For several reasons, this work emphasizes Republicans over Federalists as the exemplars of newspaper politics. Administration editor John Fenno played a role in the genesis of the phenomenon, but it was opposition statesmen and opposition printers who first conjoined newspapers and party politics. It was the Republican newspaper network that proved itself by unseating John Adams, inspiring a flurry of pattern-setting imitation and expansion. Finally, it was Republican editors and newspapers that formed the background for the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of newspaper politics. The Federalist party had virtually ceased to exist by the 1820s, so it was the Republican party from which both of the Jackson-ian-era parties developed.
Nevertheless, it seems important to acknowledge that newspaper politics was not an exclusively Republican phenomenon. A brief discussion of Federalist newspaper politics will help illuminate the internal differences between the two parties and add another dimension to the traditional explanation for the Federalists’ demise as an opposition party. It also forms a logical starting point for a major theme of the next few chapters, the bipartisan but largely failed efforts to gentrify the political press by reclaiming it from printers.
After trying to destroy it during their “reign of terror,” Federalist leaders embraced newspaper politics in the aftermath of their defeat. They well understood that Republican newspapers had been a crucial factor in the Federalists having lost both the presidency and their congressional majority. Having wrung their hands so often over the dangerous sway that newspapers held over the republic and imputed to them the most frightfully destructive capacities, the Federalists had worked themselves up to the point of outdoing the Republicans in their estimate of this “ready and powerful instrument.” According to one Federalist editor, the Republican journals had wrought “A general corruption of manners—decay of morality—vitiation of taste—a disrelish of literature— . . . bankruptcy in virtue, and national degradation!”1
The press even became a kind of excuse, allowing Federalists to believe that it was not their personnel or ideology that had been rejected. Regarding the influence of newspapers as a testament to the citizenry’s ignorance and weak-mindedness, they believed the press might be used to carry people as easily one way as another. Damning the press and plotting to exploit it were almost two sides of the same coin. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts took a back seat to no one in lurid fears of Republican journalism. Because “the majority of citizens form their ideas of men and measures almost solely from the light that reaches them through the magic-lantern of the press,” Ames wrote in “The Dangers of American Liberty,” it could become the “base and venal instrument of the very men it ought to gibbet to universal abhorrence.” So Jefferson, Duane, and company had done: “While they were climbing to power it aided their ascent; and now that they have reached it, does it not conceal or justify their abominations?” In a different mood, however, the same basic analysis drove Ames to be a leader in building up the Federalist press: “As the newspapers greatly influence public opinion, and that controls everything else,” he wrote to an ally in 1801, “it is not only important but absolutely essential, that these should be used with more effect than ever.”2
By the admission of Federalist leaders, the Federalist press had been no match for the opposition during the 1790s, despite its larger numbers. Several reasons were suggested for this deficiency. With the notable exception of Alexander Hamilton, Federalist leaders had taken printers’ support as their due, doing relatively little to sustain, improve, or expand their partisan press. Virginia Federalist John Nicholas argued that the Republicans had been successful only because of
their incessant industry & application to these objects, & our supineness and want of exertion. One of their main plans has ever been, to support with their best energies, both Mentally and pecuniarily, their best printers; & with the utmost industry, care & activity, to disseminate their papers and pamphlets: While the Federalists leave their printers to scuffle on the support of their subscribers ... a very flimsy & uncertain daily sustenance, and to scribble out their own way to conquest!
Nicholas exaggerated the extent of Republican leaders’ support and shed unnecessary tears for the majority of Federalist printers, whose papers were generally profitable enterprises well sustained by business advertisers. Yet clearly the Federalist press needed help, if only in the form of prodding to be more political and advice on how to do it.
The majority of printers who had supported the Federalists did so out of social traditionalism and conservatism of temperament. They rather agreed with the Federalist gentry that artisans were to be employed and not heard, and in any case they felt content to earn their livings while leaving the direction of community affairs to others. With a few exceptions, Federalist printers were as suspicious of electioneering as their leaders were; they were loathe to become wholly partisan or to get deeply involved in election campaigns. Usually, their political exertions were sporadic, inconsistent, and overly decorous.
A particularly glaring fault, explained Nicholas, was the Federalist newspapers’ failure to take advantage of postal policies and act as a network, as the Republicans did: “They seldom republish from each other; while on the other hand, their antagonists never get hold of any thing, however trivial in reality, but they make it ring thro’ all their papers from one end of the Continent to the other.” When Federalist printers did become partisan, they tended to take John Fenno’s route of socially belittling the opposition and histrionically denouncing its leaders as atheists, libertines, anarchists, and agents of France. Their basic message had been that opposition itself should cease, for only the evil-minded and poorly bred would cavil at the policies of the sainted George Washington and his disciples.3
A good example of the political limitations of the Federalist press before 1800 can be found in the Keene New Hampshire Sentinel, established in early 1799 just as hyperpolitical Republican journals were spreading across the country. In sharp contrast to its Republican contemporaries, the Sentinel approached the building “political tempest” gingerly, restricting the amount of political material and limiting what there was to allusive, literary matter unlikely to have much political impact, such as a strained “Dialogue between GALLATIN and RANA the frog.”
