THE DELICATE BALANCES of the Constitution were brilliantly crafted, but the framers could not anticipate all the new kinds of weights that would be thrown into their newly made scales. They balanced the powers of state and nation through federalism; they balanced the “democratic,” “aristocratic,” and “monarchical” elements of government in the House, Senate, and presidency; and they balanced executive, legislative, and judicial powers with devices like the veto, the override, and lifetime tenure for judges. They assumed that these mechanical adjustments would of themselves handle the contrasting wishes of different classes and regions without perpetuating the “factionalism” that they detested.
They were wrong. The conflicts that had paralyzed the Confederation government of the 1780s persisted (though with changes) in the 1790s. Just how they translated themselves into wracking struggles between organized parties by 1800 will be shown in the coming chapters. But the narrative will be clearer for a review of what those differences were. Paradoxically, they sprang from the very diversity and vastness of the young United States—two facts of life that were sources both of trouble and of potential strength.
PURELY IN TERMS of size, the infant United States was already an empire. In the enormous sea of space included within its 1790 boundaries—approximately 889,000 square miles—Spain, Great Britain, and France (not counting their overseas possessions) could have drowned, for altogether they totaled only a little over 500,000 square miles. America’s1 dominion was marked out on three sides by water—on the east by the Atlantic, on the west by the Mississippi, and on the north by the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. Only on the south was the republic landlocked. The southern boundary of Georgia was extended westward to the Mississippi, cutting off access to the Gulf of Mexico and to the seas beyond. The great gateway to the Gulf, the port of New Orleans at the Mississippi’s mouth, also remained in the hands of Spain, which in 1763 had gotten it from France as spoils of war in one of those constant transfers of imperial outposts between European kings—without the local populations being consulted in any way—that marked the great eighteenth-century chess game of war and diplomacy.
But size alone did not equal nationhood. Only settlement and cohesion could do that, and settlement was just what was lacking. Millions of virgin acres were considered open to the plow (no one paying much attention to the rights or claims of the resident Indian peoples), but in all that great expanse of mountain, forest, and river the population density was fewer than five per square mile. The 3,929,000 residents counted in the first census almost all dwelt within a serpentine coastal strip running from Maine to Georgia, about a thousand miles long and rarely more than a couple of hundred miles wide. That was the actual “United States” in which political action would take place. The two distinctive sections, North and South, that were already emerging were not quite equally balanced. Slightly over a million people lived in New England, then comprising four states, and slightly under a million in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Of this total population of some 1,968,00 in “the North,” all but 67,000 were white and free. In “the South,” which embraced the remaining six states, there was a total population of 1,961,000—but 657,000 of these were slaves.2 So the South, even with a slave counted in the census as three fifths of a person, was at a small but palpable disadvantage in representatives.
THE CONFLICTS of interest that would have to be solved by political horse trading arose in part from economic geography. To begin with, there was New England, whose wealth was, to paraphrase a psalm that her preachers often quoted, founded upon the seas.3 Long, bitter winters and rocky soils did not allow hardworking Yankee farmers to produce much beyond what they needed to feed and clothe themselves, and many were already moving westward. But the region did have a long coastline, abundant forests, plenty of skilled marine carpenters to turn trees into stout little vessels, and an unfailing supply of strong-nerved men to sail them anywhere in the world in search of codfish, whales, or cargoes of any kind to carry at a profit—silks and teas from China, furs from the Pacific Northwest, or groaning black men and women kidnapped, enslaved, and marketed like cattle in Africa. Most of the maritime fortunes of New England had been earned during colonial times in prosaic trips to the West Indies carrying rice, salted fish, lumber, hay, and horses for the sugar plantations. Or to Europe with holds full of West Indian molasses, Pennsylvania wheat, Virginia tobacco, or South Carolina indigo to make rich blue textile dyes. Or between British America’s own Atlantic ports with rum, hardware, glass, fruit, books, furniture, textiles, and whatever colonists needed or could afford to import. When business thrived the heavy winners were wealthy mercantile families, but their prosperity spread downward to all those involved in commerce, from sea captains and lawyers to deckhands and dockworkers.
The enemies of New England’s maritime welfare were not only storms and market fluctuations but the “mercantilist” policies then common, under which nations tried to confine commerce exclusively to ships owned by their own citizens. The “carrying trade” between the ports of Spain and her New World possessions, for example, was denied to ships that did not fly Spanish flags (though there were plenty of exceptions and evasions). This was British doctrine, too, but in the colonial period American ships were considered British and had no problem. With independence, Americans suddenly became “foreigners” to whom the vital commerce with the British West Indies was legally closed. That was an ironic twist to freedom—a former door to prosperity slammed in the faces of the Revolution’s victors.
