america’s unendng revolution

AMERICA’SUNENDNG

REVOLUTIONHow did a deferential republic become a mass democracy and a

commercial colossus? A crucial transformation of America, historians agree,was under way during the early Republic, but they have debated thenature of this “transition to capitalism” and its political implications.

Our budding capitalists, it now seems clear, were the country’s enterprisinglaborers, not its leisured few. And the democratic ideas that spurred

them on were vigorously contested—as they still are.

36 Gordon S. Wood explores the creation of capitalism 47 Sean Wilentz navigates the formative debates over democracy

36 WQ Spring 1999

Of all the “isms” that afflict us,capitalism is the worst.According to many scholars,

capitalism has been ultimately responsiblefor much of what ails us, in both the pastand the present, including our race prob-lem, our grossly unequal distribution ofwealth, and the general sense of malaiseand oppression that academics in particu-lar feel. It is not surprising therefore thatscholars should be interested in the originsof such a powerful force, especially onethat seems to affect them so personally.

The trouble is that we scholars cannotagree on the nature of the beast. Someidentify it with a general market economy;others, following Marx, with a particularmode of production, involving a bour-geoisie that owns the means of productionand a proletariat that is forced to sell itslabor for monetary wages; still others, fol-lowing Weber, with a system of calculativeand secularized rationalism; and still oth-ers, with simple hard work and a spirit ofdevelopment. As has often been pointedout, the way in which scholars define theterm capitalism usually determines theresults of their analysis.

Despite the confusion of definition,however, nearly everyone seems to agreewith Marx and other theorists on the wayin which capitalism originally developedin the West. Most scholars seem to believethat the sources of the transition from feu-

dalism to capitalism lay in the changingnature of rural society. Only when thefarming population increased its agricul-tural productivity to the point where itcould allow an increasing proportion of itsmembers to engage in manufacturing andat the same time provide a home marketfor that manufacturing—only then, it isassumed, could the takeoff into capitalisticexpansion take place.

For this reason, American historianshave tended to focus on the agriculturalproductivity of early New England, wherepresumably American capitalism firstdeveloped. Of course, from almost thebeginning of professional historical schol-arship in the late-19th century, manyAmerican historians assumed that nearlyall early American farmers, especiallythose in New England, were incipient cap-

Was AmericaBorn Capitalist?by Gordon S. Wood

italists, eager to make money and get landand get ahead. Most colonial farmers, itseemed, were involved in trade of varioussorts—sending tobacco and wheat toEngland and Europe, selling fish, food-stuffs, and lumber to the West Indies, andexchanging an array of goods among them-selves. For these historians, usually labeled“liberal” or “market” historians these days,explaining the origins of capitalism inAmerica has never been an issue: Americahas always been capitalistic.

Three decades or so ago a group of his-torians, generally labeled “social” or“moral economy” historians, began chal-lenging this view of early America as amodern market-oriented capitalisticworld. According to these scholars, includ-ing James Henretta, Alan Kulikoff,Christopher Clark, and Michael Merrill

(among others), the colonial farmers, par-ticularly the New England farmers, did notpossess a capitalistic mentality after all.The colonial farmers were not much inter-ested in markets and were not primarilyinterested in working for profit. For thesehistorians, the farmers’ disregard for thebottom line is something to be cherished.The less capitalism the better, as far as theyare concerned.

These moral economy historianshave mounted a major challengeto the older view that Americans

were born free, equal, and capitalistic inthe 17th century. All of them, in one wayor another, are seeking, in the words ofHenretta, a professor of history at theUniversity of Maryland, “to confound anuncritical ‘liberal’ interpretation of

America’s Unending Revolution 37

The scene in 1799 at the corner of Third and Market in Philadelphia.

American history,” primarily by demon-strating that “capitalist practices and val-ues were not central to the lives of most ofthe inhabitants of British North Americabefore 1750.” Many American farmers,especially in the South and middlecolonies, may have been producing for dis-tant markets, but most New England farm-ers were not.

To be sure, many colonial farmers pro-duced “surpluses” that they sold to distantmarkets, but the very term suggests thatthis sort of production was not normal orprimary. Most of their output was for fami-ly or local consumption, not for sale in themarket. The anthropologically mindedmoral economy historians, borrowing animportant distinction Marx made, arguethat most of the northern farmers were notproducing for exchange; they were pro-ducing for use. Farmers were involved in ahousehold mode of production in whichthey sought only to satisfy their familyneeds and maintain the competency and

38 WQ Spring 1999

Gordon S. Wood, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is Alda O. Way University Professor and professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize forhistory. Copyright © 1999 by Gordon S. Wood.

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independence of their households. Theysought land not to increase their personalwealth but to provide estates for their lin-eal families. Indeed, providing for theirfamilies and transmitting their accumulat-ed property and customary beliefs fromone generation to another were the majorpreoccupations of these farmers. Theywere certainly not major exploiters of awage-earning labor force.

The economy that resulted, thesehistorians say, was inevitably amoral one. Household interests

and communal values overrode the acquis-itive and exploitative instincts of individu-als. The farmers were enmeshed in localwebs of moral and social relationships thatinhibited capitalistic behavior. Self-aggrandizement gave way to concern forone’s family and neighbors, and communi-ty-regulated “just prices” were often moreimportant than what the market wouldbear. Not the Atlantic world but their tinycommunities were the places where mostof these farmers’ exchanges occurred.Most of them may not have been techni-cally self-sufficient, but the towns andsmall localities in which they lived moreor less were.

Rather than relying on the market, farm-ers met their needs by producing their owngoods for consumption and by swapping orexchanging goods and services within theirlocal communities. They charged eachother for these goods and services, but theprices were set by custom, not by the mar-ket, and in the absence of much specie orcoin, the charges were usually not paid incash but were instead entered in each per-son’s account book. Through these numer-ous exchanges, farmers built up in theirlocalities incredibly complicated networksof credits and debts—“book accounts”—among neighbors that sometimes ran onfor years at a time. Although litigationcould and did result from these obliga-tions, such credits and debts were based

A cooper

largely on mutual trust, and thus theyworked to tie local people together and todefine and stabilize communal relation-ships. Therefore, instead of seeing theNew England farmers as would-be entre-preneurs waiting for markets to rescuethem from stagnation, these social histori-ans see them as pre-modern husbandmentrying to avoid market participation inorder to preserve their moral and commu-nal culture.

