Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (8 page)

Most of the Revolutionary leaders, in other words, continued to hold out the possibility of virtuous politics, practiced by at least a few in the society. Amid all the scrambling of private interests, perhaps only a few were capable of becoming founders and legislators, who, as Hamilton said, from their “commanding eminence . . . look down with contempt upon every mean or interested pursuit.” “The rich,” declared Robert R. Livingston in the New York ratifying convention, possessed “a more disinterested emotion” than ordinary people, who tended to be “most occupied by their cares and distresses.”
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Even Jefferson admitted that only those few “whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue” could “be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”
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Only a few were liberally educated and cosmopolitan enough to have the breadth of perspective to comprehend all the different interests of the society; and only a few were independent and unbiased enough to adjudicate among these different interests and advance the public rather than a private good.

Such an elitist conception of the Constitution was bound to arouse opposition in an America that was becoming increasingly egalitarian and filled with ambitious middling people who wanted a say in how they were governed. Indeed, as John Dickinson warned his colleagues in the Philadelphia Convention, “when this plan goes forth, it will be attacked by the popular leaders. Aristocracy will be the watchword: the Shibboleth among its adversaries.”
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Dickinson was not wrong. Confronted with the new elevated federal government, the opponents of the Constitution, or the Anti-Federalists, as they were called, could only conclude that the proposed Constitution was a document designed to foist an aristocratic government of “Powdered heads” on republican America.
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Although some of the prominent Anti-Federalists, such as George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and Elbridge Gerry, were themselves aristocratic gentlemen, most of the opponents of the Constitution were ordinary middling men such as Melancton Smith, William Findley, and John Lamb—spokesmen for the market farmers, shopkeepers, traders, and paper money borrowers who represented the future dominant force of American society, at least in the Northern states of America. And they did not hesitate to lash out at the Federalists for promoting a government in which, as the New York Anti-Federalist Smith put it, “none but the great will be chosen.”
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In the egalitarian atmosphere created by the Revolution, no accusation could be more effective. The declaration in the Constitution that “no Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States” was now interpreted to mean that no one should be set apart from the body of the people.
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As the poet Joel Barlow noted, the very word “people” had come to mean something different in America than in Europe. In Europe the people remained only a portion of the society—the poor, the canaille, the rabble, the
miserables
, the
menu peuple
, the
Pöbel
. But in America, as Fisher Ames pointed out, “the class called vulgar, canaille, rabble, so numerous there, does not exist.”
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The people had become the whole society and were taking on a quasi-sacred character. In America there were no orders, no hereditary aristocracy, no estates separate from the people.

Some American gentry may have expressed contempt for ordinary folk in the privacy of their dining rooms, but it was no longer possible for an American leader to refer to the people in public as the common “herd.” During the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788 Edmund Randolph used just this term in reference to the people, and the popular demagogue Patrick Henry immediately called him on it. By likening the people
to a “herd,” Henry charged, Randolph had “levelled and degraded [them] to the lowest degree,” reducing them “from respectable independent citizens, to abject, dependent subjects or slaves.” Randolph was forced to defensively declare “that he did not use that word to excite any odium, but merely to convey an idea of a multitude.”
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But clearly he would not use it again in public.

The suggestion of elitism in the Constitution put the Federalist gentry on the defensive. In the New York ratifying convention Robert R. Livingston and Alexander Hamilton vainly tried to evade all the Anti-Federalist talk of aristocracy, or what Livingston referred to as “the phantom aristocracy . . . the bugbear” of the Anti-Federalists. Hamilton claimed he hardly knew the meaning of the word “aristocracy,” and he denied that any traditional aristocracy existed. He and gentlemen like him, he said, were not “men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens and possessing powers entirely independent of them.” But his middling opponents would not be put off by such an Old World definition, and they continued to pound away at the aristocratic character of the Federalist leaders, the “high-fliers,” as Abraham Yates called them. This was just the beginning of accusations of aristocracy that would be repeated throughout the subsequent decades.
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In 1787–1788 the middling Anti-Federalists may have lost the struggle over ratification of the Constitution, but they had won the rhetorical battle over the role of the people in public life.

A
MERICANS WERE SO EXCITED
over the successful ratification of the Constitution that they momentarily forgot the deep differences that existed among themselves and among the various states and sections. Social animosities were put aside, and gentlemen and mechanics and other middling sorts celebrated the establishment of the Constitution together, mingling their ranks in parades “in a truly republican style.”
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Even though two states—North Carolina and Rhode Island—were still outside the Union, Americans greeted the ratification of the Constitution with more unanimity than at any time since the Declaration of Independence. “‘Tis done!” declared Benjamin Rush in July 1788 with his usual impulsive enthusiasm. “We have become a nation.” (He said this despite the Convention’s having eliminated all references to the word “national”
in the Constitution.) The creation of the Constitution, said Rush, had produced “such a tide of joy as has seldom been felt in any age or country.” It represented the “triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of virtue over vice, and of liberty over slavery.” With a fifth of America’s population still enslaved, the irony in that last phrase was lost on Rush, at least for the moment.
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Rush was not the only enthusiast. Although Washington did not believe that the people of the United States had become a nation, and indeed believed that they were far from it, he abandoned his earlier pessimism and looked forward to better days, indulging a “fond, perhaps an enthusiastic idea, that as the world is much less barbarous than it has been, its melioration must still be progressive.” Everywhere Americans saw their “rising empire” at long last fulfilling the promises of the Enlightenment.
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The rebellion of the North American colonies took place at a propitious moment in the history of the West, a moment in which hopes of liberal and benevolent reform and making the world anew filled the air on both sides of the Atlantic. That the American Revolution occurred at the height of what later came to be called the Enlightenment made all the difference: the coincidence transformed what otherwise might have been a mere colonial rebellion into a world-historical event that promised, as Richard Price and other foreign liberals pointed out, a new future not just for Americans but for all humanity.

