Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (41 page)

B
UT THE SOCIAL STRUGGLE
that underlay the political conflict between Federalists and Republicans in the Northern states in the 1790s was not simply a matter of new middling sorts of men challenging the established order. It was also a matter of the established aristocratic order being too feeble to resist these challenges. The persistent problem of American society—the weakness of its would-be aristocracy, at least in the North—became more glaringly evident in the 1790s. Too many of the Federalists, like William Cooper, lacked the attributes of gentility and seemed scarcely distinguishable from the middling sorts who were challenging them.

In eighteenth-century America it had never been easy for gentlemen to play the role of disinterested public servants who were supposed to sacri-fice their private interests for the sake of the public. The problem had become especially apparent during the Revolution. General Richard Montgomery, who in 1775 led a fatal ill-fated expedition to Quebec, continually complained about the lack of discipline among his troops. If only “some method” could be found of “engaging
gentlemen
to serve,” he said, the soldiers would become “more tractable,” since “that class of men” presumably commanded deference from commoners. But many gentlemen had chosen not to serve, since as officers they had to serve without pay.
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The same had been true of many of the Revolutionary leaders serving in the Continental Congress, especially those of “small fortunes.” They had grumbled repeatedly over the burdens of office and had begged to be relieved from those burdens in order to pursue their private interests. Periodic temporary retirement from the cares and turmoil of office to one’s country estate for refuge and rest was acceptable classical behavior. But too often America’s political leaders, especially in the North, had to retire, not to relaxation in the solitude and leisure of a rural retreat, but to the making of money in the busyness and bustle of a city law practice.
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In short, America’s would-be gentlemen had a great deal of trouble maintaining the desired classical independence and freedom from business and the marketplace that philosophers like Adam Smith thought necessary for political leadership. Smith in his
Wealth of Nations
(1776) had praised the English landed gentry for being particularly qualified for
disinterested political leadership. This was because their income came from the rents of tenants, which, said Smith, “costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.”
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In America there were not many gentry who were capable of living in such a manner. Of course, large numbers of Southern gentry-planters enjoyed leisure based on the labor of their slaves, but most Southern planters were not as removed from the day-to-day management of their estates as their counterparts among the English landed gentry. Since they had slaves, not rent-paying tenants, their overseers were not comparable to the bailiffs or stewards of the English gentry. Thus the planters, despite their aristocratic poses, were often busy, commercially involved men. Their livelihoods were tied directly to the vicissitudes of international trade, and they always had an uneasy sense of being dependent on the market. Still, the great Southern planters at least approached the classical image of disinterested gentlemanly leadership, and they made the most of this image throughout the Revolutionary era and beyond. Virginia especially contributed a galaxy of leaders, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, and George Mason—slaveholders all.
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For the Northern gentry the problems of maintaining their independence from the marketplace were particularly acute. Northern gentry-leaders were never able to duplicate the degree of self-confidence and noblesse oblige that characterized even the Southern gentry, let alone the English aristocracy. More and more of the Federalist officeholders found that their property, or their proprietary wealth, did not generate enough income for them to ignore or neglect their private affairs. Consequently, they either had to exploit their offices for profit or had to absent themselves from their public responsibilities.

Although the First Congress granted members of both houses a salary of six dollars a day—a radical act for the age: members of the British Parliament did not receive salaries until 1911—paying congressmen and other federal officers salaries was never enough. Too often private interests had to trump the official’s public duty. At a crucial moment during the debate over the assumption of state debts, Federalist congressman Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts complained about absences. Thomas Fitzsimmons and George Clymer, he said, were absorbed in their private
affairs in Philadelphia, while Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut “has thought it more for his interests to speculate than to attend his duty in Congress, and is gone home.”
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New England Federalists, precarious aristocrats that they were, complained ceaselessly of “the continued disgrace of starving our public officers.” Fisher Ames thought that “such a sum should be paid for service as was sufficient to command men of talents to perform it. Anything below this was parsimonious and unwise.” Good men, he said, would not take up the public burden; or, as Oliver Wolcott Jr. put it, in words that by themselves repudiated the classical tradition of public service, “good abilities command high prices at market.” Although the federal administration had more than enough applicants for its lower and middling offices, by the mid-1790s it was having trouble filling its highest offices. In 1795 South Carolina Federalist William Loughton Smith charged in the House of Representatives that Jefferson, Hamilton, and Henry Knox had all resigned from the cabinet “chiefly for one reason, the smallness of the salary.” Although this was not true for Jefferson, both Knox and Hamilton did have trouble maintaining a genteel standard of living on their government salaries.
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Hamilton’s scrupulousness over the issue reveals the dilemma that personal interests could pose for those who wanted to hold public office. There is no doubt that Hamilton left the treasury early in 1795 in order to return to Wall Street and earn some money for his family. Since he was out of office and short of funds, his close friend Robert Troup pleaded with him to get involved in business, especially in speculative land schemes. Everyone else was doing it, said Troup. “Why should you object to making a little money in a way that cannot be reproachful? Is it not time for you to think of putting yourself in a state of independence?” Troup even joked to Hamilton that such money-making schemes might be “instrumental in making a man of fortune—I may say—a gentleman of you. For such is the present insolence of the World that hardly a man is treated like a gentleman unless his fortune enables him to live at his ease.”

