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

by Gordon S. Wood

  By the end of the War of 1812 the United States was becoming, in the minds of its citizens, a nation to be reckoned with. Its population, approaching that of England, had grown rapidly, numbering now nearly eight and a half million people, including one and a half million African Americans. The population had more than doubled in the twenty-five years since the first census in 1790—and continued to grow faster than nearly every other nation in the Western world.

  In 1815 the United States comprised eighteen states and five territories. To the original thirteen states had been added Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), Ohio (1802), and Louisiana (1812). The territories were Indiana (1809), Illinois (1809), Michigan (1805), Mississippi (1798), and Missouri (1812). Not only had the United States doubled in size, but its older eighteenth-century society, especially in the North, had been dramatically transformed. Americans, or at least the Northerners among them, were more egalitarian, more enterprising, and more selfconfident than they had been in 1789.

  With the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in France, Europe was experiencing a conservative reaction to decades of revolutionary upheaval, leaving America the only beacon of republicanism remaining in a thoroughly monarchical world. The Americans’ emotional connection with Britain was at last broken, and they had acquired a new sense of their own national character. Their perspective was no longer eastward across the Atlantic but westward across their own expansive continent. Anyone aged forty or older born in America had once been a monarchical subject of His Majesty George III; anyone younger than forty—and they comprised over 85 percent of the population—had been born a republican citizen of the youthful United States. The generation that had framed the Constitution and launched the new federal government was passing, and a new generation of Americans was emerging.

  Of the forty-one members who attended the last meeting of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, only eleven still lived, and of these only two were still actively influential in national politics: President Madison, the last president to wear his hair in a queue, and Rufus King, senator from New York. Charles Pinckney, another Framer, had retired from the South Carolina legislature in 1814, but his political career was not over: he would successfully run for Congress in 1818. When Madison left the presidency in 1817, he and Secretary of State Monroe were the only members of his administration who had been in public life at the beginning of the new national government. The turnover in the Congress was even more dramatic. Nearly all the major congressional leaders in 1815 were under age forty, including Henry Clay, Langdon Cheves, John C. Calhoun, William Lowndes, and Felix Grundy.1

  BY 1815 CHANGE WAS EVERYWHERE, but especially in the North. The War of 1812 cleared the air of much traditional thinking about commerce and made it much easier for Americans to come to a more honest appreciation of their society’s preoccupation with economic development and money-making, at least in the Northern states. By 1815 a new generation of leaders was much less apt to wring its hands over the obsessively acquisitive character of American society and was much more aware of the importance of domestic manufacturing and internal trade to the growing wealth of the nation.

  With the embargo and the non-intercourse acts, far fewer manufactured imports from Britain were available, and this meant rising prices for such manufactured items. This in turn led both to a sudden increase in the number of patents and also to an inducement for more and more investors to shift their capital out of overseas shipping into domestic manufacturing. Before 1808 only fifteen cotton mills existed in the United States; by the end of 1809 eighty-seven mills had been added. Everywhere in the North, but especially in New England, small factories were springing up. “Our people have ‘cotton mill fever’ as it is called,” declared Moses Brown of Rhode Island in 1810. “Every place almost occupied with cotton mills. . . . Spinning yarn and making cloth is become our greatest business.”2

  By inviting the English immigrant Samuel Slater to Rhode Island in 1790, Brown himself had contributed to this explosion of mills. He helped Slater use his knowledge of cotton textile machinery that he had smuggled out of England to set up a factory. By 1794 Slater had built a large part of the mill that survives today in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. By 1795 he built a second mill, and between 1803 and 1807 he and his associates started twelve more. Of all the mills in existence in the United States in 1808, nearly half belonged to Slater and his associates or to one of his former employees. Between 1808 and 1812 the embargo and the war prompted the creation of thirty-six cotton mills and forty-one woolen mills in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts. “There is probably more business done here, than at any other factory in America,” declared a young minister describing Slatersville, Rhode Island, in 1812. “On a spot where a few years ago there was but two or three houses, there is a village of 64 families and 500 people in some way employed about the factory.”3

  The growth of manufacturing was not confined to New England. By 1814 Tench Coxe estimated that 243 cotton mills operated within fifteen states. Pennsylvania alone had 64. By 1820 well over a quarter of the labor force in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States was working in small factories, making everything from shoes to textiles. But such statistics are misleading; not only was at least 30 percent of the manufacturing labor force in 1820 composed of women and children, but this factory work did not include the extraordinary amount of manufacturing taking place in rural family households.

  Unlike Britain and Europe, this American rural manufacturing was not usually the result of mercantile capitalists subcontracting work to impoverished cottagers and landless laborers in so-called putting-out systems; it was more often the consequence of ongoing farm families becoming part-time manufacturers and entrepreneurs in order to better themselves by making some extra money. Even farmers who were not growing crops for export abroad were nonetheless scrambling to create goods to exchange in local markets—working with their wives and children spinning cloth or weaving hats, dressing deer skins and beaver pelts, making hoops and barrels, distilling whiskey or cider, and fabricating whatever they might sell to local stores. In 1809 an English-born leather dresser, Talmadge Edwards, who had migrated to America in 1770, hired country girls to come to his tannery in upstate New York to cut out gloves, which Edwards then sent to farmers’ wives for sewing and finishing. By 1810 he discovered he had a market for his gloves among the households in the Albany area. From these modest beginnings grew the flourishing glove and mitten industry of the United States.