While printer John Prentiss seemed to recognize some need to campaign at election time, his newspaper’s efforts in that line were almost comically reticent: two short notices inserted by readers for the fall 1799 elections, one “Electioneering” column in one issue during the spring of 1800, and only reports of the voting in fall of 1800. The tone of this material is captured by the hard-hitting remarks of one of the 1799 notices: “In many respectable circles, it is thought . . . that in doing the most good in Congress, no one would better fill the vacancy than the Hon. DANIEL NEWCOMB, Esq.” In between elections, the Sentinel occasionally mixed its political message by printing pro-Republican items, including some harsh criticism of William Cobbett and an account of William Duane’s beating that was sympathetic to the editor.4
As with many Federalist newspapers, the Sentinel’s relative nonpartisanship was driven at least partly by Federalist philosophy, which saw political agitation itself (while wise and good men ruled) as a primary cause of the nation’s distress. Its first issue featured a long congressional defense of the Alien and Sedition Acts (exempt from qualms about campaigning because it was an official document) on the front page, and, on the back page, a poem, “Extracts from a Town Meeting,” that portrayed the outbreak of partisan debate in New England’s most cherished political institution as literally the work of Satan, that “great Jacobin of yore” who was thrown out of heaven for “Sedition.” Speaking volumes about New England Federalist distrust of popular, competitive politics, the poem pictured a Republican politician bringing a raucous crowd into the meeting, “To banish order, stir up evil, / And serve their lord and master Devil.”5
This kind of crabbed, conflicted political journalism had proven ineffective, and, what was worse, many of its basic elements became obsolescent after 1800. It was manifestly self-defeating for Federalists to argue the illegitimacy of opposition politics when they were themselves in opposition, and with their predictions of anarchy, rapine, and pillage under Republican rule failing to materialize, election campaigns, like them or not, began to seem the only safe route back to national power. Some Federalists became so disaffected as to venture down more dangerous avenues, such as plotting to make Aaron Burr president or seceding from the union, but the wisest of the self-styled wise and good gradually and grudgingly turned their attention to beating the Republicans with their own methods. That meant conducting themselves more like a party, organizing for elections in a way they never had before, and working to match Duane and the Republican newspaper network.6
The vast majority of newspapers supported the government when the Sedition Act was passed, but only a handful of these were politically active and even fewer were run by serious newspaper politicians in the manner of William Duane. Probably the closest to this model that the Federalist press came was Benjamin Russell and his Boston Columbian Centinel, which had been vituperating against the Boston elite’s enemies since the 1780s and which came to serve as the chief article supplier for many other New England newspapers. By the 1790s Russell himself had become an energetic if junior member of Boston Federalist political councils and an important street-level leader. John Prentiss, an apprentice for the Republican Chronicle who followed Russell’s Federalist line in his own editorial career, remembered often seeing “Maj. Russell ... in State Street, surrounded by his political friends,” where he “administered political party law!” Unlike most Federalist printers, Russell pursued a political career in his own right, becoming a prominent local officeholder beginning in 1805. Besides positions on the Boston School Committee, Board of Health, and as a city alderman, he represented Boston in the state legislature from 1805 to 1835 continuously, capping his career with a term on the Executive Council.
However, Russell rarely strayed from his role as a loyal auxiliary, and he was certainly no peer, competitor, or even kingmaker to the Adamses, Quincys, Otises, and such who were the leading lights of Massachusetts Federalism. A stonemason’s son and a semieducated artisan printer himself, Russell “never forgot that he was a mechanic,” according to his friend Joseph T. Buckingham, and always punctiliously observed all social distinctions and honorary titles.7
The only other notable and actively partisan early Federalist journals were the Centinel’s spin-off, the Gazette of the United States; the Hartford Connecticut Courant, organ of the Standing Order; and perhaps the Baltimore Federal Gazette. Others grew more partisan when a Republican printer set up shop in their town, as in the case of John Scull’s Pittsburgh Gazette. In the hinterlands and in the South, there were a great many cautious, conservative printers, but almost no partisan Federalist sheets.
The first glimmerings of a change came appropriately enough in July 1798, with the appearance of the Trenton Federalist, the first partisan newspaper to take that appellation. Trenton hardly opened the floodgates, however. Of forty-two Federalist-leaning newspapers founded in 1798 and 1799, at least seventeen must be classified as apolitical, moderate, or independent, including the previously discussed New Hampshire Sentinel. Salted here and there were more avowedly partisan journals such as the Richmond Virginia Federalist (May 1799), the Charleston Federal Carolina Gazette (January 1800), and the Washington Federalist (September 1800).8 In their more prolix and self-consciously dignified fashion, some of these new Federalist papers echoed their newly founded Republican contemporaries in avowing their partisanship, at least backhandedly. “At a time when . . . the enemies of the General Government are laboring ... to rob it of public confidence and affection,” announced the Washington Federalist, “we should hold a promise of absolute indifference between parties . . . to be merely an ill-timed sacrifice of our political sentiments—a cold apathy to the interests of our country—and a base renunciation of editorial independence.”9
It was after 1800 that more serious efforts began. (See map 5.) The new opposition party gained a flagship of sorts in the fall of 1801, when Alexander Hamilton raised thousands of dollars and organized the founding of the New York Evening Post. Hamilton hoped the paper would help recoup the political standing he had lost by backstabbing John Adams in 1800. That same year, the westward migration from New England produced two well-regarded local Federalist partisans. The sometime printer and clergyman Harry Croswell, originally from West Hartford, Connecticut, moved to Hudson and set up the Balance, which soon would spar with Charles Holt’s Bee. Meanwhile, the printer Asher Miner of Norwich, Connecticut (soon joined by his more talented brother and fellow printer Charles) chose political journalism over pioneer farming and started the Luzerne County Federalist at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Cros-well’s Balance would later become the state capital Federalist paper, while Charles Miner would achieve national recognition as an editor and writer, most notably for coining the phrase “he has an ax to grind” in a satire on Republican officeseekers.10
Such newspaper propagation by independent entrepreneurship would always be rarer among the Federalists than the Republicans. Heroic top-down efforts like Hamilton’s were usually required. With many leaders in Federalism’s New England heartland preoccupied with secessionist conspiracies, the Federalist press grew rather slowly during most of Jefferson’s two presidential terms. As shown in appendix 1, chart 5, the Federalists matched the Republicans from 1801 to 1803, when the Republican effort had slowed down, but fell far behind for most of the rest of Jefferson’s presidency, as new Republican papers popped up all over New England and the West. (See map 4, page 212) Still, when new Federalist journals did appear they were almost always decidedly partisan, or gradually became so (as the aforementioned New Hampshire Sentinel did by 1802). In addition, many an old, established Gazette—the colonial-vintage title that staid, commercial, Federalist-leaning monopoly newspapers usually preferred—was renovated in this period. Newspaper politics was taking hold among its former victims, especially as a younger, less despondent generation of Federalist gentlemen came to the fore.11
MAP 5. The Federalists Strike Back: Partisan Federalist Newspapers, 1800–1806.
