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

by Gordon S. Wood

  The Republicans disagreed over multitudes of issues, but mainly over the degree to which the state and federal governments represented the people. Sometimes the moderate Republicans even sounded like Federalists, appealing, as Thomas McKean’s Pennsylvania “Quids” did in 1805, to the fact that “the best and wisest men in the community” were opposed to the “mad schemes” of the radicals, who in any case were little more than “backwoods bumpkins.”111 Unlike the Federalists, however, these moderate Republicans expressed no doubt about democracy and the sacredness of the will of the people. It was all part of the process of learning just how far republican equality could be carried. Of course, many individual politicians continued to pride themselves on their independence from factions and influence of any sort, and “party” still remained a disrespectful word. In fact, until the Jacksonian era nothing approaching a stable party system developed in Congress.

  9

  Republican Society

  The Jeffersonian revolution and all that it meant socially and culturally were driven by the same dynamic forces that had been at work since at least the middle of the eighteenth century—population growth and movement and commercial expansion.1 By 1800 5,297,000 people lived in the United States, one-fifth of whom were black slaves. Since most adult whites married at early ages, fertility rates were high, with over seven births per woman being the average, nearly double that of the European states.2 After 1800 this fertility rate began to decline as people became more conscious of their ability to create prosperity for themselves and their children by limiting the size of their families. Nevertheless, the population as a whole continued to expand dramatically, doubling every twenty years or so, twice the rate of growth of any European nation.

  At the pace America was growing, one observer predicted that the country would contain 860 million people by the middle of the twentieth century.3 Americans marveled at the fact that by 1810 the United States, numbering over seven million people, was nearly as populous as England and Wales had been in 1801.4 And it was a remarkably young population: in 1810 36 percent of the white population was under the age of ten, and nearly 70 percent was under the age of twenty-five.

  It was also a population on the move as never before. While the sparse population of the new state of Tennessee (1796) multiplied tenfold between 1790 and 1820, New York’s already considerable population more than quadrupled, much of it spilling into the western parts of the state; in the single decade between 1800 and 1810 New York added fifteen new counties, 147 new towns, and 374,000 new inhabitants. “The woods are full of new settlers,” remarked a traveler in upstate New York in 1805. “Axes were resounding and the trees literally were falling about us as we passed.” Although nine-tenths of the country’s population in 1800 still lived east of the Alleghenies, increasing numbers of Americans were crossing the mountains into the West—to the dread of many Federalists. As the high-toned Federalist Gouverneur Morris warned, the backcountry folk were crude and unenlightened and were “always most adverse to the best measures.”5

  Before the Revolution the territory of Kentucky had contained almost no white settlers. By 1800 it had become a state (1792) and grown to over 220,000; at that point not a single adult Kentuckian had been born and grown up within the state’s borders. And these burgeoning Westerners were prospering. Despite the poor roads and the prevalence of simple log cabins, observed a traveler in 1802, one could not find “a single family without milk, butter, smoked or salted meat—the poorest man has always one or two horses.” By 1800 most of the major cities of the future Midwest had already been founded—St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Erie, Cleveland, Nashville, and Louisville.6

  When the defeat of the Indians at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 opened up the southern two-thirds of the present state of Ohio to white settlement, people began pouring into the region. Between 1800 and 1810 Ohio gained statehood (1803) and grew from 45,000 inhabitants to over 230,000. Cincinnati was already being called “the Great Emporium of the West.” By 1820, only thirty-two years after the first permanent white settlers arrived, Ohio had a population of over a half million people and was the fifth-largest state in the Union. The state was creating so many new towns that Ohioans complained they had run out of names for them. Gazetteers in America, it was said, could not keep up with the “very frequent changes” in the dividing of territories and naming of places “which are almost daily taking place”: it was a problem “peculiar to a new, progressive and extensive country.”7

