American Experiment (27 page)

If leaders such as Adams and Jefferson failed to understand the strategy of national parties, could anyone else have done so? We know of only one man who did—William Manning, a farmer and tavernkeeper in North Billerica, Massachusetts. Around 1797 Manning wrote a tract entitled “The Key of Libberty.” To counter the organized upper-class power of merchants, lawyers, ministers, and doctors, he called for a “Society to be composed of all the Republicans & Labourers in the United States” and organized on a class (educational), town, county, state, “Continental,” and even international basis. The associations would be composed of only those who “Labour for a living.” After intense political education in small classes with access to a library and magazines, the associations would mass their power against the elite at the polls. The “ondly Remidy” against existing evils, he wrote, “is by improveing our Rights as freemen in elections,” as long as “we ware posesed of knowledge anough to act rationally in them.” Manning concluded his tract with a constitution that spelled out the structure and powers of the new association.

The annals of the poor. All we know about Manning is that he marched to Concord on a famous April day but arrived too late to fight at the bridge, that he later served two terms as a Billerica selectman, and that he wrote one of the most prescient tracts in American history. And we know one other thing about him—that he submitted his manuscript, with the words formed one by one as though by a child, and with countless misspellings, to the
Independent Chronicle
, the only pro-Jefferson newspaper in Boston. The newspaper did not publish “The Key of Libberty,” however, for the editor about this time was arraigned for seditious libel under the Sedition Act. The editor died before his trial came on; his brother and clerk went to jail. By chance Manning’s papers survived.

We will never know how many other village intellectuals were thinking in as radical and creative terms as Manning, while the nation’s political leaders were occupied by thoughts of repression and secession. The nation would wait many years before finding another untutored thinker who would unite so brilliantly the concepts of thought and action, knowledge and power.

If, as Presidents and historians agreed, a dominant theme of the early republic was “the idea of America as an experiment, undertaken in defiance of history, fraught with risk, problematic in outcome,” how was the experiment faring by the end of the first decade? That question had to be asked, for experimentation, no matter how unwitting or radical, must not only tolerate testing in terms of certain general criteria—it
requires
such testing. Otherwise experiments would serve only as mindless leaps into the dark. But by what criteria—by what general values, principles, purposes—could the experiment be assayed? New generations would advance new standards of judgment, but the initial criteria for the early republic had to be those of early Americans themselves.

The first was of course sheer survival, as a people, as a nation. The Declaration of Independence, in trumpeting the unalienable rights of man, listed “life” before liberty, “safety” before happiness. The Constitution was carefully framed to gain the economic and military strength of a larger republic without threatening the security of individual states. Some Americans had greeted this effort with skepticism. To convert a continent into a republic, said Patrick Henry, was “a work too great for human wisdom.” It was impossible, said another doubter, “for one code of laws to suit Georgia and Massachusetts.” The constitutional solution was a radical and previously untested challenge to traditional republican thought, one that, in Benjamin Barber’s recent words, “turned the nation’s early years into an unprecedented historical experiment,” and one that could be met only by a people that, according to James Madison, had not allowed “a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.” For a decade, at least, the experiment in federalism had survived, despite efforts toward nullification and secession—and despite, as well, unrest and some violence at home, bloodshed along the western borders, and conflict with two great powers abroad.

National survival required economic strength. Agriculture continued to be the main American production during the 1790s, and agriculture continued to boom. Stimulated by better techniques of fertilization, crop
rotation, erosion control, and other improvements, crop output skyrocketed in some places. Cotton exports from the Carolina coast rose from about 10,000 pounds a year at decade’s start to 8 million pounds by decade’s end. Wheat and corn production expanded in the North and West.

Commerce also grew. Exports rose strongly from an average of $20 million annually in the early 1790s to four times that by decade’s end. Imports increased about fivefold during the 1790s. With population surging in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the sinews of continental strength were evident in the growth of manufactories, the expansion of trade especially along the big rivers, and the blossoming of ports like New Orleans. While road conditions typically ranged from fair to poor, and most rivers still had to be forded, men were building more bridges and establishing ferries. By 1800 New Yorkers were boasting of their Cayuga Bridge, more than one mile long and three lanes wide.

National strength gained from a burgeoning population. Between 1790 and 1800 the population spurted from about 3.9 million to about 5.3 million. Ohio and Mississippi were among the fastest-growing areas. Most of the rise was due to the fecundity of Americans, especially of American farm parents needing sons to help till the fields; immigration probably amounted to only about 50,000 persons for the whole decade.

Of the immigrants, those from the British Isles still predominated. But among the newcomers were people from less-known places—Oyo, Dahomey, Benin, Biafra, usually by way of Barbados and other Caribbean islands. These were African slaves. Kidnapped from their villages, sold often by other Africans to European traders for cloth or liquor or guns, herded in chains onto slave ships, they had survived the horrors of the Atlantic passage—heat, filth, stench, disease, hopeless efforts at resistance to be herded into slave-trading ports for sale mainly to planters.

National security, individual safety, economic well-being—as these fundamental needs were to a substantial degree satisfied for much of the population, other, “higher” needs were created or enhanced. Probably the most powerful of these in the 1790s was for individual liberty. Here the record was mixed. Congress had passed, and the states had ratified, a Bill of Rights of wide scope and noble sentiments. The flush of prosperity doubtless had broadened economic opportunity and liberty of choice for many Americans. The passage and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws, however, had shown how frail was the defense of these liberties. The enactment of these laws could be explained, but to explain is not to excuse. The Sedition Act lay like a blot across the luminous pages of the Bill of Rights.