The most powerful burst of Federalist newspaper energy came in the wake of Jefferson’s embargo in 1807. With their first chance to make serious inroads since 1800, the younger Federalists took over and tried hard to make their party competitive, especially in New England. Harrison Gray Otis and others had been building a tight-wired Federalist party organization to carry state and local elections. This did not mean they had reconciled themselves to democracy or continuing party competition: the organization was strictly secret and designed more to efficiently implement the Boston elite’s decisions rather than move the Federalists into any truly democratic style of politics.
Following the conventional elite assumption that the common voter was hopelessly localistic in outlook (and expecting to out-demagogue the Republicans), Federalist speakers and writers focused on appealing to Yankee sectional prejudices in their criticisms of Jefferson, emphasizing the distasteful aspects of southern culture and casting administration policies as indifferent or hostile to New England’s economic interests. The embargo was a jackpot in this regard, and the younger Federalists made a strong push to get their message out. A network of Washington Benevolent Societies was created to soften the Federalists’ elitist image by giving money to the poor and allowing the middling classes to bask in the glow of banqueting with the local aristocrats.12
At the same time, a new wave of extremely partisan Federalist newspapers appeared, surpassing in number and bitterness anything the friends of order had done before. This was apparently part of a concerted effort. In Massachusetts, Otis drew up a survey of Federalist presses in New England, noting how politically effective they were, how well they were subsidized by Federalist leaders, and where further subsidies and literary assistance were needed. The purpose of the subsidies was not only to keep Federalist newspapers afloat, but also to enable free or very low-cost distribution to voters before elections, something the Federalists believed the Republicans had done regularly. As a result of Otis’s plan and similar efforts in other areas, more than forty new Federalist journals were created during 1808 and 1809 alone, igniting a journalistic arms race with the Republicans. (See map 5 and appendix 1, charts 3 and 5.) Among these journals were the disingenuously titled Impartial Observer, founded by Judge William Cooper at Cooperstown, New York, to smite his local enemies (he was shortly forced to rename it the Cooperstown Federalist); and the soon-to-be-infamous Baltimore Federal Republican, created by a coterie of wealthy young Federalists.13
One distinct advantage the Federalists enjoyed in this race was money. As we have seen, Federalist newspapers were sounder financially than their Republican counterparts, because they were more commercially oriented and benefited from having a major political constituency (merchants) that bought advertising and needed newspaper subscriptions for year-round, other-than-political purposes. The advantages became potentially greater in times of political crisis when large numbers of new papers were needed. Republican gentlemen tended to be upwardly mobile lawyers or cash-poor planters, and they often disappointed the legions of printers who sought or were offered their aid. As the party of the nation’s wealthiest and most liquid citizens, the Federalists were better able to supplement their verbal encouragement of printers with the more material kind. Jefferson had written letters urging Republican leaders to contribute money to newspapers, but Harrison Gray Otis was able to draw up a list with specific figures. Concerned that the Washington Federalist was faltering for lack of operating funds, Benjamin Russell advised the journal’s editor that all he need do was bring up the subject with Massachusetts congressman Josiah Quincy.14
Financial advantages translated into technical advantages, and Federalist newspapers generally looked better, in terms of paper quality and type clarity, than Republican journals. Indeed, Federalist leaders believed that Federalist readers, presumed to be more discerning than the earthy Republican variety, would not subscribe to or follow the political guidance of a newspaper that did not “look respectable.” Thus even Federalist start-up newspapers came out in style, sometimes capitalized in the tens of thousands of dollars, while Republican journals were more likely to begin publishing on a used or borrowed press with worn-out type.15
The New York Evening Post was the ultimate example. Raising more than $10,000 in a few weeks, Hamilton was able to pay his chosen editor, the attorney William Coleman, a $2,000 salary and set him up with a printer, a brick building, four fonts of brand-new type, and a large supply of high-grade white paper. From the outset, the Post carried fourteen or fifteen (out of twenty) columns of Federalist merchant advertising in every issue. (To put Coleman’s salary in perspective, compare it to one of the few other editorial salary figures that appears in the record: the editor of the Republican Worcester National Aegis made only $150 per annum, thirteen years after Coleman was hired.) Coleman made much of his paper’s dignified appearance, and even a Republican writer remarked that it was “beyond all comparison, the most elegant piece of workmanship . . . seen either in Europe or America.”16
Federalist wealth also allowed the development of one of the unique features of the Federalist press, the use of short-term satirical newspapers devoted exclusively to grinding down Republican reputations. Usually published without advertising, they were presumably bankrolled by Federalist leaders and distributed free or at very low cost. Harry Croswell’s Wasp seems to have been the first, and its fame spawned at least seven imitators up through 1811, most with similarly self-explanatory titles: a Porcupine in Baltimore, a Scorpion in Worcester, a Switch in Cooperstown, and a Scourge at various times in Boston, Providence, and Baltimore. If the giant woodcut of a vengeful insect on Croswell’s banner did not announce his publication’s intentions clearly enough, his motto, “To lash the Rascals naked through the world,” certainly did.17
