Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (5 page)

The abuses of the state legislatures, said Madison, were “so frequent and so flagrant as to alarm the most stedfast friends of Republicanism”; and these abuses, he told Jefferson in the fall of 1787, “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects.”
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The Revolution had greatly democratized the state legislatures, both by increasing the number of their members and by broadening their electorates. Many ordinary men of more humble and rural origins and less education than had sat in the colonial assemblies had been elected as representatives. In New Hampshire, for example, the colonial assembly in 1765 had contained only thirty-four members, almost all well-to-do gentlemen from the coastal region around Portsmouth. By 1786 the state’s house of representatives numbered eighty-eight members, most of whom were ordinary farmers or men of moderate wealth from the western areas of the state. In other states the changes were less striking but no less important. Many of the state capitals were moved from their former colonial locations on the eastern coastline to new sites in the interior.
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In all the states electioneering and the open competition for office had expanded dramatically, along with demands for greater public access to governmental activities. The number of contested elections and the turnover of legislative seats multiplied. During the eighteenth century the colonial assemblies had attained a high degree of stability with very little change in membership from year to year. The Revolution had reversed all that. By the 1780s annual elections of the legislatures (a radical innovation in most states) were often replacing half or more of the
representatives every year. The colonial assemblies had remained closed to the public; even the record of the legislators’ votes had often been considered privileged information. The new republican legislatures built galleries and opened their proceedings to the public, and a growing number of newspapers, including dailies, began to report legislative debates.

Everywhere self-appointed leaders, speaking for newly aroused groups and localities, had taken advantage of the expanded suffrage and the annual elections to seek membership in the assemblies. New petty entrepreneurs like Abraham Yates Jr., a part-time lawyer and shoemaker of Albany, and William Findley, a Scots-Irish ex-weaver of western Pennsylvania, had vaulted into political leadership in the states. In the eyes of the more established gentlemen who had gone to Harvard or the College of New Jersey in Princeton, these popular upstarts with interests to promote seemed incapable of the kind of disinterested character that republican political leaders were supposed to display. Alexander Hamilton, for example, thought that Yates was “a man whose ignorance and perverseness are only surpassed by his pertinacity and conceit.” The state legislatures, concluded Robert R. Livingston of New York, had become full of men “unimproved by education and unreformed by honor.”
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Under these turbulent circumstances the state legislatures could scarcely fulfill what many Revolutionary leaders in 1776 had assumed was their republican responsibility to promote a unitary public interest distinguishable from the private and parochial interests of individuals. By the 1780s it was obvious to many, including Madison, that “a spirit of locality” was destroying “the aggregate interests of the community.” Everywhere the gentry leaders complained of popular legislative practices that today are taken for granted—logrolling, horse-trading, and pork-barreling that benefited special and local interest groups. Each representative, grumbled Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, was concerned only with the particular interests of his electors. Whenever a bill was read in the legislature, “every one instantly thinks how it will affect his constituents.” Instead of electing men to office “for their abilities, integrity and patriotism,” the people, said Stiles, were much more likely to vote for someone “from some mean, interested, or capricious motive.”
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Parochial politics of this kind was not new to America; after all, the colonial assemblies had spent much of their time fixing the height of
fence posts and adjudicating all sorts of petty local grievances. But the nature and scale of this post-Revolutionary parochial politics were new. Constituents were pressuring their representatives to legislate on behalf of their interests, which were usually economic or commercial. Taxes in the states were two to three times higher than they had been before the Revolution, and many people were angry, especially since many of the taxes were laid directly on polls and property. Thus farmers in debt urged the lowering of taxes, or at least greater reliance on tariffs rather than direct taxes on persons and land; they also advocated the suspension of court actions to recover debts and the continued printing of paper money. And although they were willing to resort to violence if the tax burden became too heavy, as events in several states revealed, they were discovering that electing the right candidates was more effective.

Other groups also had their special interests to promote. Merchants and creditors called for high taxes on land in place of tariffs, less paper money, the protection of private contracts, and the encouragement of foreign trade. Artisans lobbied for the regulation of the prices of agricultural products, the abolition of mercantile monopolies, and tariff protection against imported manufactured goods. Entrepreneurs everywhere petitioned for legal privileges and corporate grants. And in the state legislatures representatives of these interests were passing laws on their behalf, in effect, becoming judges in their own causes.

All this political scrambling among contending interests made lawmaking in the states seem chaotic. Laws, as the Vermont Council of Censors said in 1786 in a common complaint, were “altered—realtered—made better—made worse; and kept in such a fluctuating position, that persons in civil commission scarce know what is law.”
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Indeed, Madison in 1787 said that the states had enacted more laws in the decade since independence than had been enacted in the entire colonial period. No wonder he concluded that the lack of “
wisdom
and
steadiness
” in legislation was “the grievance complained of in all of our republics.”
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All these legislative efforts to respond to the excited pleas and pressures of the various interests alienated as many people as they pleased and brought lawmaking itself into contempt, at least in the eyes of elites. By excessively printing paper money and creating currency inflation and by enacting laws on behalf of debtors, the popularly elected representatives in the state legislatures were violating the individual rights of creditors and other property-holders.

