"Capitalism and the Rise of the Republican Opposition"


Capitalism and the Rise of the Republican Opposition
From Capitalism and a New Social Order, by Joyce Appleby, excerpts from pages 44-50, 53-58, 63-69, 81-82, 86-88, 92-94. Copyright 1984 by New York University Press.

JOYCE APPLEBY


Louis Hacker noted thirty years ago that there had always been an anticapitalist bias in the writing of American history. The reason for this is not hard to find. Historians began discussing capitalism as a specific economic system in the early twentieth century, when the ugliness of American industrialization obtruded everywhere. Capitalists themselves appeared as plutocrats grinding the faces of the poor with one hand while subverting the democratic institutions of the nation with the other. The great concentrations of wealth lodged in the "dark satanic mills" of industry made a mockery of equality of opportunity and the older justification for limiting government interference lost its liberal rationale. Capitalist apologists drew instead upon the grim determinism of the Social Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest.

When historians in the early twentieth century began to examine seriously the influence of economic factors in the American past, they appeared as independent developments, the characteristics of which were established with free enterprise. Capitalism figured in historical texts then as an entity - an organic object - like an oak whose form was determined with the planting of the first acorn. Rather than imagine different groups of people in the eighteenth century responding selectively to the possibilities afforded by the market, scholars wrote about capitalism as an external force bending men and nations to its needs. Both the anticapitalist bias that Hacker commented upon and this concept of capitalism as an independent system have obscured the role that the expectation of commercial growth played in the social thought of the Jeffersonian Republicans. Instead the hard-fisted, mean-spirited drive for profits of early industrialization seemed so totally incompatible with Jeffersonian ideals that historians construed the Jeffersonians themselves as anticapitalistic. Similarly, the tendency to see industrial capitalism as the end toward which all prior economies were moving has contributed to the notion that those in the past who promoted agriculture were out of touch with the progressive developments of their day.

A number of findings of the past generation have made it possible to look anew at capitalism as it appeared to men and women at the end of the eighteenth century. It is now generally recognized that the first capitalists were farmers and landlords - the men who revolutionized English agriculture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far from being the stronghold of conservatism, the countryside witnessed dramatic changes in the working and holding of land. The breakthrough in agricultural productivity not only freed the English from famine; it liberated their imagination as well. With old assumptions undermined, radical theories about individual freedom acquired plausibility. In England and America commercial farming was a progressive economic force suggesting to some that the future would be far different from the past....

In recent work on late eighteenth-century America scholars have begun to explore the connection between the economy and the cultural milieu in which commercial engagements took place....

[These analyses] can also be used to shed light on the striking regional concentrations of Federalists and Jeffersonians ... when the promise of prosperity superseded the depressed outlook of the post-revolutionary period. The upturn in trade that coincided with the adoption of the Constitution and the rising demand for the foods and fibers grown by ordinary farmers in the wheat belt greatly increased the commercial penetration of the market throughout the 1790s. The Northern centers for growing and marketing grains then increased at twice the rate of the rest of the nation and the number of ... cosmopolitan towns grew apace. Even Massachusetts counties that had no cosmopolitan towns in the 1780s acquired several in the 1790s. The spectacular growth in the middle states was accompanied by true prosperity. The real value of wages, profits, and land all rose substantially. The strength of the Jeffersonian movement was precisely in the fast-growing areas. As individuals, the Jeffersonians were socially and geographically mobile, particularly in the North. They were the mushroom candidates that the established political leaders scorned. In studies discriminating between new and old wealth, Jeffersonian towns are distinguished by the recentness of their money. Republicans succeeded where entrenched elites were challenged by new men, but they flourished as well without opposition in young cities like Baltimore.

In the 1790s the newness of profitable enterprise in many places and the rapidity of growth elsewhere created a division between the mobile and the established.... Again it is the kinds of experiences that mobility and stability promoted that counted, but the content of Republican ideology cannot be derived solely from a social category. Federalists and Republicans alike responded to the economic opportunities opening before America. Where Republicans differed from Federalists was in the moral character they gave to economic development. The promise in prosperity encouraged them to vault over the cumulative wisdom of the ages and imagine a future far different from the dreary past known to man. In taking this imaginative leap they were greatly aided by the line of economic analysis that began with English writers in the seventeenth century and culminated in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The uniformity of economic responses from market participants, which had encouraged a succession of observers to think of social relations as a complex of exchanges between similarly rational and selfinterested bargainers, pushed the Jeffersonians even further toward nineteenth-century liberalism. In England conspicuous social distinctions worked against acceptance of the economists, model as a depiction of reality, whereas the more equal social conditions that prevailed in America made it possible to think of the economists' description of the market as a template for society. What in England served as a device for understanding how nations grow wealthy through trade became in America the blueprint for a society of economically progressive, socially equal, and politically competent citizens. Capitalism thus disclosed itself in a benign and visionary way to Republicans who drew from its dynamic operation the promise of a new age for ordinary men. . . .

