American Experiment (41 page)

Some Federalists of the old school stood a bit apart from these men. Fisher Ames, born in Dedham, was so egregiously alarmist and pessimistic about the dangers of democracy, indeed so “lethargic, raving, sanguine and despondent,” as he described himself, as to embarrass other Federalists. And Harrison Gray Otis, born of an eminent Boston family, combined his elitist views with such elegance of bearing and moderation of political tactics as to give him a special role in linking old-school and new-school Federalists.

The Federalists meeting in the port city of Hartford were the financial and political heirs of merchant shippers, whalers, shipbuilders, fishermen, sailmakers, and hosts of others engaged for over a century in trading and shipping out of the ports of the northeastern seaboard. Some of these men operated out of inland towns, such as Hartford and Poughkeepsie, that could be reached by oceangoing vessels tacking back and forth up wide rivers. But most presided over their offices, countinghouses, wharves, and shipping fleets in the string of coastal ports stretching from Portsmouth to New York City and points south. And what a coastline this was—gnarled and wrinkled and scoured by sea and ice, battered by suddenly gathering
summer storms and winter tempests, and broken by small rivers that invited a wharf to be built along the low banks and flatlands where they joined the Atlantic.

To a returning sea captain most of the port towns presented familiar sights. He would emerge from a forest of ship’s masts and furled sails to pick his way through a maze of bags and boxes, barrels and chests alongside warehouses, sail lofts, mast yards, and rope walks, until he came to the closely packed houses of artisans, small merchants, and single or widowed women shopkeepers. He would walk along the streets here, where ground-floor shops opened up on the sidewalks and living quarters nestled in the overhanging upper stories, with their peaked gables, tiny-paned windows, and hand-split clapboards darkened by a century of salt and rain. Heading farther into town, he would come onto High Street, flanked by three-story square-built brick homes of the wealthier merchants. When he entered one of these houses to report on his voyage, the captain would find objects imported from previous Voyages: china from the Far East, furniture from England and France, hangings from Spain, souvenirs from West Africa. And climbing to the widow’s walk, captain and merchant could scan a wide panorama from the busy harbor below to the fields and blue hills disappearing into a summer haze to the west.

These ports had their distinctive features too. In the Massachusetts crescent stretching from Cape Ann to Cape Cod, Salem was the largest, grandest city to the north, the sixth city in the United States in1790. No one has pictured the Salem of that year better than Samuel Eliot Morison: “Her appearance was more antique even than that of Boston, and her reek of the salt water, that almost surrounded her, yet more pronounced. For half a mile along the harbor front, subtended by the long finger of Derby Wharf, ran Derby Street, the residential and business center of the town. On one side were the houses of the gentry, Derbys and Princes and Crowninshields, goodly gambrel or hip-roofed brick and wooden mansions dating from the middle of the century, standing well back with tidy gardens in front. Opposite were the wharves, separated from the street by counting-rooms, warehouses, ship-chandlers’ stores, pump-makers’ shops, sail-makers’ lofts; all against a background of spars, rigging, and furled or brailed-up sails.…”

Close by Salem—and long viewed by Salemites as the town of people who were “rude, swearing, drunken, and fighting” and, worst of all, poor—lay Marblehead, the leader in the Yankees’ great cod-fishing industry. Long before the Revolution, Marblehead had a fleet of 120 fishing schooners sailed by more than a thousand hands. Sloops or schooners with seven or eight men could make four or five round trips a year to fine fishing
grounds such as Georges Bank off Cape Cod, and a fisherman kept an eye cocked for mackerel and herring as well. A string of fishing towns to the south of Boston—Cohasset, Plymouth, Cape villages, reaching around to Nantucket and New Bedford—kept hundreds of ships in the fishing trade. Plymouth soon would become less noted for her fishing, or even as the Pilgrims’ landing place, than as a center for rope making.

