Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (10 page)

Most important of all, America was the premier land of liberty. The Americans had always been a vigilant people, jealous of their liberty and, as Edmund Burke had noted, snuffing tyranny in every tainted breeze. They knew—the English radical Richard Price told them—that “a Spirit,” originating in America, was arising in the Western world. This spirit promised “a State of Society more favourable to peace, virtue, Science, and liberty (and consequently to human happiness and dignity) than has yet been known. . . . The minds of men are becoming more enlighten’d, and the silly despots of the world are likely to be forced to respect human rights and to take care not to govern too much lest they should not govern at all.”
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By the early 1790s Americans were not surprised that their country was in fact attracting refugees from the tyrannies of the Old World. The enlightened everywhere had come to recognize the United States as the special asylum for liberty. In the spring of 1794 the United Irishmen of Dublin sent the renowned scientist Joseph Priestley their best wishes as he fled from persecution in England to the New World. “You are going to a happier world—the world of Washington and Franklin. . . . You are going to a country where science is turned to better uses.” Priestley was only the most famous of the many European refugees who arrived in America during the 1790 s. Thus most Americans had every reason to congratulate themselves, as they did at every opportunity, for being, in scientist David Rittenhouse’s words, “an asylum to the good, to the persecuted, and to the oppressed of other climes.”
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Americans were free and independent because, as they repeatedly told themselves, they were an intelligent people who could not be easily
fooled by their leaders. The Revolution itself had stimulated them. It had given “a spring to the active powers of the inhabitants,” said South Carolina historian David Ramsay in 1789, “and set them on thinking, speaking, and acting far beyond that to which they had been accustomed.”
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Levels of literacy may not have been high by modern standards, but by eighteenth-century standards, at least for white Americans in the North, they were higher than almost any other place on earth and were rapidly climbing, especially for white women. All their reading made them enlightened. Jefferson was convinced that an American farmer rather than an English farmer had conceived of making the rim of a wheel from a single piece of wood. He knew it had to be an American because the idea had been suggested by Homer, and “ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.”
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With the formation of the many state constitutions and especially with the formation of the federal Constitution of 1787 Americans had demonstrated to the world how to apply reason to politics. They knew that all previous nations had had their governments imposed on them by conquerors or by some supreme lawgivers or had found themselves ensnared by governments born in accident, caprice, or violence. They repeatedly assured themselves that they were, in John Jay’s words, “the first people whom heaven has favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.” With the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation and the creation of their new federal Constitution, declared David Ramsay, they showed that governments could be changed to fit new circumstances. They had therefore placed “the science of politics on a footing with the other sciences, by opening it to improvements from experience, and the discoveries of future ages.”
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In addition, Americans thought that they were less superstitious and more rational than the peoples of Europe. They had actually carried out religious reforms that European liberals could only dream about. Many Americans were convinced that their Revolution, in the words of the New York constitution of 1777, had been designed to end the “spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests” had “scourged mankind.”
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Not only had Americans achieved true religious liberty, not just the toleration that
the English made so much of, but their blending of the various European religions and nationalities had made their society much more homogeneous than those of the Old World. The European migrants had been unable to bring all of their various regional and local cultures with them, and re-creating and sustaining many of the peculiar customs, craft holidays, and primitive practices of the Old World proved difficult. Consequently, morris dances, charivaries, skimmingtons, and other folk practices were much less common in America than in Britain or Europe. The New England Puritans, moreover, had banned many of these popular festivals and customs, including Christmas, and elsewhere the mixing and settling of different peoples had worn most of them away. In New England all that remained of Old World holidays was Pope’s Day, November 5—the colonists’ version of Guy Fawkes Day. Since enlightened elites everywhere in the Western world regarded these plebeian customs and holidays as remnants of superstition and barbarism, their relative absence in America was seen as an additional sign of the New World’s precocious enlightenment.
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America had a common language, unlike the European nations, none of which was linguistically homogeneous. In 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. Englishmen from Yorkshire were incomprehensible to those from Cornwall and vice versa. By contrast, Americans could understand one another from Maine to Georgia. It was very obvious why this should be so, said John Witherspoon, president of Princeton. Since Americans were “much more unsettled, and move frequently from place to place, they are not as liable to local peculiarities, either in accent or phraseology.”
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With the Revolution some Americans wished to carry this uniformity further. They wanted their language “purged of its barbaric dross” and made “as pure, simple, and systematic as our politics.” It was bound to happen in any case. Republics, said John Adams, had always attained a greater “purity, copiousness, and perfection of language than other forms of government.”
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Americans expected the development of an American English that would be different from the English of the former mother country, a language that would reflect the peculiar character of the American people. Noah Webster, who would eventually become famous for his American dictionary, thought that language had divided the English people from one another. The court and the upper ranks of the aristocracy set the standards of usage and thus put themselves at odds with the language spoken by the rest of the country. By contrast, America’s standard was fixed by the general practice of the nation, and therefore Americans had “the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language, and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind.” Indeed, Webster was convinced that Americans already “speak the most
pure English
now known in the world.” Within a century and a half, he predicted, North America would be peopled with a hundred millions of people, “all speaking the same language.” Nowhere else in the world would such large numbers of people “be able to associate and converse together like children of the same family.”
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Others had even more grandiose visions for the spread of America’s language. John Adams was among those who suggested that American English would eventually become “the next universal language.” In 1789 even a French official agreed; in a moment of giddiness he actually predicted that American English was destined to replace diplomatic French as the language of the world. Americans, he said, “tempered by misfortune,” were “more human, more generous, more tolerant, all qualities that make one want to share the opinions, adopt the customs, and speak the language of such a people.”
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Americans believed that their English might conquer the world because they were the only true citizens of the world. To be enlightened was to be, as Washington said, “a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large.” The Revolutionary leaders were always eager to demonstrate their cosmopolitanism; they aimed not at becoming more American but at becoming more enlightened. As yet they had little sense that loyalty to their state or nation was incompatible with their cosmopolitanism.
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David Ramsay claimed he was “a citizen of the world and therefore despise[d] national reflections.” Yet he did not believe he was being “inconsistent” in hoping that the professions would be “administered to my country by its own sons.” Joel Barlow did not think he was any less American just because he ran for election to the French National Convention in 1792–1793. The many state histories written in the aftermath of the Revolution were anything but celebrations of localism. Indeed, declared Ramsay, who wrote a history of his adopted state of South Carolina, they were testimonies to American cosmopolitanism; the state histories were designed to “wear away prejudices—rub off asperities and mould us into a homogeneous people.”
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Intense local attachments were common to peasants and backward peoples, but educated gentlemen were supposed to be at home anywhere in the world. Indeed, to be free of local prejudices and parochial ties was what defined a liberally educated person. One’s humanity was measured by one’s ability to relate to strangers, and Americans prided themselves on their hospitality and their treatment of strangers, thus further contributing to the developing myth of their exceptionalism. Indeed, as CrÈve-coeur pointed out, in America the concept of “stranger” scarcely seemed to exist: “A traveller in Europe becomes a stranger as soon as he quits his own kingdom; but it is otherwise here. We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person’s country; the variety of our soils, situations, climates, governments, and produce hath something which must please everyone.”
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“In what part of the globe,” asked Benjamin Rush, “was the ‘great family of mankind’ given as a toast before it was given in the republican states of America?”
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T
HE INSTITUTION
that many Americans believed best embodied these cosmopolitan ideals of fraternity was Freemasonry. Not only did Masonry create enduring national icons (like the pyramid and the all-seeing eye of Providence on the Great Seal of the United States), but it brought people together in new ways and helped fulfill the republican dream of reorganizing social relationships. It was a major means by which thousands of Americans could think of themselves as especially enlightened.

