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

  COLUMBIA, Columbia, to glory arise

  The queen of the world, and the child of the skies!

  Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,

  While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.

  Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,

  Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime;

  Let the crimes of the East ne’er encrimson thy name,

  Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.100

  But the name did not stick. Neither did Dr. Samuel Mitchill’s suggestion that the new nation be called Fredon or Fredonia and its people Fredonians. Despite Mitchill’s argument that “we cannot be national in feeling and in fact until we have a national name,” the country’s designation remained “the United States of America,” with its people appropriating the name that belonged to all the peoples of the New World—even though the term “Americans” actually had begun as a pejorative label the metropolitan English had applied to their inferior and far-removed colonists.101

  Lacking a unique name and ethnicity, the best Americans could do was to locate their national identity and character in something other than the traditional sources of nationhood. In the absence of a common nationality, Union often became a synonym for nation. But even more important in making them a distinctive people, they told themselves, was the fact that they were both peculiarly enlightened and ideally located along the process of social development.102

  Educated Americans were fascinated by the widely held belief in successive stages of historical evolution that ranged from rude simplicity to refined complexity. The various theories of social progress current in the late eighteenth century had many sources, but especially important to the Americans was the four-stage theory that had been worked out by that remarkable group of eighteenth-century Scottish social scientists—Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Lord Kames. These thinkers posited four stages of evolutionary development based on differing modes of subsistence: hunting and gathering, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. As societies grew in population, so the theory went, people were forced to find new ways of subsisting, and this need accounted for societies advancing from one stage to another.

  Nearly every thinker saw the aboriginal inhabitants of America as the perfect representatives of the first stage, which Adam Smith called the “lowest and rudest state of society.”103 Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which the European discovery of the Indians in the New World influenced the emergence of the theory of different stages of history. Eighteenth-century theorists assumed that thousands of years in the past Europeans had been as savage as the Indians of America were in the present. The Indians helped create the notion, as John Locke put it, that “in the beginning all the world was America.”104

  If the American Indians represented the initial stage of history, then contemporary England and France represented the fourth and final stage of development, modern commercial society. This final stage of history was characterized by much of what Americans lacked—sprawling poverty-ridden cities, over-refined manners, gross inequalities of rank, complex divisions of labor, and widespread manufacturing of luxuries. Americans, such as Samuel Stanhope Smith of Princeton, knew only too well “that human society can advance only to a certain point before it becomes corrupted, and begins to decline.”105 Many concluded that Britain and France and other highly developed nations were steeped in corruption, dependency, luxury, and self-indulgence and therefore had to be on the verge of dissolution.

  American patriots in 1776 had been sure that England was so deeply implicated in the final stage of commerce that as a nation it could not last much longer. Indeed, over the next half century many Americans continued to expect and hope that overly refined and overpopulated England would soon fall apart in selfishness, extravagance, and dissipation.

  By contrast, most white Americans located themselves much earlier on the progressive spectrum of history. “In the present age, our Country is in a medium between Barbarity and Refinement,” declared the Reverend Nathanael Emmons of Massachusetts in 1787. “In such an age, the minds of men are strong and vigorous, being neither enfeebled by luxury, nor shackled by authority.”106 Americans had advanced far beyond the earliest stage of development in which the native peoples of the New World appeared to be strangely frozen. In fact, because of the proximity of the native “savages,” educated Americans were anxious to emphasize their progress. Their society may have been simple and egalitarian in many respects, without the polish and refined characteristics of Europe, but they repeatedly told themselves that they had put the bloody barbarism and savage violence of the previous century well behind them. They were confident that their society was becoming more polite and commercially sophisticated, but, of course, not to the point reached by the decadent Old World. The American people may have lacked the fine arts of Europe, wrote John Adams, but in all other matters, especially agriculture, commerce, and government, they were superior. “In this respect,” he said, “America is infinitely further removed from Barbarity, than Europe.”107

  AMERICANS ASSURED THEMSELVES that they were a young and forming people. Their youth, in fact, justified their lack of all the refinements that Thomas Shippen found so repulsive. Americans may have been raw and callow compared to Europeans, but, they told themselves, at least they were not overwhelmed by a debilitating luxury. They knew from history that too much politeness was just as bad as too much vulgarity. Look what had happened to ancient Rome when its society had become too sophisticated, too luxury-loving, too divided by extremes of rich and poor. Too much refinement eroded valor, and the Romans lost their will to fight for their liberty. Look too, they said, to what was happening to eighteenth-century England.

