Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (60 page)

People had a wide variety of explanations for the extraordinary student unrest. Some thought the students had read too much William Godwin and Thomas Paine and that French revolutionary principles of Jacobinism and atheism had infected their young minds. Others assumed that all these rich sons of elites were spoiled brats with too much money to spend, especially on whiskey and rum. Others reasoned that these mostly Federalist sons of the Founding generation were simply anxious to assert their manhood and prove their patriotism, citing especially the Quasi-War of 1798 for leaving these young men “panting for war.” Others believed that the rebellious students were simply reliving their fathers’ Revolution. As a Brown student wrote of the 1800 uprising: “Nothing but riot and confusion! No regard paid to superiors. Indeed, Sir, the Spirit of’ 75 was displayed in its brightest colors.”
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But still others supposed that the student disorder came from deeper evils in the society, from everything that the Jeffersonian Republican takeover of the government in 1801 had come to represent socially and culturally. It came, as the president of the University of Vermont declared in 1809,

from deficiencies in modern, early parental discipline; from erroneous notions of
liberty
and equality; from the spirit of revolution in the
minds
of men, constantly progressing, tending to a relinquishment of all
ancient
systems, discipline and dignities; from an increasing desire to
level
distinctions, traduce authority and diminish restraint; from licentious political discussions and controversies.
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T
HE
R
EVOLUTION HAD REPRESENTED
an attack on patriarchal monarchy, and that attack began to ramify throughout the society. In vain did conservatives complain that too many people had been captivated by “false ideas of liberty.” By collapsing all the different dependencies in the society into either freemen or slaves, the Revolution made it increasingly impossible for white males to accept any dependent status whatsoever. They were, as they told superiors who paternalistically tried to intervene in their private affairs, “free and independent.”
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Servitude of any sort in the early Republic suddenly became anomalous and anachronistic. In 1784 in New York a group, believing that indentured servitude was “contrary to . . . the idea of liberty this country has so happily established,” released a shipload of immigrant servants and arranged for public subscriptions to pay for their passage. As early as 1775 in Philadelphia the proportion of the workforce that was unfree—composed of servants and slaves—had already declined to 13 percent from the 40 to 50 percent that it had been in the middle of the eighteenth century. By 1800 less than 2 percent of the city’s labor force remained unfree. It was not long before indentured servitude, which had existed for centuries, disappeared altogether.
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With the republican culture talking of nothing but liberty, equality, and independence, maintaining even hired servants who worked for
wages became a problem. Eighteenth-century advice manuals had not devoted much space to the proper behavior of masters toward servants, since dependency and servitude had been taken for granted. But the new nineteenth-century masters, especially those in middling circumstances, had become self-conscious about the relationship and needed advice on how to treat people who were supposed to be their inferiors in a culture that prized equality. “Servitude being established contrary to the natural rights of man,” declared one such manual in 1816, “it ought to be softened as much as possible, and servants made to feel their condition as little as may be.” Many middling masters were not all that sure of their own status, yet they had to deal with servants who may have not been all that different in origin. Hence they needed advice on how to talk to their servants, how to ask them to do tasks, and how to maintain a distance, without being unkind or contemptuous toward them.
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Controlling or even finding servants was difficult in this egalitarian atmosphere. With some Americans concluding that the practice of keeping servants was “highly anti-republican,” servants resisted the implications of the status. They refused to call their employers “master” or “mistress”; for many the term “boss,” derived from the Dutch word for master, became a euphemistic substitute. A minister in Maine favored the euphemism “help” applied to a domestic maid he admired because, unlike the word “servant,” it implied “a sense of independence and a hope of rising in the world”—something that the young woman and many other Americans were increasingly capable of doing.
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With the disappearance of indentured servitude, black slavery became more conspicuous and more peculiar than it had been in the past, and hired white servants resisted any identification with black slaves. A foreign traveler was startled to discover that a white female domestic refused to admit that she was a servant and that she lived in her master’s home. She was simply “help,” and she only “stayed” in the house. “I’d have you know,
man
,” she indignantly told this foreigner, “that I am no
sarvant
; none but
negers
are
sarvants
.” White servants often demanded to sit at the table with their masters and mistresses, justifying their demand by claiming they lived in a free country, and that no freeborn American should be treated like a servant. William Cooper’s daughter-in-law could not believe
the bold behavior of servants. She blamed it all on notions of “Yankee dignity and ideas of Liberty—which is insolence only.” Since early nineteenth-century Yankees were not at all eager to become someone’s flunky, Bostonian Harrison Gray Otis had to make do with a series of French-speaking Germans, who soon picked up New England ways and rebelled at being servants. In 1811 John Jay’s son, in a common complaint, reported that his uncle was having problems with his servants, who had “become more and more ungovernable.”
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Since the slave-ridden South scarcely needed hired servants, the servant problem was largely confined to the North. Desperate would-be masters in several Northern cities were eventually compelled to form organizations for the encouragement of faithful domestic servants. These organizations were especially designed to reduce the servants’ incessant mobility and eliminate the insidious practice of masters’ enticing someone else’s servant to join their household. Despite all these efforts, however, the problem of getting and keeping good servants persisted and would continue to bother many Americans throughout the nineteenth century.

