Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (31 page)

The Northern Republicans were thus supported by a variety of social interests, ranging from fairly wealthy manufacturers and entrepreneurs to journeymen-employees and common laborers. During the 1790s these mostly middling sorts increasingly came together in angry reaction to the contempt in which they were held by the Federalist gentry. The Federalists resisted every attempt by Northern artisans to organize, lest their success, as one Federalist writer put it, “excite similar attempts among all other descriptions of persons who live by manual labor.”
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These rising Northern workers and entrepreneurs were in fact the principal contributors to the capitalist world that the Southern Republicans were coming to fear. Hamilton and the few stockjobbers, speculators, and wealthy merchants who supported his financial program could never by themselves have created the middling commercial world that was emerging in the Northern states. To be sure, it was the Federalists’ stable political structure and Hamilton’s financial program that made
economic development possible; but ultimately it was ordinary business-minded artisans and commercial farmers in the North who most fully exploited that political structure and that financial program to create the burgeoning capitalist economy of the early Republic. Although many of these Northern artisans and farmers became supporters of the Republican party, the Southern leaders of that party, Jefferson and Madison, scarcely understood the diverse social and sectional character of their followers.

What held these diverse and ultimately incompatible sectional and social elements together was a comprehensive and common ideology. This Republican ideology, involving a deep hatred of overgrown central power and a fear of the political and financial mechanisms that sustained such power—inflated executive authority, high taxes, standing armies, and perpetual debts—had been inherited from the English radical Whig “country-opposition” tradition that had been sharpened and Americanized during the Revolution. In the 1790s this ideology was given heightened relevance by the monarchical-like policies of the Federalist administration.

To those steeped in this radical Whig ideology, Hamilton’s system threatened to re-create the kind of government and society that many Americans thought they had destroyed in 1776. Such a hierarchical society, based on patronage connections and artificial privilege and supported by a bloated executive bureaucracy and a standing army, would in time, the Republicans believed, destroy the integrity and independence of the republican citizenry. Hamilton’s federal program, including funding the Revolutionary debt, assuming the state debts, adopting excise taxes, establishing a standing army, and creating a national bank, seemed to be reminiscent of what Sir Robert Walpole and other ministers had done in England earlier in the century. Hamilton appeared to be using his new economic system to create a swelling phalanx of what Jefferson called “stock-jobbers and king-jobbers” in order to corrupt Congress and build up executive power at the expense of the people in the way eighteenth-century British ministers had done.

Once the Republicans grasped this ideological pattern, all the Federalist measures fell into place. The elaborate pageantry of the “court,” the aristocratic talk of titles, the enlargement of the military, the growth of taxes, especially excise taxes, the reliance on the monarchical president and an aristocratic Senate—all these pointed toward a systematic plan, as Caroline County of Virginia declared in 1793, of “assimilating the American government to the form and spirit of the British monarchy.” Most basic and dangerous of all was the Federalist creation of a huge perpetual federal debt, which, as New York governor George Clinton explained, not
only would poison the morals of the people through speculation but would also “add an artificial support to the administration, and by a species of bribery enlist the monied men of the community on the side of the measures of the government. . . . Look to Great Britain.” In the eyes of the Republicans it was the struggle against the corrupt monarchism of the 1760s and 1770s all over again.
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5
The French Revolution in America

The French Revolution began in 1789 at the very moment that the new American national government was getting under way. When the meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789 was followed by the formation of the French National Assembly in June, the fall of the Bastille in July, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789, Americans could only conclude that France was well on its way to emulating their own revolution. Most Americans gratefully recalled how France had come to their aid during their revolutionary struggle with Great Britain. Now Americans were repaying that debt by spreading the spirit of liberty abroad. Indeed, they hoped that their revolutionary ideals would eventually extend throughout the entire world.

The liberal nobleman the Marquis de Lafayette, who in 1777 at the age of twenty had joined Washington’s army, certainly saw the insurrection of July 1789 as a response to American principles. After assuming leadership of the Paris National Guard in July 1789, Lafayette sent Washington the key to the Bastille as a token of his gratitude for having been taught what freedom was during his participation in the American Revolution. And it was right that he did so, declared Thomas Paine, for the idea “that the principles of America opened the Bastille is not to be doubted.”
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That France followed its Declaration of Rights with a written constitution in 1790 only convinced most Americans that they had become the instigator of an international liberal revolution.

At first, American enthusiasm for the French Revolution was almost unanimous. Federalists like John Jay and John Marshall were just as fervent in support of France’s liberal reforms in 1789 as future Republicans like Thomas Jefferson and William Maclay. Even most of the conservative New England clergy initially welcomed what was happening in France. “We were all strongly attached to France—scarcely any
man more strongly than myself,” recalled John Marshall. “I sincerely believed human liberty to depend in a great measure on the success of the French Revolution.”
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During the July 1790 celebration in Paris of the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, John Paul Jones and Thomas Paine carried American flags symbolizing the connection between the two revolutions. Governor Harry Lee of Virginia was so excited by the French Revolution that he thought of emigrating to France and joining the cause; George Washington helped talk him out it. Even as the French Revolution became more radical, with the Revolutionary government launching a preemptive war against monarchical Europe in April 1792—a war that would not end until the peace of 1815—American support remained strong.

