"The Worthy Against the Licentious"

THE WORTHY AGAINST THE LICENTIOUS
From Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, excerpts from 87-112.

Gordon S. Wood


How the Federalists expected a new central government to remedy the vices the individual states had been unable to remedy is the central question, the answer to which lies at the heart of their understanding of what was happening in the critical period. In the minds of the Federalists and of "men of reflection" generally, most of the evils of American society-the atmosphere of mistrust, the breakdown of authority, the increase of debt, the depravity of manners, and the decline of virtue could be reduced to a fundamental problem of social disarrangement. Even the difficulties of the United States in foreign affairs and its weakness as a nation in the world, as Jay argued in The Federalist Number 3, could be primarily explained by what the Revolution had done to America's political and social hierarchy. More than anything else the Federalists' obsession with disorder in American society and politics accounts for the revolutionary nature of the nationalist proposals offered by men like Madison in 1787 and for the resultant Federalist Constitution. Only an examination of the Federalists' social perspective, their fears and anxieties about the disarray in American society, can fully explain how they conceived of the Constitution as a political device designed to control the social forces the Revolution had released.

The most pronounced social effect of the Revolution was not harmony or stability but the sudden appearance of new men everywhere in politics and business. "When the pot boils, the scum will rise:' James Otis had warned in 1776; but few Revolutionary leaders had realized just how much it would rise. By the end of the war men like Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts could "scarcely see any other than new faces:' a change almost "as remarkable as the revolution itself." The emigration of thousands of Tories, the intensification of interest in politics, the enlargement of the legislatures and the increase in elections, the organization of new militia and political groups, the breakup of old mercantile combinations and trade circuits, the inflation and profiteering caused by the war-all offered new opportunities for hitherto unknown but ambitious persons to find new places for themselves. As John Adams noted, his own deep resentment of his supposed social superiors was being echoed throughout various levels of the society. For every brilliant provincial lawyer ready to challenge the supremacy of the imperial clique in the colonial metropolis, there were dozens of lesser men, not so brilliant but equally desirous of securing a local magistracy, a captaincy of the militia, some place, however small, of honor and distinction. With the elimination of Crown privilege and appointment men were prepared to take the republican emphasis on equality seriously. The result, as one Baltimore printer declared as early as 1777, was "Whiggism run mad." "When a man, who is only fit to patch a shoe: attempts to patch the State: fancies himself a Solon or Lycurgus, . . . he cannot fail to meet with contempt." But contempt was no longer enough to keep such men in their place.

Everywhere "Specious, interested designing men:' "men, respectable neither for their property, their virtue, nor their abilities:' were taking a lead in public affairs that they had never quite had before, courting "the suffrages of the people by tantalizing them with improper indulgences." Thousands of the most respectable people "who obtained their possessions by the hard industry, continued sobriety and economy of themselves or their virtuous ancestors" were now witnessing, so the writings of nearly all the states proclaimed over and over, many men "whose fathers they would have disdained to have sat with the dogs of their flocks, raised to immense wealth, or at least to carry the appearance of a haughty, supercilious and luxurious spendthrift." "Effrontery and arrogance, even in our virtuous and enlightened days:' said John Jay "are giving rank and Importance to men whom Wisdom would have left in obscurity." Since "every new election in the States," as Madison pointed out in The Federalist Number 62,"is found to change one half of the representatives," the newly enlarged state legislatures were being filled and yearly refilled with different faces, often with "men without reading, experience, or principle." The Revolution, it was repeatedly charged (and the evidence seems to give substance to the charges), was allowing government to fall "into the Hands of those whose ability or situation in Life does not intitle them to it. " Everywhere in the 1780's the press and the correspondence of those kinds of men whose letters are apt to be preserved complained that "a set of unprincipled men, who sacrifice everything to their popularity and private views, seem to have acquired too much influence in all our Assemblies." The Revolution was acquiring a degree of social turbulence that many, for all of their knowledge of revolutions, had not anticipated. Given the Revolutionary leaders' conventional eighteenth-century assumption of a necessary coincidence between social and political authority, many could actually believe that their world was being "turned upside down."

Beginning well before the Revolution but increasing to a fever pitch by the mid-eighties were fears of what this kind of intensifying social mobility signified for the traditional conception of a hierarchical society ("in due gradation ev'ry rank must be, Some high, some low, but all in their degree")-a conception which the Revolution had unsettled but by no means repudiated. In reaction to the excessive social movement accelerated by the Revolution some Americans, although good republicans, attempted to confine mobility within prescribed channels. Men could rise, but only within the social ranks in which they were born. Their aim in life must be to learn to perform their inherited position with "industry, economy, and good conduct. "A man, wrote Enos Hitchcock in his didactic tale of 1793, must not be "elevated above his employment. " In this respect republicanism with its emphasis on spartan adversity and simplicity became an ideology of social stratification and control. Over and over writers urged that "the crosses of life improve by re-trenching our enjoyments:' by moderating "our expectations," and by giving "the heart a mortal disgust to all the gaudy blandishments of sense." Luxury was such a great evil because it confounded "every Distinction between the Poor and the Rich" and allowed "people of the very meanest parentages, or office, if fortune be but a little favourable to them" to "vie to make themselves equal in apparel with the principal people of the place." "Dissipation and extravagance" encouraged even "country-girls in their market carts, and upon their panniered horses," to ride "through our streets with their heads deformed with the plumes of the ostrich and the feathers of other exotick birds." Although many, especially in the South, had expected the Revolution to lessen this kind of social chaos, republicanism actually seemed only to have aggravated it.

