American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The main actors were true to form. Despite his sighs for Quincy, Adams desperately wished to be President, but the custom of the day allowed him to do no campaigning, so his supporters conferred with him in Quincy and then, acting mainly on their own, organized rallies, wrote campaign pamphlets, and arranged newspaper offensives. Even less active than his rival, Jefferson told Rutledge, “I have no ambition to govern men; no passion which would lead me to delight to ride in a storm.” All he wished was to plant his corn and peas “in hills or drills as I please.…” While this attitude in part was a pose, Jefferson was genuinely torn between politics and plantation, and even more, between the call of public service and his right to a private life. Few would believe it, he told his son-in-law, but he “sincerely” wished to run second in the electoral college. Yet he did not discourage his backers, among whom Burr was active in mobilizing support from Tammany Republicans in New York.

  Once again Hamilton was trying his hand at the game of “wastage” that was invited by the presidential election system. To win the game he must elect his kind of Federalist, which meant keeping Adams—and of course Jefferson—out of the presidency. His main card was any ambitious politician who could be tempted into running, and his main tactic was withholding votes from a front-runner so that his own man could come in. But he had to play a strong card, and his calculating eye first fell on Patrick Henry in Virginia. It seemed an unlikely choice, although Henry, now sixty, had mellowed in his opposition to the federal Constitution while hardening in his opposition to the Jefferson-Madison faction in Virginia politics. But ill and weary, he declined the honor, and Hamilton turned to Pinckney. Soon word was quietly going out to Federalist electors in the North to vote for Adams and Pinckney, and to electors in South Carolina to vote unanimously for the Charlestonian but waste a few of Adams’ votes. Never mind that this maneuver might elect Jefferson, defeat the richly experienced and world-famous Adams, and disrupt the Federalist party. Hamilton played his cards coolly—but perhaps too openly or obviously, for New England Federalists, playing their own game of wastage, withheld electoral votes from Pinckney.

  The result was a hairbreadth victory for Adams over Jefferson, 71 electoral votes to 68, the elevation of Jefferson to the vice-presidency—and a naked sectional split. Jefferson won not a single vote in New England, Adams only two in the South. Of the eighteen votes that Jefferson picked up north of the Potomac, fourteen came from Pennsylvania, where Republican politicians had been especially active. Most significant, twelve of the sixteen states gave their votes either wholly to Adams or wholly to Jefferson.

  The close vote and the power of section reflected a rising polarization among political leaders. In his Farewell Address, Washington inveighed against quarreling over section and party. Everyone agreed and everyone kept on quarreling. The President himself was no longer a figure above the battle. The Republican editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, Benjamin Bache—nicknamed “Lightning Rod Junior” because he was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin and liked to apply electric shocks to Federalists—charged that Washington had deceived and debauched the nation, and had taught it that “no man may be an idol” and that “the mask of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of the people.” Nor did Jefferson stay above the battle by distancing himself from the campaign. Indiscreet talk and letters on his part came to Washington’s notice; the President, angry at Jefferson’s supporters and now cooling toward his fellow Virginian, charged that every act of his administration had been tortured by the grossest misrepresentations, in terms that “could scarcely be applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pickpocket.” Citizen Adet, a new “political diplomat” from France, hardly helped matters when he appealed in the press to the American people to elect Jefferson President and make friends with France again.

  The election left the main contestants at odds—Adams furious over Hamilton’s machinations, Jefferson none too happy about having to quit Monticello to preside over the Senate, Pinckney sorely disappointed, and Burr suspicious that he had been done in by shenanigans in Virginia.

  With the coming of Inaugural Day, however, the differences were papered over, and Adams began his administration amid a glowing sense of harmony. He and Jefferson had been quoted as saying nice things about each other, and while neither believed that the other really meant them, the gestures were appreciated. Washington, profoundly happy to be returning to Mount Vernon for good, was attentive and congratulatory. Republican editors—even Bache himself—hailed Adams’ Inaugural Address, perhaps with the thought that they might draw this proud and independent man, with his hostility to high Federalists like Hamilton, into the Republican camp.

