American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For John Adams and Thomas Jefferson still lived, the one in his ninety-first year, the other in his eighty-third. A few years earlier Jefferson had broken his arm and wrist in a fall at Monticello, and a stiffened hand combined with other ills of old age left him in severe pain for months on end, but he had recovered enough to ride several miles a day. Adams was failing. “I am certainly very near the end of my life,” he wrote in January 1826. Whether death would simply mean the end, which he did not believe, or transit to life under a constitution of the Universe, “I contemplate it without terror or dismay.”

  Adams had shared these private thoughts with his old adversary. For fourteen years the two heroes of the Revolution had been writing each other in what turned out to be a magnificent correspondence. Before that the two men had been politically so estranged that it took the best diplomatic efforts of intermediaries to persuade each that the other wished to restore the friendship of Revolutionary days. The correspondence had started awkwardly when Adams wrote Jefferson that he was sending him separately a packet containing “two Pieces of Homespun,” since the Virginian was a “Friend of American Manufactures.” Jefferson responded with a long letter about the relative lack of machinery in Virginia, except for the “Spinning Jenny and loom with the flying shuttle” that could be managed in the family. When the “homespun” arrived, it turned out to be a copy of John Quincy Adams’ lectures on “Rhetoric and Oratory” while he was a Harvard professor. Jefferson found them a “mine of learning and taste,” he wrote the proud father.

  From there the correspondence took off, ranging across religion, history, Indians, the essence of aristocracy, Napoleon’s character, the influence of women, the perfectibility of human nature, and soaring into the realms of philosophy and theology. The two men refought old battles, straightening out history, each to his own satisfaction. Jefferson did not take sharp issue with Adams, however, and he was wise in this, for the latter was extremely defensive about his place in history. Years before, when Mercy Warren published her account of the Revolution, Adams had been outraged by her conclusion that his revolutionary principles had been corrupted by his long stay in London, and that he leaned toward monarchy and was inordinately proud and ambitious. Angry exchanges had followed for weeks, terminated only, by the intervention of Elbridge Gerry and the exchange of loving letters and locks of hair. Adams still had the last word, observing to Gerry, “History is not the province of the ladies.”

  But now John Adams had mellowed, and he professed his affection for Jefferson even while debating him. There was much talk of family and friends—especially of old comrades dead or dying. Adams was inordinately proud of his numerous progeny, even though he granted that children have “cost us Grief, Anxiety, often Vexation and sometimes humiliation.” Abigail Adams occasionally added a friendly line, until she died of typhoid fever in her seventy-fourth year. Words were in vain, Jefferson wrote the inconsolable Adams, but they both could look forward to “an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

  And so the two men, constantly professing their friendship, wept and sparred and totted up historical accounts together, Adams with his palsy hardly able to write, Jefferson laboriously penning his gracious but spirited letters. Nothing lay outside the play of their minds. Adams was still unyielding on matters of prime importance—and to him this included how governments were constituted. His experience with the Constitution had not changed his old views of the arrangement of powers. “Checks and Ballances, Jefferson, however you and your Party may have ridiculed them, are our only Security, for the progress of mind, as well as the Security of Body.” There had always been party differences, Jefferson argued, and there always would be, for “every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution, and the circumstances in which he is placed.…” Yes, replied Adams, it was precisely because parties had always existed and fought each other with ridicule and persecution that the Science of Government was the least advanced of all the sciences.

  They argued briefly about the nature of liberty, but with no more acuteness or imagination than their fellow Americans. The principles of liberty were unalterable, Adams said. Then later he wondered, “Is liberty a word void of sense?” If it was, there could be no reward or punishment. Perhaps at “the bottom of the gulph of liberty and necessity” there might be the key to unlock the universe, but only God held the key. One thing was clear, though: without virtue there could be no political liberty. Jefferson was discreetly reserved on questions of liberty and equality, so enkindling were they to his friend.

