Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (121 page)

From this point of view the popular myth of equality in the early Republic was based on a substantial reality—but a psychological more than an economic reality. British traveler John Melish thought that most Northern states in 1806 resembled Connecticut, where, he said, “there is no feudal system, and no law of primogeniture; hence there are no overgrown estates on one hand, and few of those employed in agriculture are depressed by poverty on the other.” Despite this celebration of Connecticut’s equality, however, Melish went on to say that the farms in the state were very unequal in size, ranging “generally from 50 to 5000 acres.”

Still, Melish emphasized, Americans felt remarkably equal to one another. They “have a spirit of independence, and will brook no superiority. Every man is conscious of his own political importance, and will suffer none to treat him with disrespect. Nor is this disposition confined to one rank; it pervades the whole and is probably the best guarantee for the continuance of the liberty and independence of the country.”
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I
N ORDER TO JUSTIFY
and legitimate their claim to be all the people, these egalitarian-minded middling sorts needed, above all, to link themselves to the greatest event in their young history, the Revolution. Since most of the political elite who had led the Revolution were gentlemen-aristocrats, and slaveholding aristocrats at that, they had little to offer
the burgeoning groups of enterprising artisans and businessmen as models for emulation or justification. If the middling artisans and entrepreneurs who were coming to dominate Northern American culture in the early nineteenth century were to find among the Revolutionary Founders a hero they could relate to, only Benjamin Franklin, the former printer who had risen from the most obscure origins to worldly success, could fulfill their needs. Only Franklin could justify the release of their ambition.

Franklin died in 1790, and his
Autobiography
was not published until 1794. Between that year and 1828 twenty-two editions were published. After 1798 editors began adding the Poor Richard essays, and especially
The Way to Wealth
, to editions of the
Autobiography
. Franklin’s life became an inspiration to countless young men eager to make it in the world of business. Reading Franklin’s life and writings at age eighteen, Silas Felton of Marlborough, Massachusetts, was encouraged to change his life. Since, as he said in his memoir written in 1802 at age twenty-six, “Nature never formed me to follow an Agricultural Life,” he did not pursue his father’s farming career but instead turned to teaching and then to storekeeping, at which he was successful. He was interested in politics and was an insatiable reader, devouring not only newspapers and “many volumes . . . that contained true genuine Republicanism” but also Franklin’s writings and indeed everything he could lay his hands on that would improve his mind and refine his manners—all of which he dutifully listed in his memoir. Like Franklin founding his Junto for ambitious artisans in early Philadelphia, Felton in 1802 helped to organize the Society of Social Enquirers in Marlborough, a group of twelve middling men who met monthly in order to improve themselves and their society. The group debated the amount of wealth people needed and the importance of credit in the economy; it devised a plan for reforming the town’s schools, and some of the society served on the local school committee. Nothing was more important to these middling men than “a good education.”

Felton was a good Jeffersonian Republican. He harbored a deep resentment toward the local “priests” and “other Aristocrats,” that is, the Federalist Calvinist clergy and their lay supporters. These Federalists tried to keep people like him down and were always “discouraging Learning, among the lower Class of people.” By “lower class” he meant that large deferential majority who had lived too long under patriarchal rule. The “bigoted” and “sour-hearted” priests preached pessimistic sermons about depravity and sin and sought to destroy the kind of youthful and middling ambition that he and countless others in the North were expressing.
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Although Felton never became very rich or famous, he did eventually become a substantial member of his modest community—a town clerk, a selectman, a justice of the peace, and a representative to the General Court for three terms. He epitomized, in other words, the kind of self-improving sort who hated the Federalists for “conspiring against reason and republicanism,” and in reaction he celebrated the dynamic and middling Northern society composed of “probably the happiest people upon the earth.”
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Other Franklin readers were even more successful. In 1810 sixteen-year-old James Harper left his father’s farm on Long Island for New York City after reading Franklin’s
Autobiography
. Eventually he founded one of the most successful publishing firms in the country and became mayor of New York. Chauncey Jerome was another success story. The son of a blacksmith, he became a prosperous clockmaker in New Haven, with three hundred men in his employ, and mayor of the city; indeed, he was one of those enterprising individuals who turned Connecticut into the clockmaking center of the world. In his memoir he marveled at how far he had risen and could not help describing his arrival in New Haven in 1812 as a nineteen-year-old just as Franklin had, wandering alone “about the streets early one morning with a bundle of clothes and some bread and cheese in my hands.”
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Franklin emerged for businessmen everywhere as the perfect model of the “self-made man,” struggling by himself to rise from humble origins in order to achieve wealth and respectability. Haughty Federalists could only shake their heads in disgust at all those vulgar sorts who had come to believe “that there was no other road to the temple of Riches, except that which runs through—Dr. Franklin’s works.”
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The “self-made man” became such a familiar symbol for Americans that its original novelty has been lost.
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Of course, there had always been social mobility in Western society, at some times and in some places more than others. Eighteenth-century Americans had always experienced a good deal of it. But this social mobility in the past generally had been a mobility of a peculiar sort, an often sponsored mobility in which the
patronized individual acquired the attributes of the social status to which he aspired while at the same time he tried to forget and disguise the lowly sources from whence he had come. As indicated by the pejorative terms—“upstarts,” “arrivistes,” “parvenus”—used to disparage those participants unable to hide their rise, social mobility traditionally had not been something to be proud of. Hamilton certainly did not brag about his obscure background; indeed, most of the Founders did not like to talk about their humble origins. But by the nineteenth century many of those new middling sorts who had risen were boasting of their lowly beginnings in imitation of Franklin. Washington Irving mocked the “outrageous extravagance” of the manners and clothes of the wife of a nouveau riche Boston tradesman. Yet Irving could not help admiring her lack of “foolish pride respecting her origins”; instead of being embarrassed by her background, she took “great pleasure in telling how they first entered Boston in Pedlars trim.”
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Early nineteenth-century England was experiencing extensive social mobility, but it was nothing compared to the rate of upward mobility among contemporary Americans. Already, independent mobile men were bragging of their humble origins and their lack of both polish and a gentleman’s education. They had made it, they said, on their own, without family influence, without patronage, and without going to Harvard or Princeton or indeed any college at all. For many Americans the ability to make and display money now became the only proper democratic means for distinguishing one man from another.

