Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (120 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 deceives 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.”
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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.
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B
Y 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.

But by the second decade of the nineteenth century in America, in the North at least, the ambitious, go-getting middling sorts were collapsing into themselves all levels of income and all social ranks and had come to dominate American culture to a degree that the middle class in England never achieved. It was as Franklin in the 1780s had predicted: “the almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America” had obliged “its people to follow some business for subsistence,” turning America into “the land of labour.”
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The growing numbers of commercial farmers, mechanics, clerks, teachers, businessmen, and industrious, self-trained would-be professionals could scarcely think of themselves as the “middle” of anything; they considered themselves to be the whole nation and as a consequence gained a powerful moral hegemony over the society, especially in the North.

When Noah Webster later came to define “gentleman” in his
Dictionary
, he saw it simply as a courtesy title, of general address, applied most appropriately to “men of education and good breeding, of every occupation.” “Of every occupation”—that was the key to the changes taking place. By the early decades of the nineteenth century many lawyers could no longer think of themselves merely as gentlemen who sometimes practiced some law. Law, at least for those who did not use it merely as a stepping-stone to politics, was becoming a technical and specialized profession that wholly occupied the person engaged in it, making it no different really from the occupations of artisans and tradesmen. Much to the chagrin of aristocratic Federalists, not just law but all the professions had become income-producing occupations. “Our Lawyers are mere lawyers, our physicians are mere physicians, our divines are mere divines,” complained John Sylvester John Gardiner, perhaps Boston’s most distinguished man of letters in the first decade of the nineteenth century. “Everything smells of the shop, and you will, in a few minutes conversation, infallibly detect a man’s profession.”
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The distinction between gentlemen and commoners did not entirely disappear, but it was buffeted and further blurred. When working with one’s head became no different from working with one’s hands, then the distinction between gentlemen and commoners became less and less meaningful. As early as 1802 the buyer of a church pew in a New England meetinghouse called himself a “gentleman,” but the seller labeled him a “blacksmith.” Visiting foreigners were amazed to find so many adult white males, including draymen, butchers’ boys, and canal workers, being addressed as gentlemen. Outraged Federalists tried to make fun of the vulgar for claiming to be equal to gentlemen and men of education. But such satire rang hollow when no one felt embarrassed over such claims.

Since the 1790s American leaders had yearned to make their society more homogeneous, but they had hoped that that homogeneity would come from raising ordinary people to their level of gentility and enlightenment. Instead, ordinary folk were collapsing traditional social differences and were bringing the aristocracy down to their level. The many academies and colleges that were sprouting up everywhere, especially in the North, were not enlightening the society as expected; instead, they were annually producing “multitudes of half-educated candidates for public confidence and honor,” which accounted for so many trying “to
crowd themselves
into the learned professions.”
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Many foreigners were surprised to discover that the social and cultural distinctions common to the nations of Europe seemed in America, as Tocqueville later put it, “to have melted into a middle class.”
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Although the upper ranks of Americans may have lacked the elegant manners and refined courtesy of the European aristocracy, ordinary Americans were far less vulgar and uncultivated than their European counterparts.

Crossing the Allegheny Mountains westward in 1815, the English immigrant Morris Birkbeck was struck by “the urbanity and civilization that prevail in situations remote from large cities.” Americans, said Birkbeck, “are strangers to rural simplicity: the embarrassed air of an awkward rustic, so frequent in England, is rarely seen in the United States.” Birkbeck attributed the social homogeneity of the Americans to “the effects of
political equality, the consciousness of which accompanies all their intercourse, and may be supposed to operate most powerfully on the manners of the lowest class.” It was as if the sharp distinction between politeness and vulgarity that characterized European society had in America somehow become mingled and made into one—creating, said an unhappy James Fenimore Cooper, the “fussy pretensions” of the “genteel vulgar” who got their manners “second hand, as the traditions of fashion, or perhaps the pages of a novel.”
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American society, or at least the Northern part of American society, was coming more and more to resemble what Franklin and Crèvecoeur had imagined in the 1780s, a society that seemed to lack both an aristocracy and a lower class. “Patrician and plebeian orders are unknown . . .,” wrote the Federalist-turned-Republican Charles Ingersoll in 1810, drawing out the logic of what had been conventional American wisdom since the mid-eighteenth century. “Luxury has not yet corrupted the rich, nor is there any of that want, which classifies the poor. There is no populace. All are people. What in other countries is called the populace, a compost heap, whence germinate mobs, beggars, and tyrants, is not to be found in the towns; and there is no peasantry in the country. Were it not for the slaves of the south,” wrote Ingersoll, “there would be one rank.”
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The exception is jarring, to say the least, but no more jarring than Ingersoll’s larger generalization. By modern standards his judgment that America had become classless and composed of one rank seems absurd. From today’s perspective, the distinctions of early nineteenth-century society are vivid, not only those between free and enslaved, white and black, male and female, but also those between rich and poor, educated and barely literate. Despite the celebration of commerce, the many participants in business may have failed as often as they succeeded. People talked about being “busted” or of “going to smash”: one out of five householders could expect to become insolvent at least once.
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Yet understanding the wonder and the astonishment of observers like Ingersoll requires taking seriously the ways in which the Northern society of the early
Republic concocted the myth of a new middle-class society that celebrated its homogeneous egalitarian character.

To be sure, there were great discrepancies of wealth in the early Republic. The South had its great slaveholding planters while most farmers had few or no slaves. Even in the North wealth was far more unequally distributed in the decades following the Revolution than it had been before.
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Yet not only did Republican political leaders continue to hold out the vision of an egalitarian society of small producers, but many Northerners felt they were in fact living in a more egalitarian society; and in a strange way they were correct. After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.