  The English radical Whig historian Catherine Macaulay warned George Washington in 1790 of what was in store for Americans if they tried to “copy all the excesses” of England. By wallowing in “all the deceitful pleasures of a vicious dissipation,” Americans “will overturn all the virtue which at present exists in the Country.” Then “an inattention to public interest will prevail, and nothing be pursued but private gratification and emolument.” Despite Macaulay’s apprehensions that the American people were showing “a greater inclination to the fripperies of Europe, than a Classic simplicity,” most Americans believed that their society was young enough to avoid these evils of over-refinement.108

  Just as Americans lacked the corrupting luxury of Europe, so too, they constantly told themselves, were they without Europe’s great distinctions of the wealthy few and the poverty-stricken many. Compared to Great Britain, America had a truncated society; it lacked both the great noble families with their legal titles and sumptuous wealth and the great masses of poor whose lives were characterized by unremitting toil and deprivation. In America, wrote Benjamin Franklin in one of the many expressions of the idea of American exceptionalism in these years, “a general happy Mediocrity” prevailed.109

  Commentators were eager to turn the general middling character of America into an asset. “Here,” wrote CrÈvecoeur, “are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufactures employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.” There was nothing in America remotely resembling the wretched poverty and the gin-soaked slums of London. America, continued CrÈvecoeur, who wrote his essays before the Revolution that he eventually repudiated, was largely made up of “cultivators scattered over an immense territory,” each of them working for himself. Nowhere in America, he said, ignoring for the moment, as most American social commentators did, the big houses of the Southern planters and the slave quarters of hundreds of thousands of black Africans, could one find “the hostile castle and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm and dwell in meanness,
smoke and indigence.”110

  This American yeomanry, Americans told themselves, was not to be compared to the illiterate peasantry of the European states. The fact that the great bulk of Americans were landowners radically separated them from the rest of the world. Even England had very few freeholders left: most English farmers were tenants, cottagers, or landless laborers, not like “the yeomanry of this country,” said Noah Webster, which “consist[ed] of substantial independent freeholders, masters of their own persons and lords of their own soil.”111 Americans were a society, in other words, ideally suited for republicanism.

  Because of the prevalence of land, declared Jefferson, Americans had no need to develop the kinds of extensive urban workshops and intensive manufacturing establishments that confined tens of thousand of Europeans to daily dependent drudgery. Most Americans assumed that they were living in the age of agriculture with only the beginning signs of entering the age of commerce. They could remain farmers, and what a providential blessing that was. For “those who labour in the earth,” said Jefferson, in the most famous of his paeans to agriculture, “are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he had made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”

  It was precisely the prevalence of all these independent farmers that made possible virtuous republican government in America. They seemed to Jefferson and other Americans freer of the sorts of vicious temptations that prevented Europeans from adopting republicanism. As long as America rested on their independent shoulders, it was secure. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators,” said Jefferson, “is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.”112

  Not only did Americans describe themselves as a nation of independent farmers, they saw themselves as a mighty multiplying people, indeed, the fastest-growing people in the Western world. Consequently, “our population,” declared Ezra Stiles in 1783, “will soon overspread the vast territory from the Atlantick to the Mississippi, which in two generations will become a property superiour to that of Britain.” This could only mean that “God has great things in design and . . . purposes to make of us a great people.”113

  Precisely because Americans were separated from Europe and, as Jefferson said in 1787, “remote from all other aid, we are obliged to invent and execute; to find means within ourselves, and not to lean on others.”114 The result of this American pragmatism, this ability “to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance,” was a general prosperity. White Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, and goods of all sorts were widely diffused throughout the society.115

  Most important of all, America was the premier land of liberty. The Americans had always been a vigilant people, jealous of their liberty and, as Edmund Burke had noted, snuffing tyranny in every tainted breeze. They knew—the English radical Richard Price told them—that “a Spirit,” originating in America, was arising in the Western world. This spirit promised “a State of Society more favourable to peace, virtue, Science, and liberty (and consequently to human happiness and dignity) than has yet been known. . . . The minds of men are becoming more enlighten’d, and the silly despots of the world are likely to be forced to respect human rights and to take care not to govern too much lest they should not govern at all.”116