Most American leaders, however, were not opposed to the idea of social movement, for mobility, however one may have decried its abuses, lay at the heart of republicanism. Indeed, many like John Adams had entered the Revolution in order to make mobility a reality, to free American society from the artificial constraints Britain had imposed on it, and to allow "Persons of obscure Birth, and Station, and narrow Fortunes" to make their mark in the world. Republicanism represented equality of opportunity and careers open to talent. Even "the reins of state:' David Ramsay had said at the outset, "may be held by the son of the poorest man, if possessed of abilities equal to that important station." Ramsay's qualification, however, was crucial to his endorsement of mobility. For all of its emphasis on equality, republicanism was still not considered by most to be incompatible with the conception of a hierarchical society of different gradations and a unitary authority to which deference from lower to higher should be paid. Movement must necessarily exist in a republic, if talent alone were to dominate, if the natural aristocracy were to rule. But such inevitable movement must be into and out of clearly discernible ranks. Those who rose in a republic, it was assumed, must first acquire the attributes of social superiority-wealth, education, experience, and connections-before they could be considered eligible for political leadership. Most Revolutionary leaders clung tightly to the concept of a ruling elite, presumably based on merit, but an elite nonetheless - a natural aristocracy embodied in the eighteenth-century ideal of an educated and cultivated gentleman. The rising self-made man could be accepted into this natural aristocracy only if he had assimilated through education or experience its attitudes, refinements, and style. For all of their earlier criticism of "the better sort of People" in the name of "real Merit," few of the Revolutionary leaders were prepared to repudiate the idea of a dominating elite and the requisite identity of social and political authority. . . .

In South Carolina these kinds of sentiments became particularly pronounced in the eighties; the planters found themselves confronted with widespread challenges to their authority that they had never anticipated in 1776, challenges that came from a new kind of politician, one who, as a defender proudly pointed out, "had no relations or friends, but what his money made for him." In the tense atmosphere of the mid-eighties the case of William Thompson, an unfortunate tavern-keeper who was threatened with banishment from the state by the legislature for allegedly insulting John Rutledge, became a cause célébre and a focal point for the political and social animosities released and aggravated by the Revolution. Thompson's address to the public in April 1784 is a classic expression of American resentment against social superiority, a resentment voiced, as Thompson said, not on behalf of himself but on behalf of the people, or "those more especially, who go at this day, under the opprobrious appellation of, the Lower Orders of Men." Thompson was not simply attacking the few aristocratic "Nabobs" who had humiliated him, but was actually assaulting the entire conception of a social hierarchy ruled by a gentlemanly elite. In fact he turned the prevailing eighteenth-century opinion upside down and argued that the natural aristocracy was peculiarly unqualified to rule. Rather than preparing men for political leadership in a free government, said Thompson, "signal opulence and influence:' especially when united "by intermarriage or otherwise:' were really "calculated to subvert Republicanism." The "persons and conduct" of the South Carolina "Nabobs" like Rutledge "in private life, may be unexceptionable, and even amiable, but their pride, influence, ambition, connections, wealth and political principles, ought in public life, ever to exclude them from public confidence." All that was needed in republican leadership was "being good, able, useful, and friends to social equality," for in a republican government "consequence is from the public opinion, and not from private fancy." In sardonic tones Thompson recounted how he, a tavern-keeper, "a wretch of no higher rank in the Commonwealth than that of Common-Citizen:' had been debased by "those self-exalted characters, who affect to compose the grand hierarchy of the State- . . for having dared to dispute with a John Rutledge, or any of the NABOB tribe." The experience had been degrading enough to Thompson as a man, but as a former officer in the army it had been "insupportable" - indicating how Revolutionary military service may have affected the social structure. Undoubtedly, said Thompson, Rutledge had "conceived me his inferior" But Thompson like many others in these years - tavern-keepers, farmers, petty merchants, smalltime lawyers, former military officers - could no longer "comprehend the inferiority." The resultant antagonism between those who conceived of such men as their inferiors, unfit to hold public positions, and those who would not accept the imputation of inferiority lay beneath the social crisis of the 1780's - a social crisis which the federal Constitution of 1787 brought to a head.

The division over the Constitution in 1787-88 is not easily analyzed. It is difficult, as historians have recently demonstrated, to equate the supporters or opponents of the Constitution with particular economic groupings The Antifederalist politicians in the ratifying conventions often possessed wealth, including public securities, equal to that of the Federalists. While the relative youth of the Federalist leaders, compared to the ages of the prominent Antifederalists, was important, especially in accounting for the Federalists' ability to think freshly and creatively about politics, it can hardly be used to explain the division throughout the country. Moreover, the concern of the 1780's with America's moral character was not confined to the proponents of the Constitution. That rabid republican and Antifederalist, Benjamin Austin, was as convinced as any Federalist that "the luxurious living of all ranks and degrees" was "the principal cause of all the evils we now experience." Some leading Antifederalist intellectuals expressed as much fear of "the injustice, folly, and wickedness of the State Legislatures" and of "the usurpation and tyranny of the majority" against the minority as did Madison. In the Philadelphia Convention both Mason and Elbridge Gerry, later prominent Antifederalists, admitted "the danger of the levelling spirit" flowing from "the excess of democracy" in the American republics. There were many diverse reasons in each state why men supported or opposed the Constitution that cut through any sort of class division. The Constitution was a single issue in a complicated situation, and its acceptance or rejection in many states was often dictated by peculiar circumstances - the prevalence of Indians, the desire for western lands, the special interests of commerce - that defy generalization. Nevertheless, despite all of this confusion and complexity the struggle over the Constitution, as the debate if nothing else makes clear, can best be understood as a social one. Whatever the particular constituency of the antagonists may have been, men in 1787-88 talked as if they were representing distinct and opposing social elements. Both the proponents and opponents of the Constitution focused throughout the debates on an essential point of political sociology that ultimately must be used to distinguish a Federalist from an Antifederalist. The quarrel was fundamentally one between aristocracy and democracy. . . .

