and cited it over and over to great effect. Popular outrage was unprecedented, and the reputation of Congress was severely tarnished. Even congressmen who had voted against the law had to promise humbly to work to repeal it and to return the salary they had already received. In the fall elections of 1816 nearly 70 percent of the Fourteenth Congress was not returned to the Fifteenth Congress. In January 1817 a chastened lame-duck Fourteenth Congress met to debate the issue of exactly what representation meant, and by and large it determined that the people had every right to instruct their congressmen. At this session, the last of his long career as a congressman, William Findley spoke passionately about the need to pay the people’s representatives adequately. Ordinary middling people like him, who “have to support their families by their industry in any occupation,” needed more than just enough money to cover their expenses. “Agreeable to all the principles of our government,” said Findley, in summing up his view of representation that he had promoted from the beginning of his career, “all classes, and all interests ought to be represented in Congress. . . . The wages might be made so low that but one class, viz.: the wealthy who could afford the expense, and did not depend on their own personal industry would serve. But this,” he said, in defense of the middling world he had helped create, “would change the nature of our government.”47 Despite Findley’s plea for a decent salary, Congress at the end of the session repealed the Compensation Act but left it to the next Congress to set the members’ pay, which it eventually did at eight dollars a day.

  The issue marked an important point of transformation in American politics. It was “productive of good,” declared the Republican National Intelligencer, “in so far as it has been the means of teaching the Representatives of the people a lesson of accountability, which will not be soon forgotten.”48 Congress was not to be a deliberative body set apart from the people; the representatives were not to stand above t
he people making impartial judgments as wise umpires in order to promote some abstract good. It was as the comte de Volney had said in his radical book, Ruins, which so enthralled Jefferson: Just as the enlightened wanted no mediators between themselves and God—no priests—so too did good republicans want no mediators between themselves and their rulers. Instead, congressmen and other officials were to be simply temporary agents of those who elected them, and they were bound to adhere as closely as possible to the will of their constituents.49

  A new era in popular democratic politics had clearly emerged, and new modern politicians like Martin Van Buren realized that they could no longer rely on the elitist ideas of the Founders. For all of their greatness, those Founders, Van Buren said, had possessed many fears, fears of democracy that popular American experience since 1800 had laid to rest.

  IN THIS DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY heroic individuals, like the Founders, no longer mattered as much as they had in the past. What counted was the mass of ordinary people, with the term “mass” being used positively for the first time in reference to “almost innumerable wills” acting to create a process that no one of them clearly intended. No country in history ever resembled the United States “in the points of greatness, complexity, and the number of its relations,” declared the North American Review in 1816. It was a country so caught up in shifting currents, “rapid, powerful, accumulated in the mass, and uncertain in . . . direction,” that it was “scarcely possible for the mind to fix upon any . . . ground of policy or just calculation” of what to do. America was in the hands of “Providence,” and this traditional religious term now became identified with “progress” and with the natural principles of society created by the mass of busy people following their individual desires free from all sorts of artificial restraints, especially those imposed by government.50

  As people became more confident that the social process was naturally progressive, earlier talk of the successive stages of social development tended to fall away, and people became less and less worried about entering the advanced commercial stage of the civilizing process. America was unique, declared Republican Nathaniel Cogswell in 1808. It “possesses all the excellencies of the ancient and modern Republics, without their faults,” said Cogswell, whom the Federalists tried to mock as “one of Mr. Jefferson’s idolators” and “proselytes to democracy.” “It possesses, if I may so express myself, the seeds of eternal duration.” America, said recent Harvard graduate Pliny Merrick in 1817, would never suffer the fate of Greece and Rome. Its political institutions were “susceptible of infinite improvement,” said Merrick, who went on to a distinguished legal career in Massachusetts; they “will endure unhurt by the ravages of time, and . . . future ages will be their witness, that ‘decay’s effacing fingers’ are too feeble to crush their massive columns!”51

  With new progressive conceptions of the social process, educated and reflective observers found it increasingly difficult to hold to the eighteenth-century conspiratorial notion that particular individuals were directly responsible for all that happened. The kind of conspiratorial thinking that lay behind the Bavarian Illuminati scare in the 1790s, for example, no longer had quite the same appeal for many educated ministers and Yale professors. Conspiratorial interpretations of events—attributing complicated concatenations of events to the motives of particular individuals—still thrived (witness the popularity of the “slave power conspiracy”), but with the spread of scientific thinking about society many of these sorts of conspiratorial interpretations began to seem increasingly primitive and quaint.52

