Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (57 page)

Teachers in New England developed a new pedagogy based on ambition and competition instead of the traditional resort to corporal punishment. Many of the new academies that were springing up all over New England were doing with schoolchildren what Elkanah Watson was doing with his farmers and his county fairs—exciting among them “a spirit of emulation.” A schoolmaster in a tiny Massachusetts town discovered that he could get his male students to study hard by raising “their ambition to such a pitch that that their greatest thought was, who would perform the best.” Even the young women in the Litchfield Female Academy lived in a highly competitive atmosphere, with the girls repeatedly and publicly pitted against one another for awards, prizes, and credit marks. “Ambition has been raised to an uncommon degree, and our exertions have been wonderfully answered,” declared one of their teachers. Encouraging young people of all ranks to be ambitious in this manner was bound to have a powerful effect on the society.

Many, of course, continued to urge patience and contentment with one’s lot and to raise fears that too much stress on ambition could arouse envy and other harmful passions. “A degree of emulation, among literary institutions, is proper,” warned a Calvinist preacher. “But when it goes to pull down one, in order to build another up, it is wrong.” Despite these
sorts of misgivings, however, the traditional way of doing things could scarcely stand against the newly awakened sense of ambition among so many common folk.
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Competition existed everywhere in America, even in the South, where it took a different form. Many Southern planters, even though they were good Jeffersonian Republicans, were just as contemptuous of crass money-making as Northern Federalists, but they did enjoy competing with one another. Of course, they valued hierarchy but, being uncertain of their position in it, were always eager to assert their abilities and status, often through horse racing, cockfighting, gambling, and dueling.

Many Southern gentlemen possessed hair-trigger tempers and were acutely sensitive to any perceived insult, however slight.
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In 1806 Andrew Jackson, son of Scots-Irish immigrants from northern Ireland, a sometime congressman and U.S. senator from Tennessee, and a great lover of horse racing and cockfighting, ended up killing a man in a duel that began with a quarrel over a horse race wager. Duels growing out of the most trivial causes were not uncommon, especially on the frontier, where honor and gentlemanly status were especially vague and fluid and Celtic pride and touchiness were everywhere. Since Southerners bet on everything, they bet on the outcome of duels. In Nashville bets were freely made on Jackson’s duel, mostly against Jackson since his opponent was considered the better shot. Jackson took a bullet that remained lodged in his chest for the rest of his life.

So barbarous was the fighting among commoners in the South that some observers, including New England Federalists and visiting foreigners, thought the white Americans’ behavior was “worthy of their savage neighbors.”
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Men on the frontier often fought with “no holds barred,” using their hands, feet, and teeth to disfigure or dismember each other until one or the other surrendered or was incapacitated. “Scratching, pulling hair, choking, gouging out each other’s eyes, and biting off each other’s noses” were all tried, recalled Daniel Drake, growing up in late eighteenth-century Kentucky. “But what is worse than all,” observed the
English traveler Isaac Weld, “these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other’s testicles.”
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Most of these practices of rough-and-tumble fighting had been brought over from the Celtic borderlands of the British Isles—Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall. Indeed, some historians have persuasively argued that most of the characteristics of the Southern “rednecks”—including their indolence, the making of “moonshine,” fiddling and banjo-playing, chewing tobacco, hunting, and hog-raising—can be traced back to their Celtic ancestors. This is especially true, they say, of the hot-headedness and propensity to personal violence of backcountry Southern “crackers,” with someone like Andrew Jackson being a prime representative.
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But what were occasional practices of personal violence in Britain became a unique fighting style in the American South, and gouging out the eyes of one’s opponent became the defining element of that style. Although the acerbic Englishman Charles Janson may have been exaggerating in claiming that “this more than savage custom is daily practiced among the lower classes in the southern states,” he was not wrong in suggesting that it was common. Not only had the Reverend Jedidiah Morse in his
American Geography
confrmed the prevalence of the practice of gouging, but many early nineteenth-century travelers besides Janson witnessed examples of these gouging matches.
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The fighters became heroes in their local communities, and their success in these rough-and-tumble matches generated its own folklore. Eventually these matches became part of the exaggerated boasting and bombast that came to characterize Southwestern humor. At the same time, the prevalence of such personal violence convinced many observers, Federalists and European travelers alike, that as Americans moved westward and down the Ohio River they were losing civilization and reverting to savagery.
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Barbarism was not confined to the rural South and Southwest but seemed to be spreading even to the urban North and Northeast. Philadelphia in the 1790s was full of cockfighting, gambling, and quarreling that often led to fistfights.
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Despite all the rhetoric promoting politeness and
civility, Americans by 1800 were already known for pushing and shoving each other in public and for their dread of ceremony. Foreigners thought the Americans’ eating habits were atrocious, their food execrable, and their coffee detestable. Americans tended to eat fast, often sharing a common bowl or cup, to bolt their food in silence, and to use only their knives in eating. Everywhere travelers complained about “the violation of decorum, the want of etiquette, the rusticity of manners in this generation.”
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A
LL THIS VULGARITY
was changing the character of political leadership. With self-interested behavior becoming so common, the classical republican conception of governmental leadership that the Founders had extolled was rapidly losing its meaning. It became increasingly clear that society could no longer expect men to sacrifice their time and money—their private interests—for the sake of the public. It was said that John Jay had hesitated to accept a position in the new federal government because he was “waiting to see which Salary is best, that of Lord Chief Justice or Secretary of State.” If this were the case with someone as wealthy and prominent as Jay, public office could no longer be regarded merely as a burden that prominent gentlemen had an obligation to bear. If anything, holding office was becoming the source of that wealth and social authority.
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Many Americans of the early Republic, with varying degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm, came to believe that what they once thought was true was no longer true. Government officials were no longer to play the role of umpires, standing above the competing interests of the marketplace and making impartial judgments about what was good for the whole society. The democratic nightmare that had been first experienced in the 1780s was becoming all too pervasive and real. Elected officials were bringing the partial, local interests of the society, and sometimes even their own interests, right into the workings of government. The word “logrolling” in the making of laws (that is, the trading of votes by legislators for each other’s bills) began to be used for the first time, to the bewilderment
of the Federalists. “I do not well understand the Term,” said an Ohio Federalist, “but I believe it means bargaining with each other for the little loaves and fishes of the State.”
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Under such circumstances partisanship and parties—using government to promote partial interests—became increasingly legitimate. As property as a source of independence and authority gave way to an entrepreneurial idea of property, as a commodity to be exchanged in the marketplace, the older proprietary qualifications for officeholding and the suffrage existing in many of the states lost their meaning and soon fell away. Property that fluctuated and changed hands so frequently was no basis for the right to vote. When Republicans, such as those of New York in 1812, claimed that the mere owning of property was no “proof of superior virtue, discernment or patriotism,” conservative Federalists had no answer.
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In state after state the Democratic-Republicans successfully pushed for an expansion of the suffrage. By 1825 every state but Rhode Island, Virginia, and Louisiana had achieved universal white manhood suffrage; by 1830 only Rhode Island, which had once been the most democratic place in North America, retained a general freehold qualification for voting.