The European monarchies soon struck back. In August 1792 an Austrian and Prussian army together with some French aristocratic émigrés invaded France to put down the Revolution. When Americans learned that the French in September 1792 had stopped the Austrian and Prussian invaders at Valmy, one hundred miles east of Paris, and then had declared France a republic, they were thrilled. At last France had become a sister republic, joining America in a common struggle against the forces of monarchism.

Some Americans began wearing French tricolored cockades and singing French revolutionary songs. Revolutionary France reciprocated by bestowing honorary French citizenship on several Americans—George Washington, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—for courageously upholding the cause of liberty. Throughout the winter of 1792–1793 Americans celebrated the victory at Valmy up and down the continent with bells, illuminations, and parades; indeed, nearly everyone in the Western world, including Goethe, who was present at the battle, soon realized that the revolutionary enthusiasm of the French army at Valmy represented, in Goethe’s words, the beginning of “a new epoch in the history of the world.” The January 24, 1793, celebration in Boston, which was the center of conservative Federalism, was the most elaborate festival of all, involving thousands of citizens; in fact, it was the largest public celebration that had ever been held in North America.
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So popularly exuberant were these civic celebrations of “liberty and equality” in the winter of 1792–1793 that many Federalists became alarmed and began tempering their initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Actually, like Edmund Burke in England, some Federalists had expressed doubts at the outset about the course of the French Revolution and had pointed out its difference from the American Revolution. As early as 1790, members of the Senate, whose chamber was decorated with giant portraits of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, were reluctant to receive any communications at all from the French National Assembly. When the French had learned of the death of Benjamin Franklin in 1790, they, unlike Americans, were quick to eulogize the great scientist and diplomat. In addition to declaring three days of mourning—the first such honor paid a foreigner in French history—the French National Assembly proposed to the American government that the people of “the two nations connect themselves by a mutual affection” in the interests of liberty. Many Federalists, however, were not all that eager to honor Franklin, who had become identified with democratic principles and with France; and in the clumsy politics of mourning that followed his death, the Senate received the proposal of the French National Assembly with what Senator Maclay called amazing “Coldness.” Maclay could only wonder what the “French Patriots” would think “when they find that we, cold as Clay, care not a fig about them, Franklin, or Freedom.”
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In other words, some Federalists were already prepared by events in America to think the worst about what was happening in France. Since at least the 1780s many members of the elite had become increasingly anxious about the growth of popular power in America and the licentious tendencies of the American Revolution. Had not the Constitution of 1787 and the new national government been created in part at least to control these democratic tendencies? Now some Federalists began to see in France the terrifying possibilities of what might happen in America if popular power were allowed to run free. The rioting in Paris and elsewhere, the horrific massacres in September 1792 of over fourteen hundred prisoners charged with being enemies of the Revolution, the news that Lafayette had been deserted by his troops and his allies in the Assembly and had fled France—all these events convinced the Federalists that the French Revolution was sliding into popular anarchy.

American enthusiasm for the French Revolution seemed to be quite capable of dragging the United States into the same kind of popular anarchy. After describing the horrors and butchery taking place in Paris,
Federalist George Cabot of Massachusetts asked anxiously, “Will not this, or something like it, be the wretched fate of our country?”
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When Americans learned that the thirty-eight-year-old king Louis XVI, the ruler who had helped them win their independence from the British a decade earlier, had been executed for treason on January 21, 1793, and that the French Republic had declared war on England on February 1, 1793, their division into Federalists and Republicans intensified. The meaning of the French Revolution now became entwined in the quarrel that Americans were having among themselves over the direction of their own revolution.

W
HILE THE
F
EDERALISTS EXPRESSED HORROR
at what was happening in France, Republicans everywhere applauded the abolition of the French monarchy, and some of them even welcomed the execution of America’s former benefactor Louis XVI. Jefferson had no qualms about the king’s trial and execution; Louis, he said, ought to be punished “like other criminals.” James Monroe dismissed the regicide as merely an incidental contribution “to a much greater cause.” The Republican
National Gazette
even joked about it—“Louis Capet has lost his Caput.”
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While Jefferson and the Republicans tied the fate of the American Revolution to the success of the French Revolution, the Federalists were determined to distinguish them from one another. “Would to Heaven that the comparison were just,” said Hamilton in May 1793. “Would to heaven that we could discern in the Mirror of French affairs, the same humanity, the same decorum, the same gravity, the same order, the same dignity, the same solemnity, which distinguished the course of the American Revolution.” But unfortunately, he said, there was no “real resemblance” between the two revolutions—their “difference is no less great than that between Liberty and Licentiousness.”
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For the remainder of the decade, if not for the next two centuries, it became impossible for Americans to think of one revolution without the other—if only to contrast what many Americans described as their sober and conservative Revolution with the radical and chaotic French Revolution.

Most Federalists were convinced that the radical popular and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution threatened to corrupt American
society and turn it into a wild and licentious democracy. They charged that the theories of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Condorcet and atheistic Jacobinical thinking were infecting the moral and religious culture of Americans. The principles of the French Revolution, they warned, would “destroy us as a society” and were “more to be dreaded in a moral view than a thousand yellow fevers in a physical.” Better that the United States be “erased from existence than infected with French principles,” declared a rather hysterical young Oliver Wolcott Jr.
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For many frightened Federalists, Revolutionary France became a scapegoat for all that they found wrong with America.