This “transition to capitalism” debate,which has gone on now for severaldecades, is no petty ivory-tower dispute; itactually goes to the heart of what kind ofpeople we Americans are or would like tobecome. The moral economy historians inparticular have been very explicit aboutthis. They have more at stake than justrecapturing an idyllic past. For them, suchan 18th-century communal world offers anoncapitalist vision of what still might be,in the words of Michael Merrill, coeditorwith Sean Wilentz of The Key of Liberty:The Life and Democratic Writings ofWilliam Manning (1993), a vision of

a lived and viable alternative to cap-italist relations, institutions andpractices. . . . Alongside the worldof capital and its ways we wouldpoint to an alternative world oflabor and its ways; alongside theworld of cities built on money andcontract we would point to an alter-native world of the countrysidebuilt on personal credit and mutualobligation; alongside a governmentdesigned to secure to the few theopportunity to rule the many. . . wewould point to an alternative gov-ernment designed to secure to themany the chance to rule them-selves.

This debate over the origins of capital-ism has meaning not only for usAmericans but for a world seeking toacquire the prosperity of the capitalistWest. In the struggle to invent capitalismand market societies, does Eastern Europeor China have anything to learn from the

way it originally happened in America? Isthe rise of capitalism inevitably linked tothe development of a democratic society?Is it possible that anything that happenedin New England in the late 18th and early19th centuries can have any significancefor the world today?

Whatever answers ultimatelyemerge to such large politicalquestions, we certainly know

much more now about the behavior andvalues of the early New England farmersthan we did before. Especially helpful inthe debate has been the work of WinifredBarr Rothenberg, a professor of economicsat Tufts University. In From Market-Placesto a Market Economy (1992), Rothenberghas cleared the air of a lot of cant by sim-ply concentrating on some basic questionsabout the rural New England economythat can be empirically investigated.Marketplace economies, she says, haveexisted for thousands of years; people havealways bought and sold goods, even overlong distances, without experiencing mar-ket economies. Only when the market sep-arates from the political, social, and cul-tural systems constraining it and becomesitself an agent of change, only when mostpeople in the society are involved in buy-ing and selling and think in terms of bet-tering themselves economically—onlythen, she contends, can we talk of thebeginnings of a market economy.Throughout the colonial period, she sug-gests, Americans had only a marketplaceeconomy, not a market economy. By ana-lyzing the behavior of the prices of farmcommodities, farm labor, and rural sav-ings, Rothenberg has been able to date theemergence in the New England country-side of an authentic market economy. Sheplaces it in the last two decades of the 18thcentury, following the AmericanRevolution.

Although Rothenberg saw herself writ-ing in opposition to the moral economyhistorians, whom she affectionately callsher “dear enemies,” her work actually hashelped to reconcile the differencesbetween these “dear enemies” and most


market historians, including herself.Backed by Rothenberg’s impressive empir-ical investigations, scholars now seem tohave attained a remarkable amount ofagreement over the behavior of people inearly America, even if they cannot agreeon what to call that behavior. Althoughmost are doubtful that capitalism cameover on the first ships, they realize thatcommercial activities in the New Worldwere present from the beginning.Although historians recognize that a newstage in America’s commercial develop-ment was reached in the middle of the18th century, many seem to agree that itwas the American Revolution above allthat gave birth to something that can becalled capitalism.

Indeed, writes Allan Kulikoff, a neo-Marxist who teaches history at theUniversity of Northern Illinois and hastried to mediate the debate, “the AmericanRevolution may have been the most cru-cial event in the creation of capitalism.”James Henretta, probably the most influ-ential of the moral economy historians,cites Rothenberg’s findings in support ofhis thesis “that the emergence of a new sys-tem of economic behavior, values, and

40 WQ Spring 1999

institutions occurred at the beginning ofthe 19th century.” Moreover, both themarket historians and the moral economyhistorians agree that New England farmersengaged in local exchanges throughoutthe 18th century. If these local exchangescould be seen as variants of market behav-ior, then the differences between the twogroups of historians would tend to col-lapse. Kulikoff admits as much when hesays that “the two sides contend over thedegree of local self-sufficiency and theextent of market exchange rather than thefact of exchange.”

The problem seems to be the commit-ment of the moral economy historians toMarx’s distinction between producing foruse and producing for exchange, a distinc-tion that seems very dubious. When thesocial or moral economy historians cometo examine the actual behavior of the NewEngland farmers, they keep falling back onthis distinction to explain why the farmerswere not really market oriented—in effectrelying on their ability to decipher themotives of these rural folk. What seems tobe the farmers’ profit seeking or land spec-ulation the moral economy historians dis-miss as merely the farmers’ looking afterthe needs of their families. No matter howsharp or avaricious the farmers might be—and even the moral economy historiansadmit that they could indeed be sharp andavaricious—these characteristics apparent-ly did not turn them into entrepreneurs; asHenretta says, “there was no determinedpursuit of profit.”

Many of these moral economyhistorians seem to have a cari-catured image of an entrepre-

neur or capitalist as someone who thinksabout nothing but the bottom line and hasan all-consuming drive for profits that ridesroughshod over the needs of his family orhis relationship with the community. Ifthis is what it takes, then very few farmersin history have ever been this kind of self-ish, profit-maximizing individualist.

It is these historians’ deep aversion tocapitalism that lies behind their overdrawnimages of capitalists. This aversion

A blacksmith

requires evil-intentioned individuals; it isno easy matter morally condemning peo-ple who are well intentioned and have nosense of the bad and exploitative conse-quences of their actions. Although many ofthese moral historians have a lingeringcommitment to Marxist theory, they havenot found it very useful in explaining theorigins of capitalism in early rural NewEngland. They have had difficulty decid-ing, for example, whether the small-pro-ducer farmers who relied mostly on familylabor belong in the category of “exploiters”or “exploited.”

