American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Inequality in Philadelphia was visible, palpable, inescapable. At one glance an observer could rate the social status of hired laborers wearing linen shirts and striped trousers, mechanics with their leather aprons, skilled craftsmen with their respectable, sober attire, and rich young men decked out in the latest fashions from London. The distribution of wealth was not unlike that in other American cities: by the end of the century less than a quarter of the taxpayers owned more than three-quarters of the taxable property valued at over $50; but of a labor force of more than 10,000, over 3,000 were not taxable.

  About half of Philadelphia’s working class lived at or just above subsistence levels. The results were, as usual, appalling: at least a third of Philadelphia was ill housed, ill clothed, and ill nourished. The city was divided, said a contemporary observer, into several classes of company: “the cream, the new milk, the skim milk, and the canaille.…” This loose class structure did not produce sharp class conflict, however, in part because the working poor lacked the leadership that might have aroused them to political consciousness.

  The merchants of Philadelphia were not heartless exploiters. Compared to their ilk in other American and European cities, they were in many cases unusually benevolent. This very fact, however, helped involve them in a fundamental ambiguity. They were, first of all, entrepreneurs in a city bent on enterprise and profit-making. “Under the American tradition, the first purpose of the citizen,” Sam Bass Warner, Jr., said in introducing a study of Philadelphia, “is the private search for wealth; the goal of a city is to be a community of private money makers.” But many merchants were also public men. They had invested large amounts of money and time in humanitarian endeavors—founding a university and medical college, subsidizing education for the poor, blacks, and women, establishing libraries, promoting the arts, easing the plight of prison inmates, improving health and sanitation, devoting themselves to cultural and philosophical matters, serving in public office. Not only the elites but the middle classes were trying to advance themselves: laborers to get better pay, apprentices to become journeymen, artisans to become master craftsmen who could control their own work, time, and future. So a deep concern for the public welfare pervaded much of Philadelphia. But where did the private man leave off, the public man begin?

  This question was part of a broader, more complex one. How could a community be organized to advance the general welfare while protecting individual rights—while making the pursuit of individual rights, indeed, part of the means of achieving the general welfare? As the federal men governed in Philadelphia during the 1790s, there seemed to be less time for these questions to be decided, before events would make the decision. For change was accelerating in Philadelphia. The city was experiencing the full impact of the altered economic patterns and social relations reshaped during the War of Independence. Profits were becoming bigger and more tempting in the widening economic prosperity. The city was bursting at the seams as immigrants flooded in; the black population almost doubled in the last decade of the century.

  The first question—public service versus private gain—would largely be left to the consciences of wealthy men. The second question—promoting liberty and the general welfare—occupied the best minds in Philadelphia for a century.

  In April 1789 Benjamin Franklin, who had lived through eight-and-a-half decades of that century, lay mortally ill in the bedroom of his Market Street house. Although racked by fevers and his stone, only partly dulled by opiates, he was still philosophical; “what are the pains of a moment,” he said to a friend, “in comparison with the pleasures of eternity?” Until almost the end he pursued his political inquiries; the American Philosophical Society held its meetings in his home when he could no longer even be moved into his sedan chair. And he remained the empiricist, the inquirer, the experimenter, in matters political as well as scientific. “We are, I think, in the right road of improvement,” he had said the year before the constitutional convention met in his city, “for we are making experiments.”

  Franklin and his fellow Philadelphians had conducted the most radical of political experiments ten years before, an experiment in sharp contrast with that of 1787. Inspired by the revolutionary acts against Britain in Massachusetts and angered by the conservatism of the Pennsylvania government, a group of Philadelphians early in 1776 had used their control of the militia, the committees of correspondence and public safety, and other extralegal revolutionary organizations to overthrow the authority of the Assembly. The radicals who had engineered this coup were a very different lot from the sound and substantial men who had dominated Philadelphia’s politics. Thirty-year-old Benjamin Rush led a multi-faceted life as a doctor, a professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia, and a sermonizer for temperance and exercise, and also as a political reformer, a millenarian who expected Christ’s Second Coming, and a revolutionary Christian Utopian who advocated the abolition of slavery. Forty-six-year-old Timothy Matlack was an apostate Quaker, a failed shopkeeper, a gambler, horse racer, fistfighter, bull baiter, and cockfighter whose prized bantams fought a famous match with cocks brought to Philadelphia by a New York blueblood. A habitué both of Philadelphia groggeries and of the Philosophical Society, Matlack had a remarkably wide acquaintanceship with men rich and poor, black and white. There were other notables: evangelical republicans like Christopher Marshall, artists like Charles W. Peale, deists like Thomas Young, highly skilled artisans like Owen Biddle, and the self-taught scientist David Rittenhouse. But the political and intellectual luminary was Thomas Paine.