  They did not know their man. While he disliked the crass money-grubbers and speculators among the high Federalists, Adams detested even more the egalitarian Republicans with their “leveling” doctrines. Viewed as a conservative enslaved to rigid doctrine, and as a fussy, vain, self-pitying, pompous man, Adams in fact was a deeply emotional and even passionate person, almost as critical of himself as of his adversaries. He simply lacked the sublime—or sentimental—faith in the people found among so many of his fellow revolutionaries. Adams saw humankind as irredeemably quarrelsome, perverse, illogical. Still, they must govern themselves. The institutional solution was balance—balance of power among rich and poor, balance between rulers and ruled, balance between Congress and presidency, balance between order and liberty. The human solution was education, strong and selfless leadership, faith, and patience. The moral solution was private and public virtue.

  Like many of his contemporaries, Adams believed in liberty, but it was a restricted brand of liberty, limited mainly to white adult males and protected against turbulent mobs, popular majorities, crass materialists, fiscal uncertainty—and the Republican “levelers.”

  PHILADELPHIANS: THE EXPERIMENTERS

  By January 1797, when John Adams was laying plans for his presidency, the federal government had resided in Philadelphia for over six years. George Washington had created a government in New York City; at the end of the 1790s the capital would move to Washington, and there the government would create a city. But Adams inherited both a government and a city. For years members of Congress, federal judges, and bureaucrats had been living in hotels and boardinghouses, visiting Philadelphia’s historic buildings and monuments, exploring its city life. Few could escape the influence of a city noted for its cosmopolitan urban life, its heritage of philosophical debate and practical experimentation.

  Even congressmen from the great cities of New York and Boston, and from the rival city of Baltimore, could envy the spaciousness of the new federal capital. Compared with the narrow lanes and twisting alleys of other places, Philadelphia, with its broad parallel avenues and neatly laid out cross streets, was a planned city. Congressmen were well acquainted with the county courthouse, where they met in what was now renamed Congress Hall, and with the old city hall, taken over by the Supreme Court. They could visit again the Old State House (Independence Hall), where the new federal government had been conceived under its Liberty Bell in the previous decade. They could admire Franklin’s mansion on Market Street, now completed, with its ten-foot arched passageway providing direct access from the street to the courtyard, where he had built a two-story printshop and newspaper for his grandson. And they could retire after vigorous congressional debating to the City Tavern, called by John Adams the most “genteel” tavern in America. Here, in May 1774, after Paul Revere had arrived with news that Parliament had passed a bill closing down the port of Boston, a great company of Philadelphians gathered and, after a tumultuous debate, sent word to Boston asserting Philadelphia’s “firm adherence to the cause of liberty.”

  Congressmen from rural areas were plunged into the urban splendors and enticements of the second most populous city in America. Some, bringing their rustic spectacles with them and hobnobbing mainly with men from their own hinterlands, looked at city life with su
spicious eyes. Others, more willing to explore and exploit the capital, found a city bursting with intellectual activity. Philadelphians gloried especially in the subscription libraries, and if these were increasingly open to men of all classes, they were still closed to women, who had turned to reading rooms and to circulating libraries like the one established several decades earlier by William Bradford. Men of the upper and middle classes participated in the numerous scientific societies, in the spirit of the first one founded by Benjamin Franklin and joined by a glazier, a shoemaker, and a carpenter, as well as by professional men. “The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware,” a minister said some years later, “thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar.”