The disorganization and inertia of the Antifederalists, especially in contrast with the energy and effectiveness of the Federalists, has been repeatedly emphasized. The opponents of the Constitution lacked both coordination and unified leadership; "their principles:' wrote Oliver Ellsworth,"are totally opposite to each other, and their objections discordant and irreconcilable." The Federalist victory, it appears, was actually more of an Antifederalist default. "We had no principle of concert or union: 'Iamented the South Carolina Antifederalist, Aedanus Burke, while the supporters of the Constitution "left no expedient untried to push it forward." Madison's description of the Massachusetts Antifederalists was applicable to nearly all the states: "There was not a single character capable of uniting their wills or directing their measures . . . . They had no plan whatever. They looked no farther than to put a negative on the Constitution and return home. "They were not, as one Federalist put it, "good politicians."

But the Antifederalists were not simply poorer politicians than the Federalists; they were actually different kinds of politicians. Too many of them were state-centered men with local interests and loyalties only, politicians without influence and connections, and ultimately politicians without social and intellectual confidence. In South Carolina the up-country opponents of the Constitution shied from debate and when they did occasionally rise to speak apologized effusively for their inability to say what they felt had to be said, thus leaving most of the opposition to the Constitution to be voiced by Rawlins Lowndes, a low-country planter who scarcely represented their interests and soon retired from the struggle. Elsewhere, in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, the situation was similar: the Federalists had the bulk of talent and influence on their side "together with all the Speakers in the State great and small." In convention after convention the Antifecleralists, as in Connecticut, tried to speak, but "they were browbeaten by many of those Cicero'es as they think themselves and others of Superior rank." "The presses are in a great measure secured to their side," the Antifederalists complained with justice: out of a hundred or more newspapers printed in the late eighties only a dozen supported the Antifederalists, as editors, "afraid to offend the great men, or Merchants, who could work their ruin," closed their columns to the opposition. The Antifederalists were not so much beaten as overawed. In Massachusetts the two leading socially established Antifederalists, Elbridge Gerry and James Warren, were defeated as delegates to the Ratifying Convention, and Antifederalist leadership consequently fell into the hands of newer, self-made men, of whom Samuel Nasson was perhaps typical - a Maine shopkeeper who was accused of delivering ghostwritten speeches in the Convention. Nasson had previously sat in the General Court but had declined reelection because he had been too keenly made aware of "the want of a proper Education I feel my Self So Small on many occasions that I all most Scrink into Nothing Besides I am often obliged to Borrow from Gentlemen that had advantages which I have not." Now, however, he had become the stoutest of Antifederalists, "full charged with Gass," one of those grumblers who, as Rufus King told Madison, were more afraid of the proponents of the Constitution than the Constitution itself, frightened that "some injury is plotted against them" because of "the extraordinary Union in favor of the Constitution in this State of the Wealthy and sensible part of it."
This fear of a plot by men who "talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly" ran through the Antifederalist mind. Because the many "new men" of the 1780's, men like Melancthon Smith and Abraham Yates of New York or John Smilie and William Findley of Pennsylvania, had bypassed the social hierarchy in their rise to political leadership, they lacked those attributes of social distinction and dignity that went beyond mere wealth. Since these kinds of men were never assimilated to the gentlemanly cast of the Livingstons or the Morrises, they, like Americans earlier in confrontation with the British court, tended to view with suspicion and hostility the high-flying world of style and connections that they were barred by their language and tastes, if by nothing else, from sharing in. In the minds of these socially inferior politicians the movement for the strengthening of the central government could only be a "conspiracy" "planned and set to work" by a few aristocrats, who were at first, said Abraham Yates, no larger in any one state than the cabal which sought to undermine English liberty at the beginning of the eighteenth century. . . .

Nothing was more characteristic of Antifederalist thinking than this obsession with aristocracy. Although to a European, American society may have appeared remarkably egalitarian, to many Americans, especially to those who aspired to places of consequence but were made to feel their inferiority in innumerable, often subtle, ways, American society was distinguished by its inequality. "it is true:' said Melancthon Smith in the New York Ratifying Convention, "it is our singular felicity that we have no legal or hereditary distinctions . . . ; but still there are real differences." "Every society naturally divides itself into classes. . . . Birth, education, talents, and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible, and of as much influence, as titles, stars, and garters. " Everyone knew those "whom nature hath destined to rule:' declared one sardonic Antifederalist pamphlet. Their "qualifications of authority" were obvious: "such as the dictatorial air, the magisterial voice, the imperious tone, the haughty countenance, the lofty look, the majestic mien." . . .