  In 1795 the population west of the mountains had been only 150,000; by 1810 it was more than a million.8 The Americans, said the British traveler Isaac Weld, were a restless people, always on the lookout for something better or more profitable. They “seldom or ever consider whether the part of the country to which they are going is healthy or otherwise.. . . If the lands in one part . . . are superior to those in another in fertility; if they are in the neighborhood of a navigable river, or situated conveniently to a good market; if they are cheap and rising in value, thither the American will gladly emigrate, let the climate be ever so unfriendly to the human system.”9

  Lucy Fletcher Kellogg’s father, like many other American farmers, traded goods, ran a brickyard, kept a tavern, and was always on the move. Her parents had a farm in Sutton, Massachusetts, she recalled in her memoir, but “in accordance with the instincts of New England people, they must sell the farm and move to New Hampshire or some other new place.” The father of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, moved his family seven times in fourteen years. Others moved at least three or four times in a lifetime, selling their land to new settlers at a profit each time; “they are,” it was noted, “very indifferent ploughmen” anyway. Americans had a reputation among the Spanish of being able to travel “200 leagues with no other aids than a sack of cornmeal and flask of powder.”10

  The country still remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural—a puzzling condition that seemed to violate the widely accepted theories of social development. An expanding population was presumably the force that compelled a society to move from one stage of civilization to another. But that was not happening in America.

  During the early nineteenth century nineteen out of twenty Americans continued to live in rural places, that is, unincorporated sites with fewer than twenty-five hundred inhabitants. In 1800 nearly 90 percent of the labor force was still engaged in farming. Even the more urbanized areas of New England and the Mid-Atlantic had 70 percent of their workers on farms. In 1800 only thirty-three towns claimed a population of twenty-five hundred or more, and only six of these urban areas had populations over ten thousand.11 By contrast, in 1801 one-third of people in England lived in cities, and only 36 percent of English workers engaged in agriculture.

  If the United States were eventually to become a fiscal-military state capable of taking on the European powers, this was not the way to go about it. A rural, underdeveloped society preoccupied with farming was not one that could sustain a European-type war-making capacity, and it was not at all what many Federalists had wanted or expected. The Federalists had thought that America’s rapid multiplication of people would force the country to develop the same sorts of civilized urban institutions, the same kinds of integrated social hierarchies and industrial centers, the same types of balanced economies in which manufacturing was as important as farming, the same sorts of bureaucratic governments that made the states of Europe, at least before the accursed French Revolution erupted, so impressive, so powerful, and so civilized. They assumed that American society would eventually become more like that of Europe and that what Franklin had once called the “general happy Mediocrity” of America would gradually disappear.12

  But the opposite was happening. Not only was American social mediocrity spreading at an alarming rate, but more and more Americans were taking advantage of the availability of land in America and living apart from all traditional social hierarchies—especially in the new Western areas
, where, in the words of George Clymer of Philadelphia, there were “no private or publick associations for the common good.” Indeed, conservatives asked, could the frontier areas even “be called society where every man is for himself alone and has no regard for any other person farther than he can make him subservient to his own views”?13 Settlers on the move had little respect for authority. A mobile population, one Kentuckian told James Madison in 1792, “must make a very different mass from one which is composed of men born and raised on the same spot.. . . They see none about them to whom or to whose families they have been accustomed to think themselves inferior.” In these new Western territories, where “society is yet unborn,” where “your connections and friends are absent, and at a distance,” and where there was “no distinction assumed on account of rank or property,” it was difficult to put together anything that resembled a traditional social order, or even a civilized community. Kentucky, like all frontier areas, travelers noted, was “different from a staid and settled society.. . . A certain loss of civility is inevitable.” Yet to some “plain, poor” Yankees from New England like Amos Kendall, Lexington, Kentucky, was already too aristocratic and stratified for their tastes, and they continued to look westward for opportunities.14