An advantage that the Federalists felt they had over the Republicans was talent. Firmly believing in their own social, intellectual, and moral superiority, many Federalists were convinced that if only their forces could be properly marshaled, they could easily overwhelm the Republicans with their own weapons. According to John Nicholas, with “the talents, the virtue, the wealth” of the country lay “expressly against” Jefferson and his followers. There was no reason that such “whimsical and theoretical visionaries” should be suffered to “sway the public opinion & hold the rod of popular despotism” when so many writers and speakers of “better qualifications and more useful powers” could be arrayed against them.
Thus Federalists did not seek to just copy the Republican press; they wanted to improve upon it. Fisher Ames complained that the recent Republican campaign had made “uneducated printers, shop-boys, and raw school-masters . . . the chief instructors in politics.” New Federalist political journals ought to try to remedy this and make newspapers the speaking trumpets of the natural aristocracy once more: “Let the interests of the country be explained and asserted by the able men, who have had concern in the transaction of affairs, who understand those interests, and who will, and ever will, when they try, produce a deep national impression.” Moreover, the new Federalist editors would not lower themselves to the level of the Jacobin printers but would conduct their operations in a more refined manner. The Boston paper Ames was planning would be “fastidiously polite and well-bred. It should whip Jacobins as a gentleman would a chimney sweeper, at arm’s length, and keeping aloof from his soot.”
FIGURE 7. Hudson, N.Y., Wasp, front page, 7July 1802. (Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society)
The Federalist indictment of political newspapers run by printers and their ilk included many of their own journals as well as the Republican ones. For too long “newspapers have been left to the lazy or the ill-informed,” Ames thought, but they were “an engine that wit and good sense would make powerful.” The wealth of the country might be in danger from the Republicans’ “wild destroying rage,” but if its “defense was committed to the wit, learning and talent of a few, then it will be safer than armies could make it.”18
Thus when Ames, Hamilton, and other Federalist gentlemen set about improving or establishing newspapers, they took pains to place them under the management of men of education, good breeding, and demonstrated facility in the field of polite letters. These new editors were rarely printers by training. They often remained officially anonymous and were typically charged only with overseeing the paper’s editorial content, the financial and mechanical aspects of the concern being left with a practical printer or business manager.
In Boston, Fisher Ames and his friends organized some additional financial support for the Massachusetts Mercury, a commercial paper published by the printers Alexander Young and John Minns. (Most notably, they bought a prepaid subscription for every clergyman in New England.) While Federalist-leaning like all prudent Boston tradesmen, Young and Minns had been relatively impartial in the past, even allowing William Bentley space to contest the anti-Jeffersonian, anti-Masonic conspiracy theories of the Rev. Jedidiah Morse. Fortified with Federalist money, the printers increased the journal’s size, upgraded its paper, added New England Palladium to the title, and, most important of all, hired the New Haven lawyer and Yale graduate Warren Dutton, “a gentleman of fine talents, and a scholar of high reputation,” to take over the editorial duties.19
Alexander Hamilton’s hand-picked editor William Coleman also fit Ames’s specifications. Born in Massachusetts, Coleman came from humble origins but rose in the world (like Hamilton himself ) through upper-class patronage and came to identify heavily with his benefactors. “Discovered” as a child by an unidentified Boston gentleman and sent to Andover Academy, he afterwards practiced law in Greenfield, Massachusetts, enjoying some success in politics as well as law. A frequent political writer in the Greenfield Gazette, Coleman represented the town in the state legislature and was building a mansion when the collapse of the Ya-zoo land speculation suddenly bankrupted him. He moved to New York to begin life anew and attracted the attention of Hamilton, who had him appointed to a court clerkship. When the plan to create the Evening Post was hatched, Coleman’s newspaper experience, legal credentials, and dependence on Hamilton made him a logical choice to edit the paper.20
Other Federalist leaders found other William Colemans. Federalists in and around the District of Columbia engaged local printer William A. Rind (son of the man Thomas Jefferson had recruited to print his “free” Virginia Gazette before the Revolution) to publish the Washington Federalist, edited by a string of young gentlemen, including Elias Boudinot Cald-well, the Princeton-educated clerk of the Supreme Court, and Charles Prentiss, a highly regarded Harvard graduate, who bypassed the law to pursue his dream of working as a professional writer. In Philadelphia, John Ward Fenno (the original editor’s son) was succeeded at the helm of the Gazette of the United States by Enos Bronson, a young attorney and Yale graduate. Another Philadelphia Federalist paper was edited by the revolutionary veteran and lawyer William Jackson, secretary of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, former close aide to George Washington, and son-in-law of Thomas Willing, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants.21
The most extreme Federalist newspaper of all, the Baltimore Federal Republican (founded 1808), also had the most aristocratic of the Federalist editors. This was the planter and attorney Alexander Contee Hanson Jr., a graduate of St. John’s College and scion of one the state’s most influential old families. Hanson’s grandfather and father before him had been important political leaders and serial officeholders. The former’s career peaked with his service as the first president of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, while the latter enjoyed a sixteen-year run as chancellor of Maryland. From this illustrious lineage (and the estates that went with them), young Hanson the editor inherited a strong sense of entitlement to public leadership and a total unwillingness to suffer political errors in silence. These traits gave Hanson’s journalism, speeches, and letters an ideological hauteur and aggressiveness that some historians have found almost pathological.22
