Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (125 page)

is peculiar to ourselves and our books of instruction should be adapted to the nature of the Government and the genius of the people. In the best of foreign books we are liable to meet with criticism and comparisons not very flattering to the American people. In American editions of these the offensive and illiberal parts are expunged or explained, and the work is adapted to the exigencies and tastes of the American reader. But withdraw the protection, our channels of instruction will be foreign; our youth will imbibe sentiments, form attachments and acquire habits of thinking adverse to our prosperity, unfriendly to our Government, and dangerous to our liberties.
⁸³

Although Jefferson was appalled by this sort of parochial and unenlightened thinking—this repudiation of everything the cosmopolitan Enlightenment had been about—his own despairing reaction to the nineteenth-century world he saw emerging was not much different. He himself withdrew mentally from Europe. Nature had placed America in an “insulated state,” he told Alexander von Humboldt in 1813. It “has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe.” He loathed the new democratic world that America had become—a world of speculation, banks, paper money, and evangelical Christianity; and he railed against this world that was full of “pseudo-citizens . . . infected with the mania of rambling and gambling,” and indeed turned his back on it, withdrawing more and more to the sanctuary of his mountaintop home, Monticello. He had come to believe, as he said in 1813, that, in the face of this Northern obsession with money and commerce, the principles of free government that he had struggled so long to promote now must retreat “to the agricultural States of the south and west, as their last asylum and bulwark.” All he could do to counteract the threat posed by the “pious young monks from Harvard and Yale” was to hunker down in Virginia and build a university that would perpetuate true republican principles. “It is in our seminary,” he told Madison, “that that vestal flame is to be kept alive.”
⁸⁴

Although the world of the early nineteenth century was spinning out of Jefferson’s control or even his comprehension, no one had done more to bring it about. It was Jefferson’s commitment to liberty and equality that justified and legitimated the many pursuits of happiness that were bringing unprecedented prosperity to so many average white Americans. His Republican followers in the North had created this new world, and they welcomed and thrived in it. They celebrated Jefferson and equal rights and indeed looked back in awe and wonder at all the Founders and saw in them heroic leaders the likes of which they knew they would never see again in America. Yet they also knew they now lived in a different world, a bustling democratic world that required new thoughts and new behavior.

Americans had begun their experiment in national republicanism seeking a classic and cosmopolitan destiny in a Western trans-Atlantic
world they felt very much a part of. Many of them sought to receive the best of Western culture, and some of them even wanted to emulate the powers of Europe by building a similar fiscal-military state. But by 1815 most Americans had come to perceive their destiny in America itself, by becoming an unprecedented kind of democratic republic.

Indeed, with Europe restored to monarchy after 1815 and the monarchies joined together in a Holy Alliance against liberalism and revolution, Americans were coming to believe that their democracy was all the more peculiar and significant. “Alliances, Holy or Hellish, may be formed, and retard the epoch of deliverance,” declared Jefferson; they “may swell the rivers of blood which are yet to flow.” But they will eventually fail. America would remain as a light to the world showing that mankind was capable of self-government.
⁸⁵

Yet beneath the Americans’ excitement over their newfound Americanness lay what Jefferson bemoaned as “the miseries of slavery.” The War of 1812 was no sooner concluded than the country became seriously divided over the admission of Missouri as a slave state. That crisis stripped away the illusions that both the North and the South had entertained about slavery. Suddenly, Northerners came to realize that slavery was not going to disappear naturally, and Southerners came to realize that the North really cared about ending slavery. From that moment few Americans had any illusions left about the awful reality of slavery in America.

To Jefferson the crisis was “a fire bell in the night,” filling him and many other Americans with the terror that they had heard “the knell of the Union.” Jefferson feared that all he and “the generation of 1776” had done “to acquire self-government and happiness to their country” was now to be sacrificed and thrown away by the “unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.”
⁸⁶

The Missouri crisis, said Jefferson, was “not a moral question, but one merely of power.”
⁸⁷
He was wrong. It was a moral question, and the passions of the sons of the Founders were neither unwise nor unworthy; indeed, they had been his passions as well—the love of liberty and the desire for equality. No American had spoken more eloquently or more fully for the radical impulse of the Enlightenment than Jefferson. No one had expressed the radical meaning of the Revolution—the deposing of tyrannical kings and the raising up of common people to an unprecedented degree of equality—than Jefferson. Yet he always sensed that his
“empire of liberty” had a cancer at its core that was eating away at the message of liberty and equality and threatening the very existence of the nation and its democratic self-government; but he had mistakenly come to believe that the cancer was Northern bigotry and money-making promoted by Federalist priests and merchants.