Equality, like liberty, was as powerful in its appeal to early Americans as it was amorphous in meaning. “All men are created equal,” proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, before even mentioning the ideal of liberty. But informed Americans had little thought that the ideal of equality required collective action to help equalize the conditions of men born in poverty, ignorance, disease, malnutrition, and despair; they would have been aghast at the notion, if indeed they could even grasp it. Rather the term meant to most Americans the idea that men were created equal only in their God-given natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

It was obvious that men in fact—much less women and children—were most unequal in their conditions at birth and that they remained unequal in intellectual and physical endowment, economic status, intelligence, appearance, and social rank, though a few fought their way out of poverty to high position, and a few of the undeserving stumbled down the primrose path to inferior rank and disgrace. As in the case of liberty, few Americans asked the tough explicit questions about the meaning of equality: What kind of equality—legal, political, economic, social? Equality to be achieved how—by the natural workings of the social and economic order, by religious teachings, by the deliberate intervention of the community, perhaps even through government? And above all, equality for whom? All men, rich and poor? Between men and women? Between adults and children? Equality for Indians, immigrants, aliens? Equality for black people?

By the 1790s, slavery had become a peculiarly southern phenomenon. Most of the northern and central states had abolished it by legislative or judicial action. Not that the freedmen enjoyed much liberty or equality; they were usually denied their political and social rights, and discriminated against. “But when we compare them to the slaves of the South,” a French traveler had observed, “what a difference we find!—In the South, the Blacks are in a state of abjection difficult to describe.” Nine out of ten Afro-Americans lived in the South, and almost all of these—about 96 percent—were enslaved. Accounting for over a third of the South’s population, they outnumbered whites in many southern counties, though in no southern states.

Afro-Americans were better off in the upper South than the lower, under more affluent planters, in prosperous times. In a miniature class system encouraged by the masters, household workers and artisans were usually better treated than field hands, and men better than women, because often women not only worked from sunup to sundown in the fields but also were responsible for their families’ cooking and parenting. Conditions on the plantations of even the “better” masters could be harsh. Washington resorted to the whip to maintain order, and a Polish poet visiting Mount
Vernon in 1798 found the “negroes’ huts…far more miserable than the poorest of the cottages of our peasants.” In general, the life of the enslaved Afro-American was nasty, poor, brutish, and often short.

But even aside from the enslaved, life under the new republic was heavily inegalitarian, even by late-eighteenth-century standards in America and Western Europe. Gross differences among men abounded in income, property, education, speech, and social status. Women lay outside the pale. Custom, men’s attitudes, the English common-law heritage, and the teachings of the Protestant churches overwhelmed the efforts of the few women conscious of this inequality. Abigail Adams was one of them. “I will never consent,” she wrote her sister, “to have our sex considered in an inferior point of light. Let each planet shine in their own orbit. God and nature designed it so—if man is Lord, woman is
Lordess
—that is what I contend for.” It was about the same time that John Adams wrote his son Thomas: “The source of revolution, democracy, Jacobinism…has been a systematical dissolution of the true family authority. There can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mothers and children to the father.” But he asked Thomas to keep these words from his mother. If she heard of his views, he said, it would “infallibly raise a rebellion.”

Liberté, égalité
—the third great value in the revolutionary war cry of the 1790s was
fraternité.
The idea of fraternity—of a close bond based on fellowship, affection, shared goals, mutuality of interest, and loyalty—was by no means new to Americans, whether of Pilgrim or recent immigrant stock. But those who aped the latest Parisian fashion and addressed one another as “Citizen” or “Citizeness” did not always understand the true meaning of fraternity or its relationship to the two other norms in the revolutionary trinity. In fact, the three ideas could clash with one another as well as reinforce one another. “I love liberty, and I hate equality,” the corrosive John Randolph of Roanoke exclaimed, and this sentiment was backed by many Americans who saw the two concepts as opposites. In practice, it is true, the three values could be mutually reinforcing, depending on their definition and application; but explicit definition of this kind of value was not in intellectual fashion in the 1790s.

Even if it were, and even though the revolutionary trinity had considerable kindling power among leaders of the new republic, the three great symbols were still not enough for many Americans. They groped for something more, for some loftier myth or purpose that would transcend the Lockean heritage of individualism and narrow equality. This myth was religious, ethical, spiritual; the purpose was to rise above self-interest and to take part in a collective effort of mutual help, fellowship, citizenship,
community. The impetus was frankly religious and moralistic, even in a republic that had disestablished religion. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” Washington asserted in his Farewell Address, “Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them.”

Two things were necessary to create the republic of virtue, one of them obvious at the time, the other less clear. The first was education. “The Knowledge nesecary for every freeman to have is A Knowledge of Mankind,” William Manning wrote in his tract, and “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” but the tavernkeeper added that the few were “always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national acadimyes & grammer schools, in ordir to make places for men to live without work,” but were always opposed to “cheep schools and woman schools, the only or prinsaple means by which learning is spred amongue the Many.” The other great requisite was leadership—the kind of leadership that, after meeting and hence extinguishing men’s basic wants and needs, could raise followers to higher levels of need and value—to levels of individual self-expression and self-actualization, of collective equality, dignity, and justice, of civic virtue and ethical commitment. Such leadership was lacking in the second half of the decade of the 1790s.