What New England needed above all from the new United States government was a foreign policy that would reopen those doors and negotiate new trading opportunities with other powers as well. In addition, Yankee fishing vessels, which had freely hauled in catches off the coasts of Canada after that became a British possession in 1763, were now shut out. That situation, too, cried aloud for remedy in Yankee minds.
THE MID-ATLANTIC STATES shared some of these commercial and shipping concerns. In New York and Philadelphia they had two of the country’s busiest ports. But their prosperous farms, which provided huge quantities of food for home and foreign markets, created a separate agricultural interest that had a good deal in common with the plantation South. Looking to both the sea and the soil for their well-being, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York were “middle states” in more ways than mere location on a map.
The South was a truly agrarian section. The backbone of its wealth for over a century had been overseas sales of plantation-grown crops. For Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, tobacco was the foundation stone of society and politics. In South Carolina and Georgia, the last colony to be founded (in 1732), rice and indigo were also major exports. The needs of the large landowners who made up the southern elite were explicit. Their overall agenda for the national government was limited. They wanted no interference with slavery. They wanted foreign markets kept open, but it wasn’t important to them whose ships carried the goods—the cheaper the cargo rates the better. As heavy consumers of imported goods, especially from Great Britain, southern planters wanted nothing that would artificially raise import prices—no tariffs to protect any Americans looking to challenge British dominance in manufacturing. No bounties or subsidies to give American shipping a competitive edge. And no financial moves to stimulate investment that would put more money in the pockets of bankers and shareholders.
Southern planters and their political spokesmen—even those who favored the new Constitution—distrusted central power, especially when exercised in favor of the creditor class. This attitude had its roots in a long history of indebtedness. Tobacco planters in particular consigned their annual crops to British “factors” who sold them at the market price, used the proceeds to buy whatever British-made goods the planter had ordered, deducted their own fees and commissions, and sent back any leftover money. As often as not there was a negative balance, which the factor carried on his books as an interest-bearing loan secured by next year’s harvest. Southern growers lived well and serenely amid stacks of unpaid bills. Like the English landed gentry whom they emulated, they thought such encumbrances were simply part of a gentleman’s existence. But they hated business “speculators” on either side of the Atlantic, whom they suspected of manipulating prices and interest rates to the planters’ disadvantage.
True, the planters themselves often speculated in land, but that was considered a respectable road to riches, the expression of a faith that more of God’s earth would soon be under wholesome cultivation and that prices per acre would rise along with civilization.
THERE WAS hardly a distinctive “West” in 1790 except for a bulge of trans-Appalachian settlement that would create the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee within half a dozen years.4 It embraced frontier “communities” of scattered families subsisting in rough log huts on small patches of land hacked by hand out of the wilderness, where corn grew between the stumps and hogs ran wild. Their needs were few but urgent—military support, cheap land, markets for the furs they trapped and their cornmeal and pork, and above all, improvements in transportation that would connect them to those markets and pump the blood of development into their sparse existence.
But it is a mistake to assume that frontierlike conditions existed only in the remotest parts of the country. Once a traveler made his way inland from the Atlantic coast for more than several days in any state from New Hampshire to Georgia, he encountered a more egalitarian but cruder way of life—smaller farms, fewer professional men and merchants in the scattered towns, fewer amenities, more homespun clothing and homemade furniture, and more reliance on self, family, and neighbors for help with everything from childbirth to barn raising. The people of this backcountry, like those on the outer margins of settlement, also needed security, credit, markets, and improved transportation. They all had behind them a lengthy record of political, and in a few cases even armed, battles with the “aristocrats” of the coastal or tidewater regions who controlled the provincial and later the state governments. They were determined to get more land of their own, more seats in the legislatures, a better share of tax revenues, more courts and schools—everything that their growing numbers deserved. It was the troublemaking potential of these needy outsiders that had frightened conservatives in 1787 and drawn them into the effort to create the Constitution.
In addition to the issues dividing North and South, frontier and tidewater, the “middling sort” of people and the wealthy, there were other differences among Americans that added to the complexity of the political picture. Though the country’s basic institutions had their roots in the religious, political, and economic life of seventeenth-century England, heavy immigration had already added new colors to the rainbow pattern of American society. In 1782 a French-born settler in rural New York, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur, boasted that the American was a “new man,” part of a “strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country.”5 At least some two hundred thousand German-born or German-descended men and women lived in places as far apart as New York’s Mohawk Valley and western North Carolina, though the major concentration in Pennsylvania had already created the term “Pennsylvania Dutch” (a corruption of Deutsch, German). The other heavy immigration of the 1700s came from the northern counties of Ireland. These “Scots-Irish,” who gravitated heavily to the frontiers, though technically “British,” were culturally speaking a stubborn, independent-minded breed of their own, A third major addition to the population—though a politically powerless one—consisted of the thousands of Africans who arrived in chains.
