Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (6 page)

Average Americans who had occupations and had to work with their hands for a living lacked the proper qualifications for virtuous and
disinterested public leadership. In the ideal polity, Aristotle had written thousands of years earlier, “the citizen must not live a mechanical or commercial life. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue.” According to Aristotle artisans, agricultural workers, even businessmen, could not be citizens. For men “must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen.”
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In the late eighteenth century some of this ancient prejudice against artisans and other workers participating in government still remained. “Nature never intended that such men should be profound politicians or able statesmen,” declared Oxford-trained William Henry Drayton of South Carolina on the eve of the Revolution. How could “men who never were in a way to study, or to advise upon any points, but knew only rules how to cut up a beast in a market to the best advantage, to cobble an old shoe in the neatest manner, or to build a necessary house”—how could such men claim a role in government? They were not gentlemen.

T
HE DISTINCTION BETWEEN
gentlemen and commoners, this “most ancient and universal of all Divisions of People,” as John Adams called it, was a crucially important horizontal cleavage in a largely vertically organized eighteenth-century society in which most people were more aware of those above and below them than of those alongside them. This division may even have been more conspicuous to some contemporaries than the horizontal line separating freemen from slaves.
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A gentleman, as that eighteenth-century connoisseur of English manners Lord Chesterfield defined him, was “a man of good behavior, well bred, amiable, high-minded, who knows how to act in any society, in the company of any man.”
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Gentlemen, who composed 5 to 10 percent of American society—fewer in the South than in the North—walked and talked in certain ways and dressed distinctively and fashionably. In contrast to the plain shirts, leather aprons, and buckskin breeches of ordinary men, gentlemen wore lace ruffles, silk stockings, and other finery. Unlike common people, they wore wigs or powdered their hair. They learned to dance and sometimes to fence and to play a musical instrument. They prided themselves on their classical learning and often took great pains to display it. They even had their own sense of honor, which they sometimes upheld by challenging other gentlemen to duels.

Although American gentlemen, such as the Southern landed planters George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or the Northern attorneys John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, in no way resembled the elaborately titled English nobility or the legally privileged French aristocracy, they nonetheless tended to consider themselves as aristocrats, “natural aristocrats,” as both Jefferson and the New York farmer and self-made merchant Melancton Smith called them.
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They were different from ordinary folk because as gentlemen they did not have occupations, which meant, as the New Yorker Smith said, they were “not obliged to use the pains and labour to procure property.”
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Being a lawyer, a physician, a clergyman, a military officer, in other words, being members of what were beginning to be called “professions,” was not yet considered having an occupation. Lawyers, for example, often tried to assure themselves and others that they were really gentlemen who only occasionally practiced some law. For such men, such as young Thomas Shippen, law was not as much a skilled profession as it was a desirable attribute of a man of learning, one, as James Kent told his Columbia law students in 1794, that ought to be “usefully known by every Gentleman of Polite Education.” Such gentlemen-lawyers were expected to read Horace as well as Blackstone, Cicero as well as Coke, history and poetry as well as common law books. Early in his adult life Jefferson had been a lawyer, but he scarcely resembled a modern practitioner calculating billable hours. He believed that the law, like all of learning, was important for a variety of reasons. “It qualifies a man to be useful to himself, to his neighbors, and to the public. It is the most certain stepping stone to preferment in the political line.”
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Early in his career John Adams, the ambitious son of a small-town Massachusetts farmer, had struggled to fashion himself into a polite and enlightened gentleman. In 1761, at age twenty-six, he may have still been unsure of his own gentility, but at least he knew who was not a gentleman. That person was someone who “neither by Birth, Education, Office, Reputation, or Employment,” nor by “Thought, Word, or Deed,” could
pass himself off as a gentleman. A person who springs “from ordinary Parents,” who “can scarcely write his Name,” whose “Business is Boating,” who “never had any Commissions”—to call such a person a gentleman was “an arrant Prostitution of the Title.”
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Adams had attended Harvard College, and that for him had clinched his gentility. By the time the Constitution was being written, he had come to know who a proper gentleman was: he was someone who had received a liberal arts education in a college. (Perhaps this became Adams’s exclusive criterion of gentility precisely because the rivals of whom he was most jealous, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had not attended college.) “By gentlemen,” he wrote in 1787, “are not meant the rich or the poor, the high-born or the low-born, the industrious or the idle: but all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences. Whether by birth they be descended from magistrates and officers of government, or from husbandmen, merchants, mechanics, or laborers; or whether they be rich or poor.”
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By a liberal arts education Adams meant acquiring all those genteel qualities that were supposed to be the prerequisites to becoming a political leader. It meant being cosmopolitan, standing on elevated ground in order to have a large view of human affairs, being free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric, and having the ability to make disinterested judgments about the various contending interests in the society. Of course, as Noah Webster said, having a liberal arts education—and becoming a gentleman—”disqualifies a man for business.”
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Conventional wisdom, in other words, held that businessmen could not be gentlemen.

