American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  It was obvious that men in fact—much less women and children—were most unequal in their conditions at birth and that they remained unequal in intellectual and physical endowment, economic status, intelligence, appearance, and social rank, though a few fought their way out of poverty to high position, and a few of the undeserving stumbled down the primrose path to inferior rank and disgrace. As in the case of liberty, few Americans asked the tough explicit questions about the meaning of equality: What kind of equality—legal, political, economic, social? Equality to be achieved how—by the natural workings of the social and economic order, by religious teachings, by the deliberate intervention of the community, perhaps even through government? And above all, equality for whom? All men, rich and poor? Between men and women? Between adults and children? Equality for Indians, immigrants, aliens? Equality for black people?

  By the 1790s, slavery had become a peculiarly southern phenomenon. Most of the northern and central states had abolished it by legislative or judicial action. Not that the freedmen enjoyed much liberty or equality; they were usually denied their political and social rights, and discriminated against. “But when we compare them to the slaves of the South,” a French traveler had observed, “what a difference we find!—In the South, the Blacks are in a state of abjection difficult to describe.” Nine out of ten Afro-Americans lived in the South, and almost all of these—about 96 percent—were enslaved. Accounting for over a third of the South’s population, they outnumbered whites in many southern counties, though in no southern states.

  Afro-Americans were better off in the upper South than the lower, under more affluent planters, in prosperous times. In a miniature class system encouraged by the masters, household workers and artisans were usually better treated than field hands, and men better than women, because often women not only worked from sunup to sundown in the fields but also were responsible for their families’ cooking and parenting. Conditions on the plantations of even the “better” masters could be harsh. Washington resorted to the whip to maintain order, and a Polish poet visiting Mount Vernon in 1798 found the “negroes’ huts…far more miserable than the poorest of the cottages of our peasants.” In general, the life of the enslaved Afro-American was nasty, poor, brutish, and often short.

  But even aside from the enslaved, life under the new republic was heavily inegalitarian, even by late-eighteenth-century standards in America and Western Europe. Gross differences among men abounded in income, property, education, speech, and social status. Women lay outside the pale. Custom, men’s attitudes, the English common-law heritage, and the teachings of the Protestant churches overwhelmed the efforts of the few women conscious of this inequality. Abigail Adams was one of them. “I will never consent,” she wrote her sister, “to have our sex considered in an inferior point of light. Let each planet shine in their own orbit. God and nature designed it so—if man is Lord, woman is Lordess—that is what I contend for.” It was about the same time that John Adams wrote his son Thomas: “The source of revolution, democracy, Jacobinism…has been a systematical dissolution of the true family authority. There can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mothers and children to the father.” But he asked Thomas to keep these words from his mother. If she heard of his views, he said, it would “infallibly raise a rebellion.”

  Liberté, égalité—the third great value in the revolutionary war cry of the 1790s was fraternité. The idea of fraternity—of a close bond based on fellowship, affection, shared goals, mutuality of interest, and loyalty—was by no means new to Americans, whether of Pilgrim or recent immigrant stock. But those who aped the latest Parisian fashion and addressed one another as “Citizen” or “Citizeness” did not always understand the true meaning of fraternity or its relationship to the two other norms in the revolutionary trinity. In fact, the three ideas could clash with one another as well as reinforce one another. “I love liberty, and I hate equality,” the corrosive John Randolph of Roanoke exclaimed, and this sentiment was backed by many Americans who saw the two concepts as opposites. In practice, it is true, the three values could be mutually reinforcing, depending on their definition and application; but explicit definition of this kind of value was not in intellectual fashion in the 1790s.

  Even if it were, and even though the revolutionary trinity had considerable kindling power among leaders of the new republic, the three great symbols were still not enough for many Americans. They groped for something more, for some loftier myth or purpose that would transcend the Lockean heritage of individualism and narrow equality. This myth was religious, ethical, spiritual; the purpose was to rise above self-interest and to take part in a collective effort of mutual help, fellowship, citizenship, community. The impetus was frankly religious and moralistic, even in a republic that had disestablished religion. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” Washington asserted in his Farewell Address, “Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them.”

  Two things were necessary to create the republic of virtue, one of them obvious at the time, the other less clear. The first was education. “The Knowledge nesecary for every freeman to have is A Knowledge of Mankind,” William Manning wrote in his tract, and “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” but the tavernkeeper added that the few were “always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national acadimyes & grammer schools, in ordir to make places for men to live without work,” but were always opposed to “cheep schools and woman schools, the only or prinsaple means by which learning is spred amongue the Many.” The other great requisite was leadership—the kind of leadership that, after meeting and hence extinguishing men’s basic wants and needs, could raise followers to higher levels of need and value—to levels of individual self-expression and self-actualization, of collective equality, dignity, and justice, of civic virtue and ethical commitment. Such leadership was lacking in the second half of the decade of the 1790s.