Such influence was difficult to resist because, to the continual annoyance of the Antifederalists, the great body of the people willingly submitted to it. The "authority of names" and "the influence of the great" among ordinary people were too evident to be denied. "Will any one say that there does not exist in this country the pride of family, of wealth, of talents, and that they do not command influence and respect among the common people?" . . . Because of this habit of deference in the people, it was "in the power of the enlightened and aspiring few, if they should combine, at any time to destroy the best establishments, and even make the people the instruments of their own subjugation," Hence, the Antifederalist - minded declared, the people must be awakened to the consequences of their self-ensnarement; they must be warned over and over by popular tribunes, by "those who are competent to the task of developing the principles of government:' of the dangers involved in paying obeisance to those who they thought were their superiors. The people must "not be permitted to consider themselves as a grovelling, distinct species, uninterested in the general welfare. " . . .

In these repeated attacks on deference and the capacity of a conspicuous few to speak for the whole society-which was to become in time the distinguishing feature of American democratic politics - the Antifederalists struck at the roots of the traditional conception of political society. If the natural elite, whether its distinctions were ascribed or acquired, was not in any organic way connected to the "feelings, circumstances, and interests" of the people and was incapable of feeling "sympathetically the wants of the people," then it followed that only ordinary men, men not distinguished by the characteristics of aristocratic wealth and taste, men "in middling circumstances" untempted by the attractions of a cosmopolitan world and thus "more temperate, of better morals, and less ambitious, than the great," could be trusted to speak for the great body of the people, for those who were coming more and more to be referred to as "the middling and lower classes of people." The differentiating influence of the environment was such that men in various ranks and classes now seemed to be broken apart from one another, separated by their peculiar circumstances into distinct, unconnected, and often incompatible interests. With their indictment of aristocracy the Antifederalists were saying, whether they realized it or not, that the people of America even in their several states were not homogeneous entities each with a basic similarity of interest for which an empathic elite could speak. Society was not an organic hierarchy composed of ranks and degrees indissolubly linked one to another; rather it was a heterogeneous mixture of "many different classes or orders of people, Merchants, Farmers, Planter Mechanics and Gentry or wealthy Men. "In such a society men from one class or group, however educated and respectable they may have been, could never be acquainted with the "Situation and Wants" of those of another class or group. Lawyers and planters could never be "adequate judges of tradesmens concerns." If men were truly to represent the people in government, it was not enough for them to be for the people; they had to be actually of the people. "Farmers, traders and mechanics . . . all ought to have a competent number of their best informed members in the legislature "

Thus the Antifederalists were not only directly challenging the conventional belief that only a gentlemanly few, even though now in America naturally and not artificially qualified, were best equipped through learning and experience to represent and to govern the society, but they were as well indirectly denying the assumption of organic social homogeneity on which republicanism rested. Without fully comprehending the consequences of their arguments the Antifederalists were destroying the great chain of being, thus undermining the social basis of republicanism and shattering that unity and harmony of social and political authority which the eighteenth century generally and indeed most Revolutionary leaders had considered essential to the maintenance of order.

Confronted with such a fundamental challenge the Federalists initially backed away. They had no desire to argue the merits of the Constitution in terms of its social implications and were understandably reluctant to open up the character of American society as the central issue of the debate. But in the end they could not resist defending those beliefs in elitism that lay at the heart of their conception of politics and of their constitutional program. All of the Federalists' desires to establish a strong and respectable nation in the world, all of their plans to create a flourishing commercial economy, in short, all of what the Federalists wanted out of the new central government seemed in the final analysis dependent upon the prerequisite maintenance of aristocratic politics.

At first the Federalists tried to belittle the talk of an aristocracy; they even denied that they knew the meaning of the word. "Why bring into the debate the whims of writers-introducing the distinction of well-born from others?" asked Edmund Pendleton in the Virginia Ratifying Convention. In the Federalist view every man was "well-born who comes into the world with an intelligent mind, and with all his parts perfect. " Was even natural talent to be suspect? Was learning to be encouraged, the Federalists asked in exasperation, only "to set up those who attained its benefits as butts of invidious distinction?" No American, the Federalists said, could justifiably oppose a man "commencing in life without any other stock but industry and economy," and "by the mere efforts of these" rising "to opulence and wealth." If social mobility were to be meaningful then some sorts of distinctions were necessary. If government by a natural aristocracy, said Wilson, meant "nothing more or less than a government of the best men in the community," then who could object to it? . . .