  The correspondence faltered as the Jubilee year neared. In June 1826 a committee of Bostonians waited on John Adams to invite his honored attendance at the celebration, but he was too weak to make the carriage ride. Instead, he wrote a letter in tribute to the Declaration of Independence, adding that despite man’s folly and vanity he could see hope for improving the condition of the human race. Though Jefferson was eager to go to Washington, he knew he could not; he wrote that the Declaration would be “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government…the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.…”

  In Washington, on the Fourth of July 1826, President John Quincy Adams and Vice-President John Calhoun rode in their carriage amid a grand parade along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There a Revolutionary War veteran read the noble words of the Declaration. A plea was made to subscribe money to keep Monticello from being put up for sale. In New York, Governor Clinton put on a feast of roast, oxen and ale for ten thousand guests. Bostonians so crowded into Old South Church that they were “squeezed to a hot jelly,” except in the galleries reserved for women. Philadelphia, where it had all happened, contented itself with a parade and a program in Independence Hall. In Charlottesville a student at the University of Virginia read the Declaration of Independence.

  Its author was not there. On his hilltop nearby, he had awakened from a long sleep the night before to ask only, “This is the Fourth?” and he died around midday, as the celebrations were under way. About this time in Quincy, John Adams awoke as from a coma, muttered “Thomas Jefferson survives,” and died before the setting of the sun.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Birth of the Machines

  LOUNGERS ON A LOWER Manhattan pier in the fall of 1792 might have noticed a well-dressed, elegantly spoken young man board a sailing vessel for Georgia. This was Eli Whitney. A Yankee tinkerer, inventor, and jack of all trades, Whitney had learned mechanical skills growing up on a Massachusetts farm. In this, his first trip South, he found himself in the company of Catherine Greene, the young widow of the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. She was traveling to her rice plantation, Mulberry Grove, twelve miles outside of Savannah, Georgia, while Whitney was drifting into his first job as a tutor to children on a neighboring plantation. Reserved, serious, churchgoing, young Whitney was dazzled on the long trip by the flirtatious Mrs. Greene; when she invited him to visit Mulberry Grove, he accepted. Her world of carefree parties and gay entertainments was beyond his understanding and experience. The “moral world,” he said, “does not extend so far south.”

  He heard serious discussion of only one topic from the planters who gathered at Mulberry Grove to sip port and Madeira: their need for a machine to clean the seeds from short-staple inland cotton. Whitney determined to meet this need. Planters were seeking a staple to lift agriculture out of depression. The main crop south of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1800, tobacco, had brought low prices on the international market for a decade and was exhausting the soil. Rice and indigo sales were realizing only small profits, thus threatening the large capital investments in slaves in the rice districts of Georgia and South Carolina and the tidewater of Virginia and Maryland. With an almost static population, the South was attracting
few new settlers from the North or from overseas. Most farmers worked their small subsistence farms of from 100 to 300 acres with their families as the only labor. Planter and small farmer alike were looking for a cash crop to reap larger profits.

  Eli Whitney had never seen a cotton boll. When he examined one, he found the fiber intertwined with seeds covered “with a kind of green coat resembling velvet.” Whitney later wrote his father that he “involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a Machine in my mind.” Spurning an offer of 100 guineas for his “little model,” he decided to quit school and perfect an engine to clean cotton of its seeds. For six months Whitney labored behind locked doors in a basement room of the plantation house. By April 1793, he had designed a gin (short for engine) that used rotating wires in a cylinder to pull the lint through holes too small to pass the seed. Brushes revolving in an opposite direction cleaned the cotton from the wires. One man, using a hand crank, could produce fifty pounds of cleaned cotton a day.