Bondholders and those with money out on loan were especially vulnerable to inflation, which is why many leaders became so frightened by the paper money emissions and other debtor relief legislation passed by the state assemblies in the 1780 s. Inflation threatened not simply the livelihood of creditors and elites with proprietary wealth but their authority and independence as well. Although leaders like Madison often regarded the advocates of paper money and debtor relief schemes in the 1780s as little better than levelers, unconcerned with the rights of property, those popular advocates of paper money and easy credit were neither property-less masses nor destitute radicals opposed to the private ownership of property. They were themselves property owners, sometimes wealthy ones, who believed in the sacredness of property as much as Madison. Only it was usually a different kind of property they were promoting—modern, risk-taking property, property as a commodity; dynamic, entrepreneurial property; venture capital, even when it was land; not money out on loan, but money borrowed; in fact, all the paper money that enterprising farmers and proto-businessmen clamored for in these years.

By the 1780s it seemed as if the majorities of the popular legislatures had become just as dangerous to individual liberties as the detested royal governors had been. “173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one,” wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
. “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”
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Most alarming to leaders like Madison was the fact that these abuses of individual rights by the state legislatures were backed by the bulk of the electorates in each state. In the 1770s the Revolutionaries had not conceived of the possibility of the people becoming tyrannical. When Tories had suggested in 1775 that the people might indeed abuse their power, good Whig patriots like John Adams had dismissed the notion as illogical: “a democratic despotism is a contradiction in terms.”
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The crown or executive authority was the only possible source of tyranny; the people could never tyrannize themselves.

But by the 1780s many leaders had come to realize that the Revolution had unleashed social and political forces that they had not anticipated and that the “excesses of democracy” threatened the very essence of their republican revolution. The behavior of the state legislatures, in the despairing words of Madison, had called “into question the fundamental principle of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such governments are the safest Guardians both of Public Good and private
rights.”
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This was the issue that made the 1780s so critical to large numbers of American leaders.

Liberals everywhere in the Western world were anxiously watching to see what would happen to the new American republics. If the expectations of 1776 should prove illusionary, if republican self-government could not survive, then, as the English radical Richard Price told Americans in 1785, “the consequence will be, that the fairest experiment ever tried in human affairs will miscarry; and that a REVOLUTION which had revived the hopes of good men and promised an opening to better times, will become a discouragement to all future efforts in favour of liberty, and prove only an opening to a new scene of human degeneracy and misery.”
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B
Y
1787
MANY
of the Revolutionary leaders had retreated from the republican idealism of 1775–1776. People were not going to be selfless and keep their private interests out of the public arena after all. Almost from the outset Washington had realized that to expect ordinary people, such “as compose the bulk of an Army,” to be “influenced by any other principles than those of Interest, is to look for what never did, and I fear never will happen.” Even most officers could not be expected to sacrifice their private interests and their families for the sake of their country. “The few, therefore, who act upon Principles of disinterestedness,” Washington concluded, “are, comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the Ocean.”
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Looking around at aggressive debtor farmers, engrossing merchants, and factious legislators, many could only conclude that private interest ruled most social relationships. The American people, wrote Governor William Livingston of New Jersey in a common reckoning of 1787, “do not exhibit the virtue that is necessary to support a republican government.”
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The behavior of the popularly elected state legislatures revealed to the Revolutionary leaders an unanticipated dark underside to democracy and equality. Because the Revolution had made the people the sole source of authority in the thirteen republics, there seemed little that could be done about it. In an untitled play written by Yale students and performed for their classmates in 1784, one of the characters is warned against speaking out against the will of the people. “I must confess,” the character responds, “this is something very singular, that a person must be cautioned against
speaking his sentiments upon any political point in a free state.—but sir, we have a new set of folk lately come upon the stage.”
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Most Revolutionary leaders had not foreseen a “new set of folk” emerging in politics. They knew, of course, that the common people could occasionally get out of hand and riot. In 1774 the conservative New Yorker Gouverneur Morris had warned that “the mob begin to think and reason. Poor reptiles! It is with them a vernal morning; they are struggling to cast off their winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it.” Although many of the leaders certainly did begin to fear the spread of disorder among the lower orders and the possibility of coming “under the domination of a riotous mob,” they had taken such occurrences more or less in stride for years.

Mobbing was one thing; having common people actually holding high offices of government was quite another, and Morris had not seen it coming. He had focused his fears on the mobs themselves while dismissing their leaders, Isaac Sears and John Lamb, as “unimportant persons.”
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Yet the crisis of the 1780s did not come from men like Sears and Lamb leading mobs; elites could deal with popular mobs, as they had in the past. Instead, the crisis came from the election in the 1780s of such “unimportant persons” to the state legislatures, in Sears’s and Lamb’s case to the New York assembly; in a republican elective system, that was a situation not so easily dealt with.

When the Revolutionary leaders had asserted that all men were created equal, most had not imagined that ordinary people, farmers, artisans, and other workers would actually come to hold high governmental office. Men were equal at birth and in their rights, but not in ability and character. “The
rights
of mankind are simple,” said Benjamin Rush in 1787, expressing views that even those liberals like Jefferson with a magnanimous view of human nature would have endorsed. “They require no learning to unfold them. They are better
felt
, than explained. Hence in matters that relate to liberty, the mechanic and the philosopher, the farmer and the scholar, are all upon a footing. But the case is widely different with respect to
government
. It is a complicated science, and requires abilities and knowledge of a variety of other subjects, to understand it.”
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