[I]n the very first session of Congress, . . . disputes . . . were prompted largely by the boldness with which Alexander Hamilton had asserted the new federal government's financial leadership[.] [O]pponents and proponents of the various measures came from the ranks of elected officials, which meant that national politics were largely confined to the activities of office holders. The genteel arena of conflict and the general agreement on the processes of law-making ensured decorum. Policy debates did not undermine the consensus among leaders on the proper relationship between government and governed people. Indeed, through the first four years under the new constitution the style, the procedures, and the personnel of Washington's administration largely fulfilled the hopes of those conservatives who had wanted to remove politics from popular influence and restore the august majesty of government.

The execution of Louis XVI in January of 1793 and the outbreak of war between France and England changed all this. Crowds all over America gathered to celebrate the early victories of the French Revolutionary army. Parades and bonfires spread the word that France had joined the United States in the world's ranks of republics. Foreign policy, that most arcane of all government responsibilities, became the major topic of public debate. Citizen Genet's triumphal journey from Charleston to Philadelphia in April, a month after Washington's second inauguration, only advertised what had already become apparent - large portions of the American people had claimed the cause of France as their own. Washington adopted a neutrality policy designed to keep the United States from being drawn into the war, even at the cost of violating the spirit of the Franco-American treaty that had brought France into the war of American Independence. Jefferson and other administration critics within Congress recognized the wisdom of remaining neutral, but outside of government circles, neutrality was treated as a betrayal not just of France but of republican government as well. Orators at civic feasts held in honor of French victories reminded audiences that the enemies of France were "Royalists and Aristocrats associated for the express purpose of expelling the rights of Man from the world." These demonstrations of support for the French Revolution were often accompanied by angry denunciations of administration policies, which were now interpreted as unwarrantedly pro-English.

This public criticism in turn precipitated a much more divisive controversy about the legality of popular participation in politics. The issue came to a head with the spontaneous formation of political organizations. Variously called democratic or republican societies, these voluntary associations sprang up in forty different locations, at least one in each state of the union. Critics blamed their appearance upon the notorious Jacobin clubs currently radicalizing French politics, but this proved to be a bite without sting in a season of revolutionary enthusiasm. Having something of a private character in Philadelphia and New York City, they became the vehicles for more turbulent, public activities elsewhere. Even in the cities they provided the nucleus for organizing ad hoc meetings. There was in this mobilization of ordinary voters the menace of numbers. Ominously from the conservatives' point of view, the democratic clubs openly attacked the forms of polite society by electing to drop conventional honorifics like "sir" and "humble servant" in favor of "fellow citizen." In further imitation of the Jacobins across the Atlantic the Democratic Society of Philadelphia resolved to measure time from the era of the Revolution. Thus their secretary dated letters "in the eighteenth year of American Independence."

Clearly reckoning the general public as their own political resource, active club members reached out to one another and established correspondence across state lines. They saw to it that their resolutions and proceedings were published in each other's local newspaper, this at a time when newspapers were penetrating rural areas as never before. With several dozen voluntary clubs scrutinizing official actions and putting into circulation their invariably hostile reactions, it seemed as though the nation had acquired a second political structure competing with its government. Like kites without strings or ships without ballast, the democratic societies appeared to be alarmingly weightless to those for whom government was a heavy affair. Out of the democratic societies came the political mobilization of mere voters. The deferential quality of elections geared to choosing among virtuous candidates gave way to ones explicitly connecting men with issues instead of personal character. Newspapers in most cities became openly partisan and many towns in the middle states acquired their first journal as an outgrowth of popular interest in politics....

In this supercharged atmosphere, France and England became symbols of two alternative futures or fates for the United States: England, as the model of sober, ordered constitutional government committed to securing the maximum personal freedom consonant with the flawed nature of man, and France, presenting a vision of what a society of free men might be if the chains of customs and outworn creeds were cast off....

The symbolic importance of France and England heightened the significance of every policy decision American officials made between 1793 and 1801. But the symbolic overtones were not inappropriate. The French Revolution had succeeded in bringing to the surface of public life opposing conceptions of society. Republicans and Federalists did not misperceive each other. Aside from flamboyant charges of secretly conspiring to deliver the nation to a foreign power-hurled from both camps-the polemics of the 1790s clarified assumptions that had previously gone unexamined....

