Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (124 page)

This nation of inventors was creating new kinds of heroes. As early as 1796 an English author of children’s stories popular in the United States argued in a tale entitled “True Heroism” that the great men of the present could no longer be the “kings, lords, generals, and prime ministers” who had shaped public life in the past. Instead, the true heroes now were becoming those who “invent useful arts, or discover important truths which may promote the comfort and happiness of unborn generations in the distant parts of the world.” This was a message that Americans readily responded to, much to the disgust of the Federalists. Inventors and talented workmen were no doubt important, declared a writer in the
Port Folio
in 1810, “but if we crown with civic wreath every fortunate patentee of a steam engine or carding machine, every judicious speculator in merinos or Fezzan sheep, what honours have we left for wisdom and virtue?”
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By the early nineteenth century technology and prosperity were assuming for Americans the same sublime and moral significance that the Enlightenment had reserved for the classical state and the Newtonian universe. Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, and Robert Fulton, creator of the steamboat, became national heroes to the hundreds of thousands of artisans and others in the country who worked with their hands. Roads, bridges, and canals were justified by their fostering of “national grandeur and individual convenience,” the two now being inextricably linked.
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It was not virtue or sociability that held this restless and quarrelsome people together, said architect and economist Samuel Blodgett in 1806; it was commerce, “the most sublime gift of heaven, wherewith to harmonize and enlarge society.” If America were ever to “eclipse the grandeur of European nations,” it could not be in Hamilton’s Old World terms of building a great and powerful nation; it had to be in America’s new Jeffersonian terms: in its capacity to further the material welfare of its ordinary citizens.
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A
T THE OUTSET
many members of the Revolutionary elite, including Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and Francis Hopkinson, had inadvertently contributed to the popularization and vulgarization of the culture. Many of them had attacked the study of the “dead languages” of Greek and Latin as time-consuming, useless, and unrepublican without appreciating the unintended consequences of their attacks. Such study of Greek and Latin, Rush had said, was “improper in a peculiar manner in the United States” because it tended to confine education only to a few, when in fact republicanism required everyone to be educated.
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Yet when some of these enthusiastic republican gentlemen began to glimpse the populist and anti-intellectual results of these attacks on liberal learning, they began to have second thoughts about what they had said. Even Rush, though he retained his dislike of the heathenish classics on religious grounds, by 1810 came to realize that “a learned education” ought once again to “become a luxury in our country.” If college tuitions were not immediately raised, he said, “the great increase in wealth among all classes of our citizens” would enable too many ordinary people, particularly plain farmers, to pay for a college education for their sons “with more ease than in former years when wealth was confined chiefly to cities and to the learned professions.” It was one thing for a practical knowledge of “reading, writing, and arithmetic . . . to be as common and as cheap as air,” said Rush; in a republic everyone should have these skills, and “they should be a kind of sixth or civic sense.” But it was quite another thing with a college liberal arts education. “Should it become universal, it would be as destructive to civilization as universal barbarism.”
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Rush had come to perceive that middlebrow adoption of liberal learning was insidiously draining its integrity away without anyone’s being the wiser. In fact, the middling sorts were diluting everything they touched. The enlightened clergyman from Salem, Massachusetts, William Bentley, who commanded twenty languages, possessed a library of four thousand volumes, and knew something about everything, had very high hopes for the spread of knowledge through newspapers. For several decades, beginning in the early 1790s, this polymath made available his encyclopedic knowledge to his fellow citizens in regular essays in the local papers. Twice a week he presented digests of the most important
domestic and foreign news, including notices of new books and significant scientific discoveries. He often illustrated his columns with original documents, which usually he himself had translated. In his news summaries Bentley aimed to get beyond “the conversation of the day, or the reports of passing moment,” in order for his readers to understand “the causes which produce interesting events.” He hoped that his biweekly columns and newspapers in general would become an important means of elevating the knowledge of “all classes of readers.”

By 1816 his enlightened dreams of newspapers becoming agents of education for the public had dissipated. The press, he now realized, had become simply a source of “public entertainment,” filled with inconsequential and parochial pieces of information. “The great number of newspapers,” he ruefully recognized, “put in circulation every incident which is raised in every local situation. . . . So not a fire, an accident, a fear or a hope but it flies quickly throughout the union.” How could judicious analyses of foreign policy and careful discussions of domestic politics compete with such trivial and ephemeral incidents of daily life? “The public mind,” Bentley complained, “is already unaccustomed to weigh these things,” and consequently was sinking into a sea of mediocrity.
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Most Federalists and many disillusioned Republicans like Rush and Bentley thought that America would be better off with the Visigoths at the gates than with this degradation and disintegration from within.

