Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (55 page)

The party slowly withered. It was much too tainted with aristocracy and New England sectionalism to carry on as a national party. In the new Western states it virtually disappeared. One Republican reported from Ohio after the 1804 election that the Federalists “have dwindled to a number so inconsiderable that they are altogether silent on Politics.”
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Consequently, many Federalist gentry turned from party politics to the construction of civic institutions that could influence the culture—private libraries, literary and historical societies, art academies, and professional associations. By 1820 their party had become too weak even to nominate a presidential candidate, although the cultural authority of the Federalists, especially in New England, had grown substantially.
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At first the Republicans were remarkably united. In 1804 the Republican congressional caucus nominated Jefferson for president and sixty-seven-year-old George Clinton of New York for vice-president; no one at the meeting supported Vice-President Burr. By 1808 the party was faced with three candidates for the presidency—Secretary of State Madison, who was presumed to have Jefferson’s backing, Vice-President Clinton, who had strong support in New York and Pennsylvania, and James Monroe, who had recently returned from his ministry in England and had the backing of John Randolph of Virginia. Although Madison won the support of the congressional caucus (with Clinton as the vice-presidential candidate again), the supporters of Monroe and Clinton refused to recognize the right of the caucus to nominate candidates.

It was obvious that the Republican party was coming apart. Since its creation, its unity had rested on the threat the Federalists had posed to the principles of free and popular government; thus the decline of the Federalists meant that the Republicans began, in Jefferson’s words, to “schismatize among themselves.”
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A variety of Republican factions and groups arose in Congress and in the several states. These divisions were organized around particular individuals (the “Burrites,” the “Clintonians”), around political and social distinctions (the “Pennsylvania Quids,” the “Malcontents”), around states or sections (the “Old Republicans” of the South), and sometimes around ideology (“the Principles of ’98,” the “Invisibles,” the “War Hawks”).

The Republicans disagreed over multitudes of issues, but mainly over the degree to which the state and federal governments represented the people. Sometimes the moderate Republicans even sounded like Federalists, appealing, as Thomas McKean’s Pennsylvania “Quids” did in 1805, to the fact that “the best and wisest men in the community” were opposed to the “mad schemes” of the radicals, who in any case were little more than “backwoods bumpkins.”
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Unlike the Federalists, however, these moderate Republicans expressed no doubt about democracy and the sacredness of the will of the people. It was all part of the process of learning just how far republican equality could be carried. Of course, many individual politicians continued to pride themselves on their independence from factions and influence of any sort, and “party” still remained a disrespectful word. In fact, until the Jacksonian era nothing approaching a stable party system developed in Congress.

9
Republican Society

The Jeffersonian revolution and all that it meant socially and culturally were driven by the same dynamic forces that had been at work since at least the middle of the eighteenth century—population growth and movement and commercial expansion.
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By 1800 5,297,000 people lived in the United States, one-fifth of whom were black slaves. Since most adult whites married at early ages, fertility rates were high, with over seven births per woman being the average, nearly double that of the European states.
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After 1800 this fertility rate began to decline as people became more conscious of their ability to create prosperity for themselves and their children by limiting the size of their families. Nevertheless, the population as a whole continued to expand dramatically, doubling every twenty years or so, twice the rate of growth of any European nation.

At the pace America was growing, one observer predicted that the country would contain 860 million people by the middle of the twentieth century.
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Americans marveled at the fact that by 1810 the United States, numbering over seven million people, was nearly as populous as England and Wales had been in 1801.
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And it was a remarkably young population:
in 1810 36 percent of the white population was under the age of ten, and nearly 70 percent was under the age of twenty-five.

It was also a population on the move as never before. While the sparse population of the new state of Tennessee (1796) multiplied tenfold between 1790 and 1820, New York’s already considerable population more than quadrupled, much of it spilling into the western parts of the state; in the single decade between 1800 and 1810 New York added fifteen new counties, 147 new towns, and 374,000 new inhabitants. “The woods are full of new settlers,” remarked a traveler in upstate New York in 1805. “Axes were resounding and the trees literally were falling about us as we passed.” Although nine-tenths of the country’s population in 1800 still lived east of the Alleghenies, increasing numbers of Americans were crossing the mountains into the West—to the dread of many Federalists. As the high-toned Federalist Gouverneur Morris warned, the backcountry folk were crude and unenlightened and were “always most adverse to the best measures.”
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Before the Revolution the territory of Kentucky had contained almost no white settlers. By 1800 it had become a state (1792) and grown to over 220,000; at that point not a single adult Kentuckian had been born and grown up within the state’s borders. And these burgeoning Westerners were prospering. Despite the poor roads and the prevalence of simple log cabins, observed a traveler in 1802, one could not find “a single family without milk, butter, smoked or salted meat—the poorest man has always one or two horses.” By 1800 most of the major cities of the future Midwest had already been founded—St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Erie, Cleveland, Nashville, and Louisville.
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When the defeat of the Indians at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 opened up the southern two-thirds of the present state of Ohio to white settlement, people began pouring into the region. Between 1800 and 1810 Ohio gained statehood (1803) and grew from 45,000 inhabitants to over 230,000. Cincinnati was already being called “the Great Emporium of the West.” By 1820, only thirty-two years after the first permanent white settlers arrived, Ohio had a population of over a half million people and was the fifth-largest state in the Union. The state was creating so many new towns that Ohioans complained they
had run out of names for them. Gazetteers in America, it was said, could not keep up with the “very frequent changes” in the dividing of territories and naming of places “which are almost daily taking place”: it was a problem “peculiar to a new, progressive and extensive country.”
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In 1795 the population west of the mountains had been only 150,000; by 1810 it was more than a million.
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The Americans, said the British traveler Isaac Weld, were a restless people, always on the lookout for something better or more profitable. They “seldom or ever consider whether the part of the country to which they are going is healthy or otherwise.. . . If the lands in one part . . . are superior to those in another in fertility; if they are in the neighborhood of a navigable river, or situated conveniently to a good market; if they are cheap and rising in value, thither the American will gladly emigrate, let the climate be ever so unfriendly to the human system.”
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Lucy Fletcher Kellogg’s father, like many other American farmers, traded goods, ran a brickyard, kept a tavern, and was always on the move. Her parents had a farm in Sutton, Massachusetts, she recalled in her memoir, but “in accordance with the instincts of New England people, they must sell the farm and move to New Hampshire or some other new place.” The father of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, moved his family seven times in fourteen years. Others moved at least three or four times in a lifetime, selling their land to new settlers at a profit each time; “they are,” it was noted, “very indifferent ploughmen” anyway. Americans had a reputation among the Spanish of being able to travel “200 leagues with no other aids than a sack of cornmeal and flask of powder.”
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The country still remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural—a puzzling condition that seemed to violate the widely accepted theories of social development. An expanding population was presumably the force that compelled a society to move from one stage of civilization to another. But that was not happening in America.

