Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (80 page)

T
HERE WAS A CURIOUS PARADOX
in these legal developments. Just as the private rights of individuals expanded in these years of the early Republic, so too did the public power of the states and municipal governments. Despite the generous bestowal of corporate charters on private interests, the republican belief that the government should have a distinct and autonomous sphere of public activity remained strong, especially among the new states west of the Appalachian Mountains.
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Even in the
older states many Americans retained a republican faith in the power of government to promote the public good. Those who sought to protect the rights of individuals and private corporations did not deny the public prerogatives of the states. In fact, the heightened concern for the private vested rights of persons was a direct consequence of the enhanced public power the republican Revolution had given to the states and municipalities. Although the power of the federal government certainly declined in the decades following Jefferson’s election as president, the public authority, the police powers, and the regulatory rights of the states and their municipalities grew stronger.

Separating the political from the legal, the public from the private individual, actually allowed for more vigorous state action as long as that action remained within the public realm and served what was called a “public purpose.” Individuals may have had rights, but the public had rights as well—rights that grew out of the sovereignty of the state and its legitimate power to police the society. The state of New York, for example, remained deeply involved in the social and economic spheres. Not only did the state government of New York distribute its largess to individual businessmen and groups in the form of bounties, subsidies, stock ownership, loans, corporate grants, and franchises, but it also assumed direct responsibility for some economic activities, including building the Erie Canal.
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Even when the states began dissipating their newly acquired public power by reverting to the pre-modern practice of enlisting private wealth to carry out public ends by issuing increasing numbers of corporate charters, they continued to use their ancient police power to regulate their economies. Between 1780 and 1814 the Massachusetts legislature, for example, enacted a multitude of laws regulating the marketing of a variety of products—everything from lumber, fish, tobacco, and shoes, to butter, bread, nails, and firearms. The states never lost their inherited responsibility for the safety, economy, morality, and health of their societies.
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The idea of a public good that might override private rights remained alive.

Despite all this state police power legislation and regulation, however, it was usually left to the courts to sort out and mediate the conflicting claims of public authority and the private rights of individuals. The more the state legislatures enacted statutes to manage and regulate the economy,
the more judges found it necessary to exert their authority in order to do justice between individuals and make sense of what was happening. Precisely because of the exuberantly democratic nature of American politics, the judiciary right from the nation’s beginning acquired a special power that it has never lost. By protecting the rights of minorities of all sorts against popular majorities, it has become a major instrument for both curbing that democracy and maintaining it.

13
Republican Reforms

Despite all the increased violence and rioting, despite all the anxiety over America’s climate, despite all the hand-wringing over so much licentiousness spreading everywhere, by the early nineteenth century most Americans continued to remain extraordinarily confident and optimistic about the future. They could readily respond to the overweening enthusiasm of poet and diplomat Joel Barlow in his Fourth of July oration of 1809. Public speakers on such memorable occasions, said Barlow, were called upon “to give utterance to the feelings of their fellow citizens,” and that he intended to do. America, he said, had passed its infancy and was now looking forward confidently to its adolescence and its manhood. Providence had assigned Americans a special destiny, a theme iterated over and over in these years. The country was not only new to its own people, “but new also to the world.” America required thoughts and principles different from those of the Old World. “There has been no nation either ancient or modern that could have presented human nature in the same character as ours does and will present it; because there has existed no nation whose government has resembled ours . . . a representative democracy on a large scale, with a fixed constitution.” The United States, said Barlow, was “the greatest political phenomenon, and probably will be considered as the greatest advancement in the science of government that all modern ages have produced.”

But, Barlow added, Americans could not rest on their future promise; they had to work to achieve it. “Nations are educated like individual infants. They are what they are taught to be.” Monarchies could exist with a corrupt and ignorant people, but republics could not. In order to sustain their republic, Americans had realized from the outset of the Revolution that they would have to throw off their older monarchical habits and thoughts and make themselves over. But they had every reason to believe that they were equipped to do so.
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They knew—their modern assumption lying at the heart of the Enlightenment told them so—that culture was something constructed, something made by people; and thus they could solve any problem by remaking what they thought and believed. If they could remake something in the physical world as intractable as the climate, then reforming something as man-made as their culture seemed much less challenging. Since free and republican America was “in a plastic state,” where “everything is new & yielding,” the country, said Benjamin Rush, “seems destined by heaven to exhibit to the world the perfection which the mind of man is capable of receiving from the combined operation of liberty, learning, and the gospel upon it.”
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At the heart of the Revolution lay the assumption that people were not born to be what they might become. By exploiting the epistemology of John Locke, Americans had concluded that a child’s mind was a blank slate, or, as one Quaker schoolmaster in 1793 called it, “soft wax.” And since “the mind of the child is like soft wax, which will take the least stamp you put on it, so let it be your care, who teach, to make the stamp good, that the wax be not hurt.”
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Since, as Locke had democratically concluded, all knowledge came from the senses, and since, unlike reason, everyone was equally capable of receiving impressions through his or her senses, all young people could be molded to be whatever the teacher wanted them to be.
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And so Americans in the years following their Revolution set about reforming and republicanizing their society and culture. They aimed to continue the enlightened developments of the eighteenth century—to push back ignorance and barbarism and increase politeness and civilization. Indeed, as citizens of a popular-based republic, they needed more enlightenment than ever before. All aspects of life had to be republicanized—not only the society but also the literature, arts, law, religion, medicine, and even the family. One American even proposed the creation of a republican system of mathematics.

