Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Page 33
Some extreme Federalist congressmen, such as Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, thought that “the time is now come when it will be proper to declare that nothing but birth shall entitle a man to citizenship in this country.”23 Although most congressmen thought Harper’s proposal went too far, they did eventually enact a fairly radical naturalization act. The Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798, extended the period of residence required before an alien could apply to become a citizen from five to fourteen years, compelled all aliens to register with a district court or an agent appointed by the president within forty-eight hours of arrival in the United States, and forbade all aliens who were citizens or subjects of a nation with which the United States was at war from becoming American citizens.
The Federalists also laid plans for dealing with the aliens who were already in the country. Even the Republicans feared some aliens. Consequently, they had no serious objection to restraining enemy aliens during wartime and, mainly in order to prevent worse legislation, virtually took over the passage of the Alien Enemies Act of July 6, 1798—an act that is still on the books. But the Federalists wanted an even wider-ranging law to deal with aliens in peacetime as well as wartime, because, as Abigail Adams put it, even though the United States had not actually declared war against France, nonetheless, “in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.” The resultant Alien Friends Act of June 25, 1798, which Jefferson labeled “a most detestable thing . . . worthy of the 8th or 9th century,” gave the president the power to expel, without a hearing or even giving reasons, any alien whom the president judged “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” If such aliens failed to leave the country, they could be imprisoned for up to three years and permanently barred from becoming citizens. This extraordinary act was temporary and was to expire in two years.24
The Alien Friends Act and the Naturalization Act met strenuous opposition from the Republicans, especially from the New York congressmen Edward Livingston and Albert Gallatin. Denying that a French invasion was imminent, the Republicans argued that the measures were unnecessary. They declared that the state laws and courts were more than capable of taking care of all aliens and spies in the country. They claimed that the acts were unconstitutional, first, because Article V of the Constitution, made with the slave trade in mind, prevented Congress prior to 1808 from prohibiting “the Migration or Importation” of persons coming into the United States, and, second, because the acts gave the president arbitrary power. Gallatin in particular argued that the Alien Friends Act violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” pointing out that this right extended to every “person,” not just to citizens.25
Federalists, fearful, as Harrison Gray Otis put it, of “an army of spies and incendiaries scattered through the continent,” brooked no interference with their plans.26 Nevertheless, some of the Federalists were uneasy over the severity of the measures, especially those with large immigrant populations in their states, and the Naturalization Act and Alien Friends Act passed by only narrow margins. Still, most Federalists were pleased that the new measures would in the future deprive aliens from influencing America’s elections. Adams much later justified to Jefferson his signing of the Alien Friends bill on the grounds that “we were then at War with France: French Spies then swarmed in our Cities and in the Country. . . . To check them was the design of this law. Was there ever a Government,” he asked Jefferson, “which had not Authority to defend itself against Spies in its own Bosom?”27
RESTRICTING NATURALIZATION and restraining aliens were only partial solutions to the crisis the Federalists saw threatening the security of the country. Equally important was finding a way of dealing with the immense power over public opinion that newspapers were developing in the 1790s. In fact, the American press had become the most important instrument of democracy in the modern world, and because the Federalists were fearful of too much democracy, they believed the press had to be restrained.
With the number of newspapers more than doubling in the 1790s, Americans were rapidly becoming the largest newspaper-reading public in the world. When the great French observer of America Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 he marveled at the role newspapers had come to play in American culture. Since, as he noted, there was “hardly a hamlet in America without its newspaper,” the power of the American press made “political life circulate in every corner of that vast land.” The press’s power, Tocqueville suggested, flowed from the democratic nature of the society. An aristocratic society, such as that promoted by the Federalists, was tied together by patronage and personal connections. But when these ties disintegrated, which is what happened when the society became more democratic, then, said Tocqueville, it became impossible to get great numbers of people to come together and cooperate unless each individual could be persuaded to think that his private interests were best served by uniting his efforts with those of many other people. “That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper,” Tocqueville concluded. “Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.”28
Madison was one of the first to see the important role of newspapers in creating public opinion. Near the end of 1791 he revised some of his thinking in Federalist Nos. 10 and 51 and argued now that the large extent of the country was a disadvantage for republican government. In a huge country like the United States, not only was ascertaining the real opinion of the public difficult, but what opinion there was could be more easily counterfeited, which was “favorable to the authority of government.” At the same time, the more extensive the country, “the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes,” which was “unfavorable to liberty.” The solution, said Madison, was to encourage “a general intercourse of sentiments” by whatever means—good roads, domestic commerce, the exchange of representatives, and “particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people .”29
Even as Madison wrote, the press itself was changing. It began shedding its traditional neutral role of providing advertising, mercantile information, and foreign news to its readers. Editors such as John Fenno and Philip Freneau no longer saw themselves as mere tradesmen earning a living, as printer Benjamin Franklin had in the colonial era; instead, they became political advocates and party activists. During the course of the 1790s, these partisan editors, many of them immigrants, and their news papers became essential to the emerging national parties of the Federalists and especially the Republicans.