  In 1810 90 percent of the $ 42 million total textile production of the nation came from family households. As early as the 1790s Henry Wansey, a British visitor, had noted that in both Massachusetts and New Jersey housewives in every farming household kept their families busy carding and spinning woolen and linen cloth “in the evenings and when they are not in the fields.” Even earlier the French visitor Brissot de Warville had found “almost all” the households of Worcester, Massachusetts, “inhabited by men who are both cultivators and artisans; one is a tanner, another a shoemaker, another sells goods; but all are farmers.” Manufactures, it was said, were “rising in all their varied form in every direction, and pursued with an eye to profit in almost every farm house in the United States.” By 1809 households in the little town of Franklin, Massachusetts, were producing six thousand straw hats a year for sale in Boston and Providence.4

  In many Northern agricultural towns people seemed to be doing everything but farming. By 1815 even the tiny town of Mount Pleasant, Ohio, with a population of only five hundred persons, had several dozen artisans and manufacturing shops, including three saddlers, three hatters, four blacksmiths, four weavers, six boot and shoe makers, three cabinet makers, one baker, one apothecary, two wagon makers, two tanneries, one wool-carding-machine maker, two wool-carding machinists, one wool-spinning machinist, one flax spinner, and one nail factory. Within a six-mile radius of this little Ohio town were nine merchant mills, two gristmills, twelve sawmills, one paper mill, one woolen
factory, and two fulling mills.5

  With so much manufacturing and so many internal exchanges going on, the Republican leaders had to adjust their ideas of political economy. As early as 1799 Congressman Albert Gallatin had recognized that America had become commercially and socially different from the former mother country. In Britain, he told the Congress, the different trades and occupations were “so well distinguished that a merchant and a farmer are rarely combined in the same person; a merchant is a merchant, and nothing but a merchant; a manufacturer is only a manufacturer; a farmer is merely a farmer; but this is not the case in this country.” In America, by contrast, “the different professions and traders are blended together in the same person; the same man being frequently a farmer and a merchant and perhaps a manufacturer.”

  The consequence, said Gallatin, was that the United States was no longer the exclusively agricultural nation that Jefferson idealized. Nearly everyone was a farmer, and something else besides. “Go into the interior of the country,” he said, “and you will scarcely find a farmer who is not, in some degree, a trader. In a grazing part of the country, you will find them buying and selling cattle; in other parts you will find them distillers, tanners, or brick-makers. So that, from one end of the United States to the other, the people are generally traders.”6

  By the end of the War of 1812 even Jefferson realized that circumstances had radically changed since he had expressed his hostility toward manufacturing in his Notes on the State of Virginia . Who in 1785, he asked in January 1816, could have foreseen the “rapid depravity” into which Europe would sink in the subsequent decades? Who could have imagined that two such distinguished nations as Britain and France would defy “those moral laws established by the Author of nature between nation and nation” and “would cover the earth and sea with robberies and piracies”? Americans, he said, had experienced what in 1785 they had not believed possible, “that there exists both profligacy and power enough to exclude us from the field of interchange with other nations: that to be independent for the comforts of life we must fabricate them for ourselves. We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist.” Anyone opposed to domestic manufacturing, Jefferson now concluded, must be willing either to be reduced to a dependency on Great Britain or “to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns.”

  Since Jefferson wanted neither alternative, he had to concede “that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.” He vowed he would in the future purchase homemade goods and thereby “wrest that weapon of distress from the hand which has wielded it.” Still, he hoped that Americans would manufacture only enough goods to meet their domestic demand and would not end up, like England, creating urban factories into which their surplus labor would be drawn.7

  Indeed, so averse were Americans to English-style urban factories that much of the textile production remained scattered among farm families. Slater’s mills not only employed whole families, including young children, but confined the work to the spinning of yarn; the yarn was then “put out” to be woven by hand-weavers in the homes of families throughout the area. Nineteen out of twenty Americans continued to live in rural places, that is, places smaller than twenty-five hundred persons. In the two decades between 1800 and 1820 the percentage of the labor force employed in agriculture actually increased from 89. 5 percent to 91.7 percent.8

  By 1820 sixty-one urban places dotted the map, but only five were cities with populations over twenty-five thousand—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New Orleans. Altogether, these urban places held less than 7 percent of the total American population. By contrast, En gland in 1821 had well over a third of its population in cities, and more than 20 percent lived in cities larger than twenty thousand. America contained nothing resembling London with its million and a quarter people and had no burgeoning industrial cities like Leeds or Manchester.