At two critical junctures in 1794 the Washington administration adopted policies that enraged large segments of the American public.... When word reached Philadelphia that the British had seized over 399 ships in the West Indies, Washington called for a build-up of American defenses. The Federalists in Congress moved to raise the excise on distilled spirits to meet the cost. The tax fell on manufactured goods as well as whiskey, but farmers west of the Alleghenies felt particularly aggrieved, because they distilled a large part of their surplus grain. Republicans, particularly political activists outside of Congress, insisted that enforcement of the excise tax was to be undertaken as a demonstration of the federal government's power. Sending revenue officers throughout the back country was, in their view, actually a vehicle for exerting authority. Already formed into democratic societies, men in western Pennsylvania offered resistance to the collection of the tax. Convinced that it was repression, not revenue, that the Federalist had in mind, they construed opposition to the whiskey tax as a republican's duty.

Thoroughly alarmed when the resistance appeared to be spreading, the Federalists called for a vigorous response. Each side played into the other's fears.

When Washington led a combined state militia force of 13,000 across the mountains, the event seemed to confirm the Republicans' suspicions. The resistance to the tax actually collapsed without bloodshed, but the issue of popular participation in politics flared up with renewed heat. Many a moderate Republican repudiated the western Pennsylvanian's menacing opposition, but the Whiskey Rebellion, nonetheless, entered the pantheon of liberty's good fights. The Philadelphia Democratic Society wrangled over its inevitable resolutions for a month and the Tammany Society in New York acquired its partisan identification when moderates were outvoted by those who supported the resisters' rights. Washington himself created the occasion for further dissension when he suggested in his Congressional Address in the fall that "certain self-created societies" had been guilty of fomenting the Whiskey Rebellion.

The Senate responded approvingly to Washington's speech; the House passed a watered-down censure of the resisters by one vote. But outside of Congress, Washington's effort to stigmatize popular politics clearly missed the mark as newspapers and democratic societies took up the question of what was called "the true principles of government." Members of the clubs refused to be intimidated. Advertised meetings were held first in Baltimore, then Newark, Philadelphia, and New York. The 31 moderate members of the Tammany Society who had rushed through a resolution supporting Washington defended themselves by an appeal to what had once been a widely shared opinion: "The public's right to associate, speak and publish sentiments are only excellent as revolutionary means, when a government is to be overturned. An exercise of this right in a free and happy country like this," they wrote, "resembles the sport of firebrands; it is phrenzy, and this phrenzy is in proportion to the party zeal of the self-created associations."

Firebrands obviously had the upper hand, for their resolution was repealed at the next general meeting. New York newspaper columnists attacked the pusillanimity of Washington's defenders. "Political associations have been threatened by the arm of power," one declared. Another claimed that duplicity or terror had induced former members to yield to Washington's condemnation. "We have erred, we have strayed like lost sheep - this is the language which your folly has suggested." When apologists for the President affirmed the right of free association, but cautioned against its use, their position was ridiculed. "What good purposes can it answer," a Republican queried, "to claim the existence of a right which you deem it criminal to exercise, and then menacingly concluded "the government that is inimical to investigation is ripe for Revolution."

In this manner administration criticism of the democratic societies was turned into evidence of the government's bad intentions. The Philadelphia society stoked this particular fire, charging that the aristocratic faction in America was indefatigable in disseminating principles unfriendly to the rights of man. "It has ever been a favorite and important pursuit with aristocracy to stifle free inquiry, to envelop its proceedings in mystery, and as much as possible, to impede the progress of political knowledge. No wonder," the resolution continued, "they were afraid of societies whose objects were to cultivate a just knowledge of rational liberty." . . .

The Federalists called upon classical republican ideas to explain how the abuse of power should be checked within government by the different branches of elected officers rather than outside among a turbulent populace. But this theory now appeared as part of elitist rhetoric. Rejecting New Jersey Federalist Jonathan Dayton's traditional description of the parts of government as "the constituent centinels over the liberties of the people," a Republican writer insisted that this was not "an American conception," but rather a notion that "favored too much the poignant principles of aristocracy." In a similar vein two rural publishers attacked Federalist John Shippen, who had written that freedom of the press was a blessing only "while the People are virtuous and independent enough to check its degeneracy." Noting the condescension in Shippen's judgment, they sarcastically disqualified themselves from being able to understand "such sublime conceptions. "

William Findley, a Republican congressman from western Pennsylvania, readily conceded that popular meetings led to indiscretion and promoted licentiousness. "But it does not therefore follow," he maintained, "that such meetings should be prohibited by law or denounced by the government." Doing so would be reducing the people to mere machines, he wrote, and subvert the very existence of liberty. "It is the duty of the legislature not only to accommodate the laws to the people's interests, but even as far as possible, to their preconceptions." It was not the people's wisdom that the Republicans were arguing for, but their freedom to err as their elected officials, they assumed, would also err.

