Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (59 page)

Still, the threat of mobbing in Baltimore continued. In early August the Federalists tried to send their newspaper through the mail to Baltimore; but when crowds threatened the U.S. Post Office, the city’s magistrates had enough, and the militia dispersed the mob.
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The summer’s bloody rioting in Baltimore, the worst in the history of the early Republic, was over, but mobbing was not. Mobs became more ferocious, more willing to engage in personal violence, and more ready to burn property than dismantle it. Such mobs were now prepared to act without elite participation or sanction, indeed, even to act
against
elites precisely because they
were
elites. By the second decade of the nineteenth century more and more political leaders were understandably calling for
the creation of professional police forces to curb the increasing urban disorder. The social authority and the patronage power of individual magistrates and gentry were no longer able to keep the peace.

O
NE EXPLANATION OFTEN OFFERED
at the time for all this violence was the sudden rise in the drinking of hard liquor. Both the rough-and-tumble fighters and members of the urban mobs were often drunk. But such ordinary and lowly people were not the only ones drinking too much. The distinguished physician and professor of materia medica at Columbia College Dr. David Hosack complained that forty of the hundred physicians in New York City were drunkards. Even the misbehavior of children was blamed on too much alcohol. Charles Janson reported that he often had, “with horror, seen boys, whose dress indicated wealthy parents, intoxicated, shouting and swearing in the public streets.”
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Certainly the American consumption of distilled spirits was climbing rapidly during this period, rising from two and a half gallons per person per year in 1790 to almost five gallons in 1820—an amount nearly triple today’s consumption and greater than that of every major European nation at that time. If the 1,750,000 slaves, who did not have much access to alcohol, are excluded from these figures of 1820, then the Americans’ per capita consumption was even more remarkable—higher than at any other time in American history.

From the beginning of the Republic American grain farmers, particularly those of Celtic origin in western Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Tennessee, had found it easier and more profitable to distill, ship, and sell whiskey than to try to ship and sell the perishable grain itself. Consequently, distilleries popped up everywhere, their numbers growing rapidly after the 1780s, reaching ten thousand by 1810. In 1815 even the little town of Peacham, Vermont, with a population of about fifteen hundred persons, had thirty distilleries. According to Samuel L. Mitchill in 1812, American stills were producing 23,720,000 gallons of “ardent spirits” a year—an alarming amount, said Mitchill, that was turning freedom into “rudeness and something worse.” He estimated that some workers in the country were consuming up to a quart of hard liquor every day.
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Distilling whiskey was good business because, to the astonishment of foreigners, nearly all Americans—men, women, children, and sometimes even babies—drank whiskey all day long. Some workers began drinking before breakfast and then took dram breaks instead of coffee breaks. “Treating” with drink by militia officers and politicians was considered
essential to election. During court trials a bottle of liquor might be passed among the attorneys, spectators, clients, and the judge and jury.

Whiskey accompanied every communal activity, including women’s quilting bees. But since manliness was defined by the ability to drink alcohol, men were the greatest imbibers. And taverns, unlike tea parties and assemblies, were exclusively male preserves. Taverns existed everywhere; indeed, most towns, even in staid New England, had more taverns than churches. By 1810 Americans were spending 2 percent of their personal income on distilled spirits, a huge amount at a time when most people’s income went to the basic needs of food and shelter. One quarter of the total sales of an ordinary New Hampshire store was alcohol.
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The social consequences of all this drinking were frightening—absenteeism, accidental deaths, wife-beating, family desertion, rioting, and fighting. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was a temperance reformer, outlined a number of diseases that he believed were aggravated by heavy drinking, including fevers of all sorts, obstructions of the liver, jaundice, hoarseness that often terminated in consumption, epilepsy, gout, and madness. In addition to diseases, said Rush in 1805, poverty and misery, crimes and infamy, were “all the natural and usual consequences of the intemperate use of ardent spirits.” Washington, who himself had a distillery, thought as early as 1789 that distilled spirits were “the ruin of half the workmen in this Country “The thing has arrived to such a height,” declared the Greene and Delaware Moral Society in 1815, “that we are actually threatened with becoming a nation of drunkards.”
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E
XCESSIVE DRINKING MIGHT HAVE AGGRAVATED
much of America’s licentious behavior, but many observers believed the ultimate source of the social disorder lay with the family. Charles Janson, for example, thought that all the intoxicated boys he had seen resulted from indulgent parents’ allowing their children to do whatever they wanted. John Adams went further and held parents responsible for all the social and political disorder in America. “The source of revolution, democracy, Jacobinism . . .,”
he told his son in 1799, “has been a systematical dissolution of the true family authority.” Patriarchy was in disarray, and that had affected all authority, including that of government. In fact, said Adams, “there can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mother and children to the father.”
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Without clearly understanding what was happening, fathers, husbands, ministers, masters, and magistrates—patriarchy everywhere—felt their authority draining away. Stephen Arnold’s trial for beating his adopted daughter to death attracted so much attention in upstate New York in 1805 precisely because people had become unsure of the proper relationship of children to their parents.
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The spectacular movement of people did not help matters any. Strangers were now everywhere, and no one was quite certain of who owed deference to whom. Children in greater numbers left their homes for new land, in most cases never to see their parents again. Because so many of their male citizens had set out in search of new opportunities in Vermont, Maine, or the West, the older states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had a majority of females—which may help account for their relative Federalist stability. But even in New England more sons and daughters asserted their independence from their parents in courtship and in choosing their marriage partners. Daughters in wealthy families tended to delay marriage, to marry out of birth order, or to remain single—all of which imply less parental involvement and greater freedom of choice for young women in marriage.