  Changing their conception of how things happened in society was only one of many transformations Americans experienced in the early nineteenth century. Although nature had been important to liberally educated eighteenth-century Americans, it was not America’s wilderness or its landscape the Revolutionary gentlemen of the Enlightenment had sought to celebrate. Instead, they had honored the natural order of a Newtonian universe that transcended all national boundaries. In 1789 geographer Jedidiah Morse had seen nothing special, just “curious,” in Niagara Falls; instead of the wilds of nature, Morse, like most enlightened eighteenth-century Americans, had admired well-laid-out villages and productive land. The British immigrant artist William Strickland likewise had known the difference between civilization and nature, and, speaking for the enlightened everywhere in the eighteenth century, he had wanted no part of raw nature. In 1794 Strickland had told people back in Britain that he went “about 50 miles beyond Albany, just sufficiently near the verge of barbarism to give me an idea of the country in a state of nature which having once seen I feel not the least inclination to revisit.”53

  By the early nineteenth century, however, artists were changing their view of the untamed landscape. They were beginning to explore the wilds and forests of America and to paint what they now called the sublime grandeur of nature, including Niagara Falls. “Do not our vast rivers,” declared Joseph Hopkinson to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1810, “vast beyond the conception of the European, rolling over immeasurable space, with the hills and mountains, the bleak wastes and luxuriant meadows through which they force their way, afford the most sublime and beautiful objects for the pencil of the Landscape?” The wilderness was no longer a source of fear and revulsion; it had become a source of admiration and pleasure. Indeed, some even began “lamenting the melancholy progress of improvement” and the “savage hand of cultivation.”54

  The Enlightenment was passing in other ways as well. All of the learned and scientific societies formed in the period, from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780 to the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York in 1814, rested on the eighteenth-century assumption that science or learning (the two were equated) was what distinguished cultivated gentlemen from savages and made them citizens of the world. For the enlightened members of these societies, science was cosmopolitan, taxonomic, and contemplative. The study of nature raised man “above vulgar prejudice” and enabled him “to form just conceptions of things.” It expanded “his benevolence,” extinguished “everything mean, base, and selfish in his nature,” gave “a dignity to all his sentiments,” and taught “him to aspire to the moral perfections of the great author of all things.”55

  This sort of enlightened contemplative science was not supposed to be connected too closely to the nitty-gritty of life. Although Jefferson had always emphasized that knowledge in the New World should be useful and applicable to “the common business of life,” he was appalled by the idea that medical research might go on in hospitals. As far as he was concerned, hospitals were charitable institutions for the sick and the destitute, not places for science. Utility was important for eighteenth-century enlightened science but not all-encompassing. “The cultivation of knowledge, like the cultivation of virtue, is its own reward,” declared DeWitt Clinton, in one of the last echoes of the Enlightenment’s impulse. By 1814 not only had classical virtue become a behaviorist morality for the American masses, but enlightened knowledge was no longer its own reward: it had become an everyday instrument for the promotion of American prosperity.56

  By the early nineteenth century, scientists, under pressure to explain their serene detachment from the world, were strenuously subverting the Enlightenment for the sake, in the words of Dr. Thomas Ewell, of “the dignity of independence and the glory of usefulness” and urging each other to turn their backs on the generalities of European science in the name of American particularities.57 The contemplative and cosmopolitan sciences of the eighteenth century, physics and astronomy, now gave way to the more vital and patriotic sciences of biology and chemistry.

  The eighteenth-century abstractions of the Enlightenment no longer seemed relevant. As the Jeffersonian chemist and émigré from England Thomas Cooper declared in 1817, “The days of metaphysical philosophy when the learned argued from generals to particulars . . . are gone by.” Knowledge was acquired from the bottom up and could no longer deal “in abstract propositions” and b
e the exclusive business of the learned, elevated few; it belonged to everyone and had to enter “into our everyday comforts and conveniences.” Cooper even justified the study of chemistry for its usefulness in the preparing and marinating of food.58

  He was not alone in this desire to give chemistry a down-home usefulness, a peculiarly American desire that British critics enjoyed mocking. Jefferson urged Cooper to apply his chemistry “to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the making of bread, butter, cheese, soap, to the incubation of eggs, etc.” John Adams agreed. He told John Gorham, professor of chemistry at Harvard, that chemists ought to forget about “deep discovery” and instead concentrate on giving “us the best possible bread, butter, cheese, wine, beer, and cider.”59

  In its search for some sort of foundation in the popular mass, science kept sinking into curiosity-hunting and gimmickry. Charles Willson Peale, despite his devotion to the taxonomic and contemplative majesty of the natural world, nevertheless loved novelties and used all sorts of amusements to attract customers to his museum. He eventually resorted to hiring a popular musical performer who played five different instruments simultaneously, using all parts of his body. Following Peale’s death the museum passed into the enterprising hands of P. T. Barnum, becoming part of his traveling circus—a romantic ending for an Enlightenment institution.

  Others too had sought in a good Enlightenment manner to find a taxo-nomic principle under which a multitude of phenomena could be gathered. Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill thought he had discovered an element, which he called septon, that was the cause of decay and of most diseases, including cancer, leprosy, scurvy, and ringworm. But no physician went as far as Dr. Benjamin Rush in seeking the universal theory that would purge medicine of its complexities and mysteries.