  The changes, especially outside of the South, seemed overwhelming. America, noted a French observer, was a “country in flux; that which is true today as regards its population, its establishments, its prices, its commerce will not be true six months from now.”15 Americans appeared to love liberty too much. They “dread everything that preaches constraint,” concluded another foreign observer. “Natural freedom . . . is what pleases them.”16

  Although many Americans, including Jefferson, celebrated the freedom that such weak social constraints offered, most Federalists were horrified by what was happening, dismayed and disillusioned by all the licentious changes and breakdowns of authority. Perhaps no Federalist was more troubled than William Cooper of Otsego County, New York. Cooper had once imagined becoming a genteel patriarch, but his design soon began collapsing all about him. The settlers of Cooperstown grew in numbers and diversity and became strangers to Cooper and to one another. His town was increasingly racked by lawsuits, bankruptcies, disobedient servants, vandalism, thefts, and incidents of violence and arson. Cooper himself was caned in a Cooperstown street in 1807, imparting to him and his family a growing dread that anarchy and chaos were all about them.

  By the time his political world was disintegrating, Cooper had concluded that the gentility he had so relentlessly sought was beyond his grasp and that he must look to his five sons and two daughters to finish what he had begun. But in 1800 his cherished elder daughter, Hannah, died in a fall from a horse. He sent William Jr. to Princeton, where the boy became a dissipated dandy, spending lavishly on clothes, wines, and cigars before being expelled in 1802 on suspicion of setting a fire that burned Nassau Hall. He next sent James to Yale, where the future novelist ran up debts and behaved as foolishly as his brother had: in 1805 he too was expelled—for fighting and using gunpowder to blow off his opponent’s dormitory door; James then ran off and joined the navy. After William Cooper died in 1809, his children thought they could continue to live extravagantly. But Cooper’s great wealth was more apparent than real, and within fifteen years his entire estate was gone, eaten up by debts, failed speculations, unpaid mortgages, and legal suits.

  The Cooper family was devastated. Ill equipped to deal with financial problems, four of the Cooper sons succumbed to some combination of stress and high living during the next decade and one by one died prematurely—all in their thirties. By 1819, a decade after the father’s death, only two children were left—the second daughter, Ann, and James, the future novelist. The family property in Cooperstown was bought up by a new breed of upstart, William Holt Averell, the son of a Cooperstown shoemaker and a shrewd hard-nosed capitalist who would have nothing to do with wasteful spending on gentility: he trained his sons to be businessmen, not gentlemen, and succeeded where Cooper had failed.

  ALTHOUGH AMERICANS, compared to Englishmen, had never been very respectful of authority, the Revolution seemed to have emboldened many of them to challenge all hierarchy and all distinctions, even those naturally earned. Middling men began asserting themselves as never before. As one foreigner noted, “The lowest here . . . stand erect and crouch not before any man.”17 After the Revolution Bostonians stopped using the designations of “yeoman” and “husbandman” and began recording the occupational titles among artisans less and less. All adult white males began using the designation of “Mr.,” which had traditionally belonged exclusively to the gentry. Even the city council of Charleston, South Carolina, felt sufficient egalitarian pressure to abolish the titles of “Esq.” and “His Honor.”18

  By what right did authority claim obedience? This was the question now being asked of every institution, every organization, every individual. It was as if the Revolution had set in motion a disintegrative force that could not be stopped.

  European travelers, especially those from England, were, of course, those most dismayed by the society of the new Republic, and much of their criticism was devastating. Many Europeans regarded the English as wild and liberty-loving, but by comparison the licentious Americans made the English seem stable and staid. Many Americans naturally tried to discount this criticism, but for the Federalists most of it was only too true. How could they not agree with foreign critics who declared that in the United States “liberty and equality level all ranks”?