There were small but important urban pockets of French Protestant Huguenot families whose grandparents and great-grandparents had been thrown out of France a century earlier. There were Jews likewise driven from Europe, many of them involved in international trade through family-owned businesses with networks of cousins and in-laws abroad. There were small numbers of Dutchmen and Swedes descended from very early settlements. None of these groups was strenuously “ethnic,” but in the 1790s they often were at odds with their neighbors over religious matters. God was worshipped with admirable freedom in many ways, but some of them got more official backing than others. Congregationalism was a state-supported faith in parts of New England, and in some southern states the Episcopal, formerly the Anglican, church received tax revenues. Various state religious tests restricted officeholding and voting to Protestants or at least to Christians or to professors of faith in the Bible. Even where legal constraints were absent, the social and economic preeminence of Episcopalians and Congregationalists was a challenge to Jews, Dutch Reformed worshippers, Moravians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists. Some of these denominations, in particular Methodism, a recent import to America, had strong foundations among rural farmers and urban commoners—apprentices without the capital to start their own shops, day laborers, farmworkers, domestic servants, and others long shut out of decision making.
The hopes of such groups to rise in life fueled plenty of local political blazes in township and county elections for officials who ran such nuts-and-bolts operations of government as repairing roads and checking scales. Wider coalitions had occasionally been forged behind candidates for colonywide or statewide offices. But was there a possibility of creating nationwide groups organized for political action? Could there be an interlink between “outs” and “ins” in, say, North Carolina and New Hampshire that would unite them behind a single presidential hopeful? In 1790 the outlook was not promising because of the sheer physical difficulties of communication.
IN THE 1790s the obstacles to simply transmitting a message were daunting. The only way for a politician, lawyer, or businessman in Boston to make contact with another in New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston was to send him a letter, written by hand with a sharpened quill (steel-point pens were half a century in the future) on heavy rag paper with homemade ink. Copies, if needed, had to be written out one by one. Devices like the letter press, which squeezed a damp sheet of paper over an original and took a faint impression, were slow, cumbersome, and rare. Secretaries were available only to the very highest officials. Almost every man in public life spent hours each day writing dozens of letters. The monuments of the most outstanding Founding Fathers are millions of words bound in thick volumes of collected works.
Mail contact was slow and costly. Congress didn’t get around to creating the U.S. Post Office until 1792; an old system inherited from colonial days did set up post offices but could not work immediate improvements in the roads that linked them. Postage was paid for by the recipient. The 1792 act set rates ranging from six cents on a single-page letter going up to 30 miles to twenty-five cents on one traveling more than 450 miles, steep tariffs for those days. To save money (and paper), writers often filled up both sides of a sheet, then turned it at right angles and continued to write across their existing script. Then they folded the paper (no envelopes), sealed it with wax, and took it to the nearest post office.6 From there it was confided to a “contractor,” who ran a stage or wagon line.
Then came a long wait between sendoff and delivery. Forty miles a day, which meant about a week between Boston and New York, or a little under three days between New York and Philadelphia, was considered good time and depended on kind weather. But it was easier on the bones to do business by correspondence than to travel oneself. American coaches in 1790 were little more than wagons with transverse benches set on poor substitutes for springs. At every rut or rock, passengers swayed or bounced, and so did the baggage and mailbags piled around their feet. Rain poured in through imperfectly curtained side windows, made mud holes from which the coach had to be lifted by wet, filthy, and unhappy passengers, and brought long halts at streams too swollen to cross. The traveler arriving at a stopover in the late evening just had time to swallow cold leftovers and sleep for a few hours until wakened in darkness for an early start. And that was in the settled part of the country. In the West the even cruder roads were strewn with stumps and rocks that could overturn vehicles and maim and kill the unlucky. Water transportation was preferable, but sloops and schooners on the rivers could travel slowly upstream only to the first falls or shallows, and coastal vessels could be long delayed by contrary winds.
All these handicaps combined to make meetings hard to arrange between leaders in neighboring counties, let alone distant cities. Weeks of advance notice were needed. The political impact of such hardships was important. Quick adaptation to a changing scene was impossible. Misunderstandings, as for example among electors on a party’s choice of candidates, could not be clarified overnight. Building a united leadership or an electoral “machine” would be tough and slow. It would have to begin within cities, where taverns and boardinghouses offered fire, lamps, writing facilities, and good cheer to small numbers of conferees around a friendly table. Connecting local caucuses in a wider network was the next, hard step.
Large-scale gatherings of voters were no light undertaking, either. There were some, held in churches, town halls (especially in New England), or other buildings big enough for audiences of several hundred, where the speeches could flow like wine and resolutions be passed by shouted acclamation. But genuinely “mass” public meetings, indoors or out, had to await the coming of large auditoriums, streetlights, transportation—a whole supporting network of urban services later taken for granted.