  Granted a patent in February 1793, Whitney formed a partnership with Phineas Miller, the manager of Mulberry Grove, to exploit the gin. They offered to clean any quantity of cotton at sites throughout the South for the price of one pound of clean cotton for every five pounds delivered with seed. By mortgaging the Greene estate, the partners secured enough money for Whitney to equip and man a workshop in New Haven to manufacture the gins. But the cotton gin was so simple that any competent mechanic could duplicate it; and many did. Whitney had to spend his small earnings fighting infringements on his patent. He never profited in proportion to the cotton gin’s impact on the national economy.

  The most consequential innovation of the day, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin removed a bottleneck between the planting of cotton and exporting it to the voracious factories of Britain. Expanding sixtyfold from 1790 to 1815, the cotton trade caused an economic revival in the Old South and hastened settlement of the Southwest. Cotton was to replace all other crops in profitability. Supply did not catch up with British demand for years, and the price of cotton reflected the demand, staying at ten cents a pound except for 1811 and 1812, years of tension and then war between the United States and Britain.

  Some sensed that a different kind of price might have to be paid. The “inventions of the cotton-gin, the carding machine, the spinning-jenny, and the steam-engine,” a southern journal noted, “combined to weave that net-work of cotton which formed an indissoluble cord, binding the black, who was threatened to be cast off, to human progress.”

  Merchants in northern port cities began to share in cotton profits and in the general trade prosperity. With Britain and France at war, American merchant-shippers sold both countries produce of northern farms close to the coast—wheat, rice, flour, barreled beef and pork, and rum. Wagons brought farm products into New York City, soon to lead all other ports in trade owing to its auction sales of British manufactures; its regularly scheduled shipping service; and later its resident agents with branch offices in all the major cotton ports to supply credit, shipping, and maritime insurance to the cotton planter. Oxcarts laden with produce, rolled into Philadelphia, located on two waterways with an outlet to the sea, and into Boston, leader in the China trade, with a large harbor where five hundred ships could dock, load, and sail for world ports. By the turn of the century Yankee ships had become familiar in harbors the globe, over.

  It was a grand period for innovators and entrepreneurs. A merchant prince of Boston, Francis Cabot Lowell, profited first in the European trade by entering business with his wealthy merchant uncle, William Cabot. Willing to assume heavy risks, Lowell took charge of valuable cargo on his uncle’s ships. In 1795 British sailors boarded his ship to search for goods destined for France; they found no evidence of blockade running—but Lowell’s cargo found its way to France. The adventurous Lowell sent out eight ships to vie for world trade.

  Lowell was typical of many merchant-shippers in Boston and New York. Their agents maintained contacts with village storekeepers who dickered for the produce of outlying northern farms. City merchants with their warehouses, overseas contacts, and easy access to credit could ship, insure, and sell northern farm produce or the tobacco and cotton of the southern planter, and planters boosted their profits by consigning their crop to an agent who would hold it, watch prices, and sell it at a favorable time. The merchant or his agent could advance credit to the large planter until the next crop came. It was a barter economy with scarce money. Credit in goods was extended to carry farmers from crop to crop by the storekeeper or merchant.

  Lowell’s interests were wide-ranging—cotton trading, banking, and real estate with his building of India Wharf in Boston Harbor in 1808. Nervous, high-strung, inclined to overwork, he was known as a hardheaded businessman with family connections through intermarriage to the wealthiest and most prominent merchant families of Boston. He was also an economic leader who turned the merchant wealth of Boston from overseas shipping into cotton textile manufacture after the embargo in 1807-08 cut off trading ventures with Britain and France and after exports of agricultural products fell sharply. Merchants soon began to look for other profitable enterprises. Sensing that one day industry would rank as high as trade, Lowell led other Boston merchants to shift from overseas trade to the manufacture of textiles.

