American Experiment (67 page)

The voteless men of Rhode Island needed their champion, and he came in the unlikely personage of Thomas Dorr, a wealthy young Exeter and Harvard graduate, of Whiggish disposition politically but philosophically a son of the Enlightenment. After trying vainly to work for reform within the charter system, Dorr led a move to draft a “People’s Constitution” that extended the vote to all adult white male citizens if resident in the state for one year; it boosted the representation of Providence and other urban areas in the lower house; it required the use of the secret ballot—but withheld the ballot from blacks and women, and left a property requirement for voting in city and town elections.

Conservatives responded by drafting a less reformist charter. Both charters were submitted to the people, who voted Dorr’s up and the conservatives’ down.

Soon bewildered Rhode Islanders had two governments, one under the establishment, the other under Dorr as the “People’s Governor.” Constitutional comic opera turned deadly serious when the old government began arresting leaders of the new. Dorr escaped to New York to enlist aid from reform and radical leaders, and returned with promises of military assistance, including the dispatch of a thousand men from New York to Rhode Island by steamboat. Soon the Dorrites, hardly two hundred in number, attacked the Providence Arsenal, but the desperate, vainglorious effort, reminiscent of Shays’s attack on the Springfield Arsenal, failed. Dorr’s men left for home, and the leader escaped over the border. When the old government put through a liberalized constitution, he returned despite the price on his head, only to be arrested, indicted for high treason, found guilty, and sentenced to solitary confinement at hard labor for life. But the old government had overreached itself, and by the act of a Democratic legislature, Dorr was released after a year’s confinement, and the
oligarchy granted the people still another, and now heavily liberalized, charter. Decades late, Rhode Island had finally joined the parade toward full manhood suffrage.

It was because constitutions like Rhode Island’s archaic one—and even more, the Constitution of the United States—embodied fundamental compromises with human liberty that abolitionist leaders like William Lloyd Garrison rejected constitutional processes, even voting. Garrison opposed any concerted political action; rather, he proposed that truth and right would prevail by waging the moral struggle through meetings and newspapers, especially his
Liberator.
His strategy was to be absolutely uncompromising. The first issue had proclaimed, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not retreat a single inch—and
I will be heard.
” By 1843 the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, under his influence, was resolving that the United States Constitution was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

Another New England abolitionist leader, Theodore Dwight Weld, summarized the radical position. Slavery, he said, was pre-eminently a moral question, arresting the conscience of the nation. “As a question of politics and national economy, I have passed it with scarce a look or a word, believing that the business of the abolitionists is with the heart of the nation, rather than with its purse strings.” Such a stance cut this brand of radical off from others who believed philosophically that moral and economic and political forces must be seen in their interaction, and who calculated practically that persons suffering various forms of deprivations had to be brought together into some kind of alliance.

Another “solution” to the slavery problem isolated not only the reformers but the problem. This was the colonization of freed slaves and free blacks. Founded in 1817, the American Colonization Society within a decade or so bought hundreds of slaves and transported them and hundreds of other freed blacks to Liberia, with money raised from churches, state legislatures, and individual donors. People of means tried private experiments in emancipation and colonization. Frances Wright, increasingly concerned about the plight of the blacks, took $10,000, a third of her inheritance, and bought 2,000 acres of dry, rolling land in the densely forested area of western Tennessee. She also purchased five male slaves and three female slaves who were to work cooperatively on the land. Her plan was to raise $41,000 from supporters and eventually settle a hundred slaves. With the hope of eventual freedom before them, the blacks would
work off their purchase price and then emigrate to a colony of their own. The settlement would grow until all slaves in the South would be free.

With several white friends, Wright moved into one of two cabins she had built, the blacks into the other. “We have raised buildings for immediate use, cleared and fenced round them, planted and fenced an apple orchard of five acres, planted in potatoes a vegetable garden—opened fifteen acres for corn and planted two of old ground in cotton.” The forest formed a thick, dark wall around the little settlement, and to one observer, it was “desolate.” But Frances Wright’s “mind was so exclusively occupied by the object she had then in view that all things else were worthless”; her enthusiasm for the project bordered on “religious fanaticism.” She had isolated the settlement deliberately, as many planters were hostile to her experiment.

The experiment failed. The forbidding mosquito-infested environment took its toll; Wright became ill and had to leave the management to associates, who allowed it to end in disrepute and failure. She eventually colonized in Haiti the slaves she had purchased.

By the 1840s, Jefferson’s “People,” the Jacksonian Demos, Hamilton’s “Beast,” had been enthroned—the white male half of it, that is. Not only had the suffrage been immensely broadened, but the electoral college—now chosen directly by the voters—and other institutions had been made more directly and democratically responsive to the electorate. Nevertheless, the rising Demos still needed political organization strong enough to throw the People’s collective power into the political scales, yet stable and firm enough to curb the Beast when occasion might demand. Americans required a political vehicle to organize and mass the people, to fight election contests, to unify their fragmented governments, to translate popular needs and aspirations into public policy and social change. For fifty years such a vehicle had been in the process of being invented and developed, a process as slow and halting as the extension of the suffrage. That vehicle was the political party.

In 1787 a few dozen men had met in Philadelphia and struck off a new constitution that soon was ratified in a dozen state conventions. During the half century after that year, many thousands of men (and lamentably few women), in tens of thousands of local, state, and national meetings, worked out a second charter that may be called a “party” or a “people’s”
constitution. The contrasts between the formal Constitution of 1787and the party constitution of the 1780s to the 1830s are sharp and significant.

