Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (61 page)

Although Jefferson was an aristocratic slaveholder, it was his political genius to sense that the world of the early Republic ought to belong to people who lived by manual labor and not by their wits. Cities, he believed, were dangerous and promoted dissipation precisely because they were places, he said, where men sought “to live by their heads rather than their hands.”
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But Jefferson was only expressing the views of his many Northern followers. In the decades following the Revolution living by one’s head became equated with leisure, which was labeled idleness and subjected to the most scathing criticism—criticism that went well beyond anything experienced in England or Europe in these years.

Angry Democratic-Republicans, including Matthew Lyon, who moved to Kentucky and served as congressman there from 1803 to 1811, accused all those gentlemen who were “not . . . under the necessity of getting their bread by industry” of living off “the labour of the honest farmers and mechanics.” Those who “do not labor, but who enjoy in luxury, the fruits of labor,” these Republicans charged, had no right to “finally decide all acts and laws” as they had in the past. At the same time as the Northern Republicans assaulted the gentry’s idleness and capacity to govern, they emphasized and honored the significance and dignity of labor, which aristocrats traditionally had held in contempt.
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Having to work for a living became the identifying symbol for all those common middling sorts championed by Jefferson and the other Republican leaders. America’s political and social struggle, said William Manning, an uneducated New England farmer speaking as “a Labourer” on behalf of many Northern Republicans, was between the many and the few; it was based on “a Conceived Difference of Interest Between those that Labour for a Living and those that git a Living without Bodily Labour.” Those who did not have to do bodily work were “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosipher and school master, the Juditial &
Executive Officers, & many others.” These “orders of men,” once they had attained their life of “ease & rest” that “at once creates a sense of superiority,” wrote Manning in phonetic prose that was real and not some gentleman’s satiric ploy, tended to “asotiate together and look down with two much contempt on those that labour.” Although “the hole of them do not amount to one eighth part of the people,” these gentry had the “spare time” and the “arts & skeems” to combine and consult with one another. They had the power to control the electorate and the government “in a veriaty of ways.” Some voters they flattered “by promise of favors, such as being customers to them, or helping them out of debt, or other difficultyes; or help them to a good bargain, or treet them or trust them, or lend them money, or even give them a little money”—anything or everything if only “they will vote for such & such a man.” Other voters the gentry threatened: “‘if you don’t vote for such & such a man,’ or ‘if you do’ and, ‘you shall pay me what you owe me,’ or ‘I will sew you’—’I will turne you out of my house’ or ‘off of my farm’—’I wont be your customer any longer.’ . . . All these things have bin practised & may be again.” This was how the “few” exerted influence over the many.

Those who “live without Labour” (the phrase that Manning used over and over to identify the gentry) managed the government and laws, making them as “numerous, intricate and as inexplicit as possible,” controlled the newspapers, making them as “costly as possible,” and manipulated the banks and credit, so as to make “money scarse,” especially since “the interests and incomes of the few lays chiefly in money at interest, rents, salaryes, and fees that are fixed on the nominal value of money.” In addition these “few,” by which he meant the Federalists of New England, were “always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national academyes & grammer schools, in order to make places for men to live without work, & so strengthen their party.” In fact, wrote Manning in 1798, “all the orders of men who live without Labour have got so monstrously crouded with numbers & made it fashanable to live & dress so high, that Labour & produce is scarse.” Manning ended his lengthy diatribe against all gentlemen of leisure by proposing to form “a Society of Labourers to be formed as near after the order of Cincinnati as the largeness of their numbers will admit of.”
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Some historians have thought of Manning as just a simple farmer in his little developing town of Billerica, Massachusetts. But in fact he was
much more of a middling sort—an improver and a small-time entrepreneurial hustler, or what later would be called a petty businessman. He ran a tavern off and on, erected a saltpeter works making gunpowder during the Revolutionary War, helped build a canal, bought and sold land, constantly borrowed money, and urged the printing of money by state-chartered banks, seeking (not very successfully, it seems) every which way to better his and his family’s condition. By themselves Manning’s commercial activities may not be much, but multiply them many thousandfold throughout the society and we have the makings of an expanding commercial economy.

If anyone in the North was opposed to the developing market society, it was not the likes of Manning and other Northern Republicans; in fact, it was many of the traditional-minded Federalists who tried to stand in the way of the middling paper-money world that was taking over the society of the North. But the passions that divided Republicans and Federalists went beyond economic issues and political ideas. Manning and the Northern Republicans knew only too well the kind of society the Federalists favored—a hierarchical one held together by patronage and connections and dominated by a leisured few who used the mysteries of the law and their proprietary wealth to lord it over the many. The Democratic-Republicans feared and hated the English monarchy so much because it symbolized that kind of privileged aristocratic society.

M
OCKING IDLENESS AND TURNING LABOR
into a badge of honor made the South, with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery, seem even more anomalous than it had been at the time of the Revolution, thus aggravating the growing sectional split in the country. Many Southern aristocrats began emphasizing their cavalier status in contrast to the money-grubbing northern Yankees. They were fond of saying that they were real gentlemen, a rare thing in America.

But even the Southern cavaliers were not entirely immune to the changing culture. Indeed, so prevalent did the scorn of gentlemanly leisure become that some Southern slaveholding aristocrats felt compelled to identify themselves with hard work and productive labor. As good Jeffersonian Republicans, some of these Southern planters contended that they, like the ordinary working people in the North, were involved in productive labor in contrast to all those Northern Federalist professionals, bankers, speculators, and moneyed men who never grew or made a single thing.

