Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Others had even more grandiose visions for the spread of America’s language. John Adams was among those who suggested that American English would eventually become “the next universal language.” In 1789 even a French official agreed; in a moment of giddiness he actually predicted that American English was destined to replace diplomatic French as the language of the world. Americans, he said, “tempered by misfortune,” were “more human, more generous, more tolerant, all qualities that make one want to share the opinions, adopt the customs, and speak the language of such a people.”126

  Americans believed that their English might conquer the world because they were the only true citizens of the world. To be enlightened was to be, as Washington said, “a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large.” The Revolutionary leaders were always eager to demonstrate their cosmopolitanism; they aimed not at becoming more American but at becoming more enlightened. As yet they had little sense that loyalty to their state or nation was incompatible with their cosmopolitanism.127

  David Ramsay claimed he was “a citizen of the world and therefore despise[d] national reflections.” Yet he did not believe he was being “inconsistent” in hoping that the professions would be “administered to my country by its own sons.” Joel Barlow did not think he was any less American just because he ran for election to the French National Convention in 1792–1793. The many state histories written in the aftermath of the Revolution were anything but celebrations of localism. Indeed, declared Ramsay, who wrote a history of his adopted state of South Carolina, they were testimonies to American cosmopolitanism; the state histories were designed to “wear away prejudices—rub off asperities and mould us into a homogeneous people.”128

  Intense local attachments were common to peasants and backward peoples, but educated gentlemen were supposed to be at home anywhere in the world. Indeed, to be free of local prejudices and parochial ties was what defined a liberally educated person. One’s humanity was measured by one’s ability to relate to strangers, and Americans prided themselves on their hospitality and their treatment of strangers, thus further contributing to the developing myth of their exceptionalism. Indeed, as CrÈve-coeur pointed out, in America the concept of “stranger” scarcely seemed to exist: “A traveller in Europe becomes a stranger as soon as he quits his own kingdom; but it is otherwise here. We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person’s country; the variety of our soils, situations, climates, governments, and produce hath something which must please everyone.”129 “In what part of the globe,” asked Benjamin Rush, “was the ‘great family of mankind’ given as a toast before it was given in the republican states of America?”130

  THE INSTITUTION that many Americans believed best embodied these cosmopolitan ideals of fraternity was Freemasonry. Not only did Masonry create enduring national icons (like the pyramid and the all-seeing eye of Providence on the Great Seal of the United States), but it brought people together in new ways and helped fulfill the republican dream of reorganizing social relationships. It was a major means by which thousands of Americans could think of themselves as especially enlightened.

  Freemasonry took its modern meaning in Great Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first Grand Lodge was formed in London in 1717. By mid-century English Masonry was strong enough to provide inspiration and example to a worldwide movement. Although Masonry first appeared in the North American colonies in the 1730s, it grew slowly until mid-century, when membership suddenly picked up. By the eve of the Revolution dozens of lodges existed up and down the continent. Many of the Revolutionary leaders, including Washington, Franklin, Samuel Adams, James Otis, Richard Henry Lee, and Hamilton, were members of the fraternity.131

  Freemasonry was a surrogate religion for enlightened men suspicious of traditional Christianity. It offered ritual, mystery, and communality without the enthusiasm and sectarian bigotry of organized religion. But Masonry was not only an enlightened institution; with the Revolution, it became a republican one as well. As George Washington said, it was “a lodge for the virtues.”132 The Masonic lodges had always been places where men who differed in everyday affairs—politically, socially, even religiously—could “all meet amicably, and converse sociably together.” There in the lodges, the Masons told themselves, “we discover no estrangement of behavior, nor alienation of affection.” Masonry had always sought unity and harmony in a society increasingly diverse and fragmented. It traditionally had prided itself on being, as one Mason put it, “the Center of Union and the means of conciliating friendship among men that might otherwise have remained at perpetual distance.”133

  Earlier in the eighteenth century the organization had usually been confined to urban elites noted for their social status and gentility. But in the decades immediately preceding the Revolution Masonry began broadening its membership and reaching out to small village and country elites and ambitious urban artisans without abandoning its earlier concern with genteel refinement. The Revolution disrupted the organization but revitalized the movement. In the decades following the Revolution Masonry exploded in numbers, fed by hosts of new recruits from middling levels of the society. There were twenty-one lodges in Massachusetts by 1779; in the next twenty years fifty new ones were created, reaching out to embrace even small isolated communities on the frontiers of the state. Everywhere the same expansion took place. Masonry transformed the social landscape of the early Republic.

