A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (34 page)

Marshall’s appointment was, Adams later wrote, “a gift to the people of the United States” that was “the proudest of my life.”
⁷⁷
Throughout a brilliant career that spanned the entirety of the American Revolutionary era, Adams left America many great gifts. In Marshall, Adams bequeathed to the United States a chief justice fully committed to capitalism, and willing to amend pristine property rights to the cause of rapid development. Unlike Jefferson and fellow Virginian John Taylor, who weighed in as one of the leading economic thinkers of the day, Marshall perceived that true wealth came from ideas put into action, not vaults of gold or acres of land.
⁷⁸
Whereas the Jeffersonians, Taylor, and other later thinkers such as William Gouge would pin the economic hopes of the country on agriculture and metallic money, Marshall understood that the world had moved past that. Without realizing it, Adams’s last-minute appointment of Marshall ensured the defeat of the Jeffersonian ideal over the long run, but on the morning of Jefferson’s inauguration, America’s first involuntary one-term president (his son John Quincy would be the second) scarcely felt victorious. Adams departed Washington, D.C., at sunrise, several hours before his rival’s inauguration. Adams was criticized for lack of generosity toward Jefferson, but his abrupt departure, faithful to the Constitution, echoed like a thunderclap throughout the world. Here was the clear heir to Washington, narrowly beaten in a legitimate election, not only turning the levers of power over to a hated foe, but entrusting the entire machinery of government to an enemy faction—all without so much as a single bayonet raised or a lawsuit threatened. That event could be described as the most important election in the history of the world. With one colossal exception in 1860, the fact is that with this selfless act of obedience to the law, John Adams ensured that the principle of a peaceful and legal transfer of power in the United States would never even be questioned, let alone seriously challenged.

Growing America

Adams handed over to Jefferson a thriving, energetic Republic that was changing before his very eyes. A large majority of Americans remained farmers, yet increasingly cities expanded and gained more influence over the national culture at a rate that terrified Jefferson. Baltimore, Savannah, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston all remained central locations for trade, shipping, and intellectual life, but new population centers such as Cincinnati, Mobile, Richmond, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Chicago, Louisville, and Nashville surfaced as regional hubs. New York gradually emerged as a more dominant city than even Boston or Philadelphia. A manumission society there worked to end slavery, and had won passage of the Gradual Manumission Act of 1799. Above all, New York symbolized the transformation in city government that occurred in most urban areas in the early 1800s. Government, instead of an institution that relied on property holdings of a few as its source of power, evolved into a “public body financed largely by taxation and devoting its energies to distinctly public concerns.”
⁷⁹

A city like New York, despite its advances and refinements, still suffered from problems that would jolt modern Americans. An oppressive stench coming from the thousands of horses, cattle, dogs, cats, and other animals that walked the streets pervaded the atmosphere. (By 1850, one estimate put the number of horses alone in New York City at one hundred thousand, defecating at a rate of eighteen pounds a day and urinating some twenty gallons per day, each!) If living creatures did not suffice to stink up the city, the dead ones did: city officials had to cope with hundreds of carcasses per week, hiring out the collection of these dead animals to entrepreneurs.

Combined with the garbage that littered the streets, the animal excrement and road kill made for a powerful odor. And human bodies mysteriously turned up too. By midcentury, the New York City coroner’s office, always underfunded, was paying a bounty to anyone collecting bodies from the Hudson River. Hand-to-hand combat broke out on more than one occasion between the aquatic pseudoambulance drivers who both claimed the same floating cadaver and, of course, its reward.

Most important, though, the urban dwellers already had started to accept that the city owed them certain services, and had gradually developed an unhealthy dependence on city hall for a variety of services and favors. Such dependence spawned a small devil of corruption that the political spoils system would later loose fully grown. City officials, like state officials, also started to wield their authority to grant charters for political and personal ends. Hospitals, schools, road companies, and banks all had to “prove” their value to the community before the local authorities would grant them a charter. No small amount of graft crept into the system, quietly undermining Smithian concepts that the community was served when
individuals
pursued profit.

One fact is certain: in 1800, Americans were prolific. Population increases continued at a rate of 25 percent per decade and the constitutionally mandated 1800 census counted 5,308,473 Americans, double the 1775 number.
⁸⁰
Foreign immigrants accounted for some of that population increase, but an incredibly high birthrate, a result of economic abundance and a relatively healthier lifestyle, explained most of the growth. Ethnically, Americans were largely of Anglo, Celtic (Scots and Scots-Irish), and African descent, with a healthy smattering of French, Swedes, Dutch, and Germans thrown in. And of these 5.33 million Americans, 24 of 25 lived on farms or in country villages.

At least 50 percent of all Americans were female, and although their legal status was unenviable, it had improved considerably from that of European women. Most accepted the idea that a woman’s sphere of endeavor was dedicated to the house, church, and the rearing of children, a belief prevailing among American men and women alike. Women possessed no constitutional political role. Economically, widows and single women
(feme sole)
could legally hold property, but they surrendered those rights with marriage
(feme covert)
. Trust funds and prenuptial agreements (an American invention) helped some middle-class families circumvent these restrictions. A few women conducted business via power of attorney and other American contractual innovations, and a handful engaged in cottage industry. None of the professions—law, medicine (midwifery excepted), ministry, or of course the army—were open to females, although, in the case of medicine, this had less to do with sexism than it did the physical necessity of controlling large male patients while operating without anesthetic. Women could not attend public schools (some attended private schools or were tutored at home), and no colleges accepted women students.

Divorce was extremely difficult to obtain. Courts limited the grounds for separation, and in some states only a decree from the state legislature could effect a marital split. Despite the presentist critique by some modern feminists, the laws in the early Republic were designed as much to protect women from the unreliability and volatility of their husbands as to keep them under male control. Legislatures, for example, tailored divorce laws to ensure that husbands honored their economic duties to wives, even after childbearing age.