Many Americans, of course, had their hopes for the future mingled with doubts over their ability to become truly republican. Many of their
hopes went unfulfilled; many of their reforms were foiled or compromised. Still, what is most impressive is the confidence that so many Revolutionary leaders expressed in their capacity to make over their society. The result was an outburst of reform sentiment that has been rarely duplicated in American history.

A
MERICANS KNEW
“that the mode of government in any nation will always be moulded by the state of education. The throne of tyranny,” they told themselves, “is founded on ignorance. Literature and liberty go hand in hand.”
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It was the want of education that kept the mass of mankind in darkness and prejudice, in idleness and poverty, in paganism and barbarism. As the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 had stated, “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue diffused generally among the people . . . [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” But more was needed. If Americans were to sustain their republican experiment and remain a free and independent people, they must be taught not just their rights but also their duties as citizens. They must be educated in their moral obligations to the community.

The consequence of these attitudes was an unprecedented post-Revolutionary spate of speeches and writings on the importance of education. On the eve of the Revolution none of the colonies except those in New England had publicly supported schools. Even in New England the support had not been uniform: many of the towns had failed to meet their obligations to erect common or petty schools, and many more had refused to maintain the Latin grammar schools that prepared young boys for college. Many towns, such as Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1767, had urged their representative in the legislature “to relieve the people of the Province from the great burden of supporting so many Latin grammar schools.”
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And, of course, no parents in Massachusetts were required to send their children to school: the compulsion, such as it was, applied only to the towns to maintain petty or grammar schools.

Elsewhere in the colonies education had been very spotty. In New York, Philadelphia, and other coastal towns religious charity schools were the common institutions of elementary learning. Although a minister or some other patron could sponsor the education of a bright child, in all the colonies outside of New England education still remained solely the responsibility of parents. Sometimes parents hired itinerant freelance teachers or,
like many of the Southern planters, employed Northern college graduates or indentured servants to tutor their children. Few children received any formal education beyond learning to read and write.

Nine colleges had existed on the eve of the Revolution, and some of them struggled to survive. Few Americans, in fact, attended college; only about half of the members of the First Congress in 1789 had gone to college. The nine colleges together awarded fewer than two hundred B.A. degrees a year, which is why Benjamin Rush called them the “true nurseries of power and influence.” At Columbia College’s commencement in May 1789 only ten students received B.A. degrees.
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Following the Revolution Americans began adding more colleges to the original nine, and by 1815 they had created twenty-four more. Soon colleges—mostly religiously inspired and short-lived—began to be created by the dozens.
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Everybody now wanted colleges, including the first six presidents who repeatedly urged the creation of a national university.

But colleges were supposed to train only gentlemen—a tiny proportion of the society. Many leaders believed that it was the general populace above all that needed to be educated and at the state’s expense. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, organizing the territory north of the Ohio River, expressed the general Revolutionary commitment to education. It decreed that “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Six of the sixteen state constitutions formed before 1800 called explicitly for public aid to education. In 1784 New York created a board of regents to oversee a single comprehensive system of schools, pledging support for Columbia College and such other schools as the regents might create. Massachusetts made similar plans for a comprehensive three-tiered system of education building on its earlier colonial legislation.
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Of all the Founders, Jefferson worked out the most detailed plans for reforming the government and society of his state. Through extensive changes in inheritance, landowning, religion, administration, and law, he hoped to involve the people of Virginia personally in the affairs of
government. But nothing was more important to him than his plans for a state-supported system of education.
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In his 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge he, like Rush, proposed a three-tiered pyramid of local education. At the base would be three years of free elementary schools for all white children, boys and girls. The next level offered twenty regional academies with free tuition for selected boys “raked from the rubbish annually.” Finally, the state would support the best ten needy academic students at the university level, the aristocracy of talent that he described as “the most precious gift of nature.”
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Everywhere intellectual leaders drew up liberal plans for educating the American people. Unlike in England, where conservative aristocrats opposed educating the masses out of fear of promoting dissatisfied employees and social instability, American elites generally endorsed education for all white males.
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In a republic that depended on the intelligence and virtue of all citizens, the diffusion of knowledge had to be widespread. Indeed, said Noah Webster, education had to be “the most important business in civil society.”
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Most of the educational reformers in these years were less interested in releasing the talents of individuals than, as Benjamin Rush put it, in rendering “the mass of the people more homogeneous” in order to “fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.” Pupils should be taught that they did not belong to themselves but were “public property.” It was even “possible,” said Rush, “to convert men into republican machines.”
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Even Jefferson, despite his emphasis on guarding the freedom and happiness of individuals, was more interested in promoting social unity and the public good.