Adam Smith in
Wealth of Nations
(1776) claimed that businessmen could not be good political leaders. Smith thought that businessmen in a modern complicated commercial society were too engaged in their occupations and the making of money to be able to make impartial judgments about the varied interests of their society. Only “those few . . . attached to no particular occupation themselves”—by which Smith meant the English landed gentry—”have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”
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These independent gentlemen of leisure who were presumed to be free of money-grubbing were expected to supply the necessary leadership in government. This leisure was what gave the slaveholding Virginians such an advantage in holding public office. Since well-to-do gentry were “exempted from the lower and less honourable employments,” wrote the British philosopher Francis Hutcheson, they were “rather more than others obliged to an active life in some service to mankind. The publick has this claim upon them.”
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All the American Founders felt the weight of this claim, and they often agonized and complained about it.

The Revolutionary leaders did not conceive of politics as a profession and officeholding as a career. Like Jefferson, they believed that “in a virtuous government . . . public offices are what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss.” They did not like electioneering or political parties, and they regarded public office as an obligation required of certain gentlemen because of their talents, independence, social preeminence, and leisure. Benjamin Franklin never thought his accomplishments in science could begin to compare with the public’s demand for his service. He even went so far as to say that “the finest” of Newton’s “Discoveries” could not have excused the great scientist’s neglect of serving the commonwealth, if the public had needed him.
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Franklin had always stressed that he was an independent gentleman whose offices were obligations thrust upon him. In not one of fourteen elections, he insisted, “did I ever appear as a candidate. I never did, directly or indirectly, solicit any man’s vote.”
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Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.

Since politics was not yet regarded as a profession, the political office-holder was supposed to want to return to private life after serving the public; and this classical ideal remained strong. Washington’s fame as a modern Cincinnatus in the 1780s came from his eagerness to surrender his sword and return to Mount Vernon. In ancient Rome, declared James Wilson, magistrates and army officers were always gentlemen-farmers, always willing to step down “from the elevation of office” and reassume “with contentment
and with pleasure, the peaceful labours of a rural and independent life.” John Dickinson’s pose in 1767 as a “Pennsylvania Farmer” is incomprehensible except within this classical tradition. Dickinson was in fact a wealthy and busy Philadelphia lawyer, but he needed to assure his readers that he was free of marketplace interests by informing them at the outset that he was a farmer, “contented” and “undisturbed by worldly hopes or fears.”
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Those who had worldly hopes and fears, especially men, in Melancton Smith’s words, who were “obliged to employ their time in their respective callings,” were presumed to have so many overpowering private interests as to be incapable of promoting the public interest. Prominent merchants dealing in international trade brought wealth into the society and were thus valuable members of the community; but their status as independent gentlemen was always tainted by their concern, as the distinguished Massachusetts minister Charles Chauncey once put it, to “serve their own private separate interest.”
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Wealthy merchants like John Hancock and Henry Laurens who wanted a role in politics had known this, and during the imperial crisis both had shed their mercantile business and sought to ennoble themselves. Hancock spent lavishly, bought every imaginable luxury, and patronized everyone. He went through the fortune he had inherited from his uncle, but in the process he became the single most popular and powerful figure in Massachusetts politics during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Laurens knew only too well the contempt in which trading was held in aristocratic South Carolina, and in the 1760s he had begun curtailing his merchant activities. During the Revolution he became president of the Continental Congress and was able to sneer at all those merchants who were still busy making money. “How hard it is,” he had the gall to say in 1779, “for a rich or covetous man to enter heartily into the kingdom of patriotism.”
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If successful tradesmen and mechanics, such as Roger Sherman of Connecticut, wanted high political office, they had to abandon their occupations. Only when wealthy Benjamin Franklin had retired from his
printing business in 1748 did “the Publick,” as he wrote in his
Autobiography
, “now considering me as a Man of Leisure,” lay hold of him and bring him into an increasing number of important political offices.
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Thus, leisure in a classical sense was highly valued. In fact, the Virginia Revolutionaries in 1776 had originally adopted as the motto for the state seal
Deus nobis haec otia fecit
(God bestowed upon us this leisure). Only in 1779, after Jefferson and others protested that this was not the best message to set forth in the midst of a war, was the motto replaced by
Perseverando
(By persevering).
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Having sufficient leisure remained important for gentry status even in the North, which had far fewer slaves than the South. Members of the learned professions were usually considered gentlemen, particularly if they had been liberally educated in college. But were they impartial and disinterested? Were they free of the marketplace? Did they have enough leisure to be able to serve the public virtuously? The Philadelphia lawyer James Wilson thought so. So did Alexander Hamilton. In
Federalist
No. 35, Hamilton argued passionately that, unlike merchants, mechanics, and farmers, “the learned professions,” by which he meant mainly lawyers, “truly form no distinct interest in society.” Thus they “will feel a neutrality to the rival-ships between the different branches of industry” and will be most likely to be “an impartial arbiter” between the diverse interests of the society.
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B
Y THE
1780s all these classical ideals of political leadership were losing much of their meaning, particularly in the Northern states. The line between the gentry and the common people, never very strong to begin with in America, was becoming seriously blurred. The distance that traditionally had separated the social ranks from one another was collapsing, and subordinates no longer felt the same awe and respect in the presence of their superiors that they had in the past. Everywhere, but especially in the North, growing numbers of ordinary folk used the popular and egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolution to challenge their so-called gentlemanly superiors. If only acquired and learned attributes and not those of blood and birth separated one man from another, then these challenges were hard to resist. Although the aspiring commoners lacked many of the attributes of gentility, more and more of them were becoming quite wealthy, literate, and independent; and they were aping the gentry
in a variety of ways, particularly by displaying consumer goods that had traditionally belonged exclusively to the gentry.
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