In the generation following the Revolution, over three hundred thousand British and Irish immigrants entered the United States. Many were political or religious refugees, radical exiles driven from Britain and Ireland because of their dissenting beliefs, including the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley and the militant Irish Catholic brothers Mathew and James Carey. Since many of these radical exiles were writers, printers, and editors, they inevitably ended up in America creating or running newspapers. Indeed, they contributed in disproportionate numbers to the rapid growth of the American press. In the several decades following the end of the Revolutionary War, twenty-three English, Scottish, and Irish radicals edited and produced no fewer than fifty-seven American newspapers and magazines, most of which supported the Republican cause in the politically sensitive Middle States.30 Since in the early 1790s over 90 percent of newspapers had generally supported the Federalists, this surge of Republican papers represented a remarkable shift in a short period of time.31
These partisan newspapers gave party members, especially those of the opposition Republican party, a sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a common cause. Since there were no modern party organizations, no official ballots, and no lists of party members, newspaper subscriptions and readership often came to define partisanship; newspaper offices even printed party tickets.32
As thes
e newspapers grew in number and partisanship, they became increasingly accessible to more ordinary people. Of course, by modern standards the circulation of individual newspapers remained small—from a few hundred to a few thousand for the most successful of the urban papers. Yet because they were often available in taverns and other public places and were sometimes read aloud to groups, they did manage to reach ever larger numbers of people. By the end of the decade some claimed that newspapers were entering three-quarters of American homes.33
No editor did more to politicize the press in the 1790s than Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin’s grandson. Bache, called “Lightning-Rod Junior” by the Federalists, was the most prominent of the Republican editors, and he took the lead in arguing for a new and special role for the press in a popular republic. In 1793Bache’s paper, the General Advertiser (later the Aurora), claimed that the press provided “a constitutional check upon the conduct of public servants.” Since public opinion was the basis of a republic, and newspapers were the principal and in some cases the only organ of that opinion, the press in America, said Bache, needed to become a major participant in politics. Because the people could not always count on their elected representatives to express their sentiments, newspapers and other institutions outside of government had responsibilities to protect the people’s liberties and promote their interests.
Of course, nothing could be more different from the Federalists’ view of the people’s relationship to their republican governments. They assumed in traditional English fashion that once the people had elected their representatives, they should remain quiet and uninvolved in politics until the next election. But Bache’s Aurora and other Republican newspapers in the 1790s set about educating the people in their new obligations as citizens. In order to get people to throw off their traditional passivity and deference and become engaged in politics, the Republican editors urged people to change their consciousness. They relentlessly attacked aristocratic pretension and privilege and classical deference and decorum and implored the people to cast off their sense of inferiority to the “well-born” and their so-called betters and elect whomever they wished to the offices of government, including men like William Findley, Jedediah Peck, and Matthew Lyon.
“In Representative Governments,” these Republican editors declared, “the people are masters, all their officers from the highest to the lowest are servants to the people.” And the people should be able to elect men “not only of ourselves, but as much as possible as ourselves, Men who have the same kind of interests to protect and the same dangers to avert.” How could a “freeman,” they asked, trust any leader “who boldly tells the world, that there are different grades and castes in every society, arising from natural causes, and that these grades and castes must have a separate influence and power in the government, in order to preserve the whole”? For too long the “great men” of the Federalist party had looked “upon the honest laborer as a distinct animal of an inferior species.” Above all, the Republican editors attacked the leisured gentry as drones and parasites feeding on the labor of the common people. Such leisured gentlemen—who were “for the most part merchants, speculators, priests, lawyers and men employed in the various departments of government”—obtained their wealth either by inheritance or “by their art and cunning .”34
In just these ways did the Republican newspapers meet the emotional needs of thousands upon thousands of aspiring middling sorts, especially in the Northern states, who for so long had resented the condescending arrogance of the so-called better sort, or the “prigarchy,” as one Northern Republican labeled the Federalists.35 Even a Republican paper in the tiny town of Cincinnati, Ohio, filled its pages with hopeful lessons from the French Revolution that “sufficiently proved that generals may be taken from the ranks, and ministers of state from the obscurity of the most remote village.”36
By contrast with this extensive Republican use of the press, the Federalists did little. Presuming that they had a natural right to rule, they had no need to stir up public opinion, which was what demagogues did in exploiting the people’s ignorance and innocence.37 Federalist editors and printers of newspapers like John Fenno and his Gazette of the United States did exist, but most of these supporters of the national government were conservative in temperament; they tended to agree with the Federalist gentry that artisan-printers had no business organizing political parties or engaging in electioneering.38
Even the most successful printer-editor associated with the Federalist cause, William Cobbett, had very little to do with party politics. Although Cobbett was himself a British émigré who arrived in the United States in 1792, he shared none of the radical politics of his fellow émigrés. Indeed, he loved his homeland and always portrayed himself as a simple British patriot who admired all things British. What made him appear to be a supporter of the Federalists was his deep and abiding hatred of the French Revolution and all those Republicans who supported it. He actually had no great affection for the United States and never became an American citizen. He thought the country was “detestable . . . good for getting money” and little else, while its people were “a cheating, sly, roguish gang.”39 He supported the Federalists indirectly by attacking the Republicans, whose “rage for equality” he ridiculed.