Michael Merrill has tried to solve theproblem by absolving the New Englandfarmers of capitalistbehavior altogether.Realizing that thelong-standing identi-fication of capitalismwith commercial en-terprise and a gener-al market economyis disastrous for anymoral condemna-tion of capitalism(there being thesedays, it seems, noalternative to mar-kets), Merrill hassought to define cap-italism as just oneparticular marketeconomy amongmany. “Capitalism, properly speaking,” hesays, “is not just an economic system basedon market exchange, private property,wage labor, and sophisticated financialinstruments.” These are necessary but notsufficient features. “Capitalism, more pre-cisely, is a market economy ruled by, or inthe interests of, capitalists.” In other words,capitalism is antidemocratic. It involvespolitics, power, and the exploitation of oneclass by another—in particular, in theearly Republic, the exploitation of thefarmers, artisans, and laborers by thosewhom Merrill calls “the monied classes.”

Since the American economy, howevermarket-oriented and intensely commercial-ized it may have been, seemed to remain

under the control of small producers andnot the so-called capitalistic moneyed class-es in the decades following the Revolution,Merrill can make his astonishing claim thatthe American Revolution was “a profound-ly anticapitalist enterprise.” The burgeon-ing and prosperous economy of the earlyRepublic, far from representing “an emer-gent, radically new, capitalist order,” was,Merrill says, in reality only “the expansionof a dynamic, profoundly anticapitalist, anddemocratic old order.”

This is an unconventional argument, tosay the least, and it seems unlikely that itwill take hold: it runs too much against thegrain of our traditional identification of

early-19th-centurycapitalism with a free-enterprise marketeconomy, an identifi-cation shared by near-ly all the “transition-to-capitalism” histori-ans. But it does havethe merit of helpingus to understandmore precisely whatwe mean by capital-ism in the earlyRepublic and to seemore clearly how thetransition in NewEngland from farm-ing to manufacturingand business enter-

prise took place. Merrill suggests that hissmall producer class includes most artisansas well as farmers and laborers. Againstthese democratic anticapitalists he placesthe capitalists, or “the monied classes,”composed of “merchants, financiers, orbudding master manufacturers.”

The problem arises with this last group,the “budding master manufacturers.” Wetoday might readily agree that these mastermanufacturers (soon to be labeled business-men) are capitalists or future capitalists, butin the 18th century should they be separat-ed from the rest of the artisans? Contempo-raries in the early Republic, including themaster manufacturers themselves, did notthink so. They still thought of these master


A sawyer

manufacturers, however wealthy, howevermany employees they had working forthem, as men who worked for a living in acraft that involved manual labor, and thusthey grouped them with the other laborersin the society. The Providence Associationof Mechanics and Manufacturers, orga-nized in 1789, was composed of men whoranged from among the wealthiest property-holders in the city to the poorest. All, how-ever, were still regarded as workingmen.

The issue for the society of the earlyRepublic was not who was a capi-talist, but rather who was a laborer.

As John Adams put it in 1790, “the greatquestion will forever remain, who shallwork?” Adams was speaking out of a 2,000-year-old tradition of horizontally dividingthe society between those aristocrats or gen-tlemen who did not have to labor for a livingand the rest of the society that did. It isalmost impossible for us today to appreciatethe degree of contempt and scorn felt byaristocrats or gentlemen throughout historyfor those who had to work. Aristotle simplyassumed that those who engaged in trade orlabored, particularly with their hands, wereignoble and were incapable of elevated orvirtuous thoughts. In the eyes of many 18th-century gentlemen, labor was still associatedwith pain and meanness, and for most ofthem manual productivity lacked the supe-rior moral value it would soon acquire. Itwas, in fact, this traditional contempt forlabor that had sustained and justified slaveryfrom time immemorial; indeed, in a worldthat despised labor, slavery was accepted as amatter of course.

Even by the late 18th century, Americansstill tended to divide themselves into theleisured few and the laboring many.Although many artisans and mechanicswere claiming to be among the middlingsort, most aristocrats or gentlemen still tend-ed to lump together into the ignoble andmean category of “laborers” a wide variety ofcraftsmen and mechanics. They thus min-gled in their minds wealthy masters withjourneymen and apprentices, and indeedthe lowliest and poorest of workers. Despitea growing appreciation of the value of labor

and heightened egalitarian sentiments inthe 18th century, many gentry, in otherwords, still clung to the ancient prejudiceagainst labor, especially manual labor. Aslong as artisans or mechanics continued towork for a living with their hands, or even torun a business that involved employeesworking with their hands, they found it verydifficult to claim genteel status, howeverrich and elevated in other respects they mayhave become.

Walter Brewster, a young, strugglingshoemaker of Canterbury, Connecticut, wasvery different in many ways fromChristopher Leffingwell, a well-to-do manu-facturer of Norwich, Connecticut, whoowned several mills and shops and was histown’s largest employer. Yet both Brewsterand Leffingwell still saw themselves as“laborers” having to work for a living. Theyshared a common resentment of a genteelworld that had humiliated them andscorned their “laboring” status from thebeginning of time. Thus both men natural-ly allied in political movements on behalf ofartisans and understandably sought to iden-tify their “laboring interest” with “the gener-al or common interest” of the whole state. Intime, of course, the once vertically orga-nized artisans would split apart horizontally,separating into rich master businessmen (oremployers) and poor journeymen andapprentices (or employees). But this impor-tant development would come haltinglyand confusedly, and we distort our under-standing of the 18th century if we anachro-nistically rush it.

Perhaps we can help to clarify whatwas happening in the early Re-public by focusing on William

Manning (1747–1814), the self-educatedcommon New England farmer whose writ-ings Merrill and Wilentz have recently edit-ed. Manning has often been celebrated byleft-leaning historians as a plebeian critic ofcapitalism and a forerunner of the laterworking class. But what if he is not quitewhat these historians have said he is? Whatif he is in fact one of the contributors to therise of capitalism in New England? SinceManning did represent the beginnings of

42 WQ Spring 1999

American democracy, his being as well anunsuspecting agent of capitalism may helpus clarify the relationship between capital-ism and democracy in the early Republic.Manning’s ideas of labor may also help usunderstand better the eventual connectionsbetween democracy, capitalism, and theanti-slavery movement.

