American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The rich found their entertainments in formal balls and dinners, three o’clock tea parties, summer drives down Broadway to the Battery breezes. The theater, though undistinguished, attracted the socially prominent, not least George Washington. Music, equally undistinguished, was also patronized by the social elite. Peter Van Hagen, a skillful violinist who had taken political refuge from Holland, taught their children, promoted concerts, and wrote compositions for the theater. The wealthy commissioned portraits of themselves. Washington sat for the noted portraitist John Trumbull on several occasions.

  The Revolution had hardly altered old class lines. Thirty years after the British evacuated New York an observer was identifying “three distinct classes”: the first of divines, lawyers, physicians, principal merchants, and propertied persons; the second of small merchants, retail dealers, clerks, petty officials; and the third of “inferior orders of people.” Upper-class ladies advertised their standing by their dress: elaborate coiffures, costly silk gowns, hooped skirts, enormous hats. The poor found their amusements in traveling acrobats, jugglers, and comedians, in circuses, menageries, and equestrian shows, in waxworks, freaks, and “natural curiosities” from exotic places, inventors’ mechanical contrivances.

  Outdoors, people of all classes could attend horse racing near Bowery Lane, hunt small game in woods and swamps over on the west side, fish off Sandy Hook, bathe in the East and North (Hudson) rivers, take excursions to Long Island and Governors Island. On snowy winter days they could skate on Collect Pond two blocks off Broadway or ride sleds and sleighs on the rutted snow. In all seasons promoters offered fistfights and eye-gouging as attractions. Thousands attended the baiting of bulls, dogs, bears, even panthers. Gangs of young toughs, flaunting names like “Smith’s Fly” and “Broad Way,” fought one another with stones and slingshots.

  New York City in 1790 was a Federalist town. Anti-Federalists had considerable weight in state politics, with George Clinton now in his fourteenth year as governor, and a potentially strong Republican movement was organizing in New York City, but during the year and a half that the national government was headquartered in Manhattan, it was the Federalist command post of the nation. For more than a century Manhattanites had been experiencing a remarkably intensive, competitive, factious, and increasingly sophisticated political life. The New Yorkers around Washington had become expert in the Federalist style of politics. Now they had new advantages: the momentum of the new Constitution and government, the patriotic glow that surrounded Washington, a clear sense of the program and policies they wanted from the new government. These were youthful and vigorous men. Hamilton was thirty-four at the time of Washington’s inaugural, Jay forty-four, Rufus King thirty-four. They had the backing of influential newspapers, the most notable of which was John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. And the Federalists had access to money, for the city was an expanding financial center.

  The Bank of New York, founded by Hamilton and others in the mid-1780s, by 1791 was paying stock dividends of 7 percent and lending money to the city, state, and federal governments. Men of wealth were joining to found other financial institutions, as “Bancomania” began to sweep the city. Banks helped fuel a robust expansion of commerce and manufacturing in New York. Many merchant princes and shipowners lived on State Street overlooking the Battery; from their homes and offices they could watch the signal flags on top of Dongan Hills and gather the first intelligence on cargo vessels starting their passage through the Narrows. By 1790 exporters were shipping out of the city each year over $2 million worth of wheat, flour, beef and pork, furs, raw hides, lumber, and livestock.

  The habits of the New York merchants reminded a visiting English actor of his friends back home. “They breakfasted at eight or half past, and by nine were in their counting houses, laying out the business of the day; at ten they were on their wharves, with aprons round their waists, rolling hogsheads of rum and molasses; at twelve at market, flying about as dirty and as diligent as porters; at two back again to the rolling, heaving, hallooing and scribbling. At four they went home to dress for dinner; at seven, to the play; at eleven, to supper, with a crew of lusty Bacchanals who would smoke cigars, gulp down brandy, and sing, roar, and shout in the thickening clouds they created, like so many merry devils, till three in the morning. At eight, up again, to scribble, run, and roll hogsheads.…”

  Manufacturing was not far advanced in New York by 1790, but individual craftsmen turned out hats, chairs, cabinets, coaches, and rope. By 1790 a new factory on Liberty Street off Broadway employed 130 spinners and 14 weavers. One of the spinners was Samuel Slater, who soon would move to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to found the first successful cotton factory in America.