  Born of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother in a market town seventy miles northeast of London, Tom Paine rose from apprentice to journeyman to master stay maker in only a few years, and then won a post as an excise taxer, only to be dismissed for agitating for higher pay for excisemen. Married and already separated at the age of thirty-seven, he struck out for America and a new start. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1774 with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, he had intended to establish an academy for the education of young men, but was quickly swept up in the revolutionary euphoria of the city. Soon he wrote and published Common Sense, a sweeping attack on the Crown’s interference with American trade, and a bold call to American independence. Common Sense scored an immediate success, running through twenty-five editions and selling well over 150,000 copies, an astonishing number for those days. This tract—the most brilliant written during the American Revolution and one of the most brilliant ever written in the English language, in Bernard Bailyn’s judgment—had a quick and profound impact on public opinion.

  The force of that impact was due not only to Paine’s clear and blunt language, his assault on the English monarchy, his clarion call for independence; other tracts had such qualities. The impact came from his repudiation of the established thinking of centuries on the question of liberty. For most Americans, and certainly for most Philadelphians—heirs to the fine Quaker tradition of liberality and tolerance—the great issue of the 1770s was the protection and nurturing of liberty. This was also the main principle and goal of most enlightened Englishmen. The question was how to achieve this goal without sacrificing other major values such as order, stability, and virtue.

  Englishmen of Whiggish persuasion were convinced that, after decades and centuries of thought and travail, the British constitution had come to represent the best way to achieve that goal. Drawing heavily from Greek and Roman thinkers who had affirmed the need of mixed government in order to achieve balance and harmony among social classes, the English had achieved such a balance of social power among king, lords, and commons that a political balance of power would be counterpoised among these powerful estates. Social equilibrium in short would produce political equilibrium, which in turn would prevent the kind of immoderate government that might interfere in men’s liberties. This elaborate edifice was based on the theory that men, being naturally selfish, irrational, aggressive, greedy, and lustful, had to be not only protected in their liberty from
government but protected from one another by government. The “Interest of Freedom,” Marchamont Nedham had written in the mid-1650s, “is a Virgin that everyone seeks to deflower.”

  Paine and his fellow radicals rejected this view of human nature and the Whiggish apparatus that went with it. Perhaps the people of the Old World, divided into unequal estates and corrupted by their rulers, were prone to depravity and unreason, they granted, but Americans were different. Farmers and mechanics and all others who wore “leathern aprons,” being more equal and fraternal and less grasping and competitive, were more reasonable and virtuous. Because of his faith in human nature and the perfectibility of man, as Eric Foner has said, “Paine could reject the need for governmental checks and balances.”

  What kind of system, then, did the radicals want? Simple, the radicals answered—a government directly representing the people, a government mirroring the wants of the people, a government that could act quickly to meet the needs of the people, a government constantly renewed by the people so that it would never become remote from them. Under a people’s government the people’s liberty would be secure. It was Mercy Warren’s kind of polity.

  How establish such a government? The Philadelphia radicals had scored a decisive coup by waging a grass-roots, populist campaign and thus gaining control of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention held in 1776 as part of the breakaway from Britain. Then they proceeded to write perhaps the most democratic, most directly representative constitution of the founding period. The new charter granted the right to vote to every white male over twenty-one. It abolished property qualifications for officeholding. It gave the state assembly control over the government of Philadelphia. And—by far the most important—it established a unicameral legislature, elected annually, with rotation in office. The new assembly would be open to the press and people, its votes published weekly, its records available to the public. In one sweep the colonial gentry had lost its political power.

  The implications of the radicals’ constitution were frightening to Whig and conservative alike. Any year they were so minded, a majority of the voters in Pennsylvania—perhaps a majority made up of the uneducated and the unwashed—could pass whatever laws it wished, with no power in the executive to veto or in the judiciary to void. Conservatives feared the powerful currents of egalitarianism loose in Philadelphia in this first year of independence. What if the many ganged up on the few? Did not the new constitution itself bar the imprisonment of debtors not guilty of fraud, allow people to hunt on unenclosed land, provide for schools with low fees throughout the state? What other “leveling” measures might be passed?

  The radicals rejected these fears as groundless in a free society. How could any kind of republican object to putting power squarely into the hands of the directly elected representatives of the people? Indeed, the new constitution placed a limit on the number of terms a legislator could serve; that, plus annual elections, would cause legislators to be constantly refreshed by immersion in the grass roots and thus maintain their ties to the people. And if they did, the radicals contended, the Pennsylvania legislature would be a safe depository of power because it would directly reflect and embody the people’s virtue, sense of good, concern for the whole public, willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of all. These public virtues grew out of people’s private virtues of tolerance, understanding, benevolence, enlightenment. How could an assembly representing such virtues be harmful to the public interest?

