Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (30 page)

Most important in distinguishing the Southern states from the rest of the country was the overwhelming presence of African slaves. In 1790 black slaves constituted 30 percent of the population of Maryland and North Carolina, 40 percent of that of Virginia, and nearly 60 percent of that of South Carolina. The Southern states held well over 90 percent of the country’s slaves. They served their masters’ every need, from making hogsheads and horseshoes to caring for gardens and children. The planters’ reliance on the labor of their slaves inhibited the growth of large middling groups of white artisans, who were increasingly emerging in the Northern states.

Although most Southern planters were becoming more conscious of their distinctiveness, mostly because of their slaveholding, some Virginians did not as yet think of themselves as Southerners. Washington, for example, in the late 1780s regarded Virginia as one of “the middle states” and referred to South Carolina and Georgia as the “Southern states.”
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But other Americans were already aware of the sectional differences. In June 1776 John Adams had believed that the South was too aristocratic for the kind of popular republican government he had advocated in his
Thoughts on Government
, but he was relieved to see “the pride of the
haughty” brought down “a little” by the Revolution.
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An English traveler likewise thought that the Virginia planters were “haughty”; in addition, they were “jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controuled by any superior power.” By 1785 Stephen Higginson, Boston merchant and one of the Federalist leaders of Massachusetts, had become convinced that “in their habits, manners and commercial Interests, the southern and northern States are not only very dissimilar, but in many instances directly opposed.”
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Jefferson agreed, and in 1785 he outlined to a French friend his sense of the differences between the people of the two sections, which, following the intellectual fashion of the age, he attributed mostly to differences of climate. The Northerners were “cool, sober, laborious, preserving, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion.” By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.” Jefferson thought that these characteristics grew “weaker and weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North,” with Pennsylvania being the place where “the two characters seem to meet and blend, and form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue.” Despite his sensitivity to the differences, however, Jefferson and most other planters scarcely foresaw how dissimilar the two sections would become over the next several decades.
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At first the new Republican party seemed to be exclusively a Southern party, with most of its leaders, including Jefferson and Madison, being members of the slaveholding aristocracy. Indeed, some historians have contended that the Republican party was designed mainly to protect slavery from an overweening federal government.
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Certainly, there were some Southerners, especially by the second decade of the nineteenth century, who feared the power of the federal government precisely because of what it might do to the institution of slavery.

Yet paradoxically these slaveholding aristocratic leaders of the Republican party were the most fervent supporters of liberty, equality, and popular republican government in the nation. They condemned the privileges of rich speculators and moneyed men and celebrated the character of ordinary yeoman farmers, who were independent and incorruptible and “the surest support of a healthy nation.” Unlike many Federalist gentry in the North, these Southern gentry retained the earlier Whig confidence in what Jefferson called the “honest heart” of the common man.
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Part of the faith in democratic politics that Jefferson and his Southern colleagues shared came from their relative isolation from it. With the increasing questioning of black slavery in the North and throughout the world, many white yeoman small farmers in the South found a common solidarity with large plantation owners. They tended more or less faithfully to support the leadership of the great slaveholding planters. As a result, the great Southern planters never felt threatened by the democratic electoral politics that was undermining people’s deference to the “the better sort” in the North. The more established the leadership, in other words, the less reason the Southern leaders had to doubt republican principles or the power of the people.
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In the North, especially in the rapidly growing middle states, ambitious individuals and new groups without political connections were finding that the Republican party was the best means for challenging entrenched leaders who were more often than not Federalists. Therefore the Republican party in the North differed sharply from its Southern branch, which made the national party an unstable and incongruous coalition from the outset. In the South the Republican opposition to the Federalist program was largely the response of rural slaveholding gentry who were committed to a nostalgic image of independent free-holding farmers and fearful of anti-slavery sentiments and new financial and commercial interests emerging in the North.

In the North, however, the Republican party was the political expression of new egalitarian-minded social forces released and intensified by the Revolution. Of course, individuals had a variety of motives for joining the Republican party or voting for Republican candidates. Often those attracted to the Republican cause were minority groups, like the Baptists in Massachusetts and Connecticut who were eager to challenge the Federalist-dominated Congregational religious establishment. Many others, such as those of Scots-Irish or German heritage, sympathized with the
Republicans simply because they did not like the kind of Anglophiles who were Federalists. But most supportive of the Republican party in the North were those enterprising and rapidly increasing middling people resentful of the pretensions and privileges of the entrenched Federalist elites. These included ambitious commercial farmers, artisans, manufacturers, tradesmen, and second-and third-level merchants, especially those involved in newer or marginal trading areas. As the headstrong Massachusetts Federalist the Reverend Jedidiah Morse pointed out, these Northern Republicans were those who “most bitterly denounce as aristocrats all who do not think as they do.”
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“Aristocrat” indeed had become the pejorative term that best described the enemy of the Northern Republicans. These middling sorts had every reason to support the party that favored minimal government, low taxes, and hostility to monarchical England.