In the center of the Massachusetts crescent, and at its heart, lay Federalist Boston. With its total tonnage several times larger than that of any rival, Boston was not only the great port of the Commonwealth but its financial, intellectual, political, and cultural center. It was pre-eminently a city of the sea, drawing much of its wealth and its sustenance from Atlantic waters, by which it was virtually isolated when the spring tides reached far inland on the flats west of Beacon Hill. As one approached the city by the Charles River Bridge, Boston seemed “almost to stand in the water, at least to be surrounded by it, and the shipping, with the houses, trees, and churches, having a charming effect.” Boston boasted of its fine buildings, and especially of the man who designed many of them, Charles Bulfinch, but not of its maze of streets, which were reputed to be almost as muddy and rutted as the original cow paths, and just as narrow and tortuous. Outside the harbor stood probably the most famous lighthouse in America, “Boston Light,” founded almost a century before, repeatedly devastated by fire, destroyed in turn by each side during the Revolution, but always rebuilt.

Boston was the financial hub of New England and of much of the Northeast, as well as of her own state. Providence, along with such Connecticut ports as New Haven and New London, had harbors deep enough to ship goods directly across the Atlantic, but Hartford and other, shallower ports dispatched their goods to Boston for transshipment overseas. Produce from Springfield, Northampton, and other towns north of the rapids above Hartford had to be sent down the Connecticut River on barges to Hartford, for transferal to deep-water harbors. Logs from the Vermont and New Hampshire banks of the river were floated down to shipbuilders perched along the lower reaches of the Connecticut.

Boston also transshipped goods from north of Cape Ann—from the old docks of Newburyport and Portsmouth and Portland. The execrable roads inland made it easier for some of these ports to trade by sea with Boston than by land with towns not far inland. Boston merchants had long enjoyed close commercial relationships with their northern neighbors “down east”; Boston indeed was the capital of Maine for many years. But the northern Yankees valued above all their independence from London
or
Boston. When Portland refused to ship her highly prized masts for use of the British fleet during the first year of the Revolution, the Royal Navy
bombarded the city and burned much of it to the ground. Established societies in Bangor and Portsmouth enjoyed looking down on the vulgar nouveaux riches of Boston.

Yankee merchants were profit takers. They made money—and lost it—by buying, swapping, shipping, and selling goods in whatever way seemed most profitable. For this purpose they bought, built, used, and sold not only merchant ships but fishing boats, coasters, whalers, privateers, and smaller craft. They traded in whatever commodity would turn a likely profit: fish, bricks, butter, timber, hay, brooms, buckets, molasses, in exchange for mahogany, coffee, sugar, cocoa, tea, spices, nails, machinery, fashions, silks—hundreds of things from scores of ports around the world. Sometimes they dealt also in rum, opium, and human flesh. “Commerce occupies all their thought,” a foreign observer wrote in 1788, “turns all their heads, and absorbs all their speculations.” When they felt that conditions permitted or required it, the Yankees smuggled goods and sent out privateers to prey on “enemy” ships.

To take profits the merchants took risks. Their ships were sunk off Cape Hatteras or Cape Horn, burned by accident, captured or destroyed by French or British men-o’-war, seized by pirates off Morocco. Seamen took much greater risks—of life itself—with little profit. “A mariner’s life was the most dangerous calling a man could choose during the age of sail,” according to three historians of the period. “…Sunken ledges and sandy shoals reached out from the scenic New England coast to impale hundreds of hapless ships driven before a winter gale or lost in a thick summer fog.” Of Salem’s four hundred widows in 1783, most had finally waited in vain on the widow’s walks atop their mansions, or in a dwelling down by the wharf.

Merchants were the social and political, as well as economic, leaders of their ports. They presided over a pervasive class system of merchants, veteran sea captains, and professional men at the top, master artisans and clerks in the middle, and dock laborers and seamen at the bottom. The merchants sent their sons to Harvard or out to sea eventually to become sea captains, imported the finest silver and linens from abroad, had their wives and daughters painted by Copley and adorned in the latest London fashions, maintained mansions both near their businesses and out in country seats. The lower classes did none of these things. The merchants set themselves off by their manner of dress—perhaps a scarlet broadcloth coat, fancy ruffles, and sword—and by their demand for deference from their inferiors, in the form of a finger to the brow or the tipping of a hat.