  Opponents of the new constitution flatly rejected this whole premise. They simply did not share the radicals’ faith in the people’s wisdom, virtue, and benevolence. So the radicals would lodge supreme power in the people? But any sovereign power must be guarded against; whether “that power is lodged in the hands of one or many, the danger is equally great.” The new constitution presupposed “perfect equality, and equal distribution of property, wisdom and virtue, among the inhabitants of the state.” The anti-radicals would not assume this. They argued that the people would deprive themselves of their own liberty, as well as others of theirs. Behind this contention was a deep fear of the people—of their leveling tendencies, their ignorance, their bumptiousness, their eternal desire for more.

  None expressed these doubts better than Benjamin Rush, who soon began to have reservations about the radical constitution. “Absolute power should never be trusted to man,” Rush wrote the year after adoption of the new constitution. He actually meant men, no matter how many, for there was no safety in numbers. “Although we understood perfectly the principles of Liberty,” Rush wrote in 1787, “yet most of us were ignorant of the forms and combinations of power in republics.”

  Such fears led to a relentless drive against the 1776 constitution throughout the following decade. To destroy the “constitution of the people” the anti-constitutionalists went to the people themselves. Meeting in the City Tavern to plan strategy, they organized a grass-roots effort to call a new constitutional convention. The press was enlisted; one newspaper warned that Philadelphia would not be chosen as the federal capital if the state legislature remained unicameral. The anti-constitutionalists recruited candidates for the convention, organized election tickets, and won control of the convention. Soon Pennsylvania had a new constitution, replete with separation of powers and checks and balances—most notably, with a bicameral legislature and a strong, independently elected governor.

  So Pennsylvania’s brief experiment in popular government, in majority rule, had come to an end, as did the reign of the radicals. It would live on only as a memory that might be invoked in some future era of conflict and crisis. That rule in Pennsylvania had seen no tyranny of the majority, nor had the reign of the radicals brought radical government. Property had not been confiscated, churches leveled, merchants taxed to death. Life had gone on pretty much as before. Perhaps the radicals should have changed things more fundamentally. By the time the federal government was established in Philadelphia it was too late. Pennsylvanians lived under both state and federal governments hemmed in by checks and balances. They were doubly safe against the tyranny of the people.

  But Philadelphia would be experiencing more change in the 1790s. Its population continued to expand. Craft workers started to unite in local unions. Voting participation doubled. Local political cadres began to organize grass-roots parties. For almost a decade congressmen and federal officials lived among memories of old conflicts and amid the pressures of new ones. The new conflicts challenged the Constitution of 1787, with its carefully separated powers. It remained to be seen whether a constitutional system so fragmented and inhibited could deal with rising change and conflict on a national level.

  The nation would also confront formidable power abroad—and that would raise the question whether the President of the United States would need more executive authority in dealing with prime ministers and potentates.

  QUASI-WAR ABROAD

  John Adams entered the presidency at a time when relationships with the French were rapidly deteriorating. Washington had sent James Monroe to Paris with the hope that he could reconcile the French to Jay’s treaty, but even as good a Virginia Republican as Monroe could not placate the increasingly xenophobic and bellicose French government. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had taken Monroe’s place, but Adams had been in office only ten days when he was informed that the Directory had sent Pinckney packing too. The new President had already made clear in his Inaugural Address that the government would be in peril when a single vote could be influenced by “foreign nations, by flattery or menaces; by fraud or violence; by terror, intrigue, or venality”—an obvious thrust at the likes of Genêt and Adet. Now with the rebuff to Pinckney, and more news of French seizure of American ships in the West Indies, Adams faced a dire choice between peace and war.

  He first turned to his Cabinet—a natural move, except that this was not his Cabinet but Washington’s and increasingly Hamilton’s. In order to unite Federalist ranks and strengthen himself with the Hamiltonian wing of the party,
Adams had asked Washington’s Cabinet to stay on. This meant keeping on such high Federalists as Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, a Salem lawyer and merchant as proud and haughty as the Cabots though not as rich; Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, a Connecticut farmer and banker, who had proved himself a good administrator under Washington; and Secretary of War James McHenry of Maryland. When members of the Cabinet promptly turned to Hamilton in New York for advice on how to respond to the President, he seemed more concerned with domestic Federalist party strategy than with foreign policy. Hamilton urged his friends to press for further negotiations with Paris in order to combat Republican charges that the Federalists wanted war with France. They passed on this advice as though it were their own. Assured of backing from leaders of both parties, Adams convened a special session of Congress, which he asked to enact and fund defense measures and to approve a special mission to France.