In May 1793 Jefferson offered his own description of the Federalists and Republicans. On the Federalist side, rife with “old tories,” were the “fashionable circles” in the major port cities, merchants trading on British capital, and paper speculators. On the other Republican side, he said, were merchants trading on their own capital, Irish merchants, and “tradesmen, mechanics, farmers, and every other possible description of our citizens.”
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Jefferson’s description can hardly explain the extent of popular support from ordinary folk that the Federalists commanded in the 1790s, but it does suggest the aspiring and upwardly mobile character of the Republican cause in the North.
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Because wealthy Federalist merchants dominated the lucrative imported dry goods trade with Great Britain, less well established merchants were forced to find trade partners wherever they could—the European continent, the West Indies, or elsewhere. When the arriviste merchant John Swanwick of Philadelphia was denied access both to the highest social circles of the city and to the established British trade routes, he knew how to get back at his Federalist tormentors. He found prosper
ous markets in China, India, Germany, France, and parts of southern Europe and became an enthusiastic member of the Pennsylvania Republican party. His defeat of an ultra-Federalist in the 1792 election to the Pennsylvania assembly was viewed as a setback for “the aristocrats” of the state and a victory for middling export merchants and rising entrepreneurs. Swanwick’s election to Congress in 1794 as the first Republican congressman from Philadelphia was even more stunning. His victory convinced Madison that the tide was turning toward the Republicans in the North.
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Even Federalist-dominated New England had its share of “Republican-merchants.” Many, like the Crowninshields of Salem, found a niche in trade with the French empire and the Far East and naturally resented the Federalist mercantile elite that commanded the profitable trade with Great Britain.
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Elsewhere in New England those whose profits depended on trade with France, and not England, challenged Federalist control of the maritime towns. But in the 1790s these challengers were generally weak and marginal. There was, for example, only one Democratic-Republican Society of any importance in New England in 1794.
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Federalist gentry and mercantile elites involved in the British import trade dominated New England to an extent not duplicated in other sections of the nation, which made New England the center of Federalism.

Even the artisans in New England, who in other places became Republicans, remained bound to the Federalist cause. From 1793 to 1807 New England’s interests and prosperity were almost entirely absorbed in overseas trade. Indeed, investors put five to six times more money into mercantile enterprises than they did into industrial businesses. Consequently, the New England artisans often found themselves too closely tied into patronage-client relationships with the import merchants to develop as sharp a sense of their separate interests as that possessed by artisans and craftsmen elsewhere in the country. Since many of these New England-ers were involved in the building of ships and maritime equipment used in overseas trade, they inevitably became especially supportive of Hamilton’s program and its reliance on the British import trade. As a consequence, the Republicans discovered that they were less able to recruit artisans and other middling sorts in the urban ports of New England than
they were elsewhere. In the eyes of many people in the 1790s the Federalist party, such as it was, seemed to be mostly confined to New England.
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Outside of New England the situation was different. In the Mid-Atlantic States most artisans and manufacturers became Republicans. This development was unexpected. At the outset of the 1790s it seemed evident that most artisans throughout the country would be firm supporters of the Federalists. After all, during the debate over the Constitution in 1787–1788 artisans and manufacturers up and down the continent had been ardent Federalists. They had strongly favored the new Constitution and had looked forward to a strong national government that could levy tariffs and protect them from competitive British manufactured imports. Congress’s first tariff act of 1789 listed a number of goods for protection, including beer, carriages, cordage, shoes, sugars, snuff, and tobacco products. Yet most of the manufacturers soon became dissatisfied with the government’s measures, believing that the duties levied on foreign imports were too low and not sufficiently protective of their businesses. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton seemed more interested in producing revenue to finance the federal debt than in offering protection to mechanics and manufacturers. Hamilton, of course, did not foresee the future any better than the other Founders; but by not supporting artisans and manufacturers, who were the budding businessmen of the future, he made his biggest political mistake. It cost the Federalists dearly.

Not only did the Federalists refuse to levy heavy protective tariffs, but they began taxing the artisans’ products directly. When in 1794 Hamilton and the Washington administration resorted to placing excise taxes on American goods, artisans and manufacturers, especially in the Mid-Atlantic States, became alarmed. The federal government initially taxed snuff, refined sugar, and carriages, and implied that excise taxes on other goods might follow. In Philadelphia, large-scale manufacturers of tobacco and sugar organized a protest of hundreds of artisans and tradesmen against the excise taxes in May 1794. The federal excise taxes directly affected 15 percent of the manufacturers in the city and indirectly affected many more. Spokesmen for the manufacturers argued that these “infant industries” needed the “fostering care of government” and condemned the excise taxes as unrepublican. Instead of taxing industry and the new
kind of entrepreneurial property that was emerging, the government, they argued, ought to be taxing landed and proprietary wealth.

But the Federalists, concentrating on the support of established gentry and of merchants involved in importing goods from abroad, ignored the pleas of the artisans and tradesmen. Despite his report on manufacturing, Hamilton thought that Americans were, “and must be for years, rather an Agricultural than a manufacturing people.” Other Federalists agreed. The rich New England merchant and devout Federalist Stephen Higginson dismissed all American manufacturing as “of no consequence” and did all he could to stifle the efforts of artisans to organize. Although many Federalist gentlemen regarded these protesting Philadelphia artisans and mechanics as “the lower class of people” who were “ignorant but harmless,” some of the manufacturers were in fact very wealthy, their incomes nearly equaling those of the richest gentlemen in the city.
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Overall, of course, the Republicans in the North tended to have less wealth than the Federalists; during the 1790s the Republican candidates in Philadelphia, for example, possessed about half the mean wealth of the Federalist candidates.
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But they were not the poor, and they were anything but inconsequential.