Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (56 page)

The Cooper family was devastated. Ill equipped to deal with financial problems, four of the Cooper sons succumbed to some combination of stress and high living during the next decade and one by one died prematurely—all in their thirties. By 1819, a decade after the father’s death, only two children were left—the second daughter, Ann, and James, the future novelist. The family property in Cooperstown was bought up by a new breed of upstart, William Holt Averell, the son of a Cooperstown shoemaker and a shrewd hard-nosed capitalist who would have nothing to do with wasteful spending on gentility: he trained his sons to be businessmen, not gentlemen, and succeeded where Cooper had failed.

A
LTHOUGH
A
MERICANS
, compared to Englishmen, had never been very respectful of authority, the Revolution seemed to have emboldened many of them to challenge all hierarchy and all distinctions, even those naturally earned. Middling men began asserting themselves as never before. As one foreigner noted, “The lowest here . . . stand erect and crouch not before any man.”
¹⁷
After the Revolution Bostonians stopped using the designations of “yeoman” and “husbandman” and began recording the occupational titles among artisans less and less. All adult white males began using the designation of “Mr.,” which had traditionally belonged exclusively to the gentry. Even the city council of Charleston,
South Carolina, felt sufficient egalitarian pressure to abolish the titles of “Esq.” and “His Honor.”
¹⁸

By what right did authority claim obedience? This was the question now being asked of every institution, every organization, every individual. It was as if the Revolution had set in motion a disintegrative force that could not be stopped.

European travelers, especially those from England, were, of course, those most dismayed by the society of the new Republic, and much of their criticism was devastating. Many Europeans regarded the English as wild and liberty-loving, but by comparison the licentious Americans made the English seem stable and staid. Many Americans naturally tried to discount this criticism, but for the Federalists most of it was only too true. How could they not agree with foreign critics who declared that in the United States “liberty and equality level all ranks”?

One of the most colorful and censorious of these foreigners was Charles William Janson, an English immigrant who spent more than a dozen years between 1793 and 1806 trying to understand the people of this new country, who by 1806 were, he said, “the only remaining republicans in the civilized world.” Janson said that he had come to America “with an intention of passing a considerable part of his life there,” but a series of land-speculating and business failures eventually drove him back to England. American customs and manners, he concluded in his book
The Stranger in America
(1807), were “in every respect uncongenial to English habits, and to the tone of an Englishman’s constitution.” Yet his account of the emerging nature of America’s character was no more disparaging and despairing than the accounts of many Federalists, who were equally fearful of the brutality and vulgarity the new republican society seemed to be breeding. By the early nineteenth century Janson was not the only one in America who felt that he was a stranger in the land.
¹⁹

Janson’s views of America’s democratic society, where the meanest and most ignorant people “consider themselves on an equal footing with the best educated people in the country,” were actually no more severe than those of Joseph Dennie, whom Janson quoted. The Boston-born and Harvard-educated Dennie was the editor of the
Port Folio
, the most influential and longest-lasting literary journal of its day and the most distinguished
Federalist publication in the age of Jefferson. In 1803 in one of his early issues Dennie wrote with more valor than discretion that “a democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history. Its omens are always sinister.. . . It was weak and wicked in Athens. It was bad in Sparta, and worse in Rome. It has been tried in France, and has terminated in despotism. It was tried in England, and rejected with the utmost loathing and abhorrence. It is on its trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy.” For these comments Dennie was hauled into court as a factious and seditious person, though eventually acquitted.
²⁰

But Dennie and other Federalists soon came to realize that democracy in America was not going to end, as it had elsewhere, in anarchy leading to dictatorship and despotism. Instead, American democracy, driven by the most intense competitiveness, especially for the making of money, was going to end in orgies of getting and spending. Too many of the American people seemed absorbed in the selfish pursuit of their own interests, buying and selling like no other people in the world. Federalist literati and others were appalled by what seemed to be the sudden emergence of thousands upon thousands of hustling “businessmen,” which was the term that soon came into favor—appropriately enough, for the whole society seemed absorbed in business. “Enterprise,” “improvement,” and “getting ahead” were everywhere extolled in the press. “The voice of the people and their government is loud and unanimous for commerce,” said a disgruntled and bewildered Dr. Samuel Mitchill in 1800. “Their inclination and habits are adapted to trade and traffic,” declared this professor of natural history at Columbia College, who knew so much that he was called “a living encyclopedia” and “the walking library.” “From one end of the continent to the other,” said Mitchill, “the universal roar is Commerce! Commerce! at all events, Commerce!”
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Although nearly all Americans lived in rural places and were engaged in farming, most of them, as Professor Mitchill correctly perceived, were by 1800 much involved in commerce and the exchange of goods. The extent of their commercial involvement has been a matter of some debate among historians. Some have suggested that many eighteenth-century farmers, especially in New England, were pre-modern and anti-capitalist in their outlook. These farmers, these historians contend, were mainly engaged in household modes of production in which they sought not to
maximize profits but only to satisfy their family needs and maintain the competency and independence of their households. They sought land not to increase their personal wealth but to provide estates for their lineal families. Rather than relying on extended markets, these husbandmen tended to produce goods for their own consumption or for exchanges within their local communities.
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While eighteenth-century farmers may have been less commercial than they would become in the nineteenth century, they certainly knew about trade and commerce. Many, if not most, at least occasionally brought “surpluses” to markets beyond their neighborhoods—selling tobacco and other staples to Britain, sending wheat and other foodstuffs to Europe, and exporting lumber and livestock to the West Indies. In other words, from the beginning of the seventeenth century colonial Americans exchanged goods and knew about marketplaces; but, in New England at least, many farmers may not have participated in what economists call a true market economy. Only when the market became separated from the political, social, and cultural systems constraining it and became itself an agent of change, only when most people in the society became involved in buying and selling and began to think in terms of bettering themselves economically—only then did Americans begin to enter a market economy.