The press offered a way of transmitting political messages, but its reach was limited. There were some ninety newspapers in the whole country, most of them weeklies. Almost all had the same format of a single large sheet folded down the middle to create four pages. They were produced by the most literally “hands-on” technology. A tray of handset type covering two pages was inked by handheld rollers, then the paper was pressed against it by a heavy block of wood or metal screwed into place by a grunting printer or his apprentice. A day’s work gave a press run of four or five hundred, the total circulation of the issue. But readership was wider than that, as papers were passed hand to hand, kept available in taverns, and mailed to country subscribers. Most of the pages were taken up with advertisements, announcements of local interest, official proclamations, and a small amount of news in eye-straining small print. But room could be left for public debates, usually in letters written under classical pseudonyms—“Publius,” “Seneca,” or “Cato” supposedly bringing the wisdom of antiquity to bear on current events. The trouble was that the writers easily forgot classical restraint. The record will show, as it unfolds, that the press was run by men more given to shouts and tantrums than to virtuous moderation.
POLITICAL ARGUMENTS were addressed to the eyes and ears of a small electorate, though exactly how small is debatable. On the eve of the Revolution most colonies gave the vote to white, Christian, adult, propertied males. When the states became independent, there was a tendency in their new constitutions to lighten the property qualifications, so that by 1790, in most places, the taxpaying owner of any house or lot could meet them. More, however, was occasionally required for officeholding—and as for the idea of admitting people who owned nothing but themselves to the polling places, its hour had not struck. As John Adams said, “Very few men who have no property have any judgment of their own.” Women were, of course, universally considered (by men) “not to have a sufficient acquired discretion to cast ballots,” as a minister explained, because their domestic duties kept them from that “promiscuous intercourse with the world which is necessary to qualify them for electors.”7 But for men the newly relaxed rules meant that, according to scholarly estimates, 50 to 80 percent of them, depending on locality, had suffrage rights in 1789. The same researchers judge, however, that only 10 to 40 percent of this eligible electorate actually voted.
The turnout in colonial times had been on a very small scale, partly because many offices were appointive, partly because of the timeconsuming grind to get to the scattered polling places, and partly because even qualified voters had a tendency to leave such matters in the hands of their presumed betters, the wealthy and professional classes. This “politics of deference” was broken into by the generally antiauthoritarian sentiments released during the Revolution. A 1793 get-out-the-vote handbill in New York appealed to prospective new voters with a reminder that “the pedantic lawyer, the wealthy merchant and the lordly landholder have already had their interests sufficiently attended to.” Around the same time, someone in Virginia’s House of Burgesses took note that members were “not quite so well dressed, nor so politely educated, nor so highly born as [in] some Assemblies we have formerly seen.”8 These anticipatory flashes of democratic lightning on the horizon, however, were still rare.
The process of getting nominated and elected was loose and informal. An interested bidder for an office, especially an influential citizen, simply made his desire known to a number of his friends and clients by post or word of mouth. Often that was enough in lightly populated districts. As the voting rolls got larger, more organization came into play. There were caucuses in the state assemblies, or meetings of interest groups where agreement was reached on a slate of names for different offices. These were circulated in handbills or newspaper stories. Once the word got out to like-minded voters, candidates promoted themselves by personal contact according to their energies and means. One tradition dating back to colonial days was to treat the electorate. George Washington, running for Virginia’s state legislature in 1757, provided 391 supporters on election day with 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, and 46 gallons of beer.9
Unsurprisingly, then, election days could be boisterous and irregular. They were sometimes held on short notice, with polling places set up in taverns, courthouses, and even churches and private homes. Voting was still done largely by voice, the voter stepping up to the election judges and declaring his preference to the cheers and groans of onlookers. Paper ballots were just beginning to appear, some with already printed slates, but these, too, were requested aloud from the poll clerks in a very public exposure of a voter’s choice. Secret and unintimidated ballots were a long way in the future. The vote count itself ran on a loose schedule and might not be announced for days. The principle of self-government was regarded with solemnity, but the actual recording of the people’s choice took place in an atmosphere that ranged from casual to rowdy.
POPULAR ENTHUSIASM for politics is a good thing overall, a healthy sign that voters think they have a stake and a significant voice in government. In 1790 it was a warning of coming challenges to rule-by-gentlemen. The machinery to direct those feelings into safe and peaceful channels, however, had yet to be built and tested, and the process would be turbulent. But prospects were favorable at the start because the first presidential election, two years earlier, had taken place in the sunshine of a great and popular name respected everywhere. The American overture to national politics was a beguiling and deceptive hymn of unanimous welcome to George Washington.