But the Antifederalist intention and implication were too conspicuous to be avoided: all distinctions, whether naturally based or not, were being challenged. Robert Livingston in the New York Convention saw as clearly as anyone what he thought the Antifederalists were really after, and he minced no words in replying to Smith's attack on the natural aristocracy. Since Smith had classified as aristocrats not only "the rich and the great" but also "the wise, the learned, and those eminent for their talents or great virtues:' aristocrats to the Antifederalists had in substance become all men of merit. Such men, such aristocrats, were not to be chosen for public office, questioned Livingston in rising disbelief in the implications of the Antifederalist argument, "because the people will not have confidence in them; that is, the people will not have confidence in those who best deserve and most possess their confidence?" The logic of Smith's reasoning, said Livingston, would lead to a government by the dregs of society, a monstrous government where all "the unjust, the selfish, the unsocial feelings:'where all "the vices, the infirmities, the passions of the people" would be represented. "Can it be thought:' asked Livingston in an earlier development of this argument to the Society of the Cincinnati [a hereditary society formed by Revolutionary army officers in 1783], "that an enlightened people believe the science of government level to the meanest capacity? That experience, application, and education are unnecessary to those who are to frame laws for the government of the state?" Yet strange as it may have seemed to Livingston and others in the 1780's, America was actually approaching the point where ability, education, and wealth were becoming liabilities, not assets, in the attaining of public office. "Envy and the ambition of the unworthy" were robbing respectable men of the rank they merited. "To these causes:' said Livingston, "we owe the cloud that obscures our internal governments."

The course of the debates over the Constitution seemed to confirm what the Federalists had believed all along. Antifederalism represented the climax of a "war" that was, in the words of Theodore Sedgwick, being "levied on the virtue, property, and distinctions in the community." The opponents of the Constitution, despite some, "particularly in Virginia:' who were operating "from the most honorable and patriotic motives:' were essentially identical with those who were responsible for the evils the states were suffering from in the eighties - "narrowminded politicians . . . under the influence of local views." "Whilst many ostensible reasons are assigned" for the Antifederalists' opposition, charged Washington, "the real ones are concealed behind the Curtains, because they are not of a nature to appear in open day." "The real object of all their zeal in opposing the system:' agreed Madison, was to maintain "the supremacy of the State Legislatures:' with all that meant in the printing of money and the violation of contracts. The Antifederalists or those for whom the Antifederalists spoke, whether their spokesmen realized it or not, were "none but the horse-jockey, the mushroom merchant, the running and dishonest speculator," those "who owe the most and have the least to pay," those "whose dependence and expectations are upon changes in government, and distracted times:' men of "desperate Circumstances:' those "in Every State" who "have Debts to pay, Interests to support or Fortunes to make: 'those, in short, who "wish for scrambling Times. " Apart from a few of their intellectual leaders the Antifederalists were thought to be an ill-bred lot: "Their education has been rather indifferent - they have been accustomed to think on the small scale, "They were often blustering demagogues trying to push their way into office "men of much self-importance and supposed skill in politics, who are not of sufficient consequence to obtain public employment." Hence they were considered to be jealous and mistrustful of "every one in the higher offices of society," unable to bear to see others possessing "that fancied blessing, to which, alas! they must themselves aspire in vain." In the Federalist mind therefore the struggle over the Constitution was not one between kinds of wealth or property, or one between commercial or noncommercial elements of the population, but rather represented a broad social division between those who believed in the right of a natural aristocracy to speak for the people and those who did not.

Against this threat from the licentious the Federalists pictured themselves as the defenders of the worthy, of those whom they called "the better sort of people," those, said John Jay, "who are orderly and industrious, who are content with their situations and not uneasy in their circumstances." Because the Federalists were fearful that republican equality was becoming "that perfect equality which deadens the motives of industry, and places Demerit on a Footing with Virtue:' they were obsessed with the need to insure that the proper amount of inequality and natural distinctions be recognized. . . . Robert Morris, for example, was convinced there were social differences-even in Pennsylvania. "What!" he exclaimed in scornful amazement at John Smilie's argument that a republic admitted of no social superiorities. "is it insisted that there is no distinction of character?" Respectability, said Morris with conviction, was not confined to property. "Surely persons possessed of knowledge, judgment, information, integrity, and having extensive connections, are not to be classed with persons void of reputation or character." . . .

It was not simply the number of public securities, or credit outstanding, or the number of ships, or the amount of money possessed that made a man think of himself as one of the natural elite. It was much more subtle than the mere possession of wealth: it was a deeper social feeling, a sense of being socially established, of possessing attributes-family, education, and refinement-that others lacked, above all, of being accepted by and being able to move easily among those who considered themselves to be the respectable and cultivated. It is perhaps anachronistic to describe this social sense as a class interest, for it often transcended immediate political or economic concerns, and . . . was designed to cut through narrow occupational categories. The Republicans of Philadelphia, for example, repeatedly denied that they represented an aristocracy with a united class interest. "We are of different occupations; of different sects of religion; and have different views of life. No factions or private system can comprehend us all." Yet with all their assertions of diversified interests the Republicans were not without a social consciousness in their quarrel with the supporters of the Pennsylvania Constitution. If there were any of us ambitious for power, their apology continued, then there would be no need to change the Constitution, for we surely could attain power under the present Constitution. "We have already seen how easy the task is for any character to rise into power and consequence under it. And there are some of us, who think not so meanly of ourselves, as to dread any rivalship from those who are now in office."