  Masonry began emphasizing its role in spreading republican virtue and civilization. It was, declared some New York Masons in 1795, designed to wipe “away those narrow and contracted Prejudices which are born in Darkness, and fostered in the Lap of ignorance.”134 Freemasonry repudiated the monarchical hierarchy of family and favoritism and created a new republican order that rested on “real Worth and personal Merit” and “brotherly affection and sincerity.” At the same time, Masonry offered some measure of familiarity and personal relationships to a society that was experiencing greater mobility and increasing numbers of immigrants. It created an “artificial consanguinity,” declared DeWitt Clinton of New York in 1793, that operated “with as much force and effect, as the natural relationship of blood.”135

  Despite its later reputation for exclusivity, Freemasonry became a way for American males of diverse origins and ranks to be brought together in republican fraternity, including, at least in Boston, free blacks.136 That strangers, removed from their families and neighbors, could come together in such brotherly love seemed a vindication of the enlightened hope that the force of love might indeed be made to flow outward from the self. A Mason found himself “belonging, not to one particular place only, but to places without number, and in almost every quarter of the globe; to whom, by a kind of universal language, he can make himself known—and from whom we can, if in distress, be sure to receive relief and protection.” This was the enlightened dream of people throughout the world being gently bound together through benevolence and fellow-feeling. And it seemed to many Americans that the nation now responsible for fulfilling that dream was the new United States.137

  2

  A Monarchical Republic

  In 1789 the Federalists, the leaders of the new Republic who clung to the name used by the supporters of the Constitution in 1787–1788, were optimistic about forming the new government. The results of the elections in 1788 showed that most of the members of the new Congress had been supporters of the Constitution—at least forty-eight of the fifty-nine congressmen and eighteen of the twenty-two senators. And George Washington had been unanimously elected as the first president of the United States. Indeed, expectations were so high that some Federalists worried that disappointment was inevitable.1 By 1789 even the leading opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, had come to accept it, though of course with an expectation of it soon being amended. No one wanted to oppose the new national government without giving it what Washington called “a fair chance.”2

  By 1789 the most nationally minded of the Federa
lists such as Hamilton and Washington were determined to turn the United States into an integrated nation, a republic in its own right with the governmental power to act energetically in the public sphere. Monarchies all over Europe were trying to consolidate their scattered collections of small duchies, principalities, provinces, and city-states—nearly 350 of them—and to build strong consolidated nation-states.3 But could a continental-sized republic like the new United States do the same? The very idea of a single republic “on an average one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six million of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits, and of laws, is,” the Anti-Federalists had warned, “in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.”4

  By 1789 many of the Federalists had lost faith in the Revolutionary dream of 1776—that America could exist with a minimum of government. Some New England Federalists, “seeing and dreading the evils of democracy,” according to one traveler in the 1790s, were even willing to “admit monarchy, or something like it.”5 The wealthy New England merchant Benjamin Tappan, father of the future abolitionists, was not alone in thinking that a good dose of monarchism was needed to offset the popular excesses of the American people. Even though Henry Knox, Washington’s close friend, had given Tappan “a gentle check” for openly voicing such an opinion, Tappan told Knox that he could not “give up the Idea that monarchy in our present situation is become absolutely necessary to save the states from sinking into the lowest abyss of misery.” Since he had “delivered my sentiment in all companies” and found it well received, he believed that “if matters were properly arranged it would be easily and soon effected,” perhaps with the aid of the Society of the Cincinnati, the fraternal organization of former Revolutionary War officers. Even if nothing were done, Tappan intended to continue to be “a strong advocate for what I have suggested.”6

  Prevalent as this kind of thinking was in some parts of America in the late 1780s and early 1790s, the Federalists, even the high-toned ones, were not traditional monarchists. As pessimistic about republicanism as some Federalists may have been, most of them had little desire to return to the monarchical and patriarchal politics of the colonial ancien régime in which government had been treated as a source of personal and family aggrandizement. Nor did most of them believe that the restoration of monarchy was possible in America, at least not at the present time. Thus most Federalists believed that whatever aspects of monarchy they hoped to bring back into America would have to be placed within a republican framework. Indeed, Benjamin Rush described the new government in 1790 as one “which unites with the vigor of monarchy and the stability of aristocracy all the freedom of a simple republic.”7 Even though the Federalists never openly declared it to be their aim, perhaps they really intended to create another Augustan age, an age of stability and cultural achievement following a revolutionary upheaval.8 Augustus had after all sought to incorporate elements of monarchy into the Roman Empire while all the time talking about republicanism.

  ARTICLE IOF THE CONSTITUTION, with its ten sections, is by far the longest article in the document. It is devoted to the Congress, and naturally, as the most republican part of the new national government, the Congress was the first institution to be organized. Indeed, during its first session, beginning in April 1789, it was virtually the entire central government. Although the president was inaugurated at the end of April, the subordinate executive offices were not filled until late in the summer; and the judiciary was not created until just before adjournment in the early fall. The short Article III of the Constitution had prescribed only a Supreme Court for the nation and had left the possibility of establishing other federal courts to the Congress’s discretion.