Manning, writing in the 1790s under thepseudonym “Laborer,” realized only tookeenly that for ages leisured aristocrats hadheld workers like him in contempt.Therefore, in response to the traditionalview of work as demeaning and con-temptible, he offered a vigorous defense oflabor as the source of property and produc-tivity in the society. As vivid as Manning’swritings were, however, they were notunusual: attacks on the leisured aristocraticfew and defenses of labor by mechanics,farmers, and other laborers like Manningbecame increasingly common in post-Revolutionary America. Indeed, theAmericans’ celebration of work in these

years was far more successful in conqueringthe culture, at least in the northern states,than comparable efforts in Europe. By theearly decades of the 19th century, there werevery few gentry left in the northern UnitedStates who could openly admit that they didnot work for a living, in other words, whocould openly admit any longer that theywere fundamentally different from the likesof William Manning, Walter Brewster, orChristopher Leffingwell.

We are only beginning to appre-ciate the historical characterof work and the way its chang-

ing meanings at the end of the 18th centu-ry contributed to the development of capi-talism and to the separation of the free,labor-capitalist North from the aristocratic,slave-holding South. Sooner or later, theNorth’s celebration of work was bound tolead to a condemnation of slavery and thearistocratic southern society that sustainedit. Democratic capitalism, the extolling of


A 1791 certificate of membership in the New York Mechanick [sic] Society.

free labor, and anti-slavery were linked inthe North, and together they created thegrowing cultural chasm between the demo-cratic North and the cavalier South that ledto the Civil War.

Manning, writing in the 1790s, of coursehad no idea that he was participating in thecause of capitalism or democracy or anti-slavery. All he could see was a great socialstruggle in which “the whole contentionlies between those that labor for a living andthose that do not.” In Manning’s opinion,those who did not have to work were main-ly big, leisured merchants engaged in inter-national commerce, professionals, execu-tive and judicial officers of government,“and all the rich who could live on theirincomes without bodily labor.” They werethe kinds of men who had a “sense of supe-riority” and who “generally associate togeth-er and look down with too much contempton those that labor.”

Although Manning at times includedstockjobbers and speculators in his categoryof the leisured, he was scarcely thinking ofthose who did not labor for a living as “capi-talists.” Rather, his leisured few, numberingwhat he took to be about one-eighth of thepopulation, were those traditionally referredto as aristocrats or gentlemen. Most suchgentlemen did not work for a living, in anytraditional meaning of the term, or if theydid, they worked solely with their heads.Instead, as Manning realized, the incomes ofsuch leisured gentry “lie chiefly in money atinterest, rents, salaries, and fees that are fixedon the nominal value of money,” which iswhy these gentry were generally opposed topaper money and its inflationary effects.

Although we might want anachro-nistically to designate as capital-ists some of Manning’s leisured

few, those Federalist leaders (and they wereessentially the men Manning had in mind)were not really the persons most responsiblefor the emergence of the dynamic capitalis-tic economy of the early Republic. Indeed,the Federalists represented much more theold aristocratic order than they did the capi-talist future. We make a big mistake think-ing that capitalism was created mainly by

44 WQ Spring 1999

Alexander Hamilton and a few stockjobbers,speculators, and wealthy merchants.

If any group was most responsible for theburgeoning capitalist economy of the earlyRepublic, it was, as historian Joyce Applebyhas reminded us, the northern members ofthe Republican party and all the commer-cially minded artisans and farmers who werestriving to get ahead—“laboring” men suchas Walter Brewster, Christopher Leffing-well, and William Manning. These werethe sort of men who eventually becamewhat self-made Boston printer, publisher,and editor Joseph T. Buckingham in 1830called the “middling class”—“the farmers,the mechanics, the manufacturers, thetraders, who carry on professionally the ordi-nary operations of buying, selling, andexchanging merchandize.” These middlingmen, said Buckingham, were those who, incontrast to “the unproductive poor and theunprofitable rich,” worked for a living andwhose “unextinguishable desire for more”gave “birth to invention, and impart[ed]vigor to enterprise.”

Manning was one of these enterprisingtypes. As Merrill and Wilentz concede, hecertainly was no “injured little yeoman”uninvolved in a commercial economy. Hewas much more than a small farmer in hislittle developing town of Billerica; he wasas well an improver and a smalltime entre-preneurial hustler. He ran a tavern off andon, erected a saltpeter works that producedgunpowder during the Revolutionary War,

helped build a canal, bought and soldland, constantly borrowed money, andurged the printing of money by state-char-tered banks, seeking (not very successfully,it seems) every which way to better his andhis family’s condition. By themselvesManning’s commercial activities may notbe much, but multiply them many thou-sandfold throughout the society, and wehave the makings of an expanding capital-ist economy.

A lthough some of the Federalistleaders whom Manning calledthe leisured few may have

invested in businesses, by themselves thesearistocratic gentry were never numerous orwealthy enough to finance the rise of cap-italism. As historian Bray Hammondpointed out 40 years ago, America in thelate 18th century, unlike the Old World,had a severe shortage of capital, the popu-lar solution to which was banks, lots ofthem. In the early Republic, the capitalistswhom most American entrepreneurs andborrowers, including Manning, actuallyrelied upon were all those bankers in theproliferating state-chartered banks. TheseNew England banks sold shares in bankstock to thousands of ordinary citizens,often, as economic historian Naomi Lam-oreaux has pointed out, “getting peoplewith savings with accumulations as smallas $100 to invest their resources in bankstock.” These proliferating banks, in turn,

issued hundreds of thousands of dollars ofpaper money, supplying much of the capi-tal that fueled the economy of the earlyRepublic.

Manning knew a great deal about mod-ern paper money, and, like many otherantifederalist and Republican entrepre-neurs in these years, he fervently defendedpaper money and state banks; he may evenhave invested in a bank. As historian JanetRiesman has said, it was Manning and oth-ers like him, more than the Federalist“moneyed men,” who saw that the primarysource of America’s wealth lay in its “inter-nal productivity.” They came to appreciatethat it was the energy and hard work ofAmerica’s laboring people, and not anygreat resources of specie, that supportedthe credit of the bank notes. Although mensuch as Manning do not fit Merrill andWilentz’s caricature of capitalists as “prof-it-maximizing individualists who believedin the universal justice of commercialmarkets,” nevertheless he and his hard-working northern Republican “laborers”were the main force behind America’s cap-italist market revolution. For good or ill,American capitalism was created by Amer-ican democracy.