The Constitution was deeply rooted in centuries of intense moral, political, and legal thought in Europe and America; the party charter had impoverished intellectual roots. The former represented a central, strategic idea—an idea with the intellectual credentials of a Locke, a Montesquieu, a Harrington, and other philosophical giants, carefully applied to the needs and aspirations of the people of a young republic; the national party constitution was shaped without central plan or purpose, in opposition to the accepted wisdom of the day, in meetings held for more limited and parochial purposes. The Constitution was conceived and dedicated by the most illustrious and respectable leaders—men like Washington and Madison inside the Philadelphia convention hall, men like Adams and Jefferson outside. The party charter was spawned outside the establishment, often outside the law, and hence, born a bastard and growing up as a political orphan, it never became quite respectable.

The Constitution was accepted from the start, and indeed soon became a revered symbol of national unity and a mechanism of national unification. The party charter encountered sharp opposition from the established leadership of the new republic. Not only did leaders like Washington and Madison oppose parties as fractious, selfish, turbulent, divisive, but they also opposed or misconceived the essential theory of parties—the theory of majority rule, party rotation in office, party authority, party opposition, party distribution of power, the alternation of elites—that made the party charter in effect a
constitution.
The strategy of the Framers was to tame power by granting necessary authority to national officers responsible to conflicting constituencies, and to reserve authority to state and local officers who also had conflicting constituencies—all with an eye to curbing power by splitting it into pieces and balancing the pieces. The strategy of the party constitution was to control power by granting authority to electorally victorious parties that would have to compete against active opposition parties and be subjected to popular confirmation or repudiation in regular, open, and democratic elections. And that too was a difference—perhaps the fundamental difference—between the two constitutions.

To refer to the party charter as a general strategy and set of procedures would imply that a single central document existed somewhere, as the formal Constitution does under glass in the National Archives. In fact the party charter was more like the British constitution—a collection of laws, institutions, regulations, usages, understandings, traditions, to be found in
diverse places. The party founders had no strategy shaped out of political theory; they found one later in practice.

The Constitution created a new national government and left the state governments in place, with their own constitutions and governments. But by fragmenting power, it made national parties necessary at the same time that it made them impossible—necessary because parties, with their coalition building and other unifying tendencies and machinery, could provide essential teamwork among the constitutionally separated branches of government, impossible because the existing parties (actually factions) were further fragmented and pulverized as they acted upon, and were acted upon by, those separated branches. By establishing two levels of constitutional and governmental authority—the national level and the state level—the Constitution also indirectly established two levels of party activity—in effect would create a
party
federalism as well as a constitutional and governmental federalism. Since state governments and political systems already existed (though somewhat altered after 1787), all this meant in effect that state political systems continued to exist for a time in roughly their pre-Constitution form while a new national political system slowly took shape.

Considering that both Federalist and anti-Federalist leaders opposed the idea of strong national parties, it was remarkable that a Federalist and a Republican party developed so quickly, even before Washington quit the presidency—remarkable that rudimentary state and national party organizations would be formed, rising leaders would exploit intensifying and widening conflict to sharpen two-party competition, Jefferson would assemble and lead a partisan administration, Congress would come to be organized roughly on party lines, the congressional caucus, established on a partisan basis, would become the central nominating mechanism for Presidents; and even the idea of a loyal party opposition would begin to be accepted, at least by some.

The party constitution was by no means fully shaped during the first twenty years of the new republic. Party leadership did not fully mobilize party followership, in part because the party leaders did not have a strategy of party, or even a commitment to it. Party organization was rudimentary; parties were not fleshed out with leaders, officials, whips, activists. Party feeling was often intense but also unstable, unevenly distributed, lacking in depth. There were parties, but not a party
system
, not an institutionalized party ramifying through leadership cadres, levels and branches of government, into mobilized mass followings. Hence it was possible for a partisan President like Jefferson to be succeeded by a lackluster partisan like
Madison and in turn by a partyless man like Monroe. And it was perhaps inevitable that the party structure beginning to be erected by the end of John Adams’ presidency would be in decay by the start of John Quincy Adams’.

It was at the state level that the party charter continued to be shaped, parties persisted, party systems and structures began to develop. It was at this level that a fundamental transformation of American politics was precipitated.

New York State served as the great testing ground for party. If downstate Virginians had been the main intellectual fathers of the formal Constitution, upstate New Yorkers were the leading experimenters and shapers of the second, “people’s” constitution. Perhaps it was natural that this state, embracing social diversity and robust political life, should be the vanguard in the shift from the politics of the 1790s to the politics of the 1830s. New York was already a polyglot land, with its inflows of English and French and Rhinelanders, its Dutch Reformed, Huguenot, and other major religious groupings, its busy ports along the Hudson, capped by Albany and Troy; its spreading settlements on Long Island and in Westchester County; its estates of Dutch patroons and English squires; its enormous hinterland peopled by Indians, trappers, and traders; its vigorous, factious, independent, and dynamic politics reflecting the social and economic life of its people.

Even so, New York after the Revolution, continuing through the Federalist years and well into the Jeffersonian Republican epoch, epitomized not the politics of “modernity” but that of the mother country and its colonies. This was the politics of family and faction, patrician leaders and dutiful followers, hierarchy and deference. It was a politics of large patriarchal families controlling power and patronage in a narrow arena of governmental decision, and hence it was a politics of consensus within the upper socioeconomic stratum—in essence an upper-class politics, cloaked in a politics of compelling personality.