  Philadelphians had, indeed, long been debating a fundamental intellectual and educational issue: to what extent should students—especially poor students—be given a classical or a “practical” education? William Penn himself had complained that “we are in pain to make them scholars but not men; to talk rather than to know….We press their memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with words and rules to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two” that would never be used, while leaving uncultivated “their natural genius to mechanical, physical, or natural knowledge.” Anglican and liberal Quaker members of the city’s elite had argued for a classical education along European lines. Later, Franklin worked out a compromise on the question, only to see the Latin division of the new Academy of Philadelphia exceed the English division in popularity under the leadership of teachers like Francis Alison and William Smith. Women, blacks, and the poor were taught largely by private masters, but they could also attend night schools for working people, both male and female. Philadelphia by 1790 could claim that almost complete literacy had been achieved in the city.

  Philadelphians had formed societies for promoting agriculture and for “Encouraging the Manufacture of Useful Arts” only a few years before the city became the federal capital, and they founded the University of Pennsylvania two years afterwards. But the proudest boast of the city’s intellectuals was still the American Philosophical Society. Modeled closely on the Royal Society of London, the APS originally was a small group of scientifically minded men like Franklin, and it was overshadowed by “The American Society for Promoting and Propagating Useful Knowledge.” The two groups had competed for prestige until 1769, when they consolidated under the name of “The American Philosophical Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge.” Severely restricted during Revolutionary times, the society flourished in the postwar years and had completed building its official home, Philosophical Hall, just two years before the federal government moved to Philadelphia.

  The city was also famous for medical education. Its doctors had begun lecturing on anatomy and obstetrics in the absence of formal medical training, and later founded a medical college and a medical society. Dr. William Shippen, Jr., in 1767 established the first lying-in hospital in the colonies and offered courses in prenatal care to pregnant women. The press helped cultivate medical education; printers not only supplied information about lectures and clinical programs but published full accounts of medical discoveries that helped dispel some of the popular suspicion of physicians.

  Congressmen from single-interest districts such as tobacco-growing could marvel at the cultural variety and vigor of Philadelphia. Interest in literature had grown sharply during the prosperous middle years of the eighteenth century. English works, like those by Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith, sold well, but magazines and newspapers eagerly printed the efforts of local writers. The verses of William Smith and of the multi-talented Francis Hopkinson became well known. Since the Quakers were more interested in civic and humanitarian projects than in the fine arts, upper-class Anglicans tended to take the leadership in patronizing painting and sculpture.

  The desire of the wealthy to preserve their images for posterity prompted many a sign painter to turn portraitist, but later a more refined realism both in portraiture and in landscapes replaced the clumsier efforts of earlier days. After previous successes in London and Ireland, Gilbert Stuart in 1794 set up a studio in Philadelphia, where he made his first two life portraits of George Washington. Wealthy merchants also subsidized architecture by building country houses; architects tended to ape the Georgian style of England, but at least they adapted the style to local materials, to the stone and brick, the white pine and oak of the Philadelphia area.

  Some of the cultural offerings were scarcely highbrow. Congressmen had their choice of numerous theaters, such as the Southwark on South Street, and traveling circuses offered pantomimes and farces. Except for the Quakers, the churches had begun to use organs in their services, but popular airs and folk tunes constituted the “people’s music.” Visiting countrymen found ample opportunity for betting on horse racing and cockfights. Congressmen could be sure of invitations to levees, dancing assemblies, balls, formal dinners, card parties, and summer sojourns on country estates. Not all of them could wholly resist the “aristocratic embrace,” or wanted to.

  A vigorous and partisan press mirrored the cultural vitality of the city. During the late 1790s Philadelphia had more newspapers than any other city in the country. Typically consisting of about four medium-sized pages, they usually ran advertisements of merchandise and real estate on the front and back, along with news of departure and arrival of sailing vessels, notices of runaway slaves, stagecoach schedules, announcements of the publication of books and pamphlets. Some newspapers covered moral and religious news, printed poems and book reviews, and reported on scientific and medical discoveries. The inside pages usually carried letters from abroad and reports on state and congressional activities, with comments by the editor and by readers.