In the end, it was precisely becausemen such as Manning were not “prof-it-maximizing individualists” that

they were able to create a viable capitalistsociety. Only in recent decades have we


From sheep-shearing to loom at the Brandywine Woollen Mill, circa 1815.

come to appreciate the full significance ofwhat we call a civil society—that networkof social associations and organizationsthat stand between the individual and thestate and that help to temper and civilizethe stark crudities of a market society,indeed, that make a viable market societypossible. One of the remarkable results ofthe American Revolution was the suddenemergence in the early Republic of thissort of rich associational life. In the severaldecades following the Revolution, hun-dreds and thousands of voluntary associa-tions of all kinds sprang up, particularly inNew England, where American capitalismwas born.

P robably the most important ofthese voluntary associations werethe new evangelical religious

organizations—Baptists, Methodists, NewDivinity Congregationalists, and dozensof other sects—that in three decades or sotransformed the religious landscape ofAmerica. Most of the evangelicals inthese new associations were not unworld-ly or anticapitalist. Quite the contrary, itwas the involvement of people such as

46 WQ Spring 1999

Manning in these religious associationsthat helped make possible the rise of cap-italism. Evangelical religious passionworked to increase people’s energy as itrestrained their selfishness, got them onwith their work as it disciplined theiracquisitive urges. Even the New DivinityCalvinism to which Manning subscribedrecognized, as historians William Briten-bach and James D. German have pointedout, that “wicked self-interest was nothreat to a moral economic order.” TheNew Divinity theology that dominatedmuch of New England “admitted asphere within which self-interest wasmorally legitimate”; it gave people confi-dence that self-interested individuals nev-ertheless believed in absolute standards ofright and wrong and thus could be trustedin market exchanges and contract rela-tionships. Those who assume that a capi-talist society requires mainly selfish indi-viduals preoccupied with the bottom linedo not understand the sources of Amer-ica’s capitalism in the early Republic. It’stime that we recognize who the capitalistsin America really are: we have met theenemy and it is us.

WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “ALaborer,” 1747–1814, edited by Sean Wilentz and Michael Merrill (Harvard Univ.Press, 1993)

From Market-Place to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts,1750–1850, by Winifred Barr Rothenberg (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992)

The Origins of American Capitalism, by James A. Henretta (Boston, 1991)

The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, by Allan Kulikoff (Univ. Press ofVirginia, 1992)

Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, by JoyceAppleby (New York Univ. Press, 1984)

Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic, edited by PaulA. Gilje (Madison House, 1997)

“Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of theUnited States,” by Michael Merrill, Radical History Review 9 (1977), 42–72


Americans, including many his-torians, like to think of the peri-od from the end of the War of

1812 to the outbreak of the Civil War as anebullient, egalitarian era, the age of thecommon man, when ordinary working-men and farmers came into their own asfull-throated citizens and voters. It was atime, so the story goes, when age-old prej-udices linking virtue with property holdingfinally dissolved. Men of humble back-

Striving forDemocracy

by Sean Wilentz

ground who worked with their handscould aspire one day to gain wealth andsocial standing—and even, like AndrewJackson or Abraham Lincoln, to becomethe nation’s head of state. It was all a far cryfrom the high-blown, deferential NewWorld republic that the Revolutionarygeneration had envisaged. Instead of a cul-tivated gentry elite, it would be thePeople—“King Numbers,” in the disdain-ful phrase of the disgruntled Virginia aris-

Election Day, Philadelphia (1815), by John S. Kimmel, a classic tableau ofpolitical harmony in the “Era of Good Feelings”

48 WQ Spring 1999

tocrat, John Randolph of Roanoke—whowould guide the nation’s destiny.Democracy, a word that greatly troubledthe Framers in Philadelphia in 1787,became a shibboleth for partisans ofalmost every persuasion.

More skeptical scholars have ques-tioned this colorful, egalitarian tableau.Some have pointed out important anti-democratic features of the period. In sev-eral states, for example, expansion of thesuffrage for white men before 1860 wasaccompanied by an abridgement of thesuffrage and other political rights for freeblacks, as well as (in the one state wheresuch rights had existed, New Jersey) forwomen. Egalitarian with respect to class,these historians argue, the era was justthe opposite with respect to race andgender. Moreover, although officehold-ing became less attached to family influ-ence and noblesse oblige than it hadbeen after the Revolution, politicsremained firmly in the control of coter-ies of well-connected local partisans.Other historians have argued the oppo-site: that an excess of democracy openedthe way for the rise of demagogues,whose agitation degraded politics andled directly to the Civil War.

For all of their differences, theseimpressions, popular and acade-mic, share a misleading assump-

tion that what Americans of the timecalled democracy was something coher-ent and unified. That assumption owesmuch to the influence of Alexis deTocqueville, whose Democracy in Amer-ica (1835, 1840) continues to color mostaccounts of the period. Because Tocque-ville was chiefly interested in under-standing what American democracy hadto teach France, he tended to renderAmerican realities as ideal types, in glit-tering epigrammatic generalizations.Even when he drew important distinc-

tions (none more important than hiscontrast between southern slavery andnorthern freedom), his discussions ofAmerican politics and manners alwaysreturned to his ruminations about thisthing called democracy. Yet there was noone American democracy in the early19th century. When Americans spokeabout democracy, they articulated clash-ing ideals. Those clashes, the deepestlegacy of the early Republic, unleashedin peculiarly American ways issues ofclass, race, and region. Any account thatglosses over those conflicts slights howmuch the early national period tells usabout our unsettled and contentiouspolitical life even today. For what is mostdistinctive, finally, about Americandemocracy is that it is not so much anideal as an argument.

In the early Republic, two battles overdemocracy dominated public affairs,and in time became the warp and

woof of national politics. First, there was astruggle over how economic power shouldbe organized in a democracy. Second,conflict arose over increasingly differentnorthern and southern conceptions ofdemocracy.