  New York City’s biggest resource, however, lay in its people, in their numbers, variety, vigor, and talents. In 1790, with a population of 33,000, New York City had overtaken Philadelphia’s 28,500 (exclusive of suburbs), thus becoming the largest city in the nation. The city was already turning into the human salmagundi of the new nation. Its numbers included about 29,700 whites, 2,400 slaves, and 1,100 “free persons other than whites.” Old Dutch families with names like Verplanck, Beekman, and Stuyvesant were still prominent in the city’s social and financial affairs. So many exiles from France had settled in Manhattan that newspapers printed some advertisements in their language. Germans and British—especially Irish—were landing by the boatload, sometimes 400 at a time, in the “slips” protruding from lower Manhattan.

  Inevitably old families, immigrants, and free black persons tended to settle in their own communities and organize their own societies. It did not take the Irish long to establish the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Black people soon formed Protestant churches of various denominations. Scots held their parades and their flings. But these were all communities, not feudal enclaves. The Dutch, to be sure, were accused of segregating themselves along the Hudson in their yellow brick houses, from which they watched the changes in the city through “rolling waves of smoke from their melancholy pipes,” and Irish Catholics experienced the usual suspicion; but New York did not yet contain a ghetto for blacks, Jews, Irish, or any other race or nationality.

  Leaders tended more to build bridges among communities than to seal them off. It was not surprising that the political and economic notables of the city were in close touch; living so closely together in the crowded city, they could hardly avoid bumping into one another in law offices, taverns, shops, or in the street. The social elite mingled at the theater, horse races, charity balls, the President’s receptions, splendid parties in their mansions. The first families were considerably interrelated. Hamilton was married to the daughter of Philip Schuyler, the general and politico who had been an inspiration for the young Hamilton. James Duane, New York’s first federal district judge, had married into the influential Livingston family, as had Postmaster General Samuel Osgood, who was also related to the Clintons. John Jay’s wife was a Livingston.

  Group leaders outside the social elite reached out to the rest of the city. Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas not only led the Jewish community but had served as a Columbia College trustee and a leader in education. Another Seixas helped found the New York Stock Exchange. Free blacks in Manhattan had built their own church and congregation and Samuel Fraunces, a West Indian, opened the tavern bearing his name. At Fraunces’ Tavern General Washington had bidden farewell to his officers after the Revolution. “Black Sam,” as Philip Freneau called him, won such a reputation as a good manager and as a connoisseur of wine that President Washington installed him in his Manhattan household as steward. Fraunces’ daughter Phoebe became the Washingtons’ housekeeper. She was lucky; aside from socially prominent ladies who were active in charity, most women found few channels of opportunity or influence.

  A nondescript, two-story “Wigwam” on Broad Street was doubtless the best mixing place in Manhattan for all but the most fashionable. Here met the Society of St. Tammany. Founded hardly two weeks after Washington’s inaugur
ation, Tammany at this time was a benevolent and fraternal organization dedicated to liberty, patriotism, and republicanism. Its goals, a New York newspaper reported, were “the smile of charity, the chain of friendship, and the flame of liberty.” While the society attracted both Federalists and anti-Federalists, it was a clear reaction against the high Federalists and the detested Cincinnati, a fraternal society of Revolutionary officers, who retaliated by dubbing the Wigwam the “Pig Pen.”