Although he knew that many Federalists were using their governmental connections to get rich, Hamilton did not want to be one of them. “Saints,”
he told Troup, might get away with such profit-making, but he knew he would be denounced by his Republican opponents as just another one of those “speculators” and “peculators.” He had to refuse “because,” as he sardonically put it, “there must be some public fools who sacrifice private to public interest at the certainty of ingratitude and obloquy—because my vanity whispers I ought to be one of those fools and ought to keep myself in a situation the best calculated to render service.”
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Hamilton clung long and hard to the classical conception of leadership.

Many of those Federalist aristocrats who sought to live up to the classical ideal sooner or later fell on hard times. Federalist congressman Joshua Coit of Connecticut found that his attempt to achieve “Independence” and real gentility by living off a nine-hundred-acre livestock farm was “utopian” and beyond his means. Even wealthy Christopher Gore, the first district attorney for Massachusetts and later one of the commissioners in London dealing with the issues of Jay’s Treaty, discovered that he did not have sufficient proprietary wealth to realize his genteel dreams of living without having to work. Fisher Ames thought that Gore would have to forgo retiring to his Waltham estate for a while and take up his law practice once again if he were to keep up the style of life appropriate to a gentleman of his rank. “A man may not incline to take a certain degree on the scale of genteel living,” Ames told Gore, “but having once taken it he must maintain it.”
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By the late 1790s in Philadelphia, contemporaries noted, many of “those who call themselves Gentlemen” had gone bankrupt and thus had destroyed that paternalistic “Confidence in men of reputed fortunes and prudence as used to exist.” Federalists who had sought to establish their genteel independence by acquiring landed estates could not fulfill their ambitions of emulating the English landed aristocracy. Since land in the New World was a far riskier investment than it was in England, failure was common; and many prominent Federalists such as Henry Knox, James Wilson, William Duer, and Robert Morris ended their careers in bankruptcy or in some cases in debtors’ prison.
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At the new government’s outset Benjamin Rush put his finger on the peculiar problem of the aristocracy in America. Many, said Rush in 1789, had expressed doubts about the appointment of James Wilson to the Supreme Court because of “the deranged state of his Affairs.” Rush admitted as much to John Adams. “But where,” he asked, “will you find an American landholder free from embarrassments?” It was a fact of American life that too many of its wealthy gentry, at least in the North, could not live up to their pretensions of aristocratic status.
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In such circumstances it became increasingly difficult to find gentlemen willing to sacrifice their private interests in order to hold public office. After Henry Knox retired, President Washington had to go to his fourth choice for secretary of war, James McHenry, and to replace Randolph as secretary of state he had to go to his seventh choice, Timothy Pickering. Most of the gentry in America, in the Northern states at least, simply did not have the wherewithal to devote themselves exclusively to public service. This weakness was the Federalists’ dilemma. They believed that they and their kind had a natural right to rule. All history, all learning, said so; indeed, the Revolution had been largely about securing the right of the natural aristocracy of talent to rule. But if their wealth were not sufficient for them to govern, what did that mean? Would that justify the opening of opportunities in government for new men, ordinary men, who seemed to the gentry to be less scrupulous in using government to make money and promote their private interests? In the eyes of the Federalist aristocracy these new middling men such as William Findley, Jedediah Peck, and Matthew Lyon were not supposed to be political leaders; their presence violated the natural order of things. They were not well educated; they were illiberal, ill-bred, and without any cosmopolitan perspective. They were “men, who,” in the opinion of Oliver Wolcott Jr., “possessed neithercapital nor experience” and not even the inclination to be virtuous or disinterested.
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Ironically, only the South—which provided much of the leadership of the pro-democratic Republicans opposed to the aristocratic Federalists—was able to maintain a semblance of a traditional leisured patriciate. But the Republican leaders, Madison and Jefferson, never really appreciated the character of the democratic and egalitarian forces they and their fellow Southern slaveholding Republicans were unleashing in the North.

A
RISTOCRACY MAY HAVE BEEN
unusually weak in America, especially in the Northern states, but some members of this aristocracy continued to cling to what they considered its distinctive manners and customs. Indeed, the more rapidly their aristocratic rank was being undermined by fast-moving social developments, the more insistent some of them were in claiming its prerogatives and privileges. Although the emergence of the Federalists and Republicans as political parties in the 1790s steadily eroded the personal character of politics, the aristocratic concept of honor still remained strong. Many of the leading figures continued to struggle with the various ways of defending their honor in a world where the concept was fast becoming irrelevant.

The manner in which Jefferson handled publication of a notorious letter he had sent to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei reveals how the politics of reputation could work. Jefferson had written the letter in 1796 in the aftermath of the heated controversy over the Jay Treaty, and in it he expressed his deep disappointment with the Washington administration. “An Anglican monarchical, and aristocratical party,” he told Mazzei, was trying to subvert the Americans’ love of liberty and republicanism and turn the American government into something resembling the rotten British monarchy. “It would give you a fever,” wrote Jefferson, “were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.” Mazzei translated the political portion of this letter into Italian and published it in a Florentine newspaper. A French newspaper picked it up, and this French version, translated back into English, appeared in the American press in May 1797.
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Since most people assumed that Jefferson was defaming Washington, America’s great hero, the Federalists were delighted with the letter and missed no opportunity to publicize it, even having it read in the House of Representatives. “Nothing but treason and insurrection would be the consequence of such opinions,” declared one Federalist congressman.
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