Where classical republican theory had held up government as the noblest activity for men of civic virtue, the Jeffersonian Republicans celebrated the informal, voluntary political life open to all. Washington's proscription of "certain self-created societies" seemed to belittle this life. "Is our being selfcreated reckoned among the charges of the President?" a New Yorker asked, going on to inquire rhetorically, "Are not all private associations established on the foundation of their own authority, an authority sanctioned by the first principles of social life and guaranteed by the spirit of the laws?" The logical conclusion of the Federalists' position was finally reached by a writer in the Republican Independent Gazetteer: "Whatever the United States might have been previous to the American Revolution, it is pretty evident that since their emancipation from British rapacity, they are a great self-created society." Indeed, he continued, "had the British succeeded in impressing our minds with a firm belief in the infamy of self creation, we should never have been free and independent to all eternity."

During the months that this debate raged, the terms of the treaty Jay was negotiating in England were leaked to the fiery Republican editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, aptly nicknamed Lightning Rod Jr. in reference to his grandfather. The generous concessions to Britain in the treaty represented nothing less than a sell-out to the Republicans. Again raucous public meetings became the order - or the disorder - of the day. Jay's effigy stoked the flames of many a public bonfire across the land. As one of the Philadelphia Democratic Society's resolutions explained, these events had shaken Americans from their lethargy and given new impulse and new warmth to democratic institutions. They also created opportunities to explore the Federalists' pretensions of social superiority. Apparently thinking that the best offense was a good defense, Republicans enthusiastically repeated the terms of opprobrium used by Federalists. Thus one Fourth of July orator advertised that "the high prerogative set claim that the common people in this country are a set of restless, discontented, tumultuous disorganizers." Theodore Sedgwick's reference to the "ignorant herd" was linked to Edmund Burke's more notorious labeling of French commoners as the "swinish multitude." An election broadside circulated in New Jersey took the form of a deposition from a witness to a Federalist's ranting about the offense to government when common people bestir themselves in politics. "How long must government be insulted by a set of damned cut-throat Democrats?" the offender was alleged to have asked. A piece in the Republican Farmer's Register described those enlisted under the banner of democracy as "enthusiastic men, lovers of liberty, of warm passions and benevolent hearts" - hardly the qualities that commended themselves to Federalists. "If they are ignorant Or dishonest, let their opponents prove it," the writer challenged....

The rejection of the past that figured prominently in the Republican writings of the 1790s ... represented a faith in the future that was altogether novel, a future that embraced the entire human race.

Basic to this new faith was a reconceptualization of human nature. The postlapsarian view- "in Adam's fall did sin we all" - was stigmatized, as it had not been before, as a class doctrine. "Whence is it that the doctrine of the equality of man has so long been hidden from the human race?" Phineas Hedges asked an Ulster County July 4th crowd, and proceeded to answer his rhetorical question with a history of repression starting with the Egyptians and ending with Great Britain. Typical of this new approach was Tunis Wortman's "Oration on the Influence of Social Institutions Upon Human Morals and Happiness" given before the Tammany Society in 1796. In one of the most ambitious efforts to reconcile the abilities of ordinary men with the historic proof of their debased condition, the author, a young New York lawyer, grounded his optimism about the future on the malleable nature of the human mind. Wortman developed the familiar enlightenment argument about the baleful influence of autocratic governments and pointed out the conundrum that they condemn people to ignorance and superstition and hence produce the evils that are used to justify their repressiveness. Debasing human character in this way, he said, was "the constant and uniform theme of tyrants." The subversive aspects of these statements were not lost on audiences brought up on the Calvinist doctrine of original sin. By connecting the idea of the depravity of man with the venerable rationales for authoritarian institutions, Wortman was clearly flinging down the gauntlet to those Federalist magistrates and ministers who endorsed energetic government. According to him, "excessive energy in government" accounted for "all those rigid codes of law that have subverted the natural liberties of mankind." He concluded his oration by saying that "those who think that men are naturally vicious and degraded will of consequence become attached to that form of government which embraces the greatest proportion of coercion and restraint." For other, enlightened men, the popular belief that human vices and virtues "are part of man's original constitution" had been shown up as false, Wortman said, because reason had demonstrated that ugly human qualities should be traced instead to "the errors and abuses that have at every period existed in political establishments."