In 1787 this kind of elitist social consciousness was brought into play as perhaps never before in eighteenth-century America, as gentlemen up and down the continent submerged their sectional and economic differences in the face of what seemed to be a threat to the very foundations of society. Despite his earlier opposition to the Order of the Cincinnati, Theodore Sedgwick, like other frightened New Englanders, now welcomed the organization as a source of strength in the battle for the Constitution. The fear of social disruption that had run through much of the writing of the eighties was brought to a head to eclipse all other fears. . . . The Federalists were astonished at the outpouring in 1787 of influential and respectable people who had earlier remained quiescent. Too many of "the better sort of people," it was repeatedly said, had withdrawn at the end of the war "from the theatre of public action, to scenes of retirement and ease," and thus "demagogues of desperate fortunes, mere adventurers in fraud, were left to act unopposed." After all, it was explained, "when the wicked rise, men hide themselves." Even the problems of Massachusetts in 1786, noted General Benjamin Lincoln, the repressor of the Shaysites, were not caused by the rebels, but by the laxity of "the good people of the state." But the lesson of this laxity was rapidly being learned. Everywhere, it seemed, men of virtue, good sense, and property, "almost the whole body of our enlighten'd and leading characters in every state:' were awakened in support of stronger government. "The scum which was thrown upon the surface by the fermentation of the war is daily sinking:' Benjamin Rush told Richard Price in 1786, while a pure spirit is occupying its place."

Still, in the face of this preponderance of wealth and respectability in support of the Constitution, what remains extraordinary about 1787-88 is not the weakness and disunity but the political strength of Antifederalism. That large numbers of Americans could actually reject a plan of government created by a body "composed of the first characters in the Continent" and backed by Washington and nearly the whole of the natural aristocracy of the country said more about the changing character of American politics and society in the eighties than did the Constitution's eventual acceptance. It was indeed a portent of what was to come. . . .

If the new national government was to promote the common good as forcefully as any state government, and if, as the Federalists believed, a major source of the vices of the eighties lay in the abuse of state power, then there was something apparently contradictory about the new federal Constitution, which after all represented not a weakening of the dangerous power of republican government but rather a strengthening of it. "The complaints against the separate governments, even by the friends of the new plan:' remarked the Antifederalist James Winthrop, "are not that they have not power enough, but that they are disposed to make a bad use of what power they have." . . What, in other words, was different about the new federal Constitution that would enable it to mitigate the effects of tyrannical majorities? What would keep the new federal government from succumbing to the same pressures that had beset the state governments? The answer the Federalists gave to these questions unmistakably reveals the social bias underlying both their fears of the unrestrained state legislatures and their expectations for their federal remedy. . . .

The Federalists were not as much opposed to the governmental power of the states as to the character of the people who were wielding it. The constitutions of most of the states were not really at fault. Massachusetts after all possessed a nearly perfect constitution. What actually bothered the Federalists was the sort of people who had been able to gain positions of authority in the state governments, particularly in the state legislatures. Much of the quarrel with the viciousness, instability, and injustice of the various state governments was at bottom social. "For," as John Dickinson emphasized, "the government will partake of the qualities of those whose authority is prevalent.". . . Since "it cannot be expected that things will go well, when persons of vicious principles, and loose morals are in authority," it was the large number of obscure, ignorant, and unruly men occupying the state legislatures, and not the structure of the governments, that was the real cause of the evils so much complained of.

The Federalist image of the Constitution as a sort of "philosopher's stone" was indeed appropriate: it was a device intended to transmute base materials into gold and thereby prolong the life of the republic. Patrick Henry acutely perceived what the Federalists were driving at. "The Constitution:' he said in the Virginia Convention, "reflects in the most degrading and mortifying manner on the virtue, integrity, and wisdom of the state legislatures; it presupposes that the chosen few who go to Congress will have more upright hearts, and more enlightened minds, than those who are members of the individual legislatures." The new Constitution was structurally no different from the constitutions of some of the states. Yet the powers of the new central government were not as threatening as the powers of the state governments precisely because the Federalists believed different kinds of persons would hold them. They anticipated that somehow the new government would be staffed largely by "the worthy," the naturally social aristocracy of the country. "After all:' said Pelatiah Webster, putting his finger on the crux of the Federalist argument, "the grand secret of forming a good government, is, to put good men into the administration: for wild, vicious, or idle men, will ever make a bad government, let its principles be ever so good."

What was needed then, the Federalists argued, was to restore a proper share of political influence to those who through their social attributes commanded the respect of the people and who through their enlightenment and education knew the true policy of government. "The people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD:' wrote Hamilton in The Federalist but they did not "always reason right about the means of promoting it." They sometimes erred, largely because they were continually beset "by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it." The rights of man were simple, quickly felt, and easily comprehended: in matters of liberty, "the mechanic and the philosopher, the farmer and the scholar are all upon a footing." But to the Federalists matters of government were quite different: government was "a complicated science, and requires abilities and knowledge, of a variety of other subjects, to understand it." "Our states cannot be well governed," the Federalists concluded, "till our old influential characters acquire confidence and authority." Only if the respected and worthy lent their natural intellectual abilities and their natural social influence to political authority could governmental order be maintained.

Perhaps no one probed this theme more frenziedly than did Jonathan Jackson in his Thoughts upon the Political Situation of the United States, published in 1788. For Jackson the problems of the eighties were not merely intellectual but personal. Although at the close of the Revolution he had been one of the half-dozen richest residents of Newburyport, Massachusetts, by the end of the eighties not only had his wealth been greatly diminished but his position in Newburyport society had been usurped by a newer, less well-educated, less refined group of merchants. His pamphlet, expressing his bitter reaction to this displacement, exaggerated but did not misrepresent a common Federalist anxiety.

