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

by Gordon S. Wood

  The organizers of the Republican party saw themselves in just such awful circumstances, indeed, in a situation resembling the 1760s and 1770s. They believed that monarchism was once again threatening liberty, and their party was justified as a means of arousing the people into resistance. If parties were divided “merely by a greediness for office, as in England,” said Jefferson, then to participate in a party “would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man.” But where the difference was one “between the republicans and Monocrats of our country,” then the only honorable course was to refrain from pursuing a middle line and “to take a firm and decided part,” as any honest man would take against rogues.56

  The Republican party began with the activities of notables at the center of government. Voting patterns in the First and Second Congresses (1789–1792) revealed shifting sectional splits that only gradually formed regular party divisions. Only in 1793 did consistent voting blocs in the Congress clearly emerge.57

  But identification with the Republican cause involved more than the gentleman leaders in the Congress. In localities throughout much of the country, many ordinary people opposed to the established leadership or to the direction of affairs began organizing themselves and voicing their dissent. The sudden mushrooming of these Democratic-Republican Societies outside of the regular institutions of government frightened many people. Their seeming connection with the French Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion and President Washington’s criticism doomed them to a brief two-year existence.

  The organizing of these Democratic-Republican Societies began in April 1793, sparked by growing popular enthusiasm for the revolutionary ideas of France. Some Germans in Philadelphia formed a Democratic-Republican Society in order to urge citizens to be vigilant in watching over their government. This group inspired the creation of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, which in turn sent a circular letter calling for the formation of similar societies throughout the country. By the end of 1794 no fewer than thirty-five and perhaps many more of these popular organizations had been created, scattered from Maine to South Carolina. They were often composed of self-made entrepreneurs, mechanics and manufacturers, small-time merchants, farmers, and other middling people, angry at the aristocratic pretensions of many of the Federalist gentry. The organizations issued resolutions and addresses; they denounced the Federalists and supported Republican candidates and causes everywhere; and they communicated with one another in the way the committees of correspondence of the 1760s and 1770s had.58

  These societies were more radical and outspoken than elite leaders like Jefferson and Madison, who tended to keep well clear of them. They represented a democratic future that few American leaders could yet accept or even envision. They challenged the older world of deferential political leadership and called for the people’s participation in the affairs of government beyond merely periodically casting their votes. They told the people to shed their habitual awe of their so-called betters and to think and act for themselves. They adopted the French Revolutionary address of “Citizen” and resolved no longer to address their correspondents as “Sir” or use the phrase “Your humble servant” to close their letters. They took the notion of the sovereignty of the people literally and believed that the people had a continual right to organize and protest against even the actions of their own elected representatives.

  But these Democratic-Republican Societies also met widespread resistance. Most American political leaders continued to abhor such extra-legal activity, for it seemed to undermine the very idea of a legal representative government. “Undoubtedly the people is sovereign,” opponents of the Democratic-Republican Societies declared, “but this sovereignty is in the whole people, and not in any separate part, and cannot be exercised, but by the Representatives of the whole nation.”59 Although Jefferson and other Republican leaders were reluctant to endorse these popular societies openly for fear of being thought seditious, the societies themselves had no such reluctance in endorsing the Republican leaders. “May the patriots of ’76 step forward with Jefferson at their head and cleanse the country of degeneracy and corruption,” went one Kentucky toast in 1795.60 Although these societies did not generally manage elections, nominate tickets, or seek control of offices, they did set forth ideas that made people of different areas and different social groups feel they were part of a common Republican cause. Thus, even though they became associated in many people’s minds with the Whiskey Rebellion and disappeared as quickly as they had arisen, they foreshadowed the democratic world that was coming and contributed greatly to what held the Republican party together.

  THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN PARTY comprised a wide variety of social groups. Foremost were the Southern landowners who were becoming conscious of the distinctiveness of their section and increasingly estranged from the commercial and banking world that Hamilton’s system seemed to be promoting. They were surprised by the promotion of Hamilton’s system, for they had expected to have greater control over the fate of the country than the Federalist program seemed to allow. At the outset of the new national government, they had had every reason to believe that the future belonged to them.

  In 1789 the South dominated the nation. Close to half the population of the United States lived in the five states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. With a population of nearly seven hundred thousand, Virginia was by far the most populous state in the Union, almost double the size of its nearest competitor, Pennsylvania; in fact, by itself Virginia constituted a fifth of the nation. It was, as Patrick Henry declared in 1788, “the most mighty State in the Union.” It surpassed every other state, he said, not only “in number of inhabitants” but “in extent of territory, felicity of position, and affluence and wealth.”61

  The population of nearly all of the Southern states was growing rapidly. Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the white population had tripled in North Carolina and quadrupled in South Carolina and Georgia. Nearly everyone in the country in 1789 assumed that Southern migrants would be the principal settlers of the new lands of the West.