The expansion of the suffrage and the celebration of ordinary people meant that ordinary people might even become government officials, as many increasingly did in the Northern states in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Republican leaders in the North repeatedly appealed to mechanics, laborers, and farmers to elect men of their own kind. “Does a nobleman . . . know the wants of the farmer and the mechanic?” asked a New York broadside in 1810. “If we give such men the management of our concerns, where is our INDEPENDENCE and FREEDOM?” Republican spokesmen warned the common people not to elect “men whose aristocratic doctrine teaches that the rights and representative authority of the people are vested in a few proud elites” and used the Revolutionary idea of equality to justify electing ordinary men to office. To the surprise of many, Jonathan Jamison of Indiana Territory, a former clerk in the Land Office, openly and successfully campaigned for office in 1809 and continued to use his new brand of popular politics to become the state’s first governor when Indiana was admitted to the Union in 1816.
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Even parts of the South, as a North Carolinian complained in 1803, were not immune from the new egalitarian politics. “The charge of
aristocracy, fatal in America, was pressed against him,” he explained, in accounting for the defeat of former governor and Federalist-leaning William Davie in his 1803 bid for Congress, “and the radicalism of the people caused a revolt against their ancient leader.” Naturally the Old Republican John Randolph was disgusted at what was happening. The affairs of the nation, he told his fellow congressmen, had been “commit ted to Tom, Dick, and Harry, the refuse of the retail trade of politics.”
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Even when political candidates were not ordinary, many now found it advantageous to pose as such. In the campaign for governor of New York in 1807 Daniel Tompkins, successful lawyer and graduate of Columbia College, was portrayed as a simple “Farmers Boy” in contrast to his opponent, Morgan Lewis, who was an in-law of the aristocratic Livingston family. Of course, the New York Federalists in 1810 tried to combat Tompkins and the Republicans with their own plebeian candidate, Jonas Platt, “whose habits and manners,” said the Federalists, “are as plain and republican as those of his country neighbors.” Unlike Tompkins, Platt was not “a city lawyer who rolls in splendor and wallows in luxury.”
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In trying to out-popularize the Republicans, however, the Federalists could only ultimately lose, for most Republicans, in the North at least, did in fact come from lower social strata than the Federalists.

The common people increasingly seemed to want unpretentious men as their rulers, men who never went to college and never put on airs. Such a man was Simon Snyder, son of a poor mechanic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Snyder began his career as a tanner and scrivener and acquired what education he had by attending night school taught by a Quaker. He eventually became a storekeeper, mill owner, and successful businessman, so successful in fact that he was soon appointed justice of the peace and judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Entering the Pennsylvania assembly in 1797, Snyder moved up to become the speaker of the state’s house of representatives in 1802 and then governor in 1808, but he never shed his lowly origins. When he was elected governor, he refused an honor guard at his inauguration. “I hate and despise all ostentation—pomp and parade as anti-democratic . . .,” he said. “I should feel exceedingly awkward” with such pretension. When opponents mocked Snyder’s obscure origins and called him and his followers “clodhoppers,” he and his supporters quite shrewdly picked up the epithet and began proudly wearing it. Being a
clodhopper in a society of clodhoppers was the source of much of Snyder’s political success. The snobbish Philadelphia-based American Philosophical Society responded to Snyder’s election by quietly dropping the office of patron, which the incumbent governor had always held.
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Feelings of equality spread throughout Northern society and even began to be expressed in dress. Unlike in the eighteenth century, when gentlemen often wore varied and colorful clothes, nineteenth-century men began dressing alike, in black coats and pantaloons, as befitting solid and substantial businessmen who considered themselves the equals of every other man.
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By the first decade of the nineteenth century many gentlemen like Benjamin Latrobe, President Jefferson’s surveyor of public buildings, thought that democracy was getting out of hand. Although Latrobe was a good Republican, he nonetheless complained in 1806 to the Italian patriot Philip Mazzei that too many representatives in America’s national government resembled their constituents and were ignorant and “unlearned.” Philadelphia and its suburbs sent to the Congress not a single man of letters. One congressman was indeed a lawyer, “but of no eminence.” Another congressman, said Latrobe, was a clerk in a bank, and “the others are plain farmers.” From the county was sent a blacksmith and from just over the river a butcher.
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