The settlement of America, John Adams had declared in 1765, was “the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
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The Revolution had become the climax of this grand historic drama. Enlightenment was spreading everywhere in the Western world, but nowhere more than in America. With the break from Great Britain complete and the Constitution ratified, many Americans thought that the United States, as Congress told the president in 1796, had become the “freest and most enlightened” nation in the world.
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For the people of these obscure provinces, “so recently,” as Samuel Bryan of Pennsylvania admitted, “a rugged wilderness and the abode of savages and wild beasts,” to claim to be the most enlightened nation on earth and to have “attained to a degree of improvement and greatness . . . of which history furnishes no parallel” seemed scarcely credible.
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Americans had no sophisticated court life, no magnificent cities, no great concert halls, no lavish drawing rooms, and not much to speak of in the way of the fine arts. Indeed, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century most of the American colonists had been overwhelmed by a pervasive sense of their cultural inferiority. When confronted with the contrast between the achievements of metropolitan England and their provincial societies, they had felt only awe and mortification. American travelers in England had been continually astonished by the size and grandeur of English social and cultural life, by London and its excitement and social complexity, its buildings, its art, its extravagance and sumptuousness.

By 1789, however, much of this earlier colonial sense of inadequacy had fallen away. The Revolution was such an exhilarating psychological event precisely because it allowed Americans to transform their feelings of cultural inferiority into ones of superiority. Americans had thrown off the “prejudices” of the Old World and had adopted new liberal, enlightened, and rational ideas, said Thomas Paine. “We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.” Ignorance was being expelled and could not return. “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
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Many of the ambiguities colonial Americans had felt about the rural and provincial character of their society were now clarified. What some had seen as the crudities and limitations of American life could now be viewed as advantages for republican government. Independent American farmers no longer had to be regarded as primitive folk living on the edges of Western civilization and mired in the backwaters of history. Far from remaining on the periphery of the historical process, they now saw themselves suddenly cast into its center, leading the world to a new era of republican liberty. They would show the way in ridding society of superstition and barbarism and would gently bind together all parts of the globe through benevolence and commerce. “There cannot, from the history of mankind,” declared John Winthrop of Massachusetts in 1788, “be produced an instance of rapid growth in extent, in
numbers, in arts, and in trade, that will bear any comparison with our country.”
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Yet despite the ratification of the Constitution, most Americans knew that they were not yet a nation, at least not in the European sense of the term. At the end of the Declaration of Independence the members of the Continental Congress had been able only to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” In 1776 there was nothing else but themselves that they could have dedicated themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet.

Because of extensive immigration, America already had a diverse society, certainly more diverse than most European nations. In addition to seven hundred thousand people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, all the peoples of Europe were present in the country. In the census of 1790 only 60 percent of the white population of well over three million remained English in ancestry. The rest were composed of a variety of ethnicities. Nearly 9 percent were German, over 8 percent were Scots, 6 percent were Scots-Irish, nearly 4 percent were Irish, and over 3 percent were Dutch; the remainder were made up of French, Swedes, Spanish, and people of unknown ethnicity. The Mid-Atlantic region was especially diverse.
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Yet in their early attempts to invent their nationhood, Americans did not celebrate the ethnic diversity of America in any modern sense. The French immigrant and author Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, in one of his ecstatic celebrations of the distinctiveness of the New World in his
Letters from an American Farmer
(1782), was not exaggerating by much when he described the American as “this new man,” a product of “that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.”
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What the Revolutionary leaders emphasized, as Crèvecoeur’s comment suggests, was not the multicultural variety of the different immigrants, but rather their remarkable acculturation and assimilation into one people, which, as the Massachusetts political and literary figure Fisher Ames pointed out, meant, “to use the modern jargon, nationalized.”
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America, declared the enthusiastic president of Yale, Timothy Dwight, in his millennial eclogue
Greenfield Hill
(1794), was destined to be God’s commonwealth composed of one people.

One blood, one kindred, reach from sea to sea;
One language spread; one tide of manners run;
One scheme of science, and of morals one;
And, God’s own Word the structure, and the base,
One faith extend, one worship, and one praise.
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The Revolutionary leaders’ idea of a modern nation, shared by enlightened British, French, and German eighteenth-century reformers as well, was one that was homogeneous, not one fractured by differences of language, ethnicity, religion, and local customs. That enlightened dream of wanting to be a single people tended to trump all reality. John Jay lived in New York City, the most ethnically and religiously diverse place in all America, and was himself three-eighths French and five-eighths Dutch, without any English ancestry whatsoever. Nevertheless, Jay could declare with a straight face in
Federalist
No. 2 that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts . . . have nobly established general liberty and independence.”