In stark contrast to women stood the status of African Americans. Their lot was most unenviable. Nearly one million African Americans lived in the young United States (17 percent), a number proportionately larger than today. Evolving slowly from colonial days, black slavery was by 1800 fully entrenched. Opponents of slavery saw the institution thrive after the 1794 invention of the cotton gin and the solidification of state black codes defining slaves as chattels personal—moveable personal property.

No law, or set of laws, however, embedded slavery in the South as deeply as did a single invention. Eli Whitney, a Yankee teacher who had gone south as a tutor, had conceived his cotton gin while watching a cat swipe at a rooster and gather a paw full of feathers. He cobbled together a machine with two rollers, one of fine teeth that sifted the cotton seeds out, another with brushes, that swept off the residual cotton fibers. Prior to Whitney’s invention, it took a slave an hour to process a single pound of cotton by hand; afterward, a slave could process six to ten times as much.
⁸¹
In the decade of the 1790s, cotton production increased from 3,000 bales a year to 73,000; 1810 saw the production soar to 178,000 bales, all of which made slaves more indispensable than ever.
⁸²

Somehow, most African American men and women survived the ordeal of slavery. The reason for their heroic survival lies in their communities and family lives, and in their religion. The slaves built true sub-rosa societies with marriage, children, surrogate family members, and a viable folk culture—music, art, medicine, and religion. All of this they kept below the radar screen of white masters who, if they had known of these activities, would have suppressed them. A few slaves escaped to freedom, and some engaged in sabotage and even insurrections like Gabriel’s Uprising in 1800 Virginia. But for the most part, black survival came through small, day-to-day acts of courage and determination, fueled by an enthusiastic black Christian church and Old Testamaent tales of the Hebrews’ escape from Egyptian slavery.

Between the huge social gulf of master and slave stood a vast populace of “crackers,” the plain white folk of the southern and western frontier.
⁸³
Usually associated with humble Celtic-American farmers, cracker culture affected (and continues to affect) all aspects of American life. Like many derogatory terms, cracker was ultimately embraced by those at whom it was aimed. Celtic-American frontiersmen crossed the Appalachian Mountains, and their coarse, unique folk culture arose in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. As they carved out farms from the forest, crackers planted a few acres of corn and small vegetable gardens. Cattle, sheep, and the ubiquitous hogs (“wind splitters” the crackers called them) were left to their own devices in a sort of laissez-faire grazing system. Men hunted and fished, and the women worked the farms, kept house, and bore and raised children. They ate mainly meat and corn—pork, beef, hominy, johnnycake, pone, and corn mush. Water was bad and life was hard; the men drank corn whiskey.

Their diet, combined with the hardships of frontier lifestyle, led to much sickness—fevers, chills, malaria, dysentery, rheumatism, and just plain exhaustion. Worms, insects, and parasites of every description wiggled, dug, or burrowed their way into pioneer skin, infecting it with the seven-year itch, a generic term covering scabies and crabs as well as body lice, which almost everyone suffered from. Worse, hookworm, tapeworm, and other creatures fed off the flesh, intestines, and blood of frontier Americans. Crackers seemed particularly susceptible to these maladies. Foreign travelers were shocked at the appearance of the “pale and deathly looking people” of bluish-white complexion.

Despite such hardships, the crackers were content with their hard lives because they knew that land ownership meant freedom and improvement. Armed with an evangelical Christian perspective, crackers endured their present hardships with the confidence that their lives had improved, and would continue to get better. Historian George Dangerfield captured the essence of cracker ambitions when he wrote of their migration: “[T]he flow of human beings beyond the Alleghenies was perhaps the last time in all history when mankind discovered that one of its deepest needs—the need to own—could be satisfied by the simple process of walking towards it. Harsh as the journey was…the movement could not help but be a hopeful one.”
⁸⁴

“We Are All Republicans, We Are All Federalists”

The election of 1800 marked the second peaceful transfer of power (the first was 1788) in the brief history of the new nation. Perhaps it was the magnanimity of this moment that led Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address, to state, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Reading the entire text of the speech two hundred years later, however, it appears that most of the audience members must have been Republicans.

Far from the Revolution of 1800 that some historians have labeled the election, Jefferson and his followers did not return the nation to the radical Whig precepts of Anti-Federalism and the Articles of Confederation era, although they did swing the political pendulum in that direction. Jefferson’s two terms in office, from 1801 to 1809, did, however, mark a radical departure from the 1789–1800 Federalist policies that preceded them.

By the time he became president—the first to function from Washington, D.C.—Jefferson already had lived a remarkable life. Drafter of the Declaration, lawyer, member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state, the Sage of Monticello (as he would later be called) had blessed the nation richly. His personal life, however, never seemed to reflect the tremendous success he had in public. When his wife died in 1782, it left him melancholy, and whereas he still had daughters upon whom to lavish affection, he reimmersed himself in public life thereafter. His minimal religious faith offered little solace. Monticello, the mansion he built with his own hands, offered little pleasure and produced an endless stream of debts. He founded the University of Virginia and reformed the curriculum of William and Mary, introducing medicine and anatomy courses. A slaveholder who freed only a handful of his chattel, Jefferson is said to have fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. But modern DNA testing has proven only the strong probability that one of the Hemingses, Eston, was fathered by one of some twenty-four Jefferson males in Virginia at the time, including at least seven whom documentary evidence suggests were at Monticello at the time. This left only a handful of candidates, most noticeably Thomas’s brother Randolph Jefferson. But archival evidence putting him at Monticello on the key dates does not entirely support naming him as Eston’s father—but it cannot rule him out either.
⁸⁵