The first debate—over politics, privi-lege, and economics—had supposedlybeen settled by the Jeffersonian victory in1800. Among other things, that triumphthwarted Alexander Hamilton’s plans foran American version of the British state,based on a strong military establishment,backed by a centralized system of taxation.The second battle, Americans hoped, hadbeen laid to rest by the compromises overslavery worked out in the constitutionaldebates of 1787–88. Yet the democratizingpolitics of the early 19th century helpedrevive these issues dramatically during themisnamed Era of Good Feelings—thedecade or so after 1815. That revival setthe stage for both the political party battles

Sean Wilentz, currently a Wilson Center Fellow, is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of several books on the early Republic, including (with Paul E. Johnson) The Kingdom of Matthias (1994).This essay is drawn from his current book in progress, The Rise of American Democracy, 1787–1860. Copyright © 1999by Sean Wilentz.

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of the Jacksonian era and the sectional bat-tles that culminated in southern secessionand the Civil War.

The close of the War of 1812, his-torians have long noted, stirred anationalist spirit that was cele-

brated from one end of the country to theother. Having escaped defeat at the handsof the British, Americans proclaimed thattheir Revolution had been vindicated.They set to work on plans to build up theireconomy and expand their empire of lib-erty. With the virtual demise of theFederalist Party after the New EnglandFederalists’ disastrous anti-war HartfordConvention in 1814, partisan conflict, soworrisome to the founding generation,seemed dead at last. “Equally gratifying isit to witness the increased harmony ofopinion which pervades our Union,” thenewly inaugurated President James Mon-roe declared in 1817. “Discord does notbelong in our system.”

Yet the very election that elevatedMonroe to the White House showed thedepth of America’s discord. In the spring of

1816, the Fourteenth Congress passed acompensation act that roughly doubledcongressional pay—and created a tidalwave of populist revulsion. Congress, thecritics declared, had made a selfish salarygrab that violated the simple habits ofrepublicanism. In the elections later thatyear, voters wreaked havoc on congression-al incumbents. All told, more than half ofthe members of the House of Repre-sentatives judiciously declined to stand forre-election, while only 15 of the 81 who hadsupported the Compensation Act of 1816were returned to Washington. Threestates—Ohio, Delaware, and Vermont—elected entirely new congressional delega-tions. (The redoubtable young Speaker ofthe House, Henry Clay of Kentucky, heldhis seat only after completing a barnstorm-ing tour to apologize abjectly to his con-stituents.) Even in an era when normal con-gressional turnover rates were high, it was ahuge political awakening, one that JohnRandolph likened to the “great Leviathanroused into action.” Although not explicitlyconcerned with economic issues, the con-troversy foretold future eruptions over the

In The Downfall of Mother Bank (1833), President Jackson is hailed for removing governmentdeposits from Nicholas Biddle’s Bank of the United States.

50 WQ Spring 1999

alleged antidem-ocratic corrup-tion of the na-tion’s politi-cal and eco-n o m i celites.

Congressgot the mes-

sage, hastilyrepealed the

hated Compen-sation Act, and

preserved (or soPresident Mon-

oe believed) the new nationalist consen-sus. But the next decade brought freshpolitical battles, at the local as well as thenational level, which left politiciansscrambling to reach accommodation withtheir constituents. In New England andNew York, where once-powerful Feder-alists had been severely weakened by theiropposition to the War of 1812, suffrage agi-tation at the grassroots and in state capitalsled to the toppling of old property restric-tions and other checks on popular govern-ment. Older states in the upper Southshared in the agitation—but did so, signif-icantly, to a lesser degree and with far lessimmediate results.

More furious and widespread politicalinsurgencies followed in the wake of thecalamitous financial panic of 1819. In theNortheast, farmers ruined by bank failuresand workingmen paid off in now-worthlessscrip rejected claims by their preachersand politicians that an inscrutable Prov-idence had caused the depression. Anti-bank legislation and a variety of debtorrelief efforts quickly followed. Furtherwest, similar unrest rocked every stateexcept Louisiana and Mississippi. Impov-erished farmers and other rural debtorsdemanded more radical forms of legisla-tive relief than petty enterprisers andimperiled bankers wanted to provide.Plebeian democratic outrage against banksand moneyed men, dormant since the1790s, revived. Banks, above all, were thevillains, wrote the editor of the ClevelandRegister, because they enabled speculators

to steal the hard-won earnings of honestand industrious farmers in order to create“monied aristocrarcies [sic].”

This growing sense of outrage—whatthe South Carolinian John C. Calhouncalled “a general mass of disaffection”—utterly shattered the nationalist Repub-lican consensus hailed by Monroe. Afterthe panic, in particular, Old Republicanattacks on banks and capitalist commercegained a new lease on life. And those ideasnow received backing from more than justthe nostalgic, arcadian gentlemen admir-ers of Randolph and John Taylor ofCaroline. The critics included hard-bittendebtors and workingmen, along with anew generation of self-styled democraticpoliticians, including the likes of MartinVan Buren, Felix Grundy, and, in time,Andrew Jackson.

Democratic reform, advancingmore swiftly and dramatically inthe North than in the South,

became an additional vehicle for some ofthese same new politicians and their follow-ers. The harmonious, nationalist “one-party”coalition, buckling under pressure from thebottom and the top, fell apart completelyfollowing the election of 1824, whenJackson’s supporters charged that the nation-alist John Quincy Adams had won the pres-idency by making a “corrupt bargain” withHenry Clay. Fresh realignments loomed.

There was, however, another momen-tous crisis of the period that cut across theemerging political battle lines in ways thatappalled nationalistsand proto-Jackson-ians alike, andthat profoundlyaffected thecourse of dem-ocratic devel-opment: thecongressionaldebates from1819 through1821 over theextension of slav-ery and the admis-sion of Missouri to

John C. Calhoun

Henry Clay


the Union. A close reading of thosedebates shows that fundamental ideologi-cal and political shifts were under way,caused by the renaissance of slavery in thecotton South after 1800—a developmentthe Revolutionary generation could nothave foreseen. “The Missouri debateshocked Americans,” one recent accountof the period observes, “by revealing aresurgent slavery on a collision course withan aroused antislavery North.” That north-ern arousal, aimed at restricting slavery’sexpansion by admitting Missouri as a freestate, spread far beyond the halls ofCongress.

