Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (39 page)

In the 1780s this red-faced Scots-Irishman became one of the most articulate spokesmen for the debtor–paper money interests that lay behind the political turbulence and democratic excesses of the decade. As a representative from the West in the Pennsylvania state legislature in the 1780s, Findley embodied that rough, upstart, individualistic society that the Pennsylvania gentry, such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Robert Morris, and James Wilson, both scorned and feared.
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Hugh Henry Brackenridge, born in 1748, was seven years younger than Findley. As the son of a poor Scottish farmer, he too had humble origins. At the age of five, Brackenridge immigrated to Pennsylvania with his family. But his parents gave him a grammar school education and sent him to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), which upon his graduation in 1771 turned him into a gentleman. In 1781 he moved to western Pennsylvania because he thought that the wilds of Pittsburgh offered greater opportunities for advancement than crowded Philadelphia. As the only
college-educated gentleman in the area, he saw himself as an oasis of cultivation. Wanting to be “among the first to bring the press to the west of the mountains,” he helped to establish a newspaper in Pittsburgh for which he wrote poetry, bagatelles, and other things.
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Missing no opportunity to show off his learning, this young, ambitious, and pretentious Princeton graduate was just the sort of person to drive someone like William Findley to distraction.

Findley was already a member of the state legislature in 1786 when Brackenridge decided that he too would like to be a legislator. Bracken-ridge ran for election and won by promising his western constituents that he would look after their particular interests, especially in favoring the use of state certificates of paper money in buying land. But then his troubles began. In the state capital in Philadelphia he fell in with the well-to-do crowd around Robert Morris and James Wilson, who had cosmopolitan tastes more to his liking. Under the influence of Morris, Brack-enridge not only voted against the state certificates he had promised to support but came to identify himself with the eastern establishment. He actually had the nerve to write in the
Pittsburgh Gazette
that the “eastern members” of the assembly had singled him out among all the “Huns, Goths and Vandals,” who usually came over the mountains to legislate in Philadelphia, and had complimented him on his “liberality.” But it was at a dinner party at Chief Justice Thomas McKean’s house in December 1786, at which both he and Findley were guests, where he made his most costly mistake. One guest suggested that Robert Morris’s support for the Bank of North America seemed mainly for his own personal benefit rather than for the benefit of the people. To this Brackenridge replied loudly, “The people are fools; if they would let Mr. Morris alone, he would make Pennsylvania a great people, but they will not suffer him to do it.”
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Most political leaders already knew better than to call the people fools, at least in public, and Findley saw his chance to bring Brackenridge down a peg. He wrote an account of Brackenridge’s statement in the
Pittsburgh Gazette
and accused him of betraying the people’s trust by his vote against the state certificates. It was all right, said Findley sarcastically, for a representative to change his mind if he had not solicited or expected the office, “which is the case generally with modest, disinterested men.” But for someone like Brackenridge who had openly sought the office and had
made campaign promises—for Brackenridge to change his vote could only arouse the “indignation” and “contempt” of the people.

Brackenridge vainly tried to reply. He sought to justify his change of vote on the classic republican grounds that the people could not know about the “complex, intricate and involved” problems and interests involved in law-making. Only an educated elite in the assembly, said Brackenridge, possessed the “ability to be able to distinguish clearly the interests of a state.”
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But the more Brackenridge tried to explain, the worse his situation became, and he never fully recovered from Findley’s attack. The two men crossed swords again in the election to the state ratifying convention in 1788, and Brackenridge as an avowed Federalist lost to the Anti-Federalist Findley. Brackenridge then abandoned politics for the time being and turned his disillusionment with the vagaries of American democracy into his comic masterpiece,
Modern Chivalry
.

In this rambling picaresque novel, written piecemeal between 1792 and 1815, Brackenridge vented all his anger at the social changes taking place in America. His hero and spokesman in his novel was a classic figure (“his ideas were drawn chiefly from what may be called the old school; the Greek and Roman notions of things”). Nothing was more foolish, declared his classic hero, than the people’s raising of the ignorant and the unqualified—weavers, brewers, and tavern keepers—into public office. “To rise from the cellar to the senate house, would be an unnatural hoist. To come from counting threads, and adjusting them to the splits of a reed, to regulate the finances of a government, would be preposterous; there being no congruity in the case. . . . It would be a reversion of the order of things.”

This “evil of men seeking office for which they are not qualified” became “the great moral” of Brackenridge’s novel. Yet precisely because he himself was a product of social mobility, Brackenridge never lost his faith in republicanism and never fully accepted the Federalist belief in social hierarchy.

In trying to put the best face on what was happening, Brackenridge had the character of a conjuror in his story explain that there was “in every government a patrician class, against whom the spirit of the multitude naturally militates: And hence a perpetual war; the aristocrats endeavouring to detrude the people, and the people contending to obtrude themselves. And it is right it should be so,” the conjuror said; “for by this fermentation, the spirit of democracy is kept alive.” Since there seemed nothing anyone could do about this “perpetual war,”
Brackenridge had to accept the fact that “the common people are more disposed to trust one of their own class, than those who may affect to be superior.” In the end, unable to repudiate the people, and convinced that the “representatives must yield to the prejudices of their constituents even contrary to their own judgments,” Brackenridge became a moderate Jeffersonian Republican.
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Federalists like Robert Morris and James Wilson were not so forgiving of the spirit of democracy as Brackenridge turned out to be, and because they flaunted their patrician superiority more fully than Brackenridge, Findley was even more determined to knock them off their high horses. During the debate over the re-chartering of the Bank of North America in the Pennsylvania assembly in 1786, Findley accused Morris of having a selfish interest in the bank and using it to acquire wealth for himself. The supporters of the bank were its directors or stockholders and thus had no right to claim that they were impartial umpires only deciding what was good for the state.