A deferential society, and also a deferential politics—at least for a time. Before the Revolution the “best people” in Salem and Newburyport and other ports ran community affairs; voting participation was low, and dominated by the elite. Political conflict tended to be factional, personal, local, and subdued. New England merchants turned to political action less in defense of their theoretical than their economic rights. They led the Revolution—or at least financed it—not out of political or social radicalism but because Britain was threatening their maritime interests. But revolution drew in other elements—men who called themselves Sons of Liberty, mobs that seemed to have little regard for property, editors none too respectful of the gentility. Although the Yankee merchants survived the war with their social and political system largely intact, the ranks of the economic elite had been breached. At the end of the century in Newburyport, for example, an ex-cordwainer, an ex-chaise maker, and an ex-leather dresser had risen to the economic top. How would the conservative Yankees of the New England ports make out in the new, extended republic?

If the Yankee ports were economically adventurous and cosmopolitan, politically and intellectually they tended to be conservative and even stagnant. While Portland and Salem and Hartford doubtless were too small to support lively and innovative cultures, Boston and Cambridge together comprised almost a metropolis, but most of the ruling Bostonians and Cantabrigians were rich, Whiggish, status-minded, and dignified. Some knew how to live in magnificent style, Van Wyck Brooks noted: “The Cushing house in Summer Street was surrounded with a wall of Chinese porcelain. Peacocks strutted about the garden. The Chinese servants wore their native dress. The older folk, sedate, a little complacent, dwelling in the solid garden-houses that stood about the Common, each with its flagged walk and spacious courtyard, filled with fragrant shrubs, shaded by its over-arching elms, were genial and pleasure-loving, as a rule. Harrison Gray Otis, at the age of eighty, after forty years of gout, breakfasted every morning on pâté de fois gras.”

Although these cosmopolitans liked to call their town the Athens of America if not indeed the hub of the universe, their intellectual life, Brooks observed, was timid, cautious, and highly derivative from English culture. Things were no better in Cambridge, despite the dominant intellectual role of Harvard College. Indeed, Harvard too was parochial, complacent, more tolerant of eccentricity than innovation. It could boast a few remarkable professors, such as Levi Hedge, who had devoted fourteen years of his own and drafted adult members of his family to completing his
Elements of Logic
, and Dr. Henry Ware of Divinity, who had nineteen children; but
classes were usually dull recitations, and the standard of learning at Harvard was not high.

Still, one could detect cultural stirrings in these port towns. Even the smaller had their literary societies and historical associations. Religious and political disputes were often more heated than ever. Exciting young men were coming to Harvard to teach. But only the most doting parent or perspicacious teacher could have detected the potential genius of the chubby Emerson boy in Boston, the solitary, fatherless young Nathaniel Hawthorne of Salem, the frail farm youth, John Greenleaf Whittier, in Haverhill reading the poems of Robert Burns, the little orphan Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, precocious young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Portland.

Jeffersonian Republicans held dark suspicions about the New England Federalists—even more the Boston brand, and above all the Essex Federalists, who were reported to be the aggressive and conspiratorial heart of Federalism. Federalists were indeed loosely organized in the “Essex Junto.” Lying north of Boston between the promontory of Cape Ann and the farmlands of Peabody, bounded on the north by Newburyport, on the east by Gloucester, and the south by Salem, Essex County was the heartland of fashionable waterside society. If foreigners called all Americans Yankees, and if Southerners called all Northerners Yankees, and if New Englanders called eastern Massachusetts men Yankees, then the true heartland of Yankeedom lay in this country “north of Boston.” Old-school Federalists were aided by two other forces. One was the party leadership in the cities and towns along the Connecticut from southern Vermont and New Hampshire to the Atlantic; often these Federalists were more papal than the Pope. The other was the Congregationalist leadership of New England, and the Federalist press in the seaports, which week after week followed a high Federalist line and provided powerful ideological buttressing to the views of the old school.

But despite the suspicion of powerful juntas meeting secretly to spin out their diabolical plots against innocent victims, the Essexmen had little political influence, at least after the turn of the century. They constituted a tiny minority of the Federalist party, which kept its distance from them when elections had to be won or legislation passed. Their strength lay chiefly in their absolute ideological commitment to reaction; the “Essex-men,” according to David Fischer, “were conservative in the double sense that they resisted change and sought to restrict the power of the people;
their conservatism was ideological, for they defended not merely a fixed position but fixed principles.” Those principles were the fundamental inequality of men and especially women, the sanctity of property and of contracts, social deference, the necessity of upper-class leadership, the danger of popular rule and of devices that would facilitate popular rule. All these principles were anathema not only to the rising body of Jeffersonian Republicans but to moderate Federalists as well.