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

by Gordon S. Wood

  Although Peck did not win this particular election, the attacks on him made him a popular hero among the small and middling people of the county. As a result, he was repeatedly elected as a Republican member of the New York state legislature, serving in the assembly for six years between 1798 and 1804, and in the state senate for five years between 1804 and 1808. He became the defender of the common farmers and other laboring people against privileged lawyers and leisured aristocrats. Sick and tired of Federalist criticism that he was unrefined and had not read Montesquieu, Peck turned his deficiencies back on his critics. He took to ridiculing pretentious book-learning, genteel manners, and aristocratic arrogance and, to the amazement of Cooper and other Federalist gentry, won popularity in the process. Unlike the Federalists, who stood for office by writing each other letters and lining up influential gentlemen as supporters, Peck and other Republicans in the region began promoting their own candidacies and campaigning for office openly. They used the newspapers to reach out to other common people in order to challenge the Federalist assumption that only well-to-do educated gentlemen were capable of exercising political authority. Cooper, like other Federalists, saw all his aristocratic dreams endangered by the demagogic behavior of Peck, and he began to try to stifle these new kinds of democratic writings and actions.31

  The Federalist gentry could scarcely oppose social mobility since most of them were themselves the product of it. Indeed, many of the Revolutionary leaders in the 1760s and 1770s had expressed the same kind of resentment of arrogant aristocrats as Findley and Peck were voicing in the 1790s. As a young man John Adams had wondered “who are to be understood by the better Sort of People” and had concluded that there was “no Difference between one Man and another, but what real Merit creates.” He was thinking of the royal official Thomas Hutchinson and his genteel crowd, with their “certain Airs of Wisdom and Superiority,” and their “Scorn and Contempt and turning up of the Nose,” and he felt passionately that they were no better than he was.

  But Adams’s remedy for his resentment had not been to celebrate his plebeian origins, as Peck did, but instead to outdo Hutchinson and his aristocratic crowd at their own genteel game. Although Adams began his career, like Peck, writing as a hick farmer, “Humphrey Ploughjogger,” in order to do battle on behalf of all those ordinary humble people who were “made of as good Clay” as the so-called “great ones of the World,” he had no intention of remaining one of those humble people. Instead, Adams had determined to become more learned, more refined, and, most important, more virtuous and public-spirited than Hutchinson and his ilk, who lived only by their lineage. Let the people decide who are the better sort, said Adams, in his naïve and youthful republican enthusiasm; they would be the best judges of merit.32

  Many of the Republican upstarts of post-Revolutionary America were behaving quite differently. Benjamin Franklin in the 1730s had made fun of all those ordinary folk—mechanics and tradesmen—who found themselves “by their Industry or good Fortune, from mean Beginnings . . . in Circumstances a little more easy” and sought to become gentlemen when they were not really ready for the status. It was, said Franklin, “no easy Thing for a Clown or a Labourer, on a sudden to hit in all respects, the natural and easy Manner of those who have been genteelly educated: And ‘tis the Curse of Imitation, that it almost always either under-does or over-does.” Such men, said Franklin, were “Molatto Gentlemen,” possessing genteel desires and aspirations but lacking the talent and politeness to pull it off.33

  But a new generation of ambitious commoners was moving in a very different world. They had the advantage of a post-Revolutionary republican climate that celebrated equality in a manner that Franklin’s earlier generation had never quite known. To be sure, large numbers of middling sorts were buying and reading etiquette manuals in order to become polite and genteel, but many more were acting like Franklin’s “Molatto Gentlemen,” indeed, even flaunting their lowly origins and their plebeian tastes and manners, and getting away with it. No one was more representative of this kind of parvenu than Matthew Lyon.

