Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (29 page)

To deal with this sort of personal politics, gentlemen worked out sets of rituals and rules of conduct based on the importance they placed on their reputations. In defense against insult they resorted to a variety of measures: public posting in newspapers, the spreading of counter-gossip, and the writing of pamphlets or newspaper diatribes. Although the most extreme defense of one’s reputation was to challenge the opponent to a duel, physical combat was not the most likely outcome in these ritualized struggles over honor. But the possibility that a political contest could end in an exchange of fire between two men gave an anxious edge to politics.

Because the United States was still without firmly established institutions and structures of political behavior, this kind of personal gossip-laden politics meant that private relationships necessarily became intermingled with public affairs and vice versa. To attack a government policy was to attack a politician, which immediately called into question his reputation and honor. As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, “It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men.” This sort of politics based on personal alliances and animosities was difficult to manage and accounts for much of the volatility and passion of political life in the 1790s.
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Although traditional gentry like John Jay continued to assume that “men may be hostile to each other in politics and yet be incapable of such conduct” in private, it was becoming increasingly difficult to behave magnanimously when so much seemed at stake.
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In this intimate world of competing gentlemen, political parties in any modern sense were slow to emerge. Because there were as yet no elaborate mechanisms for selecting candidates, raising money, and conducting campaigns, notable gentry used their personal reputations to gather supporters and followers. If a member of Congress found himself unable to be present in his district at election time, he might, as Madison did in 1790, write letters to influential friends or relatives and ask them to look after his interest. Gentlemen generally stood, not ran, for election, and canvassing for an office, as Burr was said to have done for the vice-presidency in 1792, was widely thought to be improper. Any interference with the right of each citizen to think and vote independently was anathema. A Connecticut congressman boasted that no one in his state had ever “solicited the suffrages of the freeman, for a place in the legislature.” If anyone was ever foolish enough to try, “he may be assured of meeting with the general contempt and indignation of the people.”
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With little competition for office, voter turnouts were often very low, sometimes fewer than 5 percent of the eligible electorate.
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Gentlemen put great value on impartiality and disliked and feared parties as factious and self-seeking. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” declared Jefferson in 1789, “I would not go there at all.”
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Given this deep-seated hostility to parties, it is not surprising that men found it difficult to draw up tickets of candidates and organize elections in any modern manner.

Nevertheless, a Republican party of opposition was emerging, and men struggled to explain and justify what was happening. As one of the leaders of the Republican opposition, Madison had become convinced by September 1792 that a division into parties, “being natural to most political societies, is likely to be of some duration in ours.” One party, he wrote publicly in 1792, was composed of those who “are more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them, of course, that government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments and the terror of military force.” These Federalists, or members of what Madison called “the antire-publican party,” expected the government to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many and hoped that it would “be narrowed into fewer hands, and approximated to an hereditary form.” Members of the other party, “the Republican party, as it may be termed,” were those who believed “that mankind are capable of governing themselves” and hated “hereditary power as an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.”
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In this essay, entitled “A Candid State of Parties,” published in the
National Gazette
on September 26, 1792, Madison meant by parties not organized vehicles for recruiting candidates and winning elections but rather rough divisions of opinion manifested in Congress. In the face of the continual emphasis on the single interest of the public, men were reluctant to admit they might be members of a party. As late as 1794 the Virginia Republican congressman Nathaniel Macon wrote home, “It is said there are two parties in Congress, but the fact I do not positively know. If there are, I know that I do not belong to one.”
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In these circumstances, of course, the emerging political division between the Federalists and the Republicans bore no resemblance to the party competition of modern American politics or to the politics of the antebellum period. Neither party accepted the legitimacy or existence of the other. Indeed, each believed that the other was out to destroy the country. The Federalists, whom John Adams defined in 1792 as “the Friends of the Constitution, order and good government,” thought of themselves not as a party but as the legitimate administration that represented the whole people and the general good.
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Only their Republican opponents were willing to describe themselves as a party, and they did so
out of necessity, just as the colonists had created the Whig party to combat monarchical tyranny during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.

Even so, some Republicans objected to the term “party”; they said they were better described as “a band of patriots,” because they were looking after the good of the whole nation, not a part.
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Because there was no legitimacy for organized opposition to the government, only the most appalling circumstances could justify the resort to a party as a means of collecting the will of the people. And that party had to be a temporary one; it would exist only as long as the threat from the dire circumstances persisted.

The organizers of the Republican party saw themselves in just such awful circumstances, indeed, in a situation resembling the 1760s and 1770s. They believed that monarchism was once again threatening liberty, and their party was justified as a means of arousing the people into resistance. If parties were divided “merely by a greediness for office, as in England,” said Jefferson, then to participate in a party “would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man.” But where the difference was one “between the republicans and Monocrats of our country,” then the only honorable course was to refrain from pursuing a middle line and “to take a firm and decided part,” as any honest man would take against rogues.
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The Republican party began with the activities of notables at the center of government. Voting patterns in the First and Second Congresses (1789–1792) revealed shifting sectional splits that only gradually formed regular party divisions. Only in 1793 did consistent voting blocs in the Congress clearly emerge.
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But identification with the Republican cause involved more than the gentleman leaders in the Congress. In localities throughout much of the country, many ordinary people opposed to the established leadership or to the direction of affairs began organizing themselves and voicing their dissent. The sudden mushrooming of these Democratic-Republican Societies outside of the regular institutions of government frightened many people. Their seeming connection with the French Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion and President Washington’s criticism doomed them to a brief two-year existence.