Because of the servant problem, Americans in the 1790s began to build hotels as public residences. The New York City Hotel, built in 1794, contained 137 rooms and many public spaces. These hotels combined both eating and lodging, provided private sleeping quarters, prohibited tipping, and were often occupied by permanent boarders. Many found this arrangement cheaper than setting up a household with servants who were so hard to acquire and deal with. Foreigners found such hotels and boardinghouses to be peculiarly American institutions.
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B
Y THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
much of what remained of traditional eighteenth-century hierarchy was in shambles—broken by
social and economic changes and justified by the republican commitment to equality. No longer were apprentices simply dependents within a family; they had become trainees within a business that was increasingly conducted outside the household. A master became less of a patriarch in the craft and more of an employer, retail merchant, or businessman. Artisans did less and less “bespoke” or made-to-order work for particular patrons and instead produced more and more ready-made goods for mass distribution to impersonal markets of consumers. Cabinetmakers began stocking warehouses with a variety of pieces of furniture for ready sale in a modern manner. Impersonal cash payments of wages replaced the older paternalistic relationship between masters and journeymen, which resulted in these free wage-earners moving about in increasing numbers. Six months, for example, was the average time of employment for journeymen in one Philadelphia cabinet shop between 1795 and 1803.
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Although both masters and journeymen tried to maintain the traditional fiction that they were bound together for the “good of the trade,” they increasingly saw themselves as employers and employees with different interests. Observers applauded the fact that apprentices, journeymen, and masters of each craft had marched together in the federal procession in Philadelphia on July 4, 1788, yet some tensions and divergence of interests were already visible. By the 1780s and 1790s some journeymen in various crafts were organizing themselves against their masters’ organizations, banning their employers from their meetings, and declaring that “the interests of the journeymen are separate and in some respects opposite of those of their employers.”
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In the eighteenth century artisans had participated in strikes, but these were strikes of the whole craft against the community, a withholding of their services or goods until some communal restriction on their craft was removed. Now, however, the strikes were within the crafts themselves, pitting journeyman-employees against their master-employers until their wages or other working conditions of the employees were improved. In 1796 in Philadelphia journeyman cabinetmakers successfully struck for a wage hike, which came out to be about a dollar a day and included a provision for cost-of-living increases. To add to worker solidarity, journeymen in one craft and city began calling on journeymen in other crafts
and cities to come together in a union to protect their mutual interests against hostile masters. Between 1786 and 1816 at least twelve major strikes by various journeyman craftsmen occurred—the first major strikes by employees against employers in American history.
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Despite these early incidents of clashing interests, however, the modern separation between employers and wage-earning employees came slowly. During the first several decades of the early Republic both masters and journeymen still tended to combine as artisans with similar concerns for the trade. At the outset most journeymen could look forward to becoming masters. In 1790 87 percent of the carpenters in Boston were masters, and most of the journeymen present in the city that year eventually became masters.
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In addition, masters and journeymen were brought together by their common status as tradesmen who worked with their hands. If anything, the contempt in which their labor had traditionally been held by the aristocratic gentry compelled their collaboration. So even those who differed from one other as greatly as did Walter Brewster, a young struggling shoemaker of Canterbury, Connecticut, and Christopher Leffingwell, a well-to-do manufacturer of Norwich, Connecticut, who owned several mills and shops and was the town’s largest employer, could join forces in the 1790s in a political movement on behalf of artisans against lawyers and other Connecticut gentry. Given their common lowliness as workers involved in manual trades, men like Brewster and Leffingwell were natural allies, and they understandably identified their “laboring interest” with “the general or common interest” of the whole state.
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In time, of course, the distinction between rich capitalist employers and poor wage-earning journeymen-employees would become more conspicuous. By 1825 in Boston, for example, 62 percent of all carpenters in the city had become property-less employees; and only about 10 percent of the journeymen in that year were able to rise to become masters.
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By the third decade of the nineteenth century most of the crafts had begun splitting into the modern class division between employers and employees. But in the 1790s large-scale manufacturers like Leffingwell and small craftsmen like Brewster still shared a common resentment of a genteel aristocratic world
that had humiliated them from the beginning of time. For the same reason Joseph Williams, a mule-trader, took up the same political cause of artisans and manufacturers as Brewster and Leffingwell. Although Williams was the richest man in Norwich and as a merchant had interests that were different from those of artisans and manufacturers, he nevertheless identified with their loathing of the Federalist aristocracy of Connecticut.
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Despite all the apparent differences between wealthy mule-merchants, small shoemakers, and big manufacturers, socially and psychologically they were all middling sorts with occupations—sharply separated from gentlemen-aristocrats who did not seem to have to work for a living. In the eighteenth century, writes the premier historian of the emerging middle class in America, “the important hierarchal distinction was the one that set off the several elites from everyone else.” Thus in comparison with the great difference between the gentry and ordinary people, “differences between artisans and laborers were of no real consequence. The effect, needless to say,” says historian Stuart M. Blumin, “was to identify middling people much more closely with the bottom of the society than with the top.” What tied these disparate middling artisans and laborers together was their common involvement in manual labor. Mechanics and tradesmen considered “the farmers in the country” as “brethren,” for they “get their living as we do, by the labour of their hands.”
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In the decades following the Revolution these middling workers in the Northern parts of the country—farmers, artisans, laborers, and proto-businessmen of all sorts—released their pent-up egalitarian anger at all those “aristocrats” who had scorned and despised them as narrow-minded, parochial, and illiberal—and all because they had “not snored through four years at Princeton.” They urged each other to shed their earlier political apathy and “keep up the cry against Judges, Lawyers, Generals, Colonels, and all other designing men, and the day will be our own.” They demanded that they do their “utmost at election to prevent all men of talents, lawyers, rich men from being elected.”
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In the 1790s they organized themselves in Democratic-Republican Societies, and eventually
they came to constitute the bulk of the Republican party in the North. By the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, these ordinary working men had transformed what it meant to be a gentleman and a political leader.