  Although the entire Republic remained rural and still primarily devoted to agriculture, nowhere was it more rural and agricultural than in the South. Nearly the whole population of the South was engaged in growing staple crops for international markets, with relatively few people being involved in the internal trade and manufacturing that were rapidly emerging in the Northern states. Planters in Virginia and Maryland still produced many hogsheads of tobacco for sale abroad, though not as many as they had in the colonial period. Since tobacco was not a very perishable crop and had direct markets abroad in Glasgow and Liverpool, there had been no need for processing and distribution centers, and consequently the colonial Chesapeake had developed no towns or cities to speak of.62 But tobacco was a crop that depleted the soil, and in the late colonial period many farmers in the Upper South, including Washington, had begun turning to wheat, corn, and livestock for export or for local consumption. Because wheat and other foodstuffs were perishable and required diverse markets, they needed central facilities for sorting and distributing, which on the eve of the Revolution contributed to the rapid growth of towns such as Norfolk, Baltimore, Alexandria, and Fredericksburg. In the Lower South rice and indigo for the dying of textiles were the principal staples; in 1789 cotton was not as yet a major crop.

  Most important in distinguishing the Southern states from the rest of the country was the overwhelming presence of African slaves. In 1790 black slaves constituted 30 percent of the population of Maryland and North Carolina, 40 percent of that of Virginia, and nearly 60 percent of that of South Carolina. The Southern states held well over 90 percent of the country’s slaves. They served their masters’ every need, from making hogsheads and horseshoes to caring for gardens and children. The planters’ reliance on the labor of their slaves inhibited the growth of large middling groups of white artisans, who were increasingly emerging in the Northern states.

  Although most Southern planters were becoming
more conscious of their distinctiveness, mostly because of their slaveholding, some Virginians did not as yet think of themselves as Southerners. Washington, for example, in the late 1780s regarded Virginia as one of “the middle states” and referred to South Carolina and Georgia as the “Southern states.”63 But other Americans were already aware of the sectional differences. In June 1776 John Adams had believed that the South was too aristocratic for the kind of popular republican government he had advocated in his Thoughts on Government, but he was relieved to see “the pride of the haughty” brought down “a little” by the Revolution.64 An English traveler likewise thought that the Virginia planters were “haughty”; in addition, they were “jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controuled by any superior power.” By 1785 Stephen Higginson, Boston merchant and one of the Federalist leaders of Massachusetts, had become convinced that “in their habits, manners and commercial Interests, the southern and northern States are not only very dissimilar, but in many instances directly opposed.”65

  Jefferson agreed, and in 1785 he outlined to a French friend his sense of the differences between the people of the two sections, which, following the intellectual fashion of the age, he attributed mostly to differences of climate. The Northerners were “cool, sober, laborious, preserving, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.” By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.” Jefferson thought that these characteristics grew “weaker and weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North,” with Pennsylvania being the place where “the two characters seem to meet and blend, and form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue.” Despite his sensitivity to the differences, however, Jefferson and most other planters scarcely foresaw how dissimilar the two sections would become over the next several decades.66

  At first the new Republican party seemed to be exclusively a Southern party, with most of its leaders, including Jefferson and Madison, being members of the slaveholding aristocracy. Indeed, some historians have contended that the Republican party was designed mainly to protect slavery from an overweening federal government.67 Certainly, there were some Southerners, especially by the second decade of the nineteenth century, who feared the power of the federal government precisely because of what it might do to the institution of slavery.

  Yet paradoxically these slaveholding aristocratic leaders of the Republican party were the most fervent supporters of liberty, equality, and popular republican government in the nation. They condemned the privileges of rich speculators and moneyed men and celebrated the character of ordinary yeoman farmers, who were independent and incorruptible and “the surest support of a healthy nation.” Unlike many Federalist gentry in the North, these Southern gentry retained the earlier Whig confidence in what Jefferson called the “honest heart” of the common man.68

  Part of the faith in democratic politics that Jefferson and his Southern colleagues shared came from their relative isolation from it. With the increasing questioning of black slavery in the North and throughout the world, many white yeoman small farmers in the South found a common solidarity with large plantation owners. They tended more or less faithfully to support the leadership of the great slaveholding planters. As a result, the great Southern planters never felt threatened by the democratic electoral politics that was undermining people’s deference to the “the better sort” in the North. The more established the leadership, in other words, the less reason the Southern leaders had to doubt republican principles or the power of the people.69

  In the North, especially in the rapidly growing middle states, ambitious individuals and new groups without political connections were finding that the Republican party was the best means for challenging entrenched leaders who were more often than not Federalists. Therefore the Republican party in the North differed sharply from its Southern branch, which made the national party an unstable and incongruous coalition from the outset. In the South the Republican opposition to the Federalist program was largely the response of rural slaveholding gentry who were committed to a nostalgic image of independent free-holding farmers and fearful of anti-slavery sentiments and new financial and commercial interests emerging in the North.