In light of Jefferson’s belief that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and that each generation must be free of burdens inherited from the past, there was something perversely ironic in his bequeathing slavery to his successors. But he put all his trust in the ability of the country to educate and enlighten the future generations of Americans. This confidence in education and the future, he confessed in 1817, “may be an Utopian dream, but being innocent, I have thought I might indulge in it till I go to the land of dreams, and sleep there with the dreamers of all past and future times.” Although Jefferson in his final years tried to retain his sunny hopes for the future, he had twinges of an impending disaster whose sources he never fully understood. He and his colleagues had created a Union devoted to liberty that contained an inner flaw that would nearly prove to be its undoing. The Virginians who had done so much to bring about the United States knew in their souls, as Madison intimated in his advice to his country from beyond the grave, that there was a “Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles” in their Arcadian “Paradise.” Like Madison, many of the older generation came to realize that “slavery and farming are incompatible.”
⁸⁸
The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called “the world’s best hope” for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.
⁸⁹

Bibliographic Essay

Over the past three decades or so, the period of history covered by this book has experienced a renaissance in historical writing, involving the production of many more books than can be cited in this essay. Consequently, this bibliography is very selective.

Much of the proliferation of works on the early Republic came from the formation of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (
SHEAR
) in 1977 and the launching of the
Journal of the Early Republic
(
JER
) in 1981. This organization and its journal have turned the period into one of the most exciting and significant in American history.

Since there were so many great men in the period, biographies, many of them multivolume, have been written and continue to flourish. Douglas Southall Freeman, seven volumes on Washington (1948–1957); James Thomas Flexner, four volumes on Washington (1965–1972); Dumas Malone, six volumes on Jefferson (1948–1981); Irving Brant, six volumes on James Madison (1941–1961); and Page Smith, two volumes on Adams (1962). Early in the twentieth century Albert Beveridge wrote four laudatory volumes on John Marshall (1916–1919) that still stand up.

It seems that scarcely a year now passes that one or another of the Founders does not have his life portrayed in print. Probably the best single-volume study of Washington is Joseph J. Ellis,
His Excellency: George Washington
(2004). Good single-volume studies of other Founders are the following: Merrill D. Peterson,
Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography
(1970); for a superb brief life, see R. B. Bernstein,
Thomas Jefferson
(2003); Ron Chernow,
Alexander Hamilton
(2004), but Gerald Stourzh,
Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government
(1970) excels in placing this leading Federalist in an eighteenth-century context; John Ferling,
John Adams: A Life
(1992); Ralph Ketcham,
James Madison: A Biography
(1971), but for an excellent short biography, see Jack N. Rakove,
James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic
(1990); Jean Edward Smith,
John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
(1996), but for a good short study, see Charles F. Hobson,
The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law
(1996).

Each of these Founders also has his own mammoth papers project under way (or in the case of Hamilton, completed), each promising to publish virtually everything written by
and to the great man. Nearly all the leading Founders have volumes of their selected writings available in the Library of America. Jefferson’s exchange of letters with two of his fellow Founders is in two volumes edited by Lester J. Cappon,
The Adams-Jefferson Letters
(1959); and in three volumes edited by James Morton Smith,
The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826
(1995).

Even Aaron Burr, forever disgraced but forever fascinating, has had two volumes of his correspondence edited by Mary-Jo Kline and published in 1984. The standard biography of him is Milton Lomask,
Aaron Burr
, 2 vols. (1979, 1982). The most recent life is a defense of Burr, Nancy Isenberg,
Forgotten Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
(2007).

Many secondary figures in the period have excellent biographies. To name only several, see Talbot Hamlin,
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
(1955); Winifred E. Bernard,
Fisher Ames: Federalist and Statesman, 1758–1808
(1965); George C. Rogers Jr.,
Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston, 1758–1812
(1962); Robert Ernst,
Rufus King: American Federalist
(1968); Samuel Eliot Morison,
Harrison Gray Otis, 1765–1848: The Urbane Federalist
(1969); Harry Ammon,
James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity
(1971); George Athan Billias,
Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman
(1976); John Mack Faragher,
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer
(1992); James J. Kirschke,
Gouverneur Morris: Author, Statesman, and Man of the World
(2005); and Walter Stahr,
John Jay: Founding Father
(2005). Two collective studies of the Founders are Joseph J. Ellis,
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
(2000) and Gordon S. Wood,
Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
(2006).

In the 1960s the origins of political parties commanded the attention of political scientists and political sociologists. Since these scholars were not historians, they were primarily concerned with forming generalizations about politics that were applicable to the experience of newly developing nations in the decade or so following World War II. Consequently, they were not always sensitive to the differentness of the past, and their books often presented a very ahistorical and anachronistic view of America’s early political parties. See especially William Nesbit Chambers,
Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809
(1963); Seymour Martin Lipset,
The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective
(1963); Rudolph M. Bell,
Party and Faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1789–1801
(1973); and John F. Hoadley,
Origins of American Political Parties, 1789–1803
(1986).

In more recent years, historians more sensitive to time and place have challenged this political science conception of “the first party system.” See Richard Buel Jr.,
Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789–1815
(Ithaca, 1972); Ronald P. Formisano,
The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s
(New York, 1983); Ralph Ketcham,
Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829
(1984); James Roger Sharp,
American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis
(1993); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick,
The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800
(1993), which is a monumental study of the high politics of the 1790s sympathetic to the Federalists; and Joanne B. Freeman,
Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic
(New Haven, 2001), which nicely captures the peculiar political culture of the 1790s. The first section of Sean Wilentz’s monumental study
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(2005) is pertinent to the early Republic; Wilentz’s work is a throwback to a traditional approach to politics, focusing on elections, parties, and the maneuvering of elite white males in government.