  The First Congress faced a unique challenge, and those congressmen and senators who gathered in New York in the spring of 1789 were awed by what lay ahead of them. Not only would the members of the Congress have to pass some promised amendments to the new Constitution, but they would have to fill out the bare framework of a government that the Philadelphia Convention had created, including the organization of the executive and judicial departments. Some therefore saw the First Congress as something in the nature of a “second constitutional convention.” The responsibilities were daunting, and many congressmen and senators of the First Congress felt overwhelmed. They were, said James Madison, “in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us. Our successors will have an easier task.”9

  The First Congress had difficulty even getting itself together. It took weeks for some members of the Congress to journey from their home states to the first national capital of New York City. Even the stage from Boston, traveling eighteen hours a day, took six days to get to New York. Philadelphia was three days away.10 Although on March 4, 1789, fifty-nine representatives and twenty-two senators were supposed to convene in New York, only a handful actually showed up. Over the next few weeks the members dribbled in, several each day. Not until April 1, 1789, did the House of Representatives have a quorum and was it able to organize itself for business; the Senate got its quorum a week later.

  New York City became the first capital of the new government mainly by default: the peripatetic Confederation Congress after wandering from town to town had ended up there. With a population of about thirty thousand, New York was not yet as large as Philadelphia, which with its contiguous suburbs totaled forty-five thousand people, but it was growing rapidly. “New York,” observed a French traveler in 1794, “is less citified than Philadelphia, but the bustle of trade is far greater.” Since it had twice as many foreign-born as Philadelphia, it had a more cosmopolitan feel. Some thought it still had an aristocratic English tone left over from the occupation. “If there is one city on the American continent which above all others displays English luxury,” observed the French visitor Bris-sot de Warville, “it is New York, where you can find all the English fashions,” including ladies in “dresses which exposed much of their bosoms”—an expression of “indecency in republican women” that “scandalized” Brissot.11 Still, what impressed everyone was the commercial hurly-burly of the city. With its superb deepwater harbor and burgeoning economy, New York would soon outdistance all the other port cities in people and commerce.12

  In 1789 the city’s growing population was confined to the tip of Manhattan, extending about a mile and a half up the river on the east side and a mile on the west side. Broadway was the central boulevard, but it was paved only to Vesey Street. Greenwich Village was considered out-of-town. There were over four hundred taverns in the city, and these were increasing in number faster than the population. Despite its being caught up in English luxury, New York’s mostly narrow and dirty streets and the fact that it had not yet fully recovered from devastating fires in 1776 and 1778 kept the city from becoming too pretentious. Its people, however, were beginning to build houses at a phenomenal rate.

  Federal Hall, which was to house the new Congress, was the old City Hall located at the corner of Wall and Nassau streets; it had been recently remodeled by the French engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who filled the tympanum of the building’s pediment with the eagle drawn from the Great Seal, with thirteen stars in the entablature beneath it, even though two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, were still not part of the Union.

  The First Congress that gathered in New York had been elected in 1788 by the people of the states, or in the case of the Senate, by the state legislatures. The Constitution had left to each state the mode of electing the House of Representatives. Given the Federalist desire to enlarge the electorate for each congressman and thus help to ensure that only the most distinguished and enlightened were elected, the major issue in the states had been whether to elect all the congressional representatives at-large or to elect them by district. In 1788 most of the large states (Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia) had elected their congressmen by districts, while most of the small states, along with Pennsylvania, had
elected them statewide.13 Some warned that district elections were apt to keep out “the man of abilities.” Instead of getting a liberally educated and cosmopolitan congressman, district elections would likely result in a narrow-minded demagogue. He would be, wrote one sarcastic Marylander, someone who would “have nothing to recommend him but his supposed humility, who will not be too proud to court what are generally called the poor folks, shake them by the hand, ask them for their vote and interest, and, when an opportunity serves, treat them to a can of grog, and whilst drinking of it, join heartily in abusing what are called the great people.”14

  Many of the members of the Congress were quite distinguished. Twenty of them had attended the Philadelphia Convention, including James Madison, Robert Morris, Oliver Ellsworth, Rufus King, Roger Sherman, and Elbridge Gerry (who had left without signing). Many others had held prominent political or military positions during the Revolution, such as Richard Henry Lee, Jeremiah Wadsworth, Philip Schuyler, and Elias Boudinot. Only twenty had entered politics since the treaty of peace of 1783, and most of these were very young men. In short, most members of the Congress were men of experience and consequence. Indeed, Washington declared that “the new Congress on account of the self-created respectability and various talents of its Members, will not be inferior to any Assembly in the world.”15

  Still, when Madison looked over the list of those elected with him to the House of Representatives, the future looked troublesome. He saw only “a very scanty proportion who will share in the drudgery of business,” and for the tasks ahead he could only foresee “contentions first between federal & antifederal parties, and then between Northern and Southern parties, which give additional disagreeableness to the prospect.” His high hopes that the Congress might be free of the “vicious arts” of democracy that had plagued the states now seemed more doubtful. He was worried that too many men of “factious tempers” and “local prejudices” had been elected.16