  In place of social distinctions—or was it to mock them?—Tammany leaders took the titles of Grand Sachem, Sagamore (master of ceremonies), and Wiskinskie (doorkeeper). Men of the middle and working classes were welcome as members; if ex-officers dominated the Cincinnati, former enlisted men found a haven in the Wigwam. Fraternity was embellished in strong drink, but Tammany’s sons loved above all to parade. Wearing buck tails in their hats as symbols of liberty, often sporting full Indian regalia and war paint, the tribes marched to public ceremonies in solemn procession. On initiating new members the brothers sang out their credo:

  Sacred’s the ground where

  Freedom’s found,

  And Virtue stamps her name;

  Our hearts entwine at Friendship’s shrine,

  And Union fans the flame.…

  Tradesmen were especially active in Tammany. The first Grand Sachem, William Mooney, was a paperhanger and upholsterer. Another charter member, John Stagg, served as president of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. Lacking unions or any kind of working-class organization, mechanics and laborers might join Stagg’s society or Tammany, but neither was politically militant in 1790. Workers probably found more rousing republican talk at one of their favorite taverns, Martling’s on Nassau Street.

  Cincinnati and Tammany, white and black, Quaker and Jew, merchant and tough—all these were New Yorkers. Somehow, in fine mansions and reeking grog houses, amid a jungle of crooked streets, shop fronts, hitching posts, refuse piles, dingy stoops, amid the sledges and derricks and carts and barrows of construction sites, amid the smells of hogs and goat manure and outhouses, and out of the pushing and hauling of ambitious legislators, aroused interest groups, rival factions, elitist manipulations—the government of a young republic emerged. It is impossible to measure the effect of its New York environment on the nature of that new government. But it must have been of some significance that the men who were drawing up new tariffs, spending, taxing, banking, and other financial measures lived, worked, and played cheek by jowl with merchants, financiers, shipowners, tradesmen, ferry and stagecoach operators, real estate speculators, commodities investors, importers and exporters—of some significance, in short, that the new government was born in a bawling, innovative, expansive, competitive society, in an ugly-beautiful, capitalistic and cosmopolitan environment.

  THE FEDERALIST THRUST

  Washington’s travels had brought him face to face with tens of thousands of his fellow citizens. His magisterial appearance, his clothes and equipage, his superb presence in ceremonial situations, and above all, his ability to seem to hover far above the squalid politics of party and parochialism—all this delighted many Americans and alarmed others. Among the most pleased was John Adams, who had a profound, even philosophical faith in “the efficacy of pageantry.” Ceremony was necessary to secure the authority and dignity of government; but even more, the people wanted it. Even in the meanest families, Adams said, “you will find these little distinctions, marks, signs, and decencies which are the result of nature, feeling, reason which are policy and government in their places as much as crowns and tiaras, ceremonies, titles, etc., in theirs.”

  Washington wanted government—especially this new, frail, vulnerable government—to be respectable and dignified. It was for this reason, and because he appeared increasingly to enjoy display for its own sake, that he drove about Manhattan with a carriage and six cream-colored horses; kept fourteen white servants and seven slaves in his house on Broadway; put on large and elaborate dinners, with powdered lackeys standing by; ordered champagne and claret by the dozens of dozens. Occasionally he rode about town on a white steed with leopard-skin housing and saddlecloth bound in gold.

  The President and his fellow Federalists held full command of the government, substantive as well as symbolic. At least half of the members of the first Congress had taken part in forming and adopting the Constitution; over half the members of the 1787 convention were serving as administrators, legislators, or judges in the new government. These men were not Federalists in a formal or party sense; they were Federalists because they had wanted a government that could act quickly and decisively for the whole nation, especially in promoting banking, commerce, and industry. What they had conceived in the summer of ’87 they now wished to nurture, to provide with flesh and bone.

  This was the work not of one man, not of Washington or Hamilton or Madison alone, but of a large fraternity. They had their differences; some were more concerned with commerce, others with banking and credit, others with manufacture. Later, these and other differences would harden and deepen. But now the leaders were united on the need for rapid economic development of the new nation. And they had the votes in both the first and second sessions of the Congress.