  News was not always abundant. When the federal government moved into Philadelphia the editor of the Aurora complained: “As to domestic politics, no party disputes to raise the printer’s drooping spirits; not a legislative sitting to furnish a few columns of debates, not even so much as a piece of private abuse to grace a paper—Zounds, people now have no spirit in them….Now not even an accident, not a duel, not a suicide, not a fire, not a murder.” The arrival of a President, a Cabinet, and a few dozen congressmen soon made up for some of these lacks.

  On the surface, Philadelphia did indeed appear to be tranquil. In fact, the “City of Brotherly Love” was undergoing rapid change and experiencing severe tension and conflict, and these too would affect the nation’s as well as the city’s future.

  The history of the city was shot through with contradictions. In founding the city as a “Holy Experiment” for persecuted Quakers, William Penn had made Philadelphia an open city for all believers and nonbelievers, because “no people can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridg’d of the freedom of their Consciences as to their Religious profession & Worship.” This benign open-door policy inevitably helped bring a flood of immigrants—Irish, French, Dutch, and Swedish, with their various religions and sects—to the point that the Quakers were vastly outnumbered, with the result that they protected themselves by maintaining control of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with the help of a sharply limited suffrage.

  On the whole, immigrant groups got along together reasonably well, but this was in part because they were considerably segregated, with the Mulberry and upper Delaware areas heavily populated by Quakers and Germans, and the southern areas, especially along the docks, by the Irish. A powerful tradition of tolerance persisted, but in 1770 a mob, inflamed by rumors that Dr. William Shippen had stolen bodies from a local cemetery for medical research, attacked his home. In the same year that the constitutional convention met in Philadelphia, a woman suspected of being a witch was killed by a city crowd.

  The fundamental conflict in Philadelphia, however disguised, was economic. The brotherly city was also a class-ridden one. On the top of the social and economic pyramid sat several hund
red wealthy merchants, many of whom had made their fortunes in complex triangular trading—importing and selling sugar, rum, and molasses from the slave plantations of the Caribbean, using the profits to buy manufactured goods from Britain and France, and reselling these in the city at another profit. Often these merchants maintained dockside houses that were as unimposing as their mansions in the country were elegant. Attached to this economic elite were ministers, scholars, lawyers, and other professional men. In the middle ranks of the class pyramid stood large numbers of artisans: carpenters, shipwrights, sailmakers, millers, carriage makers, blacksmiths, harness makers, tanners, tailors, boot makers, cordwainers, and others. This stratum had its own internal class structure comprising men of differently valued skills, such as those of master craftsman and ordinary artisan, of journeymen and apprentices, who often lodged in their master’s home and ate at the family table, and of women in a variety of trades and occupations. At the bottom of the pyramid were laborers, indentured servants, itinerant workers, recently arrived immigrants unable to speak English, carters, stable boys, sailors, servants, and—somewhere below but outside the pyramid—blacks.

  The condition of the blacks in particular challenged fraternal shibboleths. Black people had been part of Philadelphia’s history from the very start; indeed, W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his monumental study The Philadelphia Negro that the Dutch “had already planted slavery on the Delaware when Penn and the Quakers arrived in 1682. One of Penn’s first acts was tacitly to recognize the serfdom of Negroes by a provision of the Free Society of Traders that they should serve fourteen years and then become serfs—a provision which he himself and all the others soon violated.” Long divided over the issue, the Quakers finally condemned slavery in 1758 and later, on the eve of the Revolution, excluded slaveholders from fellowship in the Society of Friends. During the century before, the Pennsylvania legislature had passed harsh laws directed at blacks; one, providing for execution, castration, and whipping as punishments, and barring the meeting together of more than four blacks, was disallowed by the Queen in Council. Emancipation was restricted on the ground that “free negroes are an idle and slothful people” and tended to become public burdens, but free blacks were hardly better off than slaves, since competition for jobs brought them into conflict with white laborers. It was not until 1780, amid the liberating impulses of the Revolutionary War, that an act for “the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” was passed. The initial result, Du Bois noted, was widespread poverty and idleness.