The Revolutionary War had relaxed the traditional norms of sexual behavior, particularly in the city of Philadelphia, which had been occupied by British soldiers. Not only did more women leave their marriages than ever before, but in the post-Revolutionary period the rate of bastardy nearly doubled, accompanied by a noticeable increase in prostitution and adultery, involving all ages and all social classes.
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With the dramatic slackening of laws against moral offenses in post-Revolutionary America, women began to experience unprecedented social and sexual freedom. Indeed, this new freedom accounts for the sudden flood of didactic novels and pedagogical writings warning of the dangers of seduction and female sexuality. Novels, such as Susanna Rowson’s
Charlotte Temple
(1791), Samuel Relf’s
Infidelity
(1797), and Sally Wood’s
Darval
(1801), assumed the responsibility of policing female sexuality that hitherto had been left to parents and legal authorities. Some physicians like Dr. Rush even began warning that guilt resulting from adultery, or any failure to control the passions, almost always ended in insanity. Leaders in the early Republic offered so many prescriptions for discipline precisely because there were so many frightening examples of disorder and indiscipline.
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For many observers it seemed as if sexual passions were running amuck. Premarital pregnancies dramatically increased, at rates not reached again until the 1960 s. In some communities one third of all marriages took place after the woman was pregnant. Between 1785 and 1797 Martha Ballard, a midwife in Lincoln County, Maine, delivered 106 women of their first babies; forty, or 38 percent, were conceived out of wedlock. All these statistics suggest that many sons and daughters were selecting their mates without waiting for parental approval.
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Everywhere traditional subordinations were challenged and undermined. America “is the place where old age will not be blindly worshipped,” promised one writer in 1789. Aged persons began to lose much of the respect they had commanded, and young people began asserting themselves in new ways. Seating in the New England meetinghouses by age was abandoned in favor of wealth. For the first time, American state legislatures began requiring that public officials retire at a prescribed age, usually sixty or seventy. By 1800 people were representing themselves as younger than they actually were, something not done earlier. At the same time, male dress, especially wigs, powdered hair, and knee-breeches that had earlier tended to favor older men (the calves being the last to show age), began giving way to styles, particularly hairpieces and trousers, that flattered young men. In family portraits the fathers traditionally had stood dominantly above their wives and children; now, however, they were more often portrayed alongside their families—a symbolic leveling.
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Y
OUTHS’ DEFIANCE OF TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY
and hierarchy showed up dramatically in the colleges. It began on the eve of the Revolution when Harvard and Yale abandoned the ranking of entering students on the basis of their families’ social position and estate. Then in the aftermath of the Revolution distinctions between upper and lower classmen began to break down. And as the Revolutionary message of liberty and equality spread throughout the country, all distinctions were brought into question.

As Samuel Stanhope Smith of Princeton explained in 1785 to Charles Nisbet, who was about to leave Scotland to become the first president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, “our freedom certainly takes away the distinctions of rank that are so visible in Europe; and of consequence takes away, in the same proportion, those submissive forms of politeness that exist there.” Although suitably warned, Nisbet was nevertheless stunned by what he presumed the Revolution on behalf of liberty had done to American society. It had created “a new world . . . unfortunately composed . . . of discordant atoms, jumbled together by chance, and tossed by unconstancy in an immense vacuum.” Nisbet had bumbled into a society that “greatly wants a principle of attraction and cohesion.”
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The unruly students Nisbet encountered only deepened his despair. Indeed, when college students, like those of the University of North Carolina in 1796, could debate the issue of whether “the Faculty had too much authority,” then serious trouble could not be far away.
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Between 1798 and 1808 American colleges were racked by mounting incidents of student defiance and outright rebellion—on a scale never seen before or since in American history. At Brown in 1798 the students protested commencement speaking assignments and the price of board and brought the college to a halt. Eventually, Jonathan Maxey, the president of Brown, was forced to sign a “Treaty of Amity and Intercourse” with the rebellious students, offering amnesty to the protesters and establishing procedures for legitimate protest. At Union College in 1800 students petitioned that a professor be fired. Although the authorities dismissed the petition, the professor resigned, giving the students a victory.
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These incidents only foreshadowed much more extensive and violent student protests. In 1799 University of North Carolina students beat the
president, stoned two professors, and threatened others with injury. In 1800 conflicts over discipline broke out at Harvard, Brown, William and Mary, and Princeton. In 1802 the rioting became even more serious. Williams College was under siege for two weeks. According to a tutor, Yale was in a state of “wars and rumors of wars.” After months of student rioting, Princeton’s Nassau Hall was mysteriously gutted by fire; the students, including William Cooper’s eldest son, were blamed for setting it a flame. As with other sorts of rioting, alcohol was often present. One student informed the president of Dartmouth that “the least quantity he could put up with . . . was from two to three pints daily.”
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Finally, college authorities tightened up their codes of discipline. But repression only provoked more student rebellions. In 1805 forty-five students, a majority of the total enrollment, withdrew from the University of North Carolina in protest over the new disciplinary rules, crippling the university. In 1807 Harvard students rioted over rotten cabbage and the general quality of food served in the commons; but, as a professor noted, complaining about the food was merely “the spark to set the combustibles on fire.” When the Harvard Corporation expelled twenty-three of the rebels, nearly two dozen other sympathetic students refused to return to the college. In the same year, student unrest at Princeton led to rioting and the calling out of the local town militia. Fifty-five students out of the 120 attending the college were expelled. In 1808 a student insurrection closed Williams for a month and forced the college to recruit a new faculty. Finally, college authorities up and down the continent began getting together and blacklisting the rebellious students, preventing them from enrolling in another college.
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