  In the North, however, the Republican party was the political expression of new egalitarian-minded social forces released and intensified by the Revolution. Of course, individuals had a variety of motives for joining the Republican party or voting for Republican candidates. Often those attracted to the Republican cause were minority groups, like the Baptists in Massachusetts and Connecticut who were eager to challenge the Federalist-dominated Congregational religious establishment. Many others, such as those of Scots-Irish or German heritage, sympathized with the Republicans simply because they did not like the kind of Anglophiles who were Federalists. But most supportive of the Republican party in the North were those enterprising and rapidly increasing middling people resentful of the pretensions and privileges of the entrenched Federalist elites. These included ambitious commercial farmers, artisans, manufacturers, tradesmen, and second-and third-level merchants, especially those involved in newer or marginal trading areas. As the headstrong Massachusetts Federalist the Reverend Jedidiah Morse pointed out, these Northern Republicans were those who “most bitterly denounce as aristocrats all who do not think as they do.”70 “Aristocrat” indeed had become the pejorative term that best described the enemy of the Northern Republicans. These middling sorts had every reason to support the party that favored minimal government, low taxes, and hostility to monarchical England.

  In May 1793 Jefferson offered his own description of the Federalists and Republicans. On the Federalist side, rife with “old tories,” were the “fashionable circles” in the major port cities, merchants trading on British capital, and paper speculators. On the other Republican side, he said, were merchants trading on their own capital, Irish merchants, and “tradesmen, mechanics, farmers, and every other possible description of our citizens.”71 Jefferson’s description can hardly explain the extent of popular support from ordinary folk that the Federalists commanded in the 1790s, but it does suggest the aspiring and upwardly mobile character of the Republican cause in the North.72

  Because wealthy Federalist merchants dominated the lucrative imported dry goods trade with Great Britain, less well established merchants were forced to find trade partners wherever they could—the European continent, the West Indies, or elsewhere. When the arriviste merchant John Swanwick of Philadelphia was denied access both to the highest social circles of the city and to the established British trade routes, he knew how to get back at his Federalist tormentors. He found prosper ous markets in China, India, Germany, France, and parts of southern Europe and became an enthusiastic member of the Pennsylvania Republican party. His defeat of an ultra-Federalist in the 1792 election to the Pennsylvania assembly was viewed as a setback for “the aristocrats” of the state and a victory for middling export merchants and rising entrepreneurs. Swanwick’s election to Congress in 1794 as the first Republican congressman from Philadelphia was even more stunning. His victory convinced Madison that the tide was turning toward the Republicans in the North.73

  Even Federalist-dominated New England had its share of “Republican-merchants.” Many, like the Crowninshields of Salem, found a niche in trade with the French empire and the Far East and naturally resented the Federalist mercantile elite that commanded the profitable trade with Great Britain.74 Elsewhere in New England those whose profits depended on trade with France, and not England, challenged Federalist control of the maritime towns. But in the 1790s these challengers were generally weak and marginal. There was, for example, only one Democratic-Republican Society of any import
ance in New England in 1794.75 Federalist gentry and mercantile elites involved in the British import trade dominated New England to an extent not duplicated in other sections of the nation, which made New England the center of Federalism.

  Even the artisans in New England, who in other places became Republicans, remained bound to the Federalist cause. From 1793 to 1807 New England’s interests and prosperity were almost entirely absorbed in overseas trade. Indeed, investors put five to six times more money into mercantile enterprises than they did into industrial businesses. Consequently, the New England artisans often found themselves too closely tied into patronage-client relationships with the import merchants to develop as sharp a sense of their separate interests as that possessed by artisans and craftsmen elsewhere in the country. Since many of these New England-ers were involved in the building of ships and maritime equipment used in overseas trade, they inevitably became especially supportive of Hamilton’s program and its reliance on the British import trade. As a consequence, the Republicans discovered that they were less able to recruit artisans and other middling sorts in the urban ports of New England than they were elsewhere. In the eyes of many people in the 1790s the Federalist party, such as it was, seemed to be mostly confined to New England.76

  Outside of New England the situation was different. In the Mid-Atlantic States most artisans and manufacturers became Republicans. This development was unexpected. At the outset of the 1790s it seemed evident that most artisans throughout the country would be firm supporters of the Federalists. After all, during the debate over the Constitution in 1787–1788 artisans and manufacturers up and down the continent had been ardent Federalists. They had strongly favored the new Constitution and had looked forward to a strong national government that could levy tariffs and protect them from competitive British manufactured imports. Congress’s first tariff act of 1789 listed a number of goods for protection, including beer, carriages, cordage, shoes, sugars, snuff, and tobacco products. Yet most of the manufacturers soon became dissatisfied with the government’s measures, believing that the duties levied on foreign imports were too low and not sufficiently protective of their businesses. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton seemed more interested in producing revenue to finance the federal debt than in offering protection to mechanics and manufacturers. Hamilton, of course, did not foresee the future any better than the other Founders; but by not supporting artisans and manufacturers, who were the budding businessmen of the future, he made his biggest political mistake. It cost the Federalists dearly.