Findley and his fellow western opponents of the bank, however, had no desire to establish themselves as disinterested politicians. All they wanted was to hear no more spurious patrician talk of virtue and disinterestedness. They had no objection to Morris’s and the other shareholders’ interest in the bank’s re-chartering. “Any others in their situation . . . would do as they did.” Morris and the other legislators in favor of the bank, said Findley, “have a right to advocate their own cause, on the floor of this house.” But then they could not protest when others came to realize “that it is their own cause they are advocating; and to give credit to their opinions, and to think of their votes accordingly.” Indeed, said Findley, in one of the most remarkable anticipations of modern politics made during this period, such open promotion of interests promised an end to what he now regarded as the archaic idea that political representatives should simply stand and not run for election. When a candidate of the legislature “has a cause of his own to advocate,” said Findley, “interest will dictate the propriety of canvassing for a seat.”

With this simple remark Findley was challenging the entire classical tradition of disinterested public leadership and setting forth a rationale for competitive democratic interest-laden politics that has never been bettered; it was in fact a rationale that would come to dominate the reality if not the professed standard of American politics. Such a conception of politics meant that politically ambitious middling men—like Findley—with interests and causes to promote could now legitimately run and
compete for electoral office. These politicians would thus become what Madison in
Federalist
No. 10 had most feared—parties who were at the same time judges in their own causes. With just such simple exchanges was the traditional political culture gradually transformed.
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Findley’s tangle with James Wilson, the Scottish graduate of St. Andrews, came in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. Findley believed that Wilson and the other genteel supporters of the Constitution thought they were “born of a different race from the rest of the sons of men” and “able to conceive and perform great things.”
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But he knew better, and he deeply resented the contemptuous way he was treated in the ratification debates. When the Philadelphia gentry were not laughing at him when he rose to speak, they repeatedly made snide and sarcastic comments about his arguments. The crucial moment came when Findley claimed that Sweden had declined when it ceased using jury trials. Wilson, who was one of the leading lawyers in the state, and Thomas McKean, the state’s chief justice, immediately challenged Findley to prove that Sweden had ever had jury trials.

These learned lawyers assumed that this hick from the west did not know what he was talking about. Wilson haughtily declared that “he had never met with such an idea in the course of his reading.” Findley had nothing to say at the moment but promised to answer the scoffing. When the convention assembled several days later, Findley brought with him two sources that confirmed that Sweden at one time did have jury trials. One of the sources was the third volume of William Blackstone’s
Commentaries
, the bible for all lawyers. Embarrassed, McKean had the good sense to remain silent, but Wilson could not. “I do not pretend to remember everything I read,” he sneered. “But I will add, sir, that those whose stock of knowledge is limited to a few items may easily remember and refer to them, but many things may be overlooked and forgotten by someone who has read an enormous number of books.” Wilson went on to claim that someone as well read as he had forgotten more things than someone like Findley had ever learned.
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Such expressions of arrogance only intensified the anger of middling men like Findley. Unlike many of the Revolutionary leaders, such as John Adams, who came from ordinary backgrounds but attended college and became acculturated to gentry standards, Findley continued to identify himself as a “democrat.” He eventually became a dedicated Jeffersonian Republican determined to expose the phoniness of the aristocratic claims of men like Wilson. “The citizens,” he wrote in 1794, by which he meant common citizens like himself, “have learned to take a surer course of obtaining information respecting political characters,” particularly those who pretended to disinterested public service. They had learned to inquire “into the local interests and circumstances” of such characters and to point out those with “pursuits or interests” that were “inconsistent with the equal administration of government.” Findley had seen the gentry up close, so close in fact that all the sense of awe and mystery that had hitherto surrounded aristocratic authority vanished.
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Findley went on to have a lengthy career in Congress, more or less subverting Madison’s hope in 1787 that the elevated and extended nature of the national republic would filter out his likes. He represented the western country of Pennsylvania in the Second through the Fifth Congresses (1791–1799) and again in the Eighth through the Fourteenth (1803–1817). Findley always saw himself as a spokesman for ordinary citizens. He opposed Hamilton’s financial program and the excise tax on whiskey and favored selling western land in small parcels so as to benefit small farmers rather than large speculators. As a good Jeffersonian Republican, Findley favored free public education and states’ rights, but unlike his party’s leaders he opposed slavery. Because he became the longest-serving member of Congress, he was designated the “Father of the House” just before he retired from Congress in 1817; he was the first congressman awarded this honorary title.

J
EDEDIAH
P
ECK ALSO SAW
the would-be aristocracy up close and became equally aware of how superficial its genteel claims could be. He began his political career as an ally of Federalist William Cooper, the great landlord of Otsego County in New York. Once he came to realize, however, that Cooper, for all his aristocratic pretensions, was no different from him, he turned against his patron and became a fiery Republican.

Cooper had wanted to become an aristocratic patriarch, but like many other Federalists he never acquired enough gentility to pull it off. He found himself continually scrambling to make money, and the
more he scrambled the less he was able to fulfill a Federalist image of leisured gentility. Cooper certainly sought to display his wealth as aristocratically as he could. He bought a carriage, erected his substantial Manor House in the midst of the primitive village of Cooperstown, stocked it with books, and supplied it with indentured servants and slaves. Yet at every turn he betrayed his lowly origins, his crude manners, and his unenlightened temperament. The wooden unornamented Manor House, as his son the author James Fenimore Cooper recalled with embarrassment, was “low and straggling.” Cooper had to hire men to walk alongside his pretentious carriage to keep it from jolting on the uneven rocky roads of the county. He never learned to keep a proper gentlemanly distance from the common settlers of his village; he not only jostled and joked with them but wrestled them. He could not even remain superior to his servants: one of them could write better than he could.