Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (9 page)

Yet the fact that most Americans were of British heritage and spoke the same language as the subjects of the former mother country created problems of national identity that troubled the new Republic over the next several decades. Indeed, almost to the moment of independence the colonists had continued to define themselves as British, and only reluctantly came to see themselves as a separate people called Americans.
⁹⁸
The colonists were well aware of the warning John Dickinson, the most important pamphleteer in America before Thomas Paine, had given them on the eve of independence. “If
we
are separated from our mother country,” he asked in 1768, “what new form of government shall we adopt, and where shall we find another
Britain
to supply our loss? Torn from the body, to which we are united by religion, liberty, laws, affection, relation, language and commerce we must bleed at every vein.”
⁹⁹

Could these colonists who had been British and who had celebrated their Britishness for generations become a truly independent people? How could one united people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, and professing the same Protestant religion differentiate themselves from the people of the former mother country? These questions,
perhaps more than any others, bedeviled the politics of the early decades of the new Republic’s history. In the end many Americans came to believe that they had to fight another war with Great Britain in order to reaffirm their national independence and establish their elusive identity.

If they were to be a single national people with a national character, Americans would have to invent themselves, and in some sense the whole of American history has been the story of that invention. At first, they struggled with a proper name for their new country. On the tercentenary celebration of Columbus’s discovery of America in 1792 one patriot suggested “the United States of Columbia” as a name for the new Republic. Poets, ranging from the female black slave Phillis Wheatley to the young Princeton graduate Philip Freneau, saw the logic of the name and thus repeatedly referred to the nation as Columbia. With the same rhythm and number of syllables, Columbia could easily replace Britannia in new compositions set to the music of traditional English songs. In his song “Columbia,” written in 1777 but not published until 1783, Timothy Dwight, as an army chaplain at West Point, sought to shed the new Republic’s colonial English heritage and create a land that existed outside of history.

COLUMBIA, Columbia, to glory arise
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies!
Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.
Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,
Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime;
Let the crimes of the East ne’er encrimson thy name,
Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.
¹⁰⁰

But the name did not stick. Neither did Dr. Samuel Mitchill’s suggestion that the new nation be called Fredon or Fredonia and its people Fredonians. Despite Mitchill’s argument that “we cannot be national in feeling and in fact until we have a national name,” the country’s designation remained “the United States of America,” with its people appropriating the name that belonged to all the peoples of the New World—even though the term “Americans” actually had begun as a pejorative label the metropolitan English had applied to their inferior and far-removed colonists.
¹⁰¹

Lacking a unique name and ethnicity, the best Americans could do was to locate their national identity and character in something other than the traditional sources of nationhood. In the absence of a common nationality, Union often became a synonym for nation. But even more important in making them a distinctive people, they told themselves, was the fact that they were both peculiarly enlightened and ideally located along the process of social development.
¹⁰²

Educated Americans were fascinated by the widely held belief in successive stages of historical evolution that ranged from rude simplicity to refined complexity. The various theories of social progress current in the late eighteenth century had many sources, but especially important to the Americans was the four-stage theory that had been worked out by that remarkable group of eighteenth-century Scottish social scientists—Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Lord Kames. These thinkers posited four stages of evolutionary development based on differing modes of subsistence: hunting and gathering, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. As societies grew in population, so the theory went, people were forced to find new ways of subsisting, and this need accounted for societies advancing from one stage to another.

Nearly every thinker saw the aboriginal inhabitants of America as the perfect representatives of the first stage, which Adam Smith called the “lowest and rudest state of society.”
¹⁰³
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which the European discovery of the Indians in the New World influenced the emergence of the theory of different stages of history. Eighteenth-century theorists assumed that thousands of years in the past Europeans had been as savage as the Indians of America were in the present. The Indians helped create the notion, as John Locke put it, that “in the beginning all the world was
America
.”
¹⁰⁴

If the American Indians represented the initial stage of history, then contemporary England and France represented the fourth and final stage of development, modern commercial society. This final stage of history
was characterized by much of what Americans lacked—sprawling poverty-ridden cities, over-refined manners, gross inequalities of rank, complex divisions of labor, and widespread manufacturing of luxuries. Americans, such as Samuel Stanhope Smith of Princeton, knew only too well “that human society can advance only to a certain point before it becomes corrupted, and begins to decline.”
¹⁰⁵
Many concluded that Britain and France and other highly developed nations were steeped in corruption, dependency, luxury, and self-indulgence and therefore had to be on the verge of dissolution.

American patriots in 1776 had been sure that England was so deeply implicated in the final stage of commerce that as a nation it could not last much longer. Indeed, over the next half century many Americans continued to expect and hope that overly refined and overpopulated England would soon fall apart in selfishness, extravagance, and dissipation.