During the early nineteenth century nineteen out of twenty Americans continued to live in rural places, that is, unincorporated sites with fewer than twenty-five hundred inhabitants. In 1800 nearly 90 percent of the labor force was still engaged in farming. Even the more urbanized areas of New England and the Mid-Atlantic had 70 percent of their workers on farms. In 1800 only thirty-three towns claimed a population of twenty-five hundred or more, and only six of these urban areas had populations over ten thousand.
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By contrast, in 1801 one-third of people in England lived in cities, and only 36 percent of English workers engaged in agriculture.

If the United States were eventually to become a fiscal-military state capable of taking on the European powers, this was not the way to go about it. A rural, underdeveloped society preoccupied with farming was not one that could sustain a European-type war-making capacity, and it was not at all what many Federalists had wanted or expected. The Federalists had thought that America’s rapid multiplication of people would force the country to develop the same sorts of civilized urban institutions, the same kinds of integrated social hierarchies and industrial centers, the same types of balanced economies in which manufacturing was as important as farming, the same sorts of bureaucratic governments that made the states of Europe, at least before the accursed French Revolution erupted, so impressive, so powerful, and so civilized. They assumed that American society would eventually become more like that of Europe and that what Franklin had once called the “general happy Mediocrity” of America would gradually disappear.
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But the opposite was happening. Not only was American social mediocrity spreading at an alarming rate, but more and more Americans were taking advantage of the availability of land in America and living apart from all traditional social hierarchies—especially in the new Western areas, where, in the words of George Clymer of Philadelphia, there were “no private or publick associations for the common good.” Indeed, conservatives asked, could the frontier areas even “be called society where every man is for himself alone and has no regard for any other person farther than he can make him subservient to his own views”?
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Settlers on the move had little respect for authority. A mobile population, one Kentuckian told James Madison in 1792, “must make a very different mass from one which is composed of men born and raised on the same spot.. . . They see none about them to whom or to whose families they have been accustomed to think themselves inferior.” In these new Western territories, where “society is yet unborn,” where “your connections and friends are absent, and at a distance,” and where there was “no distinction assumed on account of rank or property,” it was difficult to put together anything that resembled a traditional social order, or even a civilized community. Kentucky, like all frontier areas, travelers noted, was “different from a staid and settled society.. . . A certain loss of civility is inevitable.” Yet to some “plain, poor” Yankees from New England like Amos Kendall, Lexington, Kentucky, was already too aristocratic and stratified for their tastes, and they continued to look westward for opportunities.
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The changes, especially outside of the South, seemed overwhelming. America, noted a French observer, was a “country in flux; that which is true today as regards its population, its establishments, its prices, its commerce will not be true six months from now.”
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Americans appeared to love liberty too much. They “dread everything that preaches constraint,” concluded another foreign observer. “Natural freedom . . . is what pleases them.”
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Although many Americans, including Jefferson, celebrated the freedom that such weak social constraints offered, most Federalists were horrified by what was happening, dismayed and disillusioned by all the licentious changes and breakdowns of authority. Perhaps no Federalist was more troubled than William Cooper of Otsego County, New York. Cooper had once imagined becoming a genteel patriarch, but his design soon began collapsing all about him. The settlers of Cooperstown grew in numbers and diversity and became strangers to Cooper and to one another. His town was increasingly racked by lawsuits, bankruptcies, disobedient servants, vandalism, thefts, and incidents of violence and arson. Cooper himself was caned in a Cooperstown street in 1807, imparting to
him and his family a growing dread that anarchy and chaos were all about them.

By the time his political world was disintegrating, Cooper had concluded that the gentility he had so relentlessly sought was beyond his grasp and that he must look to his five sons and two daughters to finish what he had begun. But in 1800 his cherished elder daughter, Hannah, died in a fall from a horse. He sent William Jr. to Princeton, where the boy became a dissipated dandy, spending lavishly on clothes, wines, and cigars before being expelled in 1802 on suspicion of setting a fire that burned Nassau Hall. He next sent James to Yale, where the future novelist ran up debts and behaved as foolishly as his brother had: in 1805 he too was expelled—for fighting and using gunpowder to blow off his opponent’s dormitory door; James then ran off and joined the navy. After William Cooper died in 1809, his children thought they could continue to live extravagantly. But Cooper’s great wealth was more apparent than real, and within fifteen years his entire estate was gone, eaten up by debts, failed speculations, unpaid mortgages, and legal suits.