Although differences of rank were inevitable in every society, wrote Jackson, "there never was a people upon earth . . . who were in less hazard than the people of this country, of an aristocracy's prevailing-or anything like it, dangerous to liberty." America possessed very little "inequality of fortune. "There was "no rank of any consequence, nor hereditary titles." "Landed property is in general held in small portions, even in southern states, compared with the manors, parks and royal demesnes of most countries." And the decay of primogeniture and entail, together with the "diverse" habits and passions between fathers and sons, worked to retard the engrossing of large estates. The only kind of aristocracy possible in America would bean "aristocracy of experience, and of the best understandings," a "natural aristocracy" that had to dominate public authority in order to prevent America from degenerating into democratic licentiousness, into a government where the people "would be directed by no rule but their own will and caprice, or the interested wishes of a very few persons, who affect to speak the sentiments of the people." . . .

In a review of Jackson's pamphlet Noah Webster raised the crucial question. It was commendable, he wrote, that only the wise and honest men be elected to office. "But how can a constitution ensure the choice of such men? A constitution that leaves the choice entirely with the people?" It was not enough simply to state that such persons were to be chosen. Indeed, many of the state constitutions already declared "that senators and representatives shall be elected from the most wise, able, and honest citizens . . . . The truth is, such declarations are empty things, as they require that to be done which cannot be defined, much less enforced." It seemed to Webster that no constitution in a popular state could guarantee that only the natural aristocracy would be elected to office. How could the federal Constitution accomplish what the state constitutions like Massachusetts's and Connecticut's had been unable to accomplish? How could it insure that only the respectable and worthy would hold power?

The evils of state politics, the Federalists had become convinced, flowed from the narrowness of interest and vision of the state legislators. "We find the representatives of countries and corporations in the Legislatures of the States:' said Madison, "much more disposed to sacrifice the aggregate interest, and even authority, to the local views of their Constituents" than to promote the general good at the expense of their electors. Small electoral districts enabled obscure and designing men to gain power by practicing "the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried." Already observers in the eighties had noticed that a governmental official "standing, not on local, but a general election of the whole body of the people" tended to have a superior, broader vision by "being the interested and natural conservator of the universal interest." "The most effectual remedy for the local biass" of senators or of any elected official, said Madison, was to impress upon their minds "an attention to the interest of the whole Society by making them the choice of the whole Society." If elected officials were concerned with only the interest of those who elected them, then their outlook was most easily broadened by enlarging their electorate. Perhaps nowhere was this contrast between localism and cosmopolitanism more fully analyzed and developed than in a pamphlet written by William Beers of Connecticut. Although Beers wrote in 179 1, not to justify the Constitution, his insight into the workings of American politics was precisely that of the Federalists of 1787.

"The people of a state:' wrote Beers, "may justly be divided into two classes": those, on one hand, "who are independent in their principles, of sound judgments, actuated by no local or personal influence, and who understand, and ever act with a view to the public good"; and those, on the other hand, who were "the dependent, the weak, the biassed, local party men-the dupes of artifice and ambition," . . . [T]he best people were often overpowered in small district elections, where "the success of a candidate may depend in a great degree on the quantity of his exertions for the moment:' on his becoming "popular, for a single occasion, by qualities and means, which could not possibly establish a permanent popularity or one which should pervade a large community," on his seizing "the occasion of some prevailing passion, some strong impression of separate interest, some popular clamor against the existing administration, or some other false and fatal prejudice, " . . . But an entire state could not be so deluded. "No momentary glare of deceptive qualities, no intrigues, no exertions will be sufficient to make a whole people lose sight of those points of character which alone can entitle one to their universal confidence." With a large electorate the advance toward public honors was slow and gradual. "Much time is necessary to become the object of general observation and confidence. " Only established social leaders would thus be elected by a broad constituency. Narrow the electorate, "and you leave but a single step between the lowest and the most elevated station. You take ambition by the hand, you raise her from obscurity, and clothe her in purple." With respect to the size of the legislative body, the converse was true. Reduce the number of its members and thereby guarantee a larger proportion of the right kind of people to be elected, for "the more you enlarge the body, the greater chance there is, of introducing weak and unqualified men."

Constitutional reformers in the eighties had continually attempted to apply these insights to the states, by decreasing the size of the legislatures and by proposing at-large elections for governors and senators in order to "make a segregation of upright, virtuous, intelligent men, to guide the helm of public affairs." Now these ideas were to be applied to the new federal government with hopefully even more effectiveness. The great height of the new national government, it was expected, would prevent unprincipled and vicious men, the obscure and local-minded men who had gained power in the state legislatures, from scaling its walls. The federal government would act as a kind of sieve, extracting "from the mass of the society the purest and noblest characters which it contains." Election by the people in large districts would temper demagoguery and crass electioneering and would thus, said James Wilson, "be most likely to obtain men of intelligence and up-rightness." "Faction," it was believed, "will decrease in proportion to the diminution of counsellors." It would be "transferred from the state legislatures to Congress, where it will be more easily controlled." The men who would sit in the federal legislature, because few in number and drawn from a broad electorate, would be "the best men in the country." "For," wrote John Jay in The Federalist "although town or country, or other contracted influence, may place men in State assemblies, or senates, or courts of justice, or executive departments, yet more general and extensive reputation for talents and other qualifications will be necessary to recommend men to offices under the national government." Only by first bringing these sorts of men, the natural aristocracy of the country, back into dominance in politics, the Federalists were convinced, could Americans begin to solve the pressing foreign and domestic problems facing them. Only then, concluded Jay, would it "result that the administration, the political counsels, and the judicial decisions of the national government will be more wise, systematical, and judicious than those of individual States, and consequently more satisfactory with respect to other nations, as well as more safe with respect to us." The key therefore to the prospects of the new federal government, compared to the experience of the confederation of sovereign states, declared Francis Corbin of Virginia in words borrowed from Jean Louis De Lolme, the Genevan commentator on the English constitution, lay in the fact that the federal Constitution "places the remedy in the hands which feel the disorder; the other places the remedy in those hands which cause the disorder."