  By 1815 the United States thus remained a predominantly rural, agricultural society, on the surface not all that different from the society of the eighteenth century. Yet beneath that surface much had changed. The early Republic may have been still overwhelmingly rural, still overwhelmingly agricultural, but it was also now overwhelmingly commercial, perhaps, in the North at least, the most thoroughly commercialized society in the world. The Americans’ desire to trade was “a passion as unconquerable as any with which nature has endowed us,” Henry Clay told the House of Representatives in 1812. “You may attempt to regulate—you cannot destroy it.”9

  America’s intense involvement in overseas commerce and the carrying trade between 1792 and 1805—because of the European wars—tended to mask what was happening commercially within the United States itself. While Americans were trading with places all over the world, they were also trading with one another and creating a continental marketplace. Suddenly, the vision some had had in the aftermath of Independence that Americans constituted “a world within ourselves, sufficient to produce whatever can contribute to the necessities and even the superfluities of life,” was being realized.10

  The rapid development of domestic trade created the heightened demand almost everywhere for internal improvements—new roads, new canals, new ferries, new bridges—anything that would help increase the speed and lower the cost of the movement of goods within the country, and, as John C. Calhoun said in 1817, in a common opinion, help “bind the republic together.” All this worked to convince Americans, as the governor of Pennsylvania declared in 1811, that “foreign commerce is a good but of a secondary nature, and that happiness and prosperity must be sought for within the limits of our own country.” This growing belief that domestic commerce of the United States was “incalculably more valuable” than its foreign commerce and that “the home market for productions of the earth and manufactures is of more importance than all foreign ones” represented a momentous reversal of traditional thinking.11

  Americans had always carried on an extraordinary amount of internal trade with one another, but rarely had they appreciated its worth to their society. They had tended to believe that such domestic trade—say, between Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia—had no real value unless goods were further shipped outside of the country. Inland trade by itself, they thought, could never increase a community’s aggregate wealth; it could only move it about. The “meer handling of Goods one to another, no more increases any wealth in the Province, than Persons at a Fire, increase the Water in a Pail, by passing it thro’ twenty or Forty hands.” Such passing of wealth around the community from hand to hand, William Smith of New York had declared in 1750, “tho’ it may enrich an Individual,” meant that “others must be poorer, in an exact proportion to his Gains; but the Collective Body of the People not at all.”12

  Because of this kind of traditional thinking, Americans had tended to attach a special importance to overseas commerce. They had believed that a society could increase its aggregate wealth only by selling more beyond its borders than it bought, that is, by having a favorable balance of foreign trade. As one American put it in 1786, “Only exports make a country rich.”13 With such zero-sum mercantilist assumptions, Americans had not extended much respectability to internal traders and retail shopkeepers. They certainly had not granted such traders and shopkeepers the highly regarded status, or the right to claim the title, of “merchant,” which belonged exclusively to those who exported goods abroad and thus presumably earned real wealth for the society.

  By the early nineteenth century, however, anyone who was involved in trade of any sort, even retail shopkeepers, was claiming the title of “merchant.” Instead of defining “commerce” as Montesquieu had—”the exportation and importation of merchandise with a view to the advantage of the state”—many Americans, at least in the North, now equated “commerce” with all the exchanges taking place within the country itself, exchanges in which not only both parties always gained but the society did as well. “There is no word in the English language that more decei
ves a people than the word commerce,” wrote Hezekiah Niles in his Weekly Register in 1814. People everywhere “associate with it an idea of great ships, passing to all countries—whereas the rich commerce of every community is its internal; a communication of one part with other parts of the same. . . . In the United States, (were we at peace) our foreign trade would hardly exceed a fortieth or fiftieth part of the whole commerce of the people.”14

  Niles, whose Register was America’s first national news magazine, was one of the leaders in turning Americans inward. During the War of 1812 he called for an end to all foreign influence and the development of domestic manufacturing and trade. The war, he said, was beneficial to America because it will “bring about a blessed union of the people, in directing them to look AT HOME for all they desire.”15

  Of course, not everyone accepted the new thinking. “Perhaps the most controversial subject of political economy,” declared DeWitt Clinton in 1814, “is whether the home or foreign commerce is most productive of national wealth.” The Southern planters with their need to market their staples abroad could never acknowledge the superiority of internal trade.16

  BY THE SECOND DECADE of the nineteenth century the Republicans had won such an overwhelming victory that the Federalist “aristocrats” no longer seemed to matter either politically or socially. The result was that the middling people in the North, who were participating in all the buying and selling and made up the bulk of the Northern Jeffersonian Republicans, never developed the same acute self-consciousness of being “middling” as their counterparts in England. There the aristocracy was much more firmly established and less open to easy entry. Wealthy tradesmen and businessmen and other aspiring middling sorts usually had to wait a generation or more and then acquire land before they could move up into the ranks of the gentry. Consequently, in England the term “middle class” took on a much more literal meaning than it did in America: it came to describe that stratum of people who lay between the dominant aristocracy and the working class and were self-consciously distinguished from each of the extremes.