  By the early 1790s Americans were not surprised that their country was in fact attracting refugees from the tyrannies of the Old World. The enlightened everywhere had come to recognize the United States as the special asylum for liberty. In the spring of 1794 the United Irishmen of Dublin sent the renowned scientist Joseph Priestley their best wishes as he fled from persecution in England to the New World. “You are going to a happier world—the world of Washington and Franklin. . . . You are going to a country where science is turned to better uses.” Priestley was only the most famous of the many European refugees who arrived in America during the 1790 s. Thus most Americans had every reason to congratulate themselves, as they did at every opportunity, for being, in scientist David Rittenhouse’s words, “an asylum to the good, to the persecuted, and to the oppressed of other climes.”117

  Americans were free and independent because, as they repeatedly told themselves, they were an intelligent people who could not be easily fooled by their leaders. The Revolution itself had stimulated them. It had given “a spring to the active powers of the inhabitants,” said South Carolina historian David Ramsay in 1789, “and set them on thinking, speaking, and acting far beyond that to which they had been accustomed.”118 Levels of literacy may not have been high by modern standards, but by eighteenth-century standards, at least for white Americans in the North, they were higher than almost any other place on earth and were rapidly climbing, especially for white women. All their reading made them enlightened. Jefferson was convinced that an American farmer rather than an English farmer had conceived of making the rim of a wheel from a single piece of wood. He knew it had to be an American because the idea had been suggested by Homer, and “ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.”119

  With the formation of the many state constitutions and especially with the formation of the federal Constitution of 1787 Americans had demonstrated to the world how to apply reason to politics. They knew that all previous nations had had their governments imposed on them by conquerors or by some supreme lawgivers or had found themselves ensnared by governments born in accident, caprice, or violence. They repeatedly assured themselves that they were, in John Jay’s words, “the first people whom heaven has favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.” With the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation and the creation of their new federal Constitution, declared David Ramsay, they showed that governments could be changed to fit new circumstances. They had therefore placed “the science of politics on a footing with the other sciences, by opening it to improvements from experience, and the discoveries of future ages.”120

  In addition, Americans thought that they were less superstitious and more rational than the peoples of Europe. They had actually carried out religious reforms that European liberals could only dream about. Many Americans were convinced that their Revolution, in the words of the New York constitution of 1777, had been designed to end the “spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests” had “scourged mankind.”121 Not only had Americans achieved true religious liberty, not just the toleration that the English made so much of, but their blending of the various European religions and nationalities had made their society much more homogeneous than those of the Old World. The European migrants had been unable to bring all of their various regional and local cultures with them, and re-creating and sustaining many of the peculiar customs, craft holidays, and primitive practices of the Old World proved difficult. Consequently, morris dances, charivaries, skimmingtons, and other folk practices were much less common in America than in Britain or Europe. The New England Puritans, moreover, had banned many of these popular festivals and customs, including Christmas, and elsewhere the mixing and settling of different peoples had worn most of them away. In New England all that remained of Old World holidays was Pope’s Day, November 5—the colonists’ version of Guy Fawkes Day. Since enlightened elites everywhere in the Western world regarded these plebeian customs and holidays as remnants of superstition and barbarism, their relative absence in America was seen as an additional sign of the New World’s precocious enlightenment.122

  America had a common language, unlike the European nations, none of which was linguistically homogeneous. In 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. Englishmen from Yorkshire were incomprehensible to those from Cornwall and vice versa. By contrast, Americans could understand one another from Maine to Georgia. It was very obvious why this should be so, said John Witherspoon, president of Princeton. Since Americans were “much more unsettled, and move frequently fr
om place to place, they are not as liable to local peculiarities, either in accent or phraseology.”123 With the Revolution some Americans wished to carry this uniformity further. They wanted their language “purged of its barbaric dross” and made “as pure, simple, and systematic as our politics.” It was bound to happen in any case. Republics, said John Adams, had always attained a greater “purity, copiousness, and perfection of language than other forms of government.”124

  Americans expected the development of an American English that would be different from the English of the former mother country, a language that would reflect the peculiar character of the American people. Noah Webster, who would eventually become famous for his American dictionary, thought that language had divided the English people from one another. The court and the upper ranks of the aristocracy set the standards of usage and thus put themselves at odds with the language spoken by the rest of the country. By contrast, America’s standard was fixed by the general practice of the nation, and therefore Americans had “the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language, and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind.” Indeed, Webster was convinced that Americans already “speak the most pure English now known in the world.” Within a century and a half, he predicted, North America would be peopled with a hundred millions of people, “all speaking the same language.” Nowhere else in the world would such large numbers of people “be able to associate and converse together like children of the same family.”125