In short, through the artificial contrivance of the Constitution overlying an expanded society the Federalists meant to restore and to prolong the traditional kind of elitist influence in politics that social developments, especially since the Revolution, were undermining. As the defenders if not always the perpetrators of these developments-the "disorder" of the 1780's - the Antifederalists could scarcely have missed the social implications of the Federalist program. The Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period, and as such it dictated the character of the Antifederalist response. It was therefore inevitable that the Antifederalists should have charged that the new government was "dangerously adapted to the purposes of an immediate aristocratic tyranny." In state after state the Antifederalists reduced the issue to those social terms predetermined by the Federalists themselves: the Constitution was a plan intended to "raise the fortunes and respectability of the well-born few, and oppress the plebians"; it was "a continental exertion of the well-born of America to obtain that darling domination,which they have not been able to accomplish in their respective states"; it "will lead to an aristocratical government, and establish tyranny over us.". . .

Aristocratic principles were in fact "interwoven" in the very fabric of the proposed government. If a government was "so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it:' then it would "according to the natural course of things" end up in the hands of "the natural aristocracy." It went almost without saying that the awesome president and the exalted Senate, "a compound of monarchy and aristocracy," would be dangerously far removed from the people. But even the House of Representatives, the very body that "should be a true picture of the people, possess a knowledge of their circumstances and their wants, sympathize in all their distresses, and disposed to seek their true interest," was without "a tincture of democracy." Since it could never collect "the interests, feelings, and opinions of three or four millions of people:' it was better understood as "an Assistant Aristocratical Branch" to the Senate than as a real representation of the people . . . . The Antifederalists thus came to oppose the new national government for the same reason the Federalists favored it: because its very structure and detachment from the people would work to exclude any kind of actual and local interest representation and prevent those who were not rich, well-born, or prominent from exercising political power. Both sides fully appreciated the central issue the Constitution posed and grappled with it throughout the debates: whether a professedly popular government should actually be in the hands of, rather than simply derived from, common ordinary people.

Out of the division in 1787-88 over this issue, an issue which was as conspicuously social as any in American history, the Antifederalists emerged as the spokesmen for the growing American antagonism to aristocracy and as the defenders of the most intimate participation in politics of the widest variety of people possible. It was not from lack of vision that the Antifederalists feared the new government. Although their viewpoint was intensely localist, it was grounded in as perceptive an understanding of the social basis of American politics as that of the Federalists. Most of the Antifederalists were majoritarians with respect to the state legislatures but not with respect to the national legislature, because they presumed as well as the Federalists did that different sorts of people from those who sat in the state assemblies would occupy the Congress. Whatever else may be said about the Antifederalists, their populism cannot be impugned. They were true champions of the most extreme kind of democratic and egalitarian politics expressed in the Revolutionary era. Convinced that "it has been the principal care of free governments to guard against the encroachments of the great:' the Antifederalists believed that popular government itself, as defined by the principles of 1776, was endangered by the new national government. If the Revolution had been a transfer of power from the few to the many, then the federal Constitution clearly represented an abnegation of the Revolution. For, as Richard Henry Lee wrote in his Letters from the Federal Farmer, "every man of reflection must see, that the change now proposed, is a transfer of power from the many to the few." . . .

To the Federalists the greatest dangers to republicanism were flowing not, as the old Whigs had thought, from the rulers or from any distinctive minority in the community, but from the widespread participation of the people in the government. It now seemed increasingly evident that if the public good not only of the United States as a whole but even of the separate states were to be truly perceived and promoted, the American people must abandon their Revolutionary reliance on their representative state legislatures and place their confidence in the highmindedness of the natural leaders of the society, which ideally everyone had the opportunity of becoming. Since the Federalists presumed that only such a self-conscious elite could transcend the many narrow and contradictory interests inevitable in any society, however small, the measure of a good government became its capacity for insuring the predominance of these kinds of natural leaders who knew better than the people as a whole what was good for the society.


The result was an amazing display of confidence in constitutionalism, in the efficacy of institutional devices for solving social and political problems. Through the proper arrangement of new institutional structures the Federalists aimed to turn the political and social developments that were weakening the place of "the better sort of people" in government back upon themselves and to make these developments the very source of the perpetuation of the natural aristocracy's dominance of politics. Thus the Federalists did not directly reject democratic politics as it had manifested itself in the 1780's; rather they attempted to adjust to this politics in order to control and mitigate its effects. In short they offered the country an elitist theory of democracy. They did not see themselves as repudiating either the Revolution or popular government, but saw themselves as saving both from their excesses. If the Constitution were not established, they told themselves and the country over and over, then republicanism was doomed, the grand experiment was over, and a division of the confederacy, monarchy, or worse would result. . . .