Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (40 page)

More than anything, Cooper yearned to be a father to his people. To do so, however, he needed political authority commensurate with his social position and wealth. When Otsego became a New York county in 1791, Cooperstown became the county seat, and Cooper became the county’s first judge, a powerful and influential position. In 1794 he was elected to the U.S. Congress, narrowly defeated in 1796, but re-elected in 1798. From a distance Cooper appeared to have had the county pretty much in his pocket (Jefferson called him “the Bashaw of Otsego”) and to have become the dominant patriarchal political figure he longed to be. But in fact he was more confused, more vulnerable, and less powerful than he appeared. Cooper never fitted the Federalist ideal of a learned, wise, and genteel leader; he never came close to possessing the self-assurance and politeness of someone like John Jay. Cooper was caught up in a dynamic democratic frontier world that was rapidly undermining everything the Federalists stood for.

Representative of that new democratic world was Jedediah Peck. Peck was born in 1748 in Lyme, Connecticut, one of thirteen children of a lowly farmer. He essentially taught himself to read, mostly by reading the Bible over and over. He served in the Continental Army as a common soldier, developing a latent resentment of aristocratic pretension. After the war Peck was one of the early migrants to the Otsego area. He became a jack-of-all-trades, trying his hand at farming, surveying, carpentry, and millwrighting; he even traveled about as an evangelical preacher unaffiliated with any denomination before he became Cooper’s protégé. Although Peck’s origins were not all that different from Cooper’s, he acquired little of Cooper’s wealth and none of his need for Federalist gentility. One of his contemporaries
described Peck as “illiterate but a shrewd cunning man. . . . He had not talent as a preacher or speaker; his language was low and he spoke with a drawling, nasal twang, so that on public speaking he was almost unintelligible.”
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Peck had begun as a Federalist, securing a county judgeship with Cooper’s influence. But in 1796 he turned to electoral politics and in a raucous populist campaign sought a seat in the New York senate. Writing in the Otsego newspaper as “A Ploughjogger,” Peck identified with “my brother farmers, mechanicks and traders.” He apologized for his misspellings and his simple style, for he knew his brother commoners would forgive him. He especially attacked the “intriguing set” of lawyers who, he said, “have wooled up the practices of the laws in such a heap of formality on purpose so that we cannot see through their entanglement to oblige us to employ them to untangle them, and if we go to them for advice they will not say a word without five dollars.” All this demagoguery infuriated the gentry elite of the county, and they retaliated by calling Peck an “ambitious, mean, and groveling demagogue,” who resembled a frog, an “insignificant animal that just so vainly imagined its little self swelled, or about to be, to the size of an ox.”
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Although Peck did not win this particular election, the attacks on him made him a popular hero among the small and middling people of the county. As a result, he was repeatedly elected as a Republican member of the New York state legislature, serving in the assembly for six years between 1798 and 1804, and in the state senate for five years between 1804 and 1808. He became the defender of the common farmers and other laboring people against privileged lawyers and leisured aristocrats. Sick and tired of Federalist criticism that he was unrefined and had not read Montesquieu, Peck turned his deficiencies back on his critics. He took to ridiculing pretentious book-learning, genteel manners, and aristocratic arrogance and, to the amazement of Cooper and other Federalist gentry, won popularity in the process. Unlike the Federalists, who stood for office by writing each other letters and lining up influential gentlemen as supporters, Peck and other Republicans in the region began promoting their own candidacies and campaigning for office openly. They used the newspapers to reach out to other common people in order to challenge the Federalist assumption that only well-to-do
educated gentlemen were capable of exercising political authority. Cooper, like other Federalists, saw all his aristocratic dreams endangered by the demagogic behavior of Peck, and he began to try to stifle these new kinds of democratic writings and actions.
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The Federalist gentry could scarcely oppose social mobility since most of them were themselves the product of it. Indeed, many of the Revolutionary leaders in the 1760s and 1770s had expressed the same kind of resentment of arrogant aristocrats as Findley and Peck were voicing in the 1790s. As a young man John Adams had wondered “who are to be understood by the better Sort of People” and had concluded that there was “no Difference between one Man and another, but what real Merit creates.” He was thinking of the royal official Thomas Hutchinson and his genteel crowd, with their “certain Airs of Wisdom and Superiority,” and their “Scorn and Contempt and turning up of the Nose,” and he felt passionately that they were no better than he was.