Under Hanson’s direction, the Federal Republican was an extreme Federalist journal on almost every count. On the one hand, its distaste for democracy and enthusiasm for the British cause in the Napoleonic Wars rivaled anything found in Hartford or Boston. “THE RABBLE,” one early item was headed, more or less summarizing Hanson’s feelings toward the mass of voters who were providing Republican majorities in Maryland, and especially in Baltimore. These rabble were not only stupid but vicious and violent, and granting them political influence would inevitably lead to chaos and mass murder. Hanson sometimes argued that the people of Maryland were merely being misled by Republican demagogues, but in the same breath deplored the “tame and submissive spirit” they showed for following such leaders and thus coupling themselves with the “scum of society.”
While other Federalists were learning to tone down their antidemocratic rhetoric, Hanson wrote as though guillotines were operating in the streets of Baltimore. An item entitled “Democracy delights in blood” managed to get, in less than one-third of a column, from condemning a Republican reference to Timothy Pickering, John Marshall, and Aaron Burr as traitors to warning that the “germ of French democracy, more ferocious than the tyger, more desolating than the pestilence” was abroad in the country. “Are we in Turkey, the slaves of a tyrant .l.l. do we live under Robespierre?”23
Hanson recognized few limits on his partisan rhetoric or behavior. Jefferson and Madison were depicted as despotic, pusillanimous, and incompetent all at once, most infamously with the remark that in the areas of “tyranny and oppression,” George III had nearly been matched by “Jefferson and his political pimp .l.l. whiffling Jemmy.”24 Though several years after the fact, Hanson’s retrospective attacks on the cowardice of the American officers involved in the Chesapeake affair were so harsh that one of them, Capt. Charles Gordon, challenged the editor to a duel. As a plantation-owning southern gentleman, Hanson was better trained for this kind of thing than most editors; “a crack shot,” he wounded Gordon in the abdomen and left him crippled.25
Even more troubling was Hanson’s advocacy for the British, which at times involved not just defending the once-and-future enemy government, but turning the Federal Republican into a direct conduit for British diplomatic propaganda. For instance, when the Madison administration asked for the recall of British minister Francis James Jackson in the wake of the “Erskine letter” fiasco, Hanson published a long, detailed essay series defending Jackson, essays which were written by Jackson or based on documents he supplied. (The editor carried on an extensive correspondence with the British minister under an assumed name.) Then Hanson arranged to have the essays published in pamphlet form, apparently at British government expense! In the context of this direct collusion, it is not surprising that when it came to United States efforts to punish the British through trade sanctions or raise troops in preparation for war with them, Hanson went beyond merely opposing the policies and urged the people of Maryland to ignore or disobey the government’s requests and orders.26
The Federal Republican bristled with prejudices of a more personal sort as well, against immigrants, Republicans, merchants, the working people of Baltimore, indeed virtually everyone who was not a rural landowning Federalist like Hanson himself. When an immigrant Republican editor offered a relatively innocuous plan “to unite the democratick party from Maine to Mississippi,” the Federal Republican responded with a startling sneer that used special symbols and extra-large type for emphasis:
Here is our plan.
Let every officious foreigner, who presumes to interfere in the great concerns of the country, who dares to dictate to our national representatives . . . who has the audacity to slander native virtue and patriotism, be branded with scorn and sent back to the country, which first cast him out.27
Republican candidates and editors were lampooned for foreign accents, bad grammar, and poor educations. “This new made politician rose to ‘spake of the Ambargo,’” began one account of a speech by congressional candidate Alexander McKim. It went on to heap scorn on the candidate’s mercantile background (“his great commercial acquirements”) and the “bullies and babblers” from the city who came out to see him speak.28
Conversely, while never able to suppress his prejudices or limit his forays into disloyal opposition, Hanson was a defender of party politics who genuinely believed that Federalists could win back power through the electoral process. The Federal Republican argued that too many Federalist gentlemen “injure our cause with their timidity and want of zeal,” based on a “false calculation of strength in the democratick party.” By failing to act as zealous partisans, these Federalists had “contributed more to fasten democracy upon us than either the influence, exertion, or numbers of our opponents.”29
Working to reenergize the Federalist party, Hanson was heavily involved in organizing electioneering committees and the Washington Benevolent Societies that younger Federalists had devised to counter Republican fraternities, such as the Tammany Societies.30 More important for present purposes, he tried hard to make his newspaper a politically potent one. Somewhat obsessed with William Duane, “the source of all the polluted streams of democracy with which this country is poisoned,” he morbidly admired the Aurora editor’s influence and techniques, once remarking of a rival editor trained by Duane that with such a political education “not even Moloch himself was better qualified for . . . mighty revolutionary purposes.” Hanson wanted the Federal Republican to match or surpass for the Federalist cause what the Aurora had been able to do for democracy.31
With that inspiration, the Federal Republican was often a very effective and resourceful partisan newspaper. Hanson and coeditor Jacob Wagner frequently used headlines and titles (“How to Carry an Election by Storm”), and created several short comparative items that tried to define party differences in a succinct, slogan-like fashion. For instance, one item summarized Federalist versus Republican foreign policies when faced with a European war, namely Adams’s military buildup versus Jefferson’s trade embargo: “FEDERAL DOCTRINE. ‘Millions for defence, not a cent for tribute!’ . . . DEMOCRATICK DOCTRINE. ‘Millions for tribute, not a cent for defence.’” (An earlier version had quoted secretary of state James Madison under the “Democratic” head: “France wants money, we must give it to her.”)