Cobbett was especially effective in mocking the hypocrisy of the liberty-loving Southern Republicans who were slaveholders. “After having spent the day in singing hymns to the Goddess of Liberty,” he wrote in his 1795 pamphlet, A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats, “the virtuous Democrat gets him home to his peaceful dwelling, and sleeps, with his property secure beneath his roof, yea, sometimes in his very arms; and when his ‘industry’ has enhanced its value, it bears to a new owner the proofs of his Democratic Delicacy!” Such earthy sarcasm and fiery invective were unmatched by any other writer of the period. Sometimes Cobbett’s nastiness and vulgarity embarrassed even the Federalists.40
Since Cobbett was much more anti-French and pro-British than pro-Federalist, he never played the same role in organizing the Federalist party that Bache played in creating the Republican party. What Cobbett did do, however, was legitimize many latent American loyalties to the former mother country. “After all,” he wrote, “our connexions are nearly as close as those of Man and Wife (I avoid,” he said, “the comparison of Mother and Child, for fear of affecting the nerves of some delicate constitutions.)” Reading Cobbett, many Federalists felt they could at last express their long-suppressed affection for England openly and without embarrassment, especially as England had emerged as the champion of the European counter-revolution, opposed to all the frenzy and madness coming out of France.41
All aspects of American culture—parades, songs, art, theater, even language—became engines of one party or another promoting France or Britain. The Republicans attacked the English-dominated theater and, according to Cobbett, prohibited the use of all such words as “your majesty, My Lord, and the like,” and the appearance onstage of all “silks, gold lace, painted cheeks, and powdered periwigs.” They sang the new song attributed to Joel Barlow, “God Save the Guillotine,” to the tune of “God Save the King.” They pulled down all remnants of Britain and royalty, including a statue of William Pitt, Lord Chatham, which Americans themselves had erected during the imperial crisis, and destroyed images of the executed French king Louis XVI, who had helped America win the Revolution.42
When the Republicans began wearing the French tricolor cockade to show their support for the French Revolution, the Federalists labeled it “that emblem of treason” and in retaliation adopted a cockade of black ribbon, four inches in diameter and worn with a white button on a hat. Passions ran so high that some church services in 1798 ended in fisticuffs when several Republicans dared to show up wearing French cockades. According to one person’s recollection, even ladies would “meet at the church door and violently pluck the badges from one another’s bosoms.” To some frightened observers society seemed to be breaking up. “Friendships were dissolved, tr
adesmen dismissed, and custom withdrawn from the Republican party,” complained the wife of a prominent Republican in Philadelphia. “Many gentlemen went armed.”43
It was the newspapers that became the principal instruments of this partisan warfare. While the Federalist press accused the Republicans of being “filthy Jacobins” and “monsters of sedition,” the Republican press denounced the Federalists for being “Tory monarchists” and “British-loving aristocrats” and the president for being “a mock Monarch” who was “blind, bald, toothless, querulous” and “a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind.” By the late 1790s both President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson came to believe that they had become the victims, in Adams’s words, of “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies” that had ever been leveled against any public official.44
BECAUSE THE FEDERALISTS were in charge of the government in the 1790s, they were the ones most frightened by the vituperation of the Republican press. It was one thing to libel private individuals; it was quite another thing to libel someone in public office. Such libels were doubly serious, indeed, under the common law were seditious, because they called into question the officeholders’ authority to rule. Even Republican Thomas McKean, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, agreed. Libels against public officials, McKean declared, involved “a direct tendency to breed in the people a dislike of their governors, and incline them to faction and sedition.”45
Because politics was still personal, the honor and reputation of the political leaders seemed essential to social order and stability. Indeed, it was difficult in this early modern world for men to conceive of anyone becoming a political leader who did not already have an established social superiority. The reasons seemed obvious to many American leaders at the time, both Federalists and Republicans alike. Since early modern governments lacked most of the local coercive powers of a modern state—a few constables and sheriffs scarcely constituted a police force—officeholders had to rely on their social respectability and their reputation for character to compel the obedience of ordinary people and maintain public order. It is not surprising, therefore, that public officials should have been acutely sensitive to criticism of their private character. “Whatever tends to create in the minds of the people, a contempt of the persons who hold the highest offices in the state,” declared conventional eighteenth-century wisdom, whatever convinced people that “subordination is not necessary, and is no essential part of government, tends directly to destroy it.”46