  James Madison had made economic policy the very first order of business in the first session when on April 8, 1789—three weeks before the nation even had a President—he stood up in the House of Representatives and called for an economy that was balanced, equitable, and above all independent of control by other nations. For these ends, and also to raise badly needed revenue, and to promote manufacturing, he proposed an elaborate system of duties. Those first tariff measures—like countless others that would follow in the next two centuries—aroused a furious and interminable debate. Senators and representatives sprang to the protection of their local interests. Rum, beer, molasses, sugar, cocoa, coffee suddenly became hot political items, as tea had been sixteen years before. In jousting with some of his old comrades and with rising young men such as Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, in coping with faction in the House, and in facing up to the opposition of the Senate, Madison the practical legislative leader was also confronting Madison the “speculative philosopher” who had led in fashioning a federal government of limited, balanced, and checked powers.

  Throughout the first year of Congress members were clamoring to get on with the major task of securing the credit of the new United States. Public creditors, especially in Pennsylvania, were demanding support of the national credit, and a committee of sixteen in the House backed them up. This was all the encouragement needed by Hamilton, who had become Secretary of the Treasury in mid-September 1789, to prepare reports on the broadest dimensions of the American economy. Hamilton saw a vital need to honor debts, quicken the national economy through expanded currency and credit, and strengthen the Union by giving businessmen, as well as the educated and professional persons, a vested interest in the political and financial strength of the new government.

  As lively, generous, and charming as ever, at least within his own circle, Hamilton continued to impress his fellow politicians with his habit of command, his eloquence, his darting imagination, his ability to stick to principle despite concessions to expediency. He had not only an instinct for leadership but a theory of it. He believed that the leader must risk and dare, venture and strive; that great men could influence history; that the mass of people could not act on their own, but only in response to forceful initiatives and bold innovations from a few men; that in his own case, he could lead best not by appealing to the masses—an idea he detested—but by galvanizing his immediate followers, who in turn would carry his purposes and ideas to the people. Hamilton was the supreme political venturer; consciously or not, a biographer noted, he seemed to follow Machiavelli’s case for boldness: “for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly.” Hence fortune
, like a woman, was a friend to the young, because they mastered her with greater ferocity. And Hamilton was young.

  Certainly his Report on Public Credit was audacious. Not only did he repudiate the idea of repudiating the debt, on the ground that failure to repay was a rejection of public morality and an invitation to anarchy or despotism. He also proposed that the federal government assume the states’ debts contracted during the Revolution, as well as those of the Confederation. And—most provocative of all—he urged that those presently holding securities, rather than the original buyers, be compensated. Thus the foreign and domestic debt would be funded at par, allowing creditors to swap depreciated securities for new interest-bearing bonds at face value. The bearers of these securities had a property right in them, Hamilton said, as in “their houses or their lands, their hats or their coats.” Hamilton had not dreamed up his proposals out of his fertile imagination alone. He had drawn heavily from European and especially British experience, from the writings of philosophers and economists, from extensive correspondence with other leaders, including James Madison. He had won the backing of the President, who had commended the resolve for support of the public credit in his January message to Congress.

  It was not enough. The House of Representatives was so dubious about the forthcoming report, and so wary of Hamilton’s persuasiveness with a small body of his peers, that he was not permitted to introduce the report in person, or to answer questions. Soon his proposal to pay off current securities holders was opening partly healed wounds. All the old fears of a dominating national government, of a moneyed elite, of a paradise for speculators, were revived. It was the people against the money men. “America, sir,” cried James Jackson of Georgia, “will not always think as is the fashion of the present day; and when the iron hand of tyranny is felt, denunciations will fall on those who, by imposing this enormous and iniquitous debt, will beggar the people and bind them in chains.” For weeks a steaming debate occupied the House. Hamilton, always the realist, could not have been surprised by a revival of the old issues that had divided Federalists and anti-Federalists. But he was astonished when Madison—Madison, his collaborator on the Federalist; Madison, his partner in conceiving and setting up the new government—turned against major parts of his report. A “perfidious desertion” of principles Madison had sworn to defend, this seemed to Hamilton. But the two men had been drawn into different political and philosophical orbits since the days of the Federalist; they now held clashing views over the nature, role, and scope of government.