  LYON HAD ARRIVED IN AMERICA from Ireland in 1764 as a fifteen-year-old indentured servant. He had been bound to a dealer in pork, who sold him to another master for a “yoke of bulls.” In 1773 he bought land in what became Vermont, and the following year migrated there and fell in with Ethan Allen and his brothers. Lyon was an ambitious scrambler who seized every opportunity for personal advancement offered by the Revolution, whether it was the confiscation of Loyalist lands or the creation of an independent Vermont. He founded the Vermont town of Fair Haven and served for well over a decade in the state assembly. He built saw, grist, and paper mills, an iron foundry, a blast furnace, and a tavern. Before he was done he had become a leader in the Vermont assembly and one of the richest entrepreneurs and manufacturers in Vermont, if not in all New England. Inevitably, he became a fervent Republican.

  But for all of his wealth Lyon was always just an “ignorant Irish puppy” in the eyes of educated gentlemen like Nathaniel Chipman. It was not that Chipman himself came from a genteel background. Far from it: he was the son of a Connecticut blacksmith and farmer. But he had graduated from Yale College in 1777, and in his mind that made all the difference between him and the likes of Matthew Lyon. Like so many of the Revolutionary leaders Chipman was the first of his family to go to college and become a full-fledged gentleman. After resigning his commission in the Revolutionary army in 1778 because he lacked the income “to support the character of a gentleman” and “an officer,” Chipman followed many other Connecticut migrants, including Lyon, up the Connecticut River to Vermont, where he thought his college degree and his legal education at Litchfield Law School might go further. “I shall indeed be rara avis in terris,” he joked to a friend in 1779, “for there is not an attorney in the state. Think . . . think what a figure I shall make, when I become the oracle of law to the state of Vermont.”

  Although there was a good deal of self-protective humor in these revelations of ambition to a close friend, there is no doubt Chipman was serious about rising rapidly in government, eventually even becoming a member of the Confederation Congress, then the highest national office in the land. All his joshing about the “many steps” he had to mount to attain “that pinnacle of happiness. . . . First, an attorney; then a selectman; a huffing justice; a deputy; an assistant; a member of Congress”—only points up his arrogant expectation that such offices naturally belonged to educated gentlemen like himself. It was just as inevitable that Chipman became a Federalist as Lyon had become a Republican.34

  Naturally, Lyon deeply resented someone like Chipman. He regarded him and his fellow lawyers as “professional gentlemen” and “aristocrats” who used their knowledge of the rigmarole of the common law on behalf of former Loyalists, New York landlords, and other “over-grown land jobbers in preference to the poorer sort of people.” However big a manufacturer and however rich he became, Lyon was not wrong in claiming to represent the poorer sort of people, for emotionally and traditionally he remained one of them. From his perspective the struggle between Federalists like Chipman and Republicans like himself was indeed, as he said echoing John Adams, “a struggle . . . between the aristocrats and the democrats.” In 1793 Lyon formed a newspaper, the Farmer’s Library, which opposed Hamilton’s financial program and promoted the French Revolution. At the same time, he missed no opportunity to label Chipman and his family “tories” and “aristocrats.”35

  The ironies of being called an “aristocrat” were not lost on Chipman and his family. “Nathaniel Chipman an aristocrat!” said his brother in amazed disbelief. “This must sound very oddly . . . to all those who have witnessed his plain, republican manners, habits, and sentiments.” Yet in the levels below levels of post-Revolutionary American egalitarianism, Chipman was in fact as much of an aristocrat as Vermont was to know, and Lyon, especially because he was wealthier than Chipman, deeply resented being made to feel his inferior.36