B
UT IT WAS TOO LATE
. Not only were the middling people popularizing America’s culture, but they were as well creating the country’s sense of identity, even its sense of nationhood. Many Americans had hoped that participation in the War of 1812 would in an aristocratic manner vindicate the honor of the new Republic and establish its reputation in the world. But by the end of the war America’s conception of its national character was becoming much more indebted to the middling people’s go-getting involvement in commerce and enterprise. These ambitious, risk-taking entrepreneurs, who were coming into their own by the second decade of the nineteenth century, were the generation that imagined the myth of the American dream. They went way beyond the eighteenth century’s earlier celebration of America as “the best poor man’s country” and created, as Joyce Appleby, the foremost historian of this post-Revolutionary generation, points out, “a new character ideal . . .: the man who developed
inner resources, acted independently, lived virtuously, and bent his behavior to his personal goals.” The middling sorts who created this ideal extolled hard work and ingenuity and wrote the hundreds of stories of “the self-made man,” which, says Appleby, appeared “as a recognizable type for the first time in this era.” In short, these middling men invented America’s sense of itself as a land of enterprising, optimistic, innovative, and equality-loving Americans. Even today their sense that America is a land of opportunity and enterprise remains alive and influential.
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Although this peculiar identity was a Northern middle-class creation, it quickly came to be embraced by the nation as a whole. In fact, Northern characteristics of enterprise and hard work were now categorized as “national” while Southern qualities were viewed as sectional or regional, “a development,” notes Appleby, “that the Virginians who initiated the move for a ‘more perfect union’ provided by the Constitution could never have predicted.”
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Although most Southern farmers were not slaveholders and many of the plain folk of the South valued hard work as much as any ambitious Northern artisan, these ordinary Southern folk could never give the same kind of enterprising middling tone to Southern society that existed in the North. There were fewer middling institutions in the South—fewer towns, schools, newspapers, businesses, manufacturing firms, banks, and shops. And there were fewer middling people in the South—fewer teachers, physicians, clerks, publishers, editors, and engineers. The antebellum South never became a middling commercial-minded society like that of the North. Its patrician order of large slaveholders continued to dominate both the culture and the politics of the section.

Although the great Southern planters celebrated the advance of republicanism and the destruction of monarchy everywhere, their confidence in republicanism, unlike that of the Federalists of the North, was necessarily based on their ability to take the hierarchy and deference of their slave society for granted. Yet, as opposition to slavery grew in the North, the Southern planters began to create ever more elaborate apologies and defenses of their “peculiar institution.” Many of the younger planters were even beginning to argue that the very existence of civilization depended on slavery. By 1815 the South seemed sharply separated from the North in ways that had not been true a generation earlier.

In 1789 the South and especially Virginia had been the impelling force in creating the nation. By 1815 the South and slaveholders still seemed to be in
control of the national government. President Madison was a slaveholder. So too were Speaker of the House Henry Clay, James Monroe, the secretary of state, and George W. Campbell, the secretary of the treasury. All the Republican leaders of the House were slaveholders. In 1815 the United States had four missions in Europe: two of them were held by slaveholders. The chief justice of the United States was a slaveholder, as were a majority of the other members of the Court. Since 1789 three of the four presidents, two of the five vice-presidents, fourteen of the twenty-six presidents pro tempore of the Senate, and five of the ten Speakers of the House had been slaveholders.
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Nevertheless, despite this political dominance, many slaveholding Southerners had a growing uneasiness that the South was being marginalized by the dynamic, enterprising, and egalitarian North, which was rapidly seizing control of the nation’s identity. By 1815 Virginia was still the most populous state in the nation, with nearly nine hundred thousand people. But the growth of its white population had slowed dramatically, its land was depleted, and it no longer possessed its earlier confidence that it would always be in charge of the nation. Many of its vigorous and ambitious younger people were fleeing the state. In fact, as many as 230 men born in Virginia before 1810, including Henry Clay, were eventually elected to Congress from other states.
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While the North was busy building schools, roads, and canals, Virginia was in decline. As early as 1800, according to one Virginian, Albemarle County, Jefferson’s home county, had become a “scene of desolation that baffles description.” Farms were “worn out, washed and gullied, so that scarcely an acre could be found in a place fit for cultivation.” Even as the Virginia planters were celebrating the yeoman farmer and the agricultural way of life, some of them sensed that their best days were behind them. In 1814 John Randolph spoke for many of them in reflecting on the decline and ruin he saw in Virginia’s Tidewater.

The old mansions, where they have been spared by fire (the consequence of the poverty and carelessness of their present tenants), are fast falling into decay; the families, with a few exceptions, dispersed from St. Mary’s to St. Louis; such as remain here sunk into obscurity. They whose fathers rode in coaches and drank the choicest wines now ride on saddlebags, and drink grog, when they can get it. What enterprise or capital there was in the country retired westward.
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The Southern planters, bewildered and besieged by the fast-moving commercial developments in the North, reacted, as Jefferson did, by turning inward, blaming conniving, mercenary, hypocritical Yankees for their problems, and becoming increasingly anxious and defensive about slavery. Although in the first decade of the nineteenth century foreign travelers had observed how confident most Virginians were that slavery would eventually disappear, that confidence soon dissipated. In 1815 an English visitor was struck by how much Virginians talked about slavery. It was “an evil uppermost in every man’s thoughts,” an evil, he noted, “which all deplore, many were anxious to flee, but for which no man can devise a remedy.” Soon, however, many Southerners became less and less willing to talk about slavery in front of strangers.
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B
Y THE END OF THE
W
AR OF
1812 the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in America was clearly over. The people of the United States no longer had the same interest in a cosmopolitan connection with Europe. France no longer influenced American thinking, and with the demise of the Federalists, the cultural authority of England lost much of its fearsomeness. Most Americans abandoned any lingering sense that they were “secondhand” Englishmen and concluded that they no longer needed to compete with Europe in a European manner. Instead, they turned in on themselves in admiration at their own peculiarities and spaciousness.

In 1816, much to the chagrin of Jefferson and other enlightened figures, Congress enacted a duty on imported foreign books. Jefferson protested, as did Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions, including the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but to no avail. “Our Government,” declared the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in defense of the tariff,