But Adams’s remedy for his resentment had not been to celebrate his plebeian origins, as Peck did, but instead to outdo Hutchinson and his aristocratic crowd at their own genteel game. Although Adams began his career, like Peck, writing as a hick farmer, “Humphrey Ploughjogger,” in order to do battle on behalf of all those ordinary humble people who were “made of as good Clay” as the so-called “great ones of the World,” he had no intention of remaining one of those humble people. Instead, Adams had determined to become more learned, more refined, and, most important, more virtuous and public-spirited than Hutchinson and his ilk, who lived only by their lineage. Let the people decide who are the better sort, said Adams, in his naïve and youthful republican enthusiasm; they would be the best judges of merit.
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Many of the Republican upstarts of post-Revolutionary America were behaving quite differently. Benjamin Franklin in the 1730s had made fun of all those ordinary folk—mechanics and tradesmen—who found themselves “by their Industry or good Fortune, from mean Beginnings . . . in Circumstances a little more easy” and sought to become gentlemen when they were not really ready for the status. It was, said Franklin, “no easy Thing for a Clown or a Labourer, on a sudden to hit in all respects, the natural and easy Manner of those who have been genteelly educated: And ‘tis the Curse of
Imitation
, that it almost always either under-does or over-does.” Such men, said Franklin, were “Molatto Gentlemen,”
possessing genteel desires and aspirations but lacking the talent and politeness to pull it off.
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But a new generation of ambitious commoners was moving in a very different world. They had the advantage of a post-Revolutionary republican climate that celebrated equality in a manner that Franklin’s earlier generation had never quite known. To be sure, large numbers of middling sorts were buying and reading etiquette manuals in order to become polite and genteel, but many more were acting like Franklin’s “Molatto Gentlemen,” indeed, even flaunting their lowly origins and their plebeian tastes and manners, and getting away with it. No one was more representative of this kind of parvenu than Matthew Lyon.

L
YON HAD ARRIVED IN
A
MERICA
from Ireland in 1764 as a fifteen-year-old indentured servant. He had been bound to a dealer in pork, who sold him to another master for a “yoke of bulls.” In 1773 he bought land in what became Vermont, and the following year migrated there and fell in with Ethan Allen and his brothers. Lyon was an ambitious scrambler who seized every opportunity for personal advancement offered by the Revolution, whether it was the confiscation of Loyalist lands or the creation of an independent Vermont. He founded the Vermont town of Fair Haven and served for well over a decade in the state assembly. He built saw, grist, and paper mills, an iron foundry, a blast furnace, and a tavern. Before he was done he had become a leader in the Vermont assembly and one of the richest entrepreneurs and manufacturers in Vermont, if not in all New England. Inevitably, he became a fervent Republican.

But for all of his wealth Lyon was always just an “ignorant Irish puppy” in the eyes of educated gentlemen like Nathaniel Chipman. It was not that Chipman himself came from a genteel background. Far from it: he was the son of a Connecticut blacksmith and farmer. But he had graduated from Yale College in 1777, and in his mind that made all the difference between him and the likes of Matthew Lyon. Like so many of the Revolutionary leaders Chipman was the first of his family to go to college and become a full-fledged gentleman. After resigning his commission in the Revolutionary army in 1778 because he lacked the income “to support the character of a gentleman” and “an officer,” Chipman followed many other Connecticut migrants, including Lyon, up the Connecticut River to Vermont, where he thought his college degree and his legal education at Litchfield Law School might go further. “I shall indeed be
rara avis
in
terris
,” he joked to a friend in 1779, “for there is not an attorney in
the state. Think . . . think what a figure I shall make, when I become the oracle of law to the state of Vermont.”