  Although Lyon
was a member of the state legislature, he spent the greater part of the 1790s trying to get elected to the United States Congress and was finally successful in 1797. He arrived in Philadelphia seething with rage at the aristocratic Federalist world. He immediately began ridiculing the customary ceremonies involved in the House’s replying to an address of the president. He did not wish, he declared, to take any part in “such a boyish piece of business.” In reaction, the Federalists missed no opportunity to make fun of his behavior and his origins, both in the Congress itself and in the press. Chipman, at that time one of Vermont’s senators, hoped that Lyon was making so “incredulous a figure” that he would embarrass his fellow Republicans. The Federalists called him “ragged Matt, the Democrat,” a “beast” that ought to be caged, the “Lyon” that was captured in the bogs of Hibernia. He was an Irishman, they said, who did not have real American blood in him. It was left to William Cobbett, the acerbic Federalist editor of Porcupine’s Gazette, however, to deliver the most devastating attack of all on Lyon. Among other derisive and satirical comments, Cobbett brought up the fact that Lyon had been court-martialed for cowardice during the Revolutionary War and had been forced to wear a wooden sword as punishment. This was something neither Lyon nor the Federalists were apt to forget.37

  On January 30, 1798, during a brief recess in the Congress, Lyon was telling a group of his fellow congressmen that the conservative people of Connecticut needed someone like him to come in with his newspaper and turn them into Republicans. Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut interrupted to tell Lyon that if he were going to go into Connecticut, he had better wear his wooden sword, whereupon a furious Lyon spat in Griswold’s face. Many members were aghast at Lyon’s behavior but were even more appalled by the “outrageous” and “indecent” defense he offered for it: he was reported in the papers to have said, “I did not come here to have my———kicked by everybody.” When the Federalists urged that Lyon be expelled from the House for “gross indecency,” the Republicans rallied to his defense and prevented the two-thirds majority needed for expulsion.

  Frustrated, Griswold wanted to avenge his honor. Had he considered Lyon his equal, he might have challenged him to a duel; instead, two weeks after having been spat upon, he assaulted and began caning Lyon in the House chamber. Lyon responded by grabbing a pair of fireplace tongs, and the two men ended up wrestling on the floor of the House of Representatives. Many were horrified, and some concluded that Congress had become no better than a “tavern,” filled with “beasts, and not gentlemen.”38 More than words ever could, this extraordinary incident of two congressmen wrestling on the floor of the House revealed the intensity of partisan antagonism and the emergence of new men into politics.

  BUT THE SOCIAL STRUGGLE that underlay the political conflict between Federalists and Republicans in the Northern states in the 1790s was not simply a matter of new middling sorts of men challenging the established order. It was also a matter of the established aristocratic order being too feeble to resist these challenges. The persistent problem of American society—the weakness of its would-be aristocracy, at least in the North—became more glaringly evident in the 1790s. Too many of the Federalists, like William Cooper, lacked the attributes of gentility and seemed scarcely distinguishable from the middling sorts who were challenging them.

  In eighteenth-century America it had never been easy for gentlemen to play the role of disinterested public servants who were supposed to sacri-fice their private interests for the sake of the public. The problem had become especially apparent during the Revolution. General Richard Montgomery, who in 1775 led a fatal ill-fated expedition to Quebec, continually complained about the lack of discipline among his troops. If only “some method” could be found of “engaging gentlemen to serve,” he said, the soldiers would become “more tractable,” since “that class of men” presumably commanded deference from commoners. But many gentlemen had chosen not to serve, since as officers they had to serve without pay.39

  The same had been true of many of the Revolutionary leaders serving in the Continental Congress, especially those of “small fortunes.” They had grumbled repeatedly over the burdens of office and had begged to be relieved from those burdens in order to pursue their private interests. Periodic temporary retirement from the cares and turmoil of office to one’s country estate for refuge and rest was acceptable classical behavior. But too often America’s political leaders, especially in the North, had to retire, not to relaxation in the solitude and leisure of a rural retreat, but to the making of money in the busyness and bustle of a city law practice.40

  In short, America’s would-be gentlemen had a great deal of trouble maintaining the desired classical independence and freedom from business and the marketplace that philosophers like Adam Smith thought necessary for political leadership. Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) had praised the English landed gentry for being particularly qualified for disinterested political leadership. This was because their income came from the rents of tenants, which, said Smith, “costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.”41