The Southerners could even respond to the marvelous manner in which Parson Mason Weems, author of the most popular biography of George Washington ever written, turned the aristocratic father of his
country into someone who worked as diligently for a living as an ordinary mechanic. By conceiving of Washington as an industrious businessman, Weems spoke for the new rising generation of middling entrepreneurs and others eager to get ahead. He was determined, he said, to destroy the “notion, from the land of lies,” which had “taken too deep root among some, that ‘labour is a low-lived thing, fit for none but poor people and slaves! and that dress and pleasure are the only accomplishments for a gentleman!’” Weems urged all the young men who might be reading his book, “though humble thy birth, low thy fortune, and few thy friends, still think of Washington, and HOPE.”
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Of course, since more than anyone in the society the Southern slave-holding aristocrats depended on the labor of others, honoring themselves as workers was awkward, to say the least. In fact, once the planters invoked this celebration of productive labor, they discovered it could be readily turned against them. Professional lawyers in Virginia, struggling to gain control of the county courts from gentlemen-amateurs, accused the planter-aristocrats of being men raised to no “pursuit of honest industry.” All a member of this idle gentry had ever done, charged the lawyers, was “learned to dress, to dance, to drink, to smoke, to swear, to game; contracted a violent passion for the very rational, elegant and humane pleasures of the turf and the cock-pit, and was long distinguished for the best horses and game-cocks in the country.” Then again, the lawyers found themselves open to the same accusation: that they were unproductive parasites who lived off the cares and anxieties of others.
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Everyone in America, it seemed, was expected to be a worker or businessman—an expectation that was not matched to the same extent by any other country in the world.

T
HE CULTURE WAS CHANGING RADICALLY
, especially in the North, and many Americans, older generations in particular, became frightened that the young Republic was caught up in a carousal of getting and spending. As Benjamin Rush lamented in 1809, the values of the Founders were being replaced by the “love of money.”
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Too many of the American
people seemed absorbed in the selfish pursuit of their own interests. Americans, in what Federalist Joseph Dennie called this “penny-getting pound-hoarding world,” were always looking to bargain; they treated everything they owned, even their homes, as merchandise.
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English travelers were stunned to see Americans selling their landed estates in order to go into trade—the reverse of what Englishmen sought to do. Nothing was beyond the lure of cash. In the heart of Federalist New England an enterprising Yankee even saw a way to make money out of the gruesome Baltimore riots. Within weeks after the riots, this New Haven hustler established a museum exhibit of the “
Cruelties of the Baltimore MOB
” in “a group of WAX FIGURES as large as life” and charged twenty-five cents admission.
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Many, of course, even some Federalists, wanted to put the best face on what was happening. In his publications President Timothy Dwight of Yale, for example, was eager to counter foreign criticism of American materialism, and thus in his published comments, though not in his private notes, he always tried to emphasize the positive aspects of American behavior. Americans may have been restless adventurers, he wrote in his
Travels in New England and New York
, but they were also enterprising and versatile, “ready when disappointed in one kind of business to slide into another, and fitted to conduct the second, or even a third, or fourth, with much the same facility and success as if they had been bred to nothing else.”
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James Sullivan, a Maine-born lawyer who became Republican governor of Massachusetts in 1807, tried to justify all the scrambling for money, especially since most of the hustlers were members of his own party. In an extraordinary argument that marked the passing of the aristocratic passions of power and glory and the coming of the harmless and humdrum interests of ordinary money-making, Sullivan suggested that a man who sought only to acquire property “is not, perhaps, the good man for whom ‘one would dare to die’; but he is a character whom no one need to fear.” Indeed, by advancing his own particular interest in an innocuous piecemeal way, he even “advances the interest of the public.” Sullivan was celebrating the fact that the older aristocratic world of the great-souled and ambitious Hamiltons and Burrs, who were heroic but dangerous, was giving way to a new
world of ordinary middling businessmen, who were mundane but safe. Ambition, which hitherto had been associated with the desire for aristocratic distinction, was becoming tamed and domesticated. Common people were now capable of ambition—the desire for improvement or gain—without necessarily being thought selfish or self-seeking, an endorsement of a peculiar kind of success that had extraordinary cultural power.
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Many others, however, were frightened and confused by what seemed to be a whole society being taken over by money-making and the pursuit of “soul-destroying dollars.” Too many were racing ahead in search of success without regard for the collective good or for those who failed and were left behind. Literati of varying tastes—ranging from Philip Freneau to Charles Brockden Brown to Washington Irving—filled the air with satirical complaints or hand-wringing analyses of what was happening. “This is a nation of peddlers and shopkeepers,” Brown complained of his countrymen in 1803. “Money engrosses all their passions and pursuits.” Such imaginative writers wanted nothing to do with men, as one Baltimore editor put it, “who are immersed in business, whose souls are exclusively devoted to the pursuit of riches, who suffer no ideas to intrude upon their speculations, or to disturb their calculations on exchange, insurance, and bank stock.”
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Although authors, professors, and poets were eager to be patriotic, many of them feared that a society so absorbed in business and money-making not only would contribute nothing to the arts and the finer things of life but would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness.

At the outset of his presidency in 1802 Jefferson told the newly arrived immigrant Joseph Priestley that the theologian-scientist had become part of a grand experiment in freedom, an experiment in which Americans were “acting for all mankind.” Precisely because Americans enjoyed liberties denied the rest of mankind, said Jefferson, they had “the duty of proving what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.” By the end of Jefferson’s administration in 1809 some Americans, mostly Federalists, thought the experiment was failing, that the degree of freedom left to individuals had already gone too far.
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