Economic historian Winifred Barr Rothenberg has dated the emergence of this market economy in New England in the several decades following the American Revolution. She has discovered that market integration, the price convergence of commodities, and the development of capital markets in rural New England took place in this period—brought about by the impersonal exchanges of the farmers themselves. In the 1780s and 1790s farmers were lending more money more often to ever more scattered and distant debtors and shifting more of their assets away from cattle and implements toward liquid and evanescent forms of wealth. At the same time as interest rates, or the price of money, began to float free from their ancient and customary restraints, agricultural productivity of all sorts began to increase rapidly. By 1801, for example, the output of grains in a sample of Massachusetts towns was nearly two and a half times what it had been in 1771. Only when these farmers increased their
productivity to the point where an increasing proportion of them could engage in manufacturing and at the same time provide a home market for that manufacturing—only then could the takeoff into capitalistic expansion take place.
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Since this remarkable increase in labor productivity occurred well before the availability of any new farm machinery or any other technological change, it can be explained only by the more efficient use and organization of labor. In 1795 a Massachusetts physician noted the changes taking place among the farmers of his little town. “The former state of cultivation was bad, but is much altered for the better,” he said. “A spirit of emulation prevails among the farmers. Their enclosures, which used to be fenced with hedge and log fences, are now generally fenced with good stone wall,” a sure sign, he suggested, that the farmers were using their land more intensively and more productively.
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Farmers were becoming more productive because they glimpsed the prospect of improving their standard of living by consuming luxury goods that hitherto only the gentry had consumed—feather instead of straw mattresses, pewter instead of wooden bowls, and silk instead of cotton handkerchiefs.

“Is not the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur to labour and Industry?” Benjamin Franklin had asked in 1784—a question that flew in the face of age-old wisdom. For centuries it was assumed that most people would not work unless they had to. “Everybody but an idiot,” declared the enlightened English agricultural writer Arthur Young, in a startling summary of this traditional view, “knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.”
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But farmers now were working harder, not, as conventional thinking would have it, out of poverty and necessity, but in order to increase their purchase of luxury goods and become more respectable.

A
LTHOUGH MOST
F
EDERALISTS
and even some Republican elites like Professor Mitchill, who later became a Republican congressman and U.S. senator from New York, were frightened by the growing mania for commerce and money, believing that it resembled people’s being at war with one another, most of the farmers and businessmen themselves welcomed this competitive scramble. Some of them, in the Northern states at least, used the competitive vehicle of the Republican party to challenge the static Federalist establishment. But others sensed, as John Adams had, that competition arose out of the egalitarianism of the society as people sought not just to keep up with the Joneses but to get ahead of them. And they came to see that a spirit of emulation was good for prosperity.

Americans were in fact using competition to democratize ambition and make it the basis for a new kind of middling society. Other societies, said Noah Webster, trained their children in the occupations of their parents. But this European practice “cramps genius and limits the progress of national improvement.” Americans celebrated the “ambition and fire of youth” and allowed genius to express itself. Many cultures feared the expression of ambition because it was an aristocratic passion that belonged to the Macbeths of the world—great-souled individuals who were apt to be dangerous. Americans, however, need not have this fear, at least not to the same extent. In a republic ambition should belong to everyone, and, said Webster, it “should be governed, rather than repressed.”
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Elkanah Watson was eager to exploit this popular characteristic of American culture. Watson, the son of a Plymouth, Massachusetts, artisan and representative of the new breed of hustlers springing up everywhere, discovered that the earlier aristocratic and philosophical techniques of stimulating agricultural reform through scientific societies of gentleman-farmers would not work in America. Because Americans were too independent for such learned paternalism, Watson in 1810 devised for Berkshire County in western Massachusetts what soon became the familiar American county fair, with exhibitions, music, dancing, singing, and prizes awarded for the best crops and the biggest livestock. In 1812 “the female part of the community in a spirit of honorable competition” was allowed to demonstrate cloth, lace, hats, and other products of domestic manufacturing. Women began hanging their prizewinning certificates on the walls of their homes, where “they excite the envy of a whole neighbourhood.” Indeed, said Watson, producing “some tincture of envy” was crucial in calling forth “more extended efforts” by the farmers and their wives. The fairs, which Watson claimed were “original and peculiar,”
were designed “to excite a lively spirit of competition” by exploiting the desire for “personal ambition” that he claimed was characteristic of all Americans. Watson knew, as the enlightened gentry apparently did not, that society had to be dealt with “in its actual state of existence,—not as we could wish it.” One of his fairs, he said, produced “more
practical
good” and more actual agricultural improvement “than
ten
studied, wiredrawn books” written by “scientific gentlemen farmers” settled in their Eastern cities. The only way of achieving public benefits in agriculture and domestic manufacturing, said Watson, was to create “a system congenial to
American habits
, and the state of
our society
,” and to incite the farmers’ “self-love,—self-interest, combined with a natural love of country.” Watson thought that his county fairs had produced “a general strife” among farmers and had done much to awaken the slumbers of husbandry in the United States.
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