  One of the most colorful and censorious of these foreigners was Charles William Janson, an English immigrant who spent more than a dozen years between 1793 and 1806 trying to understand the people of this new country, who by 1806 were, he said, “the only remaining republicans in the civilized world.” Janson said that he had come to America “with an intention of passing a considerable part of his life there,” but a series of land-speculating and business failures eventually drove him back to England. American customs and manners, he concluded in his book The Stranger in America (1807), were “in every respect uncongenial to English habits, and to the tone of an Englishman’s constitution.” Yet his account of the emerging nature of America’s character was no more disparaging and despairing than the accounts of many Federalists, who were equally fearful of the brutality and vulgarity the new republican society seemed to be breeding. By the early nineteenth century Janson was not the only one in America who felt that he was a stranger in the land.19

  Janson’s views of America’s democratic society, where the meanest and most ignorant people “consider themselves on an equal footing with the best educated people in the country,” were actually no more severe than those of Joseph Dennie, whom Janson quoted. The Boston-born and Harvard-educated Dennie was the editor of the Port Folio, the most influential and longest-lasting literary journal of its day and the most distinguished Federalist publication in the age of Jefferson. In 1803 in one of his early issues Dennie wrote with more valor than discretion that “a democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history. Its omens are always sinister.. . . It was weak and wicked in Athens. It was bad in Sparta, and worse in Rome. It has been tried in France, and has terminated in despotism. It was tried in England, and rejected with the utmost loathing and abhorrence. It is on its trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy.” For these comments Dennie was hauled into court as a factious and seditious person, though eventually acquitted.20

  But Dennie and other Federalists soon came to realize that democracy in America was not going to end, as it had elsewhere, in anarchy leading to dictatorship and despotism. Instead, American democracy, driven by the most intense competitiveness, especially for the making of money, was going to end in orgies of getting and spending. Too many of the American people seemed absorbed in the selfish pursuit of their own interests, buying and selling like no other people in the world. Federalist literati and others were appalled by what seemed to be the sudden eme
rgence of thousands upon thousands of hustling “businessmen,” which was the term that soon came into favor—appropriately enough, for the whole society seemed absorbed in business. “Enterprise,” “improvement,” and “getting ahead” were everywhere extolled in the press. “The voice of the people and their government is loud and unanimous for commerce,” said a disgruntled and bewildered Dr. Samuel Mitchill in 1800. “Their inclination and habits are adapted to trade and traffic,” declared this professor of natural history at Columbia College, who knew so much that he was called “a living encyclopedia” and “the walking library.” “From one end of the continent to the other,” said Mitchill, “the universal roar is Commerce! Commerce! at all events, Commerce!”21

  Although nearly all Americans lived in rural places and were engaged in farming, most of them, as Professor Mitchill correctly perceived, were by 1800 much involved in commerce and the exchange of goods. The extent of their commercial involvement has been a matter of some debate among historians. Some have suggested that many eighteenth-century farmers, especially in New England, were pre-modern and anti-capitalist in their outlook. These farmers, these historians contend, were mainly engaged in household modes of production in which they sought not to maximize profits but only to satisfy their family needs and maintain the competency and independence of their households. They sought land not to increase their personal wealth but to provide estates for their lineal families. Rather than relying on extended markets, these husbandmen tended to produce goods for their own consumption or for exchanges within their local communities.22

  While eighteenth-century farmers may have been less commercial than they would become in the nineteenth century, they certainly knew about trade and commerce. Many, if not most, at least occasionally brought “surpluses” to markets beyond their neighborhoods—selling tobacco and other staples to Britain, sending wheat and other foodstuffs to Europe, and exporting lumber and livestock to the West Indies. In other words, from the beginning of the seventeenth century colonial Americans exchanged goods and knew about marketplaces; but, in New England at least, many farmers may not have participated in what economists call a true market economy. Only when the market became separated from the political, social, and cultural systems constraining it and became itself an agent of change, only when most people in the society became involved in buying and selling and began to think in terms of bettering themselves economically—only then did Americans begin to enter a market economy.