The Federal Republican also closely linked its political material with Federalist candidates and election campaigns. Hanson and Wagner printed Federalist election slates under headings designed to put the Federalist cause in the best light, such as ANTI-FRENCH TICKET and ANTI-EMBARGO TICKET. They addressed various essays to the common voter, focusing on the “honest yeomen” of Baltimore county rather than the city Republicans. At least one campaign article, signed “AN ENEMY TO POLL TAXES,” tried to outdo the Republicans in terms of sympathy for ordinary voters, decrying taxes and militia laws that required the poor to pay the same amount of money as the rich. Giving extensive coverage to live campaign events held in the area, they upheld local Federalist candidates and belittled their opponents.32
This side of Hanson revealed him as a product of Maryland’s uniquely sophisticated political culture, which combined the Chesapeake tradition of barbecues and stump-speaking in the rural areas with Pennsylvania-style partisanship emanating from Baltimore. Building on these traditions, and fueled by great economic diversity and deep political divisions, Maryland became one of the earliest states to display many features of nineteenth-century mass party politics, including extensive public campaigning (such as issue-oriented debates between candidates) and stable partisan voting. Thus it was no accident that Maryland produced one of the first Republican newspapers to declare itself a party organ from its birth (the Baltimore American) and one of the most uncompromisingly and self-consciously partisan Federalist journals in the Federal Republican.33
Hanson’s extremism and erratic behavior have led many historians of the Federalists to treat him as a marginal or unusual figure. Yet there was probably no Federalist politician who more clearly embodied the contradictions of the Federalist political project after 1800, which was to conduct vigorous popular political campaigns in support of ideals and men sincerely opposed to, or extremely doubtful about, the democratic principles on which popular campaigns were based.34
For many Federalist leaders, even so basic a democratic proposition as heeding the wishes of the majority of citizens was deeply troubling. To bow to mere numbers, in Hanson’s view, was deeply wounding to the high feelings of any gentleman who was fit to make or execute the laws. “A thousand puny politicians in this country” based their “political calculations . . . solely upon the rules of arithmetick,” not understanding that “the unconquerable mind, the determined spirit, and the heart warmed with the love of honor” were far more powerful than mere numbers or physical force. This thinking authorized Hanson’s all-out rhetoric and tactics, but while it may have made a satisfying personal psychodrama for him, it ranged from ineffective to dangerous as a political strategy, looking as it did for enemies and opponents to suddenly realize their errors and bow before superior honor and virtue.35
Of course, this is not what happened in Baltimore. The Federal Republican became the nation’s most virulent detractor of Jefferson and Madison’s anti-British foreign policy and the resulting War of 1812, despite being published in the nation’s most exposed, anti-British, and prowar city. The Republican administrations were supported by a well-organized and increasingly politicized artisan community that did not appreciate Hanson’s assertions that they were cowards, dupes, and thugs for making the political choices they had. The mechanics’ local political hero was merchant-politician Gen. Samuel Smith, who had long crusaded against any form of submission to the British and helped forge a strong link in his followers’ minds between American independence from Great Britain and their own aspirations for independence and equal rights. Much of the population of Baltimore came to loathe Hanson’s newspaper, not least because it was published insolently in their midst.36
Thus the extremist Federal Republican eventually called forth the most extreme violence ever visited on a partisan newspaper office. Just after war was finally declared in June 1812, Hanson published his editorial response under the title “Thou hast done a deed whereat valour will weep.” Beginning with some pertinent remarks about the nation’s unpreparedness for war, he then sailed off into the ether, charging the declaration was opposed by the “vast majority of the nation,” that the motivations for it bore “marks of undisguised foreign influence,” and that the real aims of the war were to offer a pretext for repressing the administration’s enemies and to place the United States in the power of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Hanson committed the Federal Republican to an aggressive campaign of what the Federalists had once defined as sedition: “We mean to use every constitutional argument and every legal means to render as odious and suspicious to the American people . . . the patrons and contrivers of this highly impolitic and destructive war.” But Hanson could not stop himself even there, at mere criticism and exposure, and ended by vowing rebellion if necessary: “We are avowedly hostile to the administration of James Madison, and we never will breathe under the dominion, direct or derivative, of Bonaparte, let it be acknowledged when it may.” He challenged all patriots to “adopt this confession.”37
As Baltimore Republicans saw it, Hanson had revealed himself as a traitor, siding with the enemy and accusing the president of treason while planning further treason of his own. With some encouragement from the Republican press, a crowd of artisans and other street Republicans attacked and destroyed the Federal Republican office a few days later. This was a classic example of what John Nerone has labeled “majoritarian” violence against the press, a rough but semiorganized means of expressing (and enforcing) prevailing community opinion akin to what had been used against Loyalist newspapers during the Revolution. Unfortunately, Hanson refused to stop once the community had rejected him. A few weeks after the riot, he procured a fortresslike, three-story brick mansion to be the new Federal Republican office, gathered friends from the Federalist countryside along with enough weapons to mount a minor military campaign, and went back to Baltimore looking for a glorious showdown with the forces of anarchy.