The restrictionist cause gained a follow-ing only gradually after RepresentativeJames Tallmadge of New York introducedtwo amendments, in February 1819, bar-ring slavery in Missouri. At first, restric-tionist views appeared chiefly in the writ-ings of the aging New Jersey patricianElias Boudinot, the editorials of TheodoreDwight in the New York Daily Advertiser,and the speeches of New York’s antislaverysenator Rufus King. By the late summer of1819, however, the increasingly bitterdebates in Washington, combined withlurid reports of atrocities committed byproslavery men in Missouri, began raisingthe temperature of northern public opin-ion to a fever pitch.

In New Jersey, an antislavery meetingchaired by Boudinot made plans forfuture action across the North. These

efforts found their headquarters in NewYork City, where, on November 13, morethan 2,000 citizens gathered to approveantislavery resolutions and establishRevolutionary-style committees of corre-spondence to communicate with allies inother states. By December, according toone New Hampshire congressman, it hadbecome “political suicide” for any free-state officeholder “to tolerate slaverybeyond its present limits.” From NewJersey, Boudinot reported that the protestsappeared “to have run like a flaming firethro our middle states and cause[d] greatanxiety.”

Much of that anxiety was, naturally,

centered in the South. The violence of thesouthern reaction in Congress toTallmadge’s proposals had laid to rest,once and for all, the lingering myth thatmany of the South’s leading citizens har-bored deep antislavery convictions. Signif-icantly, however, there was no mass popu-lar response on anything approaching thescale of the northern mobilization. In part,ordinary southerners were much lessalarmed at the controversy than eithertheir northern counterparts or their slave-holder representatives in Congress were.And in part, southern politicians were waryof sponsoring too much public discussionof the issue back home, lest the slavessomehow overhear it and get their mindsfoolishly and dangerously set on freedom.“Public meetings will be held and legisla-tive resolutions will probably be passed,”the Richmond Enquirer correctly predictedabout the North late in 1819. “But in theslave-holding states, notone meeting, notone resolution.”

Nat iona l i s tRepublicansand theire m e r g i n gJ a c k s o ni a nadversar ieswere just asupset as thes laveholder swere about Nor-thern unrest. WhileJohn Calhoun—still a leading na-tionalist, not yetthe chief theoretician of states’ rights—ledthe public efforts to calm southern fears,President Monroe and his allies (includingthe Philadelphia banker Nicholas Biddle)worked skillfully behind the scenes to checkboth pro- and antislavery activists. In NewYork, the young and ambitious Martin VanBuren smoothly acted to neutralize SenatorRufus King as an antislavery tribune. Andfinally, when southern die-hards refused tolet the matter rest even after the Houseapproved Missouri statehood with slavery,Henry Clay cobbled together a compromise

Martin Van Buren

52 WQ Spring 1999

that linked Missouri’s admission to theUnion with Maine’s. Slavery was also to bebanned in any state admitted from theLouisiana Purchase territories north of lati-tude 36º30'.

Calhoun, Biddle, Van Buren, Clay:with the exception of AndrewJackson, the list of moderate com-

promisers in the Missouri debates reads likethe general staffs of the opposing parties inthe other national political struggles tocome in the 1830s. Divided over so many ofthe economic and political issues inflamedby mass protests since 1815, these moderateswere united on the need to keep sectionalanimosities at bay. They were determined tosuppress the slavery issue in national affairs.And so American politics would unfold overthe next 30 years, as party leaders made theconflicts over economics and privilege thepremier points of party rhetoric, whilechecking the conflicts over slavery.

In the national political mainstream,what remained of antidemocratic senti-ment seemed to disappear in the 1830sand 1840s, so much so that, as Tocquevilleobserved, even “the wealthy man” whoharbored “a great distaste for [his] coun-try’s democratic institutions” could befound “boasting in public of the blessingsof republican government and the advan-tages of democratic forms.” Yet the majorparties did fight, passionately, over whatdemocracy meant.

The followers of Andrew Jackson—whoonce described himself as an upholder of“good old jeffersonian democratic princi-ples”—proclaimed that all history had beena battle between the few and the many.Democracy, by these lights, was the chiefpolitical weapon of “the great labouringclasses,” namely ordinary farmers and work-ingmen, in their battles against monopolists,“paper bank” financiers, and other mon-eyed, would-be aristocrats. (By classingslaveholders among the farmers, theJacksonians solidified their southern base.)

The Whigs, meanwhile, were no lessemphatic in calling themselves (as one oftheir chief publicists, Calvin Colton,wrote) “uncompromising American Demo-

crat[s].” But the Whigs celebrated a sup-posed harmony of interests between thefew and the many. Democracy, in theWhig view, arose not out of social conflictbut by the individual exertions of moral,prudent citizens, in an America that was,as Colton put it, “a country of self-mademen, than which nothing better could besaid of any state of society.”

Beneath this divide, meanwhile,sectional differences on the sub-ject of democracy also widened,

as the South’s growing connection to slav-ery stunted democratic development. Thisstunting was caused largely by the fact (soobvious that it often goes unnoticed) thatthe bulk of the dependent southern workforce, the slaves, were not simply un-en-franchised but relegated to what theHarvard University sociologist OrlandoPatterson has called “social death.” Laborissues, increasingly contested by northernworkers in the 1830s and 1840s, lay out-side the purview of southern political con-troversy, at least as far as the slaves wereconcerned.

Moreover, the intellectual cornerstoneof the slaveholders’ democracy was the tra-ditional precept that personal dependencyrendered a man dangerous to the polityand unfit for citizenship. That precept wasquickly losing favor in the more expansive-ly democratic North. It was this very prin-ciple, which Calhoun, J. H. Hammond,and other incipient southern nationalistslauded as part of the genius of southerninstitutions, that led many free-soilers andincipient Republicans to castigate theSouth as a cryptoaristocratic “mudsilldemocracy.”