Freemasonry took its modern meaning in Great Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first Grand Lodge was formed in London in 1717. By mid-century English Masonry was strong enough to provide inspiration and example to a worldwide movement. Although Masonry first appeared in the North American colonies in the 1730s, it grew slowly until mid-century, when membership suddenly picked up. By the eve of the Revolution dozens of lodges existed up and down the continent. Many of the Revolutionary leaders, including Washington, Franklin, Samuel Adams, James Otis, Richard Henry Lee, and Hamilton, were members of the fraternity.
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Freemasonry was a surrogate religion for enlightened men suspicious of traditional Christianity. It offered ritual, mystery, and communality without the enthusiasm and sectarian bigotry of organized religion. But Masonry was not only an enlightened institution; with the Revolution, it became a republican one as well. As George Washington said, it was “a lodge for the virtues.”
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The Masonic lodges had always been places where men who differed in everyday affairs—politically, socially, even religiously—could “all meet amicably, and converse sociably together.” There in the lodges, the Masons told themselves, “we discover no estrangement of behavior, nor alienation of affection.” Masonry had always sought unity and harmony in a society increasingly diverse and fragmented. It traditionally had prided itself on being, as one Mason put it, “the Center of Union and the means of conciliating friendship among men that might otherwise have remained at perpetual distance.”
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Earlier in the eighteenth century the organization had usually been confined to urban elites noted for their social status and gentility. But in the decades immediately preceding the Revolution Masonry began broadening its membership and reaching out to small village and country elites and ambitious urban artisans without abandoning its earlier concern with genteel refinement. The Revolution disrupted the organization but revitalized the movement. In the decades following the Revolution Masonry exploded in numbers, fed by hosts of new recruits from middling levels of
the society. There were twenty-one lodges in Massachusetts by 1779; in the next twenty years fifty new ones were created, reaching out to embrace even small isolated communities on the frontiers of the state. Everywhere the same expansion took place. Masonry transformed the social landscape of the early Republic.

Masonry began emphasizing its role in spreading republican virtue and civilization. It was, declared some New York Masons in 1795, designed to wipe “away those narrow and contracted Prejudices which are born in Darkness, and fostered in the Lap of ignorance.”
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Freemasonry repudiated the monarchical hierarchy of family and favoritism and created a new republican order that rested on “real Worth and personal Merit” and “brotherly affection and sincerity.” At the same time, Masonry offered some measure of familiarity and personal relationships to a society that was experiencing greater mobility and increasing numbers of immigrants. It created an “artificial consanguinity,” declared DeWitt Clinton of New York in 1793, that operated “with as much force and effect, as the natural relationship of blood.”
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