These assertions about the newly discovered capacity of human beings to develop constructively under conditions of freedom undermined traditional notions about authority in several ways. By denying natural inequality they undercut the old argument that God had created the talented few for some purpose. Making authoritarian institutions the cause rather than the consequence of human waywardness turned the traditional justification for them on its head, while at the same time the new claims that human beings could take care of themselves removed the rationale for vigorous government. . .

What clearly animated the Republicans was the principle of hope. . . . Republican hopes ... were fed from many sources. The successful Revolution against England was one such. The foes of religious uniformity took heart from the disestablishment of the Church of England in Virginia. A tribute to the combined efforts of the dissenting Presbyterian and Baptist sects and religious rationalists like Madison and Jefferson, the decade-long struggle involved the mobilization of thousands of ordinary voters. Another lively expression of hope in the 1790s bubbled up from millenarian springs. Jedidiah Peck, for instance, mingled quotations from Thomas Paine and predictions of the global spread of representative democracy with references to monarchies as the anti-Christ, the beast, and the literal kingdom of Satan. Imagery from the Book of Revelations was frequently evoked to describe the social order aborning, and evangelical Protestants found nothing incompatible between their piety and the affirmation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. Another strong source of hope issued from the fact of scientific achievement. Writers spoke of the recent attainment of "the true principles of political science." One Republican announced that "comparatively society is in political science what infants are respecting knowledge." Another suggested that progressive improvement would enable men "to penetrate into the mysteries of animate and inanimate matter."

The economy nurtured hopes in two complementary ways. The sense of a new commercial age fed into expectations of fundamental change, and the conception of the economy as a natural system with lawlike regularities provided specific answers to the reservations expressed by conservatives. Hardly a Republican gathering disbanded without hearing toasts and resolutions extolling agriculture and trade. "In a free government," as one typical orator explained, "commerce expands her sails; Prompted by a spirit of enterprize and a desire of gain, men venture the dangers of a boisterous ocean in pursuit of new commodities. With wider acquaintance of man the elements of the monk and the barbarian dissolve into the sympathizing heart of a citizen of civilized life ... .. Legislators of the people," an anonymous writer said, "should never neglect any means of promoting agriculture. It is the basis of the happiness of the people, the strength of empires, the aliment of commerce, and the foundation of manufacturers." In a similar manner, Republican Congressman Edward Livingston toasted "The Colossus of American freedom-may it bestride the commerce of the world."

As even these celebratory remarks suggest, Republican claims for future economic development were tied to the belief in economic freedom. Alexander Hamilton labeled the idea that commerce might regulate itself a "wild speculative paradox," but Adam Smith's invisible hand was warmly clasped by the Republicans....

At the most general level, the Republicans' expectation of a sustained prosperity based upon an ever-expanding global exchange of goods undercut the Federalists rationale for energetic government. It was no longer needed to protect the weak from the strong, the hungry from the hoarders, the survival of the whole from the selfish acts of the few. An increased level of productivity had solved that ancient problem. Nor in Republican thinking was government needed to direct economic activities to secure a larger share of a finite pie in an age of commercial expansion. This was what the English example offered and the Republicans feared. As one newspaper writer noted, Great Britain had enjoyed a long period of economic growth, but "the body of the British nation live in a state of abject dependence upon the potent few. The hard earned wages are wrung from the hands of the laboring part of the community" to support the government and pay the interest on a national debt that only grows larger. Here is a critique of the British funded debt that owes nothing to the classical republican obsession with political corruption. The Republicans interpret the mercantilist goals of national wealth and power as parts of another scheme of the few to wrest natural and equal rights from the many....

The passionate party warfare of the 1790s did not determine whether or not America's economy would be capitalistic. That had already been decided long ago with the integration of the colonies into the great Atlantic trade. Nor did the contest between the Federalists and Republicans resemble a replay of the earlier colonial division between conservatives and innovators over such things as paper money and regulated markets, for both the Republican and Federalist parties were dominated by modernists-men committed to economic change. Rather, the fight was over the social and political context in which this change was to take place. Would the traditional division between the few and the many persist? Would the nation's economic development be directed from the center through the government's fiscal and banking policies? Would those in authority continue to be protected through laws and public usages promoting deference? The natural harmony of autonomous individuals freely exerting themselves to take care of their own interests while expanding the range of free exchange and free inquiry was the liberating alternative Republicans juxtaposed to the Federalists' expectations of orderly growth within venerable social limits. They celebrated work not for its glorification of God but rather for its contribution to human productivity and knowledge. In place of virtue, they extolled the independence of individuals and the voluntary cooperation of private persons.