  These early Americans, to be sure, had enormous energy and boundless optimism. They labored, each for himself, in the vineyard of liberty. But a vineyard, in eighteenth-century usage, was also a sphere of moral activity, and the new century might tell whether these Americans were laboring only for themselves, or also for humankind.

  SHOWDOWN: THE ELECTION OF 1800

  On the eve of the last year of the century, American leaders were intent more on political prospects than moral. The looming national elections were tending to focus their minds. The decisive figure in this election would be Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson hardly appeared decisive at the time. His political course during the late 1790s had mirrored the political uncertainties and party gropings of those years. Tentatively he looked for some kind of North-South combination.

  “If a prospect could be once opened upon us of the penetration of truth into the eastern States; if the people there, who are unquestionably republicans, could discover that they have been duped into the support of measures calculated to sap the very foundations of republicanism, we might still hope for salvation,” Jefferson had written Aaron Burr some weeks after Adams’ inauguration in 1797. “…But will that region ever awake to the true state of things? Can the middle, Southern and Western States hold on till they awake?” He asked Burr for a “comfortable solution” to these “painful questions.”

  Immensely flattered, Burr requested an early meeting with the Vice-President in Philadelphia. Jefferson now became more active as party leader, working closely with Madison in Virginia and with Gallatin in the House of Representatives. Following the election setbacks to Republicans in 1798, he redoubled his efforts especially as a party propagandist. He asked every man to “lay his purpose & his pen” to the cause; coaxed local Repub
lican leaders into writing pamphlets and letters to editors; stressed the issues of peace, liberty, and states’ rights; turned his office into a kind of clearinghouse for Republican propaganda. “The engine is the press,” he told Madison.

  Hundreds of other men too were busy with politics, but like Jefferson earlier, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense. Intellectual leaders—clergymen, editors, and others—were still preaching against the whole idea of an open, clear-cut party and election battle. Party formations were still primitive in many areas. Even fiercer than the conflict between Federalists and Republicans was the feuding between factions within the parties—especially between the Adams following and the Hamilton “cabal.” Certain high Federalists were hinting at the need for armed repression of the opposition, particularly in the event of war, and Jefferson and Madison were openly pushing the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions—a strategy of nullification and even secession still in flat contradiction to the idea of two-party opposition and rotation in power. All these factors enhanced the most pressing question of all—could the American republic, could any republic, survive a decisive challenge by the “outs” to the “ins”? Or would ballots give way to bullets?

  Not intellectual theorizing but heated issues, fierce political ambitions, and the practical need to win a scheduled national election compelled the political testing of 1800.

  In Philadelphia, John Adams contemplated the coming test with apprehension and anger. Political and personal affairs had gone badly for him since the euphoria of ’98. Abigail was ill a good part of the time, and his beloved son Charles, a bankrupt and an alcoholic, was dying in New York. As proud, captious, sensitive, and sermonizing as ever, he hated much of the day-to-day business of the presidency, and he longed to take sanctuary in Quincy; but he desperately wanted to win in 1800, to confound his enemies, to complete his work. He tried to lend some direction and unity to the Federalists, but he was handicapped by his concept of leadership as a solitary search for the morally correct course, regardless of day-to-day pressures from factions and interests. He sensed, probably correctly, that his party should take a more centrist course to win in 1800. But his own moderate positions on foreign and domestic policy left him isolated between high Federalists and moderate Republicans.

  The Fries “rebellion” epitomized his difficulty. A direct federal tax on land and houses, enacted by Congress in 1798, touched off the next winter an uprising by several hundred Pennsylvanians—and especially by the women, who poured scalding water on assessors who came to measure their windows. John Fries, a traveling auctioneer, led a band of men to Bethlehem, where they forced the release of others jailed for resisting the tax. The President promptly labeled the act treasonable and ordered Fries and his band arrested. Unlucky enough to be tried before Justice Samuel Chase, the auctioneer was convicted of treason and, amid great hubbub, sentenced to die. Later the President, without consulting his Cabinet, pardoned Fries—only to arouse the fury of high Federalists. Not the least of these was Alexander Hamilton, who, his biographer says, would have preferred to load the gibbets of Pennsylvania with Friesians and viewed the pardon as one more example of Adams’ petulant indecisiveness.

  By the spring of 1800 Adams’ wrath against the Hamiltonians in his Cabinet—especially Pickering and McHenry—was about to burst out of control. Politically the President faced a dilemma: he wished to lead the Federalists toward the center of the political spectrum, in order to head off any Republican effort to pre-empt the same ground, but he feared to alienate the high Federalists and disrupt his party when unity was desperately needed. His uncertainty and frustration only exacerbated his anger. One day, as he was talking with McHenry about routine matters, his anger boiled over. He accused the frightened McHenry to his face of being subservient to Hamilton—a man, he went on, who was the “greatest intriguant in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin.” Adams accepted McHenry’s resignation on the spot. A few days later he demanded that Pickering quit. When the Secretary of State refused, Adams summarily sacked him. Oddly, he did not fire Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott, who was Hamilton’s main conduit to the high Federalists in Adams’ administration.

