Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (45 page)

“In Representative Governments,” these Republican editors declared, “the people are masters, all their officers from the highest to the lowest are servants to the people.” And the people should be able to elect men “not only
of
ourselves, but as much as possible
as
ourselves, Men who have the same kind of interests to protect and the same dangers to avert.” How could a “freeman,” they asked, trust any leader “who boldly tells the world, that there are different grades and castes in every society,
arising from natural causes, and that these grades and castes must have a separate influence and power in the government, in order to preserve the whole”? For too long the “great men” of the Federalist party had looked “upon the honest laborer as a distinct animal of an inferior species.” Above all, the Republican editors attacked the leisured gentry as drones and parasites feeding on the labor of the common people. Such leisured gentlemen—who were “for the most part merchants, speculators, priests, lawyers and men employed in the various departments of government”—obtained their wealth either by inheritance or “by their
art
and
cunning
.”
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In just these ways did the Republican newspapers meet the emotional needs of thousands upon thousands of aspiring middling sorts, especially in the Northern states, who for so long had resented the condescending arrogance of the so-called better sort, or the “prigarchy,” as one Northern Republican labeled the Federalists.
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Even a Republican paper in the tiny town of Cincinnati, Ohio, filled its pages with hopeful lessons from the French Revolution that “sufficiently proved that generals may be taken from the ranks, and ministers of state from the obscurity of the most remote village.”
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By contrast with this extensive Republican use of the press, the Federalists did little. Presuming that they had a natural right to rule, they had no need to stir up public opinion, which was what demagogues did in exploiting the people’s ignorance and innocence.
³⁷
Federalist editors and printers of newspapers like John Fenno and his
Gazette of the United States
did exist, but most of these supporters of the national government were conservative in temperament; they tended to agree with the Federalist gentry that artisan-printers had no business organizing political parties or engaging in electioneering.
³⁸

Even the most successful printer-editor associated with the Federalist cause, William Cobbett, had very little to do with party politics. Although Cobbett was himself a British émigré who arrived in the United States in 1792, he shared none of the radical politics of his fellow émigrés. Indeed, he loved his homeland and always portrayed himself as a simple British
patriot who admired all things British. What made him appear to be a supporter of the Federalists was his deep and abiding hatred of the French Revolution and all those Republicans who supported it. He actually had no great affection for the United States and never became an American citizen. He thought the country was “detestable . . . good for getting money” and little else, while its people were “a cheating, sly, roguish gang.”
³⁹
He supported the Federalists indirectly by attacking the Republicans, whose “rage for equality” he ridiculed.

Cobbett was especially effective in mocking the hypocrisy of the liberty-loving Southern Republicans who were slaveholders. “After having spent the day in singing hymns to the Goddess of Liberty,” he wrote in his 1795 pamphlet,
A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats
, “the virtuous Democrat gets him home to his peaceful dwelling, and sleeps, with his
property
secure beneath his roof, yea, sometimes in his very
arms
; and when his ‘
industry
’ has enhanced its value, it bears to a new owner the proofs of his Democratic Delicacy!” Such earthy sarcasm and fiery invective were unmatched by any other writer of the period. Sometimes Cobbett’s nastiness and vulgarity embarrassed even the Federalists.
⁴⁰

Since Cobbett was much more anti-French and pro-British than pro-Federalist, he never played the same role in organizing the Federalist party that Bache played in creating the Republican party. What Cobbett did do, however, was legitimize many latent American loyalties to the former mother country. “After all,” he wrote, “our connexions are nearly as close as those of Man and Wife (I avoid,” he said, “the comparison of Mother and Child, for fear of affecting the nerves of some delicate constitutions.)” Reading Cobbett, many Federalists felt they could at last express their long-suppressed affection for England openly and without embarrassment, especially as England had emerged as the champion of the European counter-revolution, opposed to all the frenzy and madness coming out of France.
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All aspects of American culture—parades, songs, art, theater, even language—became engines of one party or another promoting France or Britain. The Republicans attacked the English-dominated theater and, according to Cobbett, prohibited the use of all such words as “your majesty, My Lord, and the like,” and the appearance onstage of all “silks, gold lace, painted cheeks, and powdered periwigs.” They sang the new song attributed
to Joel Barlow, “God Save the Guillotine,” to the tune of “God Save the King.” They pulled down all remnants of Britain and royalty, including a statue of William Pitt, Lord Chatham, which Americans themselves had erected during the imperial crisis, and destroyed images of the executed French king Louis XVI, who had helped America win the Revolution.
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When the Republicans began wearing the French tricolor cockade to show their support for the French Revolution, the Federalists labeled it “that emblem of treason” and in retaliation adopted a cockade of black ribbon, four inches in diameter and worn with a white button on a hat. Passions ran so high that some church services in 1798 ended in fisticuffs when several Republicans dared to show up wearing French cockades. According to one person’s recollection, even ladies would “meet at the church door and violently pluck the badges from one another’s bosoms.” To some frightened observers society seemed to be breaking up. “Friendships were dissolved, tradesmen dismissed, and custom withdrawn from the Republican party,” complained the wife of a prominent Republican in Philadelphia. “Many gentlemen went armed.”
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It was the newspapers that became the principal instruments of this partisan warfare. While the Federalist press accused the Republicans of being “filthy Jacobins” and “monsters of sedition,” the Republican press denounced the Federalists for being “Tory monarchists” and “British-loving aristocrats” and the president for being “a mock Monarch” who was “blind, bald, toothless, querulous” and “a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind.” By the late 1790s both President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson came to believe that they had become the victims, in Adams’s words, of “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies” that had ever been leveled against any public official.
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B
ECAUSE THE
F
EDERALISTS
were in charge of the government in the 1790s, they were the ones most frightened by the vituperation of the Republican press. It was one thing to libel private individuals; it was quite another thing to libel someone in public office. Such libels were doubly serious, indeed, under the common law were seditious, because they called into question the officeholders’ authority to rule. Even Republican Thomas McKean, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, agreed. Libels against public officials, McKean declared, involved “a
direct tendency to breed in the people a dislike of their governors, and incline them to faction and sedition.”
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Because politics was still personal, the honor and reputation of the political leaders seemed essential to social order and stability. Indeed, it was difficult in this early modern world for men to conceive of anyone becoming a political leader who did not already have an established social superiority. The reasons seemed obvious to many American leaders at the time, both Federalists and Republicans alike. Since early modern governments lacked most of the local coercive powers of a modern state—a few constables and sheriffs scarcely constituted a police force—officeholders had to rely on their social respectability and their reputation for character to compel the obedience of ordinary people and maintain public order. It is not surprising, therefore, that public officials should have been acutely sensitive to criticism of their private character. “Whatever tends to create in the minds of the people, a contempt of the persons who hold the highest offices in the state,” declared conventional eighteenth-century wisdom, whatever convinced people that “subordination is not necessary, and is no essential part of government, tends directly to destroy it.”
⁴⁶