The organizing of these Democratic-Republican Societies began in April 1793, sparked by growing popular enthusiasm for the revolutionary
ideas of France. Some Germans in Philadelphia formed a Democratic-Republican Society in order to urge citizens to be vigilant in watching over their government. This group inspired the creation of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, which in turn sent a circular letter calling for the formation of similar societies throughout the country. By the end of 1794 no fewer than thirty-five and perhaps many more of these popular organizations had been created, scattered from Maine to South Carolina. They were often composed of self-made entrepreneurs, mechanics and manufacturers, small-time merchants, farmers, and other middling people, angry at the aristocratic pretensions of many of the Federalist gentry. The organizations issued resolutions and addresses; they denounced the Federalists and supported Republican candidates and causes everywhere; and they communicated with one another in the way the committees of correspondence of the 1760s and 1770s had.
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These societies were more radical and outspoken than elite leaders like Jefferson and Madison, who tended to keep well clear of them. They represented a democratic future that few American leaders could yet accept or even envision. They challenged the older world of deferential political leadership and called for the people’s participation in the affairs of government beyond merely periodically casting their votes. They told the people to shed their habitual awe of their so-called betters and to think and act for themselves. They adopted the French Revolutionary address of “Citizen” and resolved no longer to address their correspondents as “Sir” or use the phrase “Your humble servant” to close their letters. They took the notion of the sovereignty of the people literally and believed that the people had a continual right to organize and protest against even the actions of their own elected representatives.

But these Democratic-Republican Societies also met widespread resistance. Most American political leaders continued to abhor such extra-legal activity, for it seemed to undermine the very idea of a legal representative government. “Undoubtedly the people is sovereign,” opponents of the Democratic-Republican Societies declared, “but this sovereignty is in the whole people, and not in any separate part, and cannot be exercised, but by the Representatives of the whole nation.”
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Although Jefferson and other Republican leaders were reluctant to endorse these popular societies openly for fear of being thought seditious, the societies
themselves had no such reluctance in endorsing the Republican leaders. “May the patriots of ’76 step forward with Jefferson at their head and cleanse the country of degeneracy and corruption,” went one Kentucky toast in 1795.
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Although these societies did not generally manage elections, nominate tickets, or seek control of offices, they did set forth ideas that made people of different areas and different social groups feel they were part of a common Republican cause. Thus, even though they became associated in many people’s minds with the Whiskey Rebellion and disappeared as quickly as they had arisen, they foreshadowed the democratic world that was coming and contributed greatly to what held the Republican party together.

T
HE EMERGING
R
EPUBLICAN PARTY
comprised a wide variety of social groups. Foremost were the Southern landowners who were becoming conscious of the distinctiveness of their section and increasingly estranged from the commercial and banking world that Hamilton’s system seemed to be promoting. They were surprised by the promotion of Hamilton’s system, for they had expected to have greater control over the fate of the country than the Federalist program seemed to allow. At the outset of the new national government, they had had every reason to believe that the future belonged to them.

In 1789 the South dominated the nation. Close to half the population of the United States lived in the five states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. With a population of nearly seven hundred thousand, Virginia was by far the most populous state in the Union, almost double the size of its nearest competitor, Pennsylvania; in fact, by itself Virginia constituted a fifth of the nation. It was, as Patrick Henry declared in 1788, “the most mighty State in the Union.” It surpassed every other state, he said, not only “in number of inhabitants” but “in extent of territory, felicity of position, and affluence and wealth.”
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The population of nearly all of the Southern states was growing rapidly. Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the white population had tripled in North Carolina and quadrupled in South Carolina and Georgia. Nearly everyone in the country in 1789 assumed that Southern migrants would be the principal settlers of the new lands of the West.

Although the entire Republic remained rural and still primarily devoted to agriculture, nowhere was it more rural and agricultural than
in the South. Nearly the whole population of the South was engaged in growing staple crops for international markets, with relatively few people being involved in the internal trade and manufacturing that were rapidly emerging in the Northern states. Planters in Virginia and Maryland still produced many hogsheads of tobacco for sale abroad, though not as many as they had in the colonial period. Since tobacco was not a very perishable crop and had direct markets abroad in Glasgow and Liverpool, there had been no need for processing and distribution centers, and consequently the colonial Chesapeake had developed no towns or cities to speak of.
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But tobacco was a crop that depleted the soil, and in the late colonial period many farmers in the Upper South, including Washington, had begun turning to wheat, corn, and livestock for export or for local consumption. Because wheat and other foodstuffs were perishable and required diverse markets, they needed central facilities for sorting and distributing, which on the eve of the Revolution contributed to the rapid growth of towns such as Norfolk, Baltimore, Alexandria, and Fredericksburg. In the Lower South rice and indigo for the dying of textiles were the principal staples; in 1789 cotton was not as yet a major crop.