  In America there were not many gentry who were capable of living in such a manner. Of course, large numbers of Southern gentry-planters enjoyed leisure based on the labor of their slaves, but most Southern planters were not as removed from the day-to-day management of their estates as their counterparts among the English landed gentry. Since they had slaves, not rent-paying tenants, their overseers were not comparable to the bailiffs or stewards of the English gentry. Thus the planters, despite their aristocratic poses, were often busy, commercially involved men. Their livelihoods were tied directly to the vicissitudes of international trade, and they always had an uneasy sense of being dependent on the market. Still, the great Southern planters at least approached the classical image of disinterested gentlemanly leadership, and they made the most of this image throughout the Revolutionary era and beyond. Virginia especially contributed a galaxy of leaders, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, and George Mason—slaveholders all.42

  For the Northern gentry the problems of maintaining their independence from the marketplace were particularly acute. Northern gentry-leaders were never able to duplicate the degree of self-confidence and noblesse oblige that characterized even the Southern gentry, let alone the English aristocracy. More and more of the Federalist officeholders found that their property, or their proprietary wealth, did not generate enough income for them to ignore or neglect their private affairs. Consequently, they either had to exploit their offices for profit or had to absent themselves from their public responsibilities.

  Although the First Congress granted members of both houses a salary of six dollars a day—a radical act for the age: members of the British Parliament did not receive salaries until 1911—paying congressmen and other federal officers salaries was never enough. Too often private interests had to trump the official’s public duty. At a crucial moment during the debate over the assumption of state debts, Federalist congressman Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts complained about absences. Thomas Fitzsimmons and George Clymer, he said, were absorbed in their private affairs in Philadelphia, while Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut “has thought it more for his interests to speculate than to attend his duty in Congress, and is gone home.”43

  New England Federalists, precarious aristocrats that they were, complained ceaselessly of “the continued disgrace of starving our public officers.” Fisher Ames thought that “such a sum should be paid for service as was sufficient to command men of talents to perform it. Anything below this was parsimonious and unwise.” Good men, he said, would not take up the public burden; or, as Oliver Wolcott Jr. put it, in words that by themselves repudiated the classical tradition of public service, “good abilities command high prices at market.” Although the federal administration had more than enough applicants for its lower and middling offices,
by the mid-1790s it was having trouble filling its highest offices. In 1795 South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith charged in the House of Representatives that Jefferson, Hamilton, and Henry Knox had all resigned from the cabinet “chiefly for one reason, the smallness of the salary.” Although this was not true for Jefferson, both Knox and Hamilton did have trouble maintaining a genteel standard of living on their government salaries.44

  Hamilton’s scrupulousness over the issue reveals the dilemma that personal interests could pose for those who wanted to hold public office. There is no doubt that Hamilton left the treasury early in 1795 in order to return to Wall Street and earn some money for his family. Since he was out of office and short of funds, his close friend Robert Troup pleaded with him to get involved in business, especially in speculative land schemes. Everyone else was doing it, said Troup. “Why should you object to making a little money in a way that cannot be reproachful? Is it not time for you to think of putting yourself in a state of independence?” Troup even joked to Hamilton that such money-making schemes might be “instrumental in making a man of fortune—I may say—a gentleman of you. For such is the present insolence of the World that hardly a man is treated like a gentleman unless his fortune enables him to live at his ease.”

  Although he knew that many Federalists were using their governmental connections to get rich, Hamilton did not want to be one of them. “Saints,” he told Troup, might get away with such profit-making, but he knew he would be denounced by his Republican opponents as just another one of those “speculators” and “peculators.” He had to refuse “because,” as he sardonically put it, “there must be some public fools who sacrifice private to public interest at the certainty of ingratitude and obloquy—because my vanity whispers I ought to be one of those fools and ought to keep myself in a situation the best calculated to render service.”45 Hamilton clung long and hard to the classical conception of leadership.