In the Federalists’ eyes much of the Republican press in the 1790s was indeed creating contempt for authority and undermining the due subordination of society. President Adams was especially vulnerable to criticism. Lacking Washington’s popularity and stature, Adams was ill equipped to play the role of the republican monarch, and efforts to bolster his authority with formal ceremonies and elaborate rituals only made him seem absurd and open to ridicule, which the Republican press was more than willing to supply.
⁴⁷

If the Republicans’ smear campaigns had been read by gentlemanly elites alone, they might have been tolerable to the Federalists. But, instead, the Republicans’ slanders against public officials were reaching down to new popular levels of readers. The Federalist attitude to published materials was similar to that of the attorney general of Great Britain. When the radical scientist Thomas Cooper, who would soon emigrate to the United States, sought to respond in print to an attack by Edmund Burke, he was warned by the British attorney general to publish his work in an expensive
edition, “so as to confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly.” If it were to be “published cheaply for dissemination among the populace,” declared this law officer of the crown, “it will be my duty to prosecute.”
⁴⁸
In other words, more important than what one said was to whom it was said. Anything that undermined the public’s confidence in their leaders’ capacities to rule was by that fact alone seditious.

It was bad enough that the Republican newspapers’ slanderous and malicious attacks on federal officials were reaching out to a new popular readership, but, equally alarming to many Federalists, like the Reverend Samuel Miller, whose
Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century
was an elaborate compendium of the Enlightenment, these newspapers had fallen into “the hands of persons destitute at once of the urbanity of gentlemen, the information of scholars, and the principles of virtue.”
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This helped explain why the Republicans’ writings had become so vulgar and vituperative. The politics of honor made it difficult to deal with muckraking by social inferiors. Newspaper criticism from the likes of James Madison or James Monroe could be handled by the code of honor. But criticism from the likes of Matthew Lyon or William Duane or James Callender was another matter altogether. Such Republican editors and writers were not gentlemen and in many cases were not even American citizens.

The Federalists concluded that these upstart scandalmongers were destroying the character of the country’s political leaders and undermining the entire political order. Believing, as George Cabot of Massachusetts put it, that “no free government, however perfect its form and virtuous its administration, can withstand the continued assaults of unrefuted calumny,” they sought to limit the national effectiveness of the muckrakers in the only way possible outside of the code of honor—by making seditious libel a federal crime.
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Americans believed in freedom of the press and had written that freedom into their Bill of Rights. But they believed in it as Englishmen did. Indeed, the English had celebrated freedom of the press since the seventeenth century, but they meant by it, in contrast with the French, no prior restraint or censorship of what was published. Under English law, people were nevertheless held responsible for what they published. If a person’s publications were slanderous and calumnious enough to bring public officials into disrespect, then under the common law the publisher could be prosecuted for seditious libel. The truth of what was published was no
defense; indeed, it even aggravated the offense. Furthermore, under the common law judges, not juries, had the responsibility to decide whether or not a publication was seditious. Although this common law view of seditious libel had been challenged and seriously weakened by John Peter Zenger’s trial in New York in 1735, it had never been fully eradicated from American thinking or practice in the state courts.

Federalists wanted such a sedition law for the national government. The Sedition Act of July 14, 1798, which Vice-President Jefferson said was designed for the “suppression of the whig presses,” especially Bache’s
Aurora
, made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the President, or to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.” (Significantly, the office of vice-president was not protected by the act.) The punishment was a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding two years.
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Compared to the harsh punishments Britain had meted out in its sedition trials of 1793–1794—individuals transported to Australia for fourteen years for expressing the slightest misgivings about the war with France—the American punishments for seditious libel were tame.