  Moving crops to merchants in the cities was a central problem of the agricultural economy of America in 1800, especially in the North. In the South, planters could ship cotton and other products to port on numerous waterways, while in the North highways radiated from the principal eastern cities. Oxcarts from Concord, only twenty miles from the sea, could travel to Boston from the backcountry to supply city dwellers as well as to load ships bound for foreign ports. But farther inland, only a few roads might run from the interior to a waterway. With construction and maintenance of roads in the hands of local officials, a basic road in 1800 was a cleared path through the trees, an improved one was crowned high with dirt and edged by a gutter. Farmers could profitably haul freight only very short distances. One wagonload of goods sent from Augusta, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, took almost four months, at a cost of $1,000. The northern farmer who was not close to a market or a river exchanged his surplus crops for necessities for his family in the village store. He did not try to expand production; there was no market in which to sell.

  Once again, it took some innovators and tinkerers to see the potential of steam as a source of power. Since that day during the Philadelphia convention when John Fitch had experimented with his boat Perseverance, traveling at a snail’s pace on the Delaware River, James Rumsey had also launched a steamboat on the Potomac River in 1787, and John Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey, took the lead farther north. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, “a sort of mania began to prevail…for impelling boats by steam-engines.”

  Two decades passed before steamboats began to operate on western waters; by then leadership in steamboat building and operating had passed to two men who brilliantly solved the problems of boat construction, business security, and profits. The resources and organizational talents of both Robert R. Livingston, New York manorial farmer, and Robert Fulton, mechanical genius, would make the steamboat a reality on the western waters of America.

  By facilitating upstream travel on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the steamboat opened up the fertile country of the Northwest Territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Settlers who homesteaded in the West after the War of 1812 could market their surpluses. Interregional trade changed local, self-sufficient economies to one commercial economy with each region producing its specialties for the national market—foodstuffs in the Northwest, cotton in the South, and capital, ships, and manufactured goods in the East. A traveler who knew the Northwest Territory wrote in 1817: “The center of population and wealth is rapidly inclining westward; and within a very few years hence it will ‘cross the mountains’ …I look forward to the time, as at no great distance, when the great western r
ivers and lakes shall be covered with hundreds of steam boats, performing regular voyages between New Orleans and the numerous ports on the Mississippi and its great tributaries.…”

  FARMS: THE JACKS-OF-ALL-TRADES

  It was sheep-shearing time on Chancellor Robert Livingston’s estate, in the spring of 1810, and he had invited friends to drive over and admire his fine merinos. Elegant phaetons wound their way up a long avenue bordered by feathery locust trees and deposited the guests at the manor house. Outside the visitors could admire the breathtaking view of the jagged Catskills across the Hudson River; inside, the tapestry, silver, and fashionable French furnishings that the chancellor had collected when he had been Jefferson’s Minister to France. After a lavish dinner in the greenhouse, among large ornamental plants, the guests strolled along grassy lawns and orchards to a park devoted to the care and feeding of merino sheep. Then they watched while fleece was cut from the merinos in great fluffy swaths. Some of the sheep were sold, at prices ranging from $40 to $1,000 a head.

  The chancellor was a prime leader of the New York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, organized in the early 1790s by seventy-two farmers who had large holdings, time to keep abreast of writings on farming, and funds to experiment with promising agricultural methods. Descended from a family that owned over 300,000 acres originally granted by the Dutch, Livingston pursued his experiments on lands that bordered the Hudson for twelve miles and stretched east toward Massachusetts. One of the first scientific agriculturalists to urge the use of gypsum as a fertilizer, he built a mill to grind the substance. Writing in the society’s Transactions on soil conservation, he showed how sowing grass and clover on worn-out fields could restore fertility. But his passion was merino sheep, which he had discovered in France and imported to his own country. His first tiny flock—two merino rams and two ewes—were dirty brown in color, their wool greasy and closely curled, but after cleaning the wool seemed whiter and softer than any other. The society proudly circulated 1,000 copies of Livingston’s “Essay on Sheep.” After the trade embargo of 1808 helped produce a kind of merino sheep craze, Livingston and other gentlemen farmers expanded their flocks and built several woolen mills, to their further profit.