By contrast, most white Americans located themselves much earlier on the progressive spectrum of history. “In the present age, our Country is in a medium between Barbarity and Refinement,” declared the Reverend Nathanael Emmons of Massachusetts in 1787. “In such an age, the minds of men are strong and vigorous, being neither enfeebled by luxury, nor shackled by authority.”
¹⁰⁶
Americans had advanced far beyond the earliest stage of development in which the native peoples of the New World appeared to be strangely frozen. In fact, because of the proximity of the native “savages,” educated Americans were anxious to emphasize their progress. Their society may have been simple and egalitarian in many respects, without the polish and refined characteristics of Europe, but they repeatedly told themselves that they had put the bloody barbarism and savage violence of the previous century well behind them. They were confident that their society was becoming more polite and commercially sophisticated, but, of course, not to the point reached by the decadent Old World. The American people may have lacked the fine arts of Europe, wrote John Adams, but in all other matters, especially agriculture, commerce, and government, they were superior. “In this respect,” he said, “America is infinitely further removed from Barbarity, than Europe.”
¹⁰⁷

A
MERICANS ASSURED THEMSELVES
that they were a young and forming people. Their youth, in fact, justified their lack of all the refinements that Thomas Shippen found so repulsive. Americans may have
been raw and callow compared to Europeans, but, they told themselves, at least they were not overwhelmed by a debilitating luxury. They knew from history that too much politeness was just as bad as too much vulgarity. Look what had happened to ancient Rome when its society had become too sophisticated, too luxury-loving, too divided by extremes of rich and poor. Too much refinement eroded valor, and the Romans lost their will to fight for their liberty. Look too, they said, to what was happening to eighteenth-century England.

The English radical Whig historian Catherine Macaulay warned George Washington in 1790 of what was in store for Americans if they tried to “copy all the excesses” of England. By wallowing in “all the deceitful pleasures of a vicious dissipation,” Americans “will overturn all the virtue which at present exists in the Country.” Then “an inattention to public interest will prevail, and nothing be pursued but private gratification and emolument.” Despite Macaulay’s apprehensions that the American people were showing “a greater inclination to the fripperies of Europe, than a Classic simplicity,” most Americans believed that their society was young enough to avoid these evils of over-refinement.
¹⁰⁸

Just as Americans lacked the corrupting luxury of Europe, so too, they constantly told themselves, were they without Europe’s great distinctions of the wealthy few and the poverty-stricken many. Compared to Great Britain, America had a truncated society; it lacked both the great noble families with their legal titles and sumptuous wealth and the great masses of poor whose lives were characterized by unremitting toil and deprivation. In America, wrote Benjamin Franklin in one of the many expressions of the idea of American exceptionalism in these years, “a general happy Mediocrity” prevailed.
¹⁰⁹

Commentators were eager to turn the general middling character of America into an asset. “Here,” wrote CrÈvecoeur, “are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufactures employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.” There was nothing in America remotely resembling the wretched poverty and the gin-soaked slums of London. America, continued CrÈvecoeur, who wrote his essays before the Revolution that he eventually repudiated, was largely made up of “cultivators scattered over an immense territory,” each of them working for himself. Nowhere in America, he said, ignoring
for the moment, as most American social commentators did, the big houses of the Southern planters and the slave quarters of hundreds of thousands of black Africans, could one find “the hostile castle and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm and dwell in meanness, smoke and indigence.”
¹¹⁰

This American yeomanry, Americans told themselves, was not to be compared to the illiterate peasantry of the European states. The fact that the great bulk of Americans were landowners radically separated them from the rest of the world. Even England had very few freeholders left: most English farmers were tenants, cottagers, or landless laborers, not like “the yeomanry of this country,” said Noah Webster, which “consist[ed] of substantial independent freeholders, masters of their own persons and lords of their own soil.”
¹¹¹
Americans were a society, in other words, ideally suited for republicanism.

Because of the prevalence of land, declared Jefferson, Americans had no need to develop the kinds of extensive urban workshops and intensive manufacturing establishments that confined tens of thousand of Europeans to daily dependent drudgery. Most Americans assumed that they were living in the age of agriculture with only the beginning signs of entering the age of commerce. They could remain farmers, and what a providential blessing that was. For “those who labour in the earth,” said Jefferson, in the most famous of his paeans to agriculture, “are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he had made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”

It was precisely the prevalence of all these independent farmers that made possible virtuous republican government in America. They seemed to Jefferson and other Americans freer of the sorts of vicious temptations that prevented Europeans from adopting republicanism. As long as America rested on their independent shoulders, it was secure. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators,” said Jefferson, “is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.”
¹¹²

Not only did Americans describe themselves as a nation of independent farmers, they saw themselves as a mighty multiplying people, indeed, the fastest-growing people in the Western world. Consequently, “our population,” declared Ezra Stiles in 1783, “will soon overspread the vast territory from the Atlantick to the Mississippi, which in two generations will become a property superiour to that of Britain.” This could only mean
that “God has great things in design and . . . purposes to make of us a great people.”
¹¹³

Precisely because Americans were separated from Europe and, as Jefferson said in 1787, “remote from all other aid, we are obliged to invent and execute; to find means within ourselves, and not to lean on others.”
¹¹⁴
The result of this American pragmatism, this ability “to surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance,” was a general prosperity. White Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, and goods of all sorts were widely diffused throughout the society.
¹¹⁵