Of course, most Federalists were outraged by these attempts to make wealth the sole criterion of social distinction. The socially established families of Philadelphia looked down upon the nouveau riche businessman John Swanwick even though he was one of the wealthiest men of the city; they regarded him as “our Lilliputian, [who] with his dollars, gets access where without them he would not be suffered to appear.”
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Catharine Maria Sedgwick, author and daughter of an esteemed Federalist family, spoke for all of the old aristocracy when she said of the emerging nineteenth-century money-based hierarchy, “wealth, you know, is the grand leveling principle.”
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Some of the ambitious middling sorts declared that they did not need formal educational institutions to learn about the world and get ahead. Like William Findley, they “prefer[red] common sense and common
usage” to pompous theories and pretentious words picked up in college classrooms. Through newspapers, almanacs, tracts, chapbooks, periodicals, lectures, novels, and other media, those who were eager to improve themselves sought to obtain smatterings of knowledge about things that previously had been the exclusive property of college-educated elites—learning to write legibly, for example.
Niles’ Weekly Register
became a regular source of information for these striving middling people, and no one was a more devoted subscriber than William Findley. Near the end of Findley’s life the personal property he had accumulated was very modest, appraised at less than five hundred dollars; but it contained a large number of books, including Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary
and Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, with which he had educated himself.
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Others, however, like Jedediah Peck, who had begun their assaults on the aristocracy by ridiculing fancy book-learning and genteel manners, ultimately accepted the need for educational institutions. Peck, for example, eventually became the father of the common school system of New York. In the end many of the new middling sorts did not repudiate the politeness and learning of the Enlightenment; instead they popularized and vulgarized that politeness and learning and turned both into respectability. Reacting to the Federalists’ many snubs and jeers, many of the middling people began seeking to acquire some of the refinement of the aristocracy, to obtain what the leading historian of this process has nicely called “vernacular gentility.” Americans socially and culturally set about constructing what one observer astutely noted was “a most uncommon union of qualities not easily kept together—simplicity and refinement”—the very qualities that came to constitute the nineteenth-century middle class.
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In seeking to become genteel, many of these wealthy middling sorts came to resemble the “molatto gentleman” that Benjamin Franklin had mocked—a “new Gentleman, or rather a half Gentleman, or Mungrel, an unnatural Compound of earth and Brass like the Feet of Nebuchad-nezzar’s Image.” These were the people who bought the increasing numbers of books and manuals to teach themselves manners and politeness, including various abridged editions of Lord Chesterfield’s
Letters to His Son
. Daniel Drake, a famous physician in the West, recalled growing up in late eighteenth-century Kentucky, where books were scarce, reading
Chesterfield’s
Letters
, which “fell in mightily close with my tastes, and not less with those of father and mother, who cherished as high and pure an idea of duty of good breeding as any people on earth.”
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But, as one young woman recognized, in the struggles of those seeking to become refined “an easy unassuming politeness . . . is not the acquirement of a day.”
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For some of these new middlebrow Americans, buying a tea service or placing a piano in their parlor came to be the mark of being cultivated and genteel. Out of these efforts was born the middle-class Victorianism of the nineteenth century.

Honor—that aristocratic sense of reputation—decreased in significance for the new middle-class society. Except for the South and the military, which retained many aristocratic values, the concept of honor was attacked as monarchical and anti-republican. As honor came under assault, so too did dueling, which was the special means by which gentlemen protected their honor. Although Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in 1804 in a duel led to much condemnation of the practice, it was the spread of egalitarian sentiments that most effectively undermined it. When even servants began challenging others to duels, many gentlemen realized that the code of honor had lost its cachet.

As Tocqueville later pointed out, Americans, in the North at least, came to replace aristocratic honor with middle-class morality. Virtue lost much of the rational and stoical quality befitting the antique heroes the Revolutionary leaders had emulated. Temperance—that self-control of the passions so valued by the ancients and one of Cicero’s four cardinal virtues—became mainly identified with the elimination of popular drunkenness—”a good cause,” declared the Franklin Society for the Suppression of Intemperance in 1814, in which “perseverance and assiduity seldom fail of securing the denied object.” The hustling entrepreneur Parson Weems labeled a republic “the best government for morals,” by which he mainly meant “the best remedy under heaven against national intemperance”; it “imparts a joy that loathes the thought of drunkenness.”
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If indeed the Americans had become one homogeneous people and the people as a single estate were all there was, then many Americans now became much more willing than they had been in 1789 to label their
government a “democracy.” At the time of the Revolution, “democrat” had been a pejorative term that conservatives leveled at those who wanted to give too much power to the people; indeed, Federalists identified democracy with mobocracy, or, as Gouverneur Morris said, “no government at all.” “Simple democracy,” declared a Federalist editor in 1804, was even more abhorrent than “simple monarchy.” Even Madison in
Federalist
No. 10 had said that pure democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they been violent in their deaths.”
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