  Thomas Jefferson, watching these events from his vice-presidential perch, had the advantage of being close to the government, if not inside it, with little of the burden of power and none of the responsibility. By early 1800 he was emerging clearly as the national leader of the Republicans. Gone were the doubts and vacillations of earlier days. He was eager to take on the “feds,” as he called them, to vanquish their whole philosophy and practice of government, to establish his party and himself in control of Congress and the presidency. He consciously assumed leadership of his party. Unable to campaign across the country—stumping was contrary to both his own nature and the custom of the day—he cast political lines into key areas through letters and friends.

  His meeting with Burr paid off handsomely. The dapper little New Yorker set to work uniting New York Republicans against the divided Federalists. Then he organized his lieutenants tightly on a ward-by-ward basis; had the voters’ names card-indexed, along with their political background, attitudes, and need for transportation on election day; set up committees for house-to-house canvassing for funds; pressed more affluent Republicans for bigger donations; organized rallies; converted Tammany into a campaign organization; debated Hamilton publicly; and spent ten hours straight at the polls on the last day of the three-day state election. He won a resounding victory in the election of state assemblymen—and got full credit for it from Republican leaders in Philadelphia.

  The New York victory buoyed Jefferson’s hopes. He recognized the critical role of the central states, and how they hung together. “If the city election of N York is in favor of the Republican ticket, the issue will be republican,” he had instructed Madison; “if the federal ticket for the city of N York prevails, the probabilities will be in favor of a federal issue, because it would then require a republican vote both from Jersey and Pennsylva to preponderate against New York, on which we could not count with any confidence.” What Jefferson called the “Political arithmetic” looked so good after the New York victory that he shrugged off the Federalist “lies” about him. He would not try to answer them, “for while I should be engaged with one, they would publich twenty new ones.” He had confidence in the voters’ common sense. “Thirty years of public life have enabled most of those who read newspapers to judge of one for themselves.”

  Doubtless Jefferson was too optimistic. The Federalists in 1800 were still a formidable party. While they were losing some of the vigorous younger men to the Republicans, they were still the party of Washington and Adams and Jay and Pinckney and Hamilton, and the vehicle of a younger generation represented by men like John Marshall and Fisher Ames. The Federalists had never been a purely mercantile or urban party; their strength lay also in rural areas and along the rivers and other avenues of commerce into the hinterland, such as the Connecticut Valley. Adams as President had immense national prestige, if not always popularity, and his “move toward the middle” broadened the party’s appeal. Stung by losses in New York, the Federalists rallied their forces in other states. In New Jersey, where women were not expressly barred from voting, they “marched their wives, daughters, and other qualified ‘females’ to the polls,” in one historian’s words, and won the state’s seven electoral votes.

  Not only was the parties’ popular support crucial, but also the manner in which that support was translated into presidential electoral votes. The selection of presidential electors was not designed for accurate translation. For one thing, state legislatures set selection of electors on a statewide basis or on a district basis, or took on the task themselves, according to a guess by the party dominating the legislature as to which system would help that party’s candidate. More and more legislatures moved to choose electors themselves, rather than by popular vote. Electors were supposed to exercise some i
ndependent judgment. But more important in 1800, the electoral system was still so novel as to be open to flagrant rigging, such as changing the method of choosing electors. Broaching to John Jay such a scheme for New York, Hamilton said that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be over-scrupulous.” It was permissible to take such a step to “prevent an atheist in religion, and a fanatic in politics, from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay was not impressed.

  And so the presidential campaign proceeded, in its noisy, slightly manipulated, but nonviolent way. During the summer candidates for state legislatures toured the districts and talked to crowds where they could find them—“even at a horse race—a cock fight—or a Methodist quarterly meeting.” Then a shocking event broke in on the game of politics.

  Through the darkness and the driving rain they made their way, some on horseback but more on foot, most armed with clubs and scythes, hearth-wrought swords and crossbows, a few with guns and homemade bullets. Streaming in from all directions—some from Richmond, others from farms and plantations in the county, still others from more distant places—they gathered at a “briery spot” near a brook six miles outside the Virginia capital. These black men, perhaps a thousand strong, were fired by a common purpose: to wrest liberty from the white slavocracy. The election was as remote to them as they were remote to the politicians counting and recounting electoral odds. They were the voteless, the politically impotent, the socially outcast. But they could not be immunized against the contagious idea of liberty. A few years after the Revolution an enslaved Afro-American, using the pseudonym “Othello,” had demanded: “After a long, successful, and glorious struggle for liberty,” could Americans “meanly descend to take up the scourge?”