Many Maryland Federalists did not especially approve of Hanson’s course, and their reaction formed the beginning of a serious rift in the party. A substantial group of more moderate Federalists opposed the declaration of war but felt they had to nominally support the government now that war had begun. Further provocations of the type that Hanson was bent on were out of the question. Rising Federalist leader Roger B. Taney argued that returning to Baltimore armed was an invitation to further violence and that this time the Federalists would be just as responsible for it as the Republicans. Fearing serious consequences, Taney advised his younger brother not to go with Hanson. Taney’s fears turned out to be more accurate than he knew. A Republican crowd besieged the house as expected, but things spun out of control after Federalist shots killed a leader of the mob and an innocent bystander. The rioting crescendoed with a group of angry artisans pulling ten of Hanson’s men from jail— where they had been placed for their own protection—beating most of them senseless, killing one, and setting fire to another, some of this while serenading the victims with revolutionary-era chants and songs.38
The Federal Republican was sustained through these travails, and the years of mere unpopularity that preceded and followed them, by massive infusions of cash from the “association” that printed it, including the Hanson family and other wealthy Maryland Federalists. The total came to at least $40,000 during the war years alone. The heavy financial backing showed at every point in the newspaper’s career. Early on, Hanson freely admitted that the paper was being given away to the “honest poor,” to further the journal’s “useful and patriotick work” of instructing “those willing to be instructed who have not . . . means of acquiring information.” The proprietors were able to resume publication in Georgetown only five days after the first riot, and then to arrange immediately for expensive new facilities. These too were destroyed, but the publishers’ bodies were in far greater jeopardy than their newspaper. After the second riot, they went back to publishing in Georgetown for the rest of the war, then returned to Baltimore once more and continued publishing until Hanson’s death in 1819.39
Near martyrdom made Hanson a hero among a certain set of Maryland Federalists. In the fall elections following the riots, Hanson was put up for Congress from the safely Federalist district comprising rural Montgomery and Frederick Counties, as a stick jabbed in the eye of Republican Baltimore. Later, when the Federalists gained control of the state House of Delegates, the editor was elevated to the national Senate. He kept charge of the Federal Republican all the while, making him one of the few members of Congress to actively run a newspaper while in office. The journal did double duty by publishing Hanson’s speeches.40
Despite his seeming political success, the years after the riots were frustrating for Hanson. He never forgave the Taney wing of the party for failing to support him, and they in turn prevented the Federal Republican from being recognized as the Maryland Federalists’ premier organ, a distinction that went to other more staid journals. Detesting the “mean, servile, temporizing spirit” he saw growing among his fellow Federalists after the end of the war, Hanson stuck ferociously to his guns and found himself in the kind of money trouble with which radical Republican editors were familiar, but with a peculiarly Hansonian spin: he was too proud to focus on collecting his back subscription bills, and so expended most of the family fortune making up the Federal Republican’s losses.
In Congress, Hanson spoke in the same enraged vein in which his newspaper articles were written, nearly causing several duels with various Republicans and alienating many of the Federalists as well. Fellow young Federalist congressman Daniel Webster admired Hanson as a hero when the two first met, but two years later, after getting to know the editor better, Webster and other Federalist leaders saw to it that Hanson was the only congressman of their party not invited to a meeting to plan for the next election. His last years were spent waging a factional war for control of the Maryland Federalist party that helped usher it out of existence. Still failing to recognize the rules of political arithmetic that doomed his cause, Hanson traveled the road from martyr to embarrassment in record time.41
Most Federalist editors were not reactionary firebrands like Alexander Contee Hanson. The largest group of them would probably be best classified as young lawyer-literati. Most of the self-consciously “literary” writings of the period were produced by men who were some combination of lawyer, college graduate, and Federalist, and many of them were persuaded to lend their talents to political newspapers.42 The essayist, attorney, and Harvard graduate Joseph Dennie, named by some sources as the country’s first professional author, ran a Federalist newspaper at Walpole, New Hampshire, in the mid-1790s and then was hired to help John Fenno’s son edit the Gazette of the United States. In 1801 he founded a literary weekly called The Port Folio, which in addition to becoming one of the nation’s foremost outlets for polite literature, doubled as a partisan Federalist journal of opinion.43
The most prominent Federalist author-lawyer to turn editor and political professional was Theodore Dwight, brother of Yale president Timothy Dwight and a graduate of the college himself. Though largely forgotten now, in his own time Theodore Dwight was, as a leading Connecticut Wit, one of the nation’s best-known writers. He produced many of the group’s most bitterly political satires, including The Political Greenhouse for 1J98 and the “Echo” series. Some time around 1800, Dwight began aiding the printer George Goodwin with the political direction of the Hartford Connecticut Courant. While filling the Courant’s columns, Dwight continued to practice law and also acted as the Connecticut Federalists’ primary party manager. He served a term in Congress during Jefferson’s second administration but apparently found more fulfillment in winning elections and writing newspaper polemics than in debating legislation. (He may have been influenced by the fact that congressional Federalists were now typically defeated by margins as overwhelming as those by which the Connecticut Federalists usually won at home.) Soon after leaving Congress, Dwight became a party editor. In 1809 he founded the Hartford Connecticut Mirror, an elegantly written paper that viciously attacked all Republicans and became (along with Hanson’s Federal Republican and the Boston Columbian Centinel), the War of 1812’s nastiest critic. Dwight himself was a leading spirit (and in later years, a leading defender) of the Hartford Convention, in which he served as secretary. Soon after that body’s disgrace, Dwight moved to New York, where over the next two decades he edited a series of diehard Federalist papers in Albany and then New York City.44