Southern politics was, to be sure, demo-cratic enough to stimulate fractious dis-putes. Some engaged rival factions of elitefamilies and some pitted the plantersagainst nonslaveholding yeomen, tenants,and laborers. Still, southern politicsbecame structured ever more in ways thatthwarted challenges to the slaveholders’dominion. The imposing power of themasters accounts for why battles over suf-frage reform and representation lasted


much longer in some of the older southernstates than they did in the North. As late as1857, for example, North Carolina’s 50-acre property requirement for voting instate senate elections disfranchised an esti-mated one-half of the state’s voters. Manyother constitutional provisions and elec-toral codes helped keep southern politicaloffices, from governors to county sheriffs,firmly in the hands of the slaveholders ortheir personal clients.

Southern social and cultural normsreinforced the slaveholders’ politi-cal power. With its widely dis-

persed rural citizenry and relatively poorinland transportation networks (apart fromthe rivers and other cotton routes), theSouth proved less hospitable to the sorts ofindependent political organizing and dis-cussion that blossomed in the North. Onthose few occasions, other than electiondays, when ordinary citizens would gatherin public—above all, compulsory militiamusters—local notables oftenpresided, and used the opportunityfor political proselytizing. Much ofthat proselytizing had to do with slav-ery, as rival politicians tried to surpasseach other in portraying themselvesas defenders of white men’s equality,states’ rights, and the peculiar institu-tion. Should anyone dare to speak orwrite too rashly (or, in time, too pub-licly) against slavery, thereby raisingthe specter of slave insurrection, theslaveholders quickly gained popularand legislative support to suppress themiscreants, their assemblies, andtheir publications.

The backwardness of southerndemocracy was, it should be empha-sized, only relative. Northern politics,at least party politics in the 1830s and1840s, was run primarily by smallclusters of insiders, chiefly lawyersand other professionals, who wereadept at screening out discomfitingpublic opinions and their advocates.Anyone naive enough to look for aparticipatory democracy of whitemen in the party machinations of the

Jacksonian and antebellum North isbound to be quickly disillusioned. Never-theless, compared with the South, democ-racy in the North was flourishing. No oneclass or class fraction held sway over poli-tics as the slaveholders did in the South. Amuch greater variety of ethnic and, moreimportant, religious loyalties, cuttingacross class and geographical lines, madenorthern politics more complex andvibrant. It was this fluidity that made possi-ble the rise of popular political movementssuch as the Liberty and Free-Soil Parties,successors to the pro-restrictionist move-ment of the Missouri crisis. Despite theirunanimity, the Whig and Democratic par-ties faced enormous difficulties in theirefforts to keep the slavery issue out ofnational debates.

Indeed, the great irony of national poli-tics after 1830 was that mainstream effortsto suppress debates over slavery onlywidened the breach between North and

With placards like this, the Vigilance Committeeof Boston helped make slavery a Northern issue.

54 WQ Spring 1999

South. Politicians of both major partiesthwarted Calhoun and the sectionalist nul-lification movement in 1832. They alsobacked efforts to silence the abolitionists.Yet in the North, attacks on the fairly smallabolitionist minority (by raucous, some-times pro-southern mobs as well as by theslaveholders themselves) made non-aboli-tionists ask whether slavery could coexistwith democratic institutions. Between1836 and 1842, the continuing controver-sy over the Gag Rule, which automaticallysquelched any discussion of antislaverypetitions in Congress, heightened north-ern fears that an arrogant slaveholder aris-tocracy was trying to impose its will on theentire country. And after 1840, when onewing of the abolitionist movement joinedforces with Whig and Democratic dissi-dents and entered electoral politics, themachinery of mass democracy helpedexpand the antislavery cause into a sec-tional political crusade.

The planters, for their part,became increasingly unnerved atthe boldness of northern criti-

cism and the failure of northern politicalleaders to squelch it. While clampingdown on any hints of homegrown antislav-ery dissent, they oversaw the final, painedcompletion of white male suffrage andmore equal representation in the South—with the explicit aim, voiced by HenryWise of Virginia, of enhancing the “com-mon safety” against “our Northernbrethren on the subject of slavery.” Havingforged a democracy built on slavery, theywould brook no interference. In the mid-1840s, convinced that they needed addi-tional political bulwarks, Calhoun and hisallies set about securing Jackson and VanBuren’s Democratic Party as their own.Thereafter, in a point-counterpoint longfamiliar to historians, northern democracyand southern democracy crystallized asantagonistic political forces, and the fight-ing turned lethal.

The Civil War settled the issue of slavery,as bequeathed by the early national period.It did not, however, settle America’s argu-ments over democracy. In the controversies

over populism in the 1890s, the GreatDepression in the 1930s, and the War onPoverty in the 1960s, Americans wouldreturn to their debates over how economicpower and privilege ought to be squaredwith political democracy. And in the con-tinuing controversies over racial justice,states’ rights, and civil rights, from the closeof Reconstruction to the present, we havestruggled with the abiding effects of slaveryand the outcome of the Civil War. At times,political alignments have resembled thoseof the Jackson era, most notably during theascendancy of the New Deal coalition. Butat other times (though the party labelsmight change), sectional differences havebeen more pronounced, as with the rise ofa southern-based conservative RepublicanParty since the 1960s.

Here, finally, is the full and last-ing legacy of the earlyRepublic. The old impressions

of the bustling, democratizing new nationcertainly carry a measure of truth.Politically, as well as economically,changes that were well under way by1815—including the linking of capitalismand democracy highlighted by Gordon S.Wood and other scholars—decisivelyreshaped the country and have continuedto shape American political perceptionsand behavior ever since. But no one ofthese changes or linkages can account forthe politics of the early Republic and after,just as no one image of democracy canstand as the single, agreed-upon Americanway. Whatever our agreements—about theillegitimacy of kingship and aristocracy, orabout popular sovereignty and the rule oflaw, or about the sanctity of private proper-ty—ours has been a democracy ever inconflict, ever unfinished, on the subject ofwhat a proper American democracyshould be. Those conflicts arose with thedemocratizing movements that followedthe American Revolution, and they havesurvived, in different forms, for nearly twocenturies. In that respect, whether we con-sider the Americans of that long-ago timeas friends or as enemies (or as both), theyare us.

america’s unendng revolution

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