Although there was a good deal of self-protective humor in these revelations of ambition to a close friend, there is no doubt Chipman was serious about rising rapidly in government, eventually even becoming a member of the Confederation Congress, then the highest national office in the land. All his joshing about the “many steps” he had to mount to attain “that pinnacle of happiness. . . . First, an attorney; then a selectman; a huffing justice; a deputy; an assistant; a member of Congress”—only points up his arrogant expectation that such offices naturally belonged to educated gentlemen like himself. It was just as inevitable that Chipman became a Federalist as Lyon had become a Republican.
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Naturally, Lyon deeply resented someone like Chipman. He regarded him and his fellow lawyers as “professional gentlemen” and “aristocrats” who used their knowledge of the rigmarole of the common law on behalf of former Loyalists, New York landlords, and other “over-grown land jobbers in preference to the poorer sort of people.” However big a manufacturer and however rich he became, Lyon was not wrong in claiming to represent the poorer sort of people, for emotionally and traditionally he remained one of them. From his perspective the struggle between Federalists like Chipman and Republicans like himself was indeed, as he said echoing John Adams, “a struggle . . . between the aristocrats and the democrats.” In 1793 Lyon formed a newspaper, the
Farmer’s Library
, which opposed Hamilton’s financial program and promoted the French Revolution. At the same time, he missed no opportunity to label Chipman and his family “tories” and “aristocrats.”
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The ironies of being called an “aristocrat” were not lost on Chipman and his family. “Nathaniel Chipman an aristocrat!” said his brother in amazed disbelief. “This must sound very oddly . . . to all those who have witnessed his plain, republican manners, habits, and sentiments.” Yet in the levels below levels of post-Revolutionary American egalitarianism, Chipman was in fact as much of an aristocrat as Vermont was to know, and Lyon, especially because he was wealthier than Chipman, deeply resented being made to feel his inferior.
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Although Lyon was a member of the state legislature, he spent the greater part of the 1790s trying to get elected to the United States Congress and was finally successful in 1797. He arrived in Philadelphia seething
with rage at the aristocratic Federalist world. He immediately began ridiculing the customary ceremonies involved in the House’s replying to an address of the president. He did not wish, he declared, to take any part in “such a boyish piece of business.” In reaction, the Federalists missed no opportunity to make fun of his behavior and his origins, both in the Congress itself and in the press. Chipman, at that time one of Vermont’s senators, hoped that Lyon was making so “incredulous a figure” that he would embarrass his fellow Republicans. The Federalists called him “ragged Matt, the Democrat,” a “beast” that ought to be caged, the “Lyon” that was captured in the bogs of Hibernia. He was an Irishman, they said, who did not have real American blood in him. It was left to William Cobbett, the acerbic Federalist editor of
Porcupine’s Gazette
, however, to deliver the most devastating attack of all on Lyon. Among other derisive and satirical comments, Cobbett brought up the fact that Lyon had been court-martialed for cowardice during the Revolutionary War and had been forced to wear a wooden sword as punishment. This was something neither Lyon nor the Federalists were apt to forget.
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On January 30, 1798, during a brief recess in the Congress, Lyon was telling a group of his fellow congressmen that the conservative people of Connecticut needed someone like him to come in with his newspaper and turn them into Republicans. Federalist Roger Griswold of Connecticut interrupted to tell Lyon that if he were going to go into Connecticut, he had better wear his wooden sword, whereupon a furious Lyon spat in Griswold’s face. Many members were aghast at Lyon’s behavior but were even more appalled by the “outrageous” and “indecent” defense he offered for it: he was reported in the papers to have said, “I did not come here to have my———kicked by everybody.” When the Federalists urged that Lyon be expelled from the House for “gross indecency,” the Republicans rallied to his defense and prevented the two-thirds majority needed for expulsion.

Frustrated, Griswold wanted to avenge his honor. Had he considered Lyon his equal, he might have challenged him to a duel; instead, two weeks after having been spat upon, he assaulted and began caning Lyon in the House chamber. Lyon responded by grabbing a pair of fireplace tongs, and the two men ended up wrestling on the floor of the House of Representatives. Many were horrified, and some concluded that Congress had become no better than a “tavern,” filled with “beasts, and not gentlemen.”
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More than words ever could, this extraordinary incident of
two congressmen wrestling on the floor of the House revealed the intensity of partisan antagonism and the emergence of new men into politics.