Following Fisher Ames’s formula for gentrifying the partisan press, printers played a strictly subordinate role in most Federalist newspapers. Whereas the political role of Republican printers such as Charles Holt and William Duane represented democratization in action, the internal structure of the Federalist press amounted to democratization forestalled. Reminiscing about his early days in the printing trade, the Republican editor Isaac Hill recalled that the Federalist paper in Concord, New Hampshire, though printed by his friend Jesse C. Tuttle, “generally was conducted by a hired editor of liberal education” whose name was not on the masthead. Thomas Dickman, editor of the Greenfield Gazette, was in fact a Republican himself, having been an apprentice of Benjamin Edes. Yet Dickman “never undertook to write for his paper any article of greater length than the statement of an ordinary occurrence” and allowed his predominantly Federalist writers and subscribers to determine the political character of the paper.
These kinds of arrangements were typical. With a few notable exceptions, Federalist printers, rather than taking any active or leading role in politics themselves, provided strictly mechanical services to Federalist political leaders. The most a Federalist printer could usually hope for was to be the business manager of the operation, overseeing finances and production, as William Coleman’s “partner and printer” Michael Burnham did at the New York Evening Post. Even then, he could expect to be sniffed at, as Burnham was by Coleman, as a vulgarian who could not possibly fathom the literary and philosophical concerns of an educated gentleman.45 In Federalist politics, the class distinctions were even sharper. Printers of Federalist newspapers were much less likely to hold office than their Republican counterparts, and few Federalist printers can be considered political professionals or even politicians.46
There was a great irony in this for the Federalist leadership, so selfconsciously committed to the idea of themselves as the virtuous few. Though they wanted to destroy the politics that those sleazy Republican editors had helped create, many Federalist gentlemen ended up engaging much more directly in newspaper politics than their Republican counterparts did. There is virtually no example of a prominent Republican statesman who became a newspaper editor. There were too many artisans and clerks eager for the job. Republican editors were typically people who entered politics through newspapers, not the other way around. Most of the many Republican editors who won election to Congress, for instance, did so after their newspaper service.47
The Federalists reversed these patterns almost exactly. Some of the most illustrious Federalist statesmen—Hamilton, Fisher Ames, and John Quincy Adams among them—wrote incessantly for newspapers, and countless prominent or rising Federalist politicians became editors or shadow editors.48 Hamilton never actually edited the Evening Post, the newspaper that still boasts of being founded by him, but he was deeply involved in its daily affairs. William Coleman proudly admitted to friends that whenever there was a tough editorial to write, he made an appointment with Hamilton: “As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in short-hand . . . ; when he stops, my article is completed.”49 Like Theodore Dwight, the typical Federalist editor-congressman took up the newspaper business after leaving Congress. In short, the Federalists diverted what they believed to be the nation’s greatest literary and intellectual talents into the newspaper politics they deplored.
Some Republican gentlemen were jealous of the Federalists’ more respectable press. “Federal papers are conducted by gentlemen of education, talents, and respectability,” fumed one Maryland Republican officeholder, to the Federal Republican’s delight, “while the democratick prints are in the hands of men of no talents, learning, or character, the mere scum of the party.” By standards of polite society, this was true enough, but how much political difference would it make?50
Though Federalist leaders successfully gentrified their press, their high political expectations for it were not met. Though Ames had advised that “truth ought to be made popular,” the poets and belletrists who tended to become Federalist editors found this difficult, uncongenial work. Their genteel habits and tastes turned out to be poorly suited to the political tasks they were given. More concerned with crafting their prose or honing their literary personae than effective campaigning, Federalist editors tended to be reticent about promoting candidates and to dislike devoting space to electioneering.51 Examples abound, even in the newer Federalist journals. Harry Croswell’s Hudson Balance ran a twenty-part series on education and an eleven-part rebuttal to Jefferson’s annual message, but its response to the state elections of 1802 consisted of an inserted nomination notice, a stray essay or two, and brief reports of the results. Though full of criticism of Thomas Jefferson’s administration, the Washington Federalist made no mention of the presidential election contest during the fall of 1804, nor any notable reference to the existence, much less the merits, of Federalist candidate Charles C. Pinckney.52
Many well-bred Federalist editors simply lacked the appropriate temperament for political combat. In this category fell the shy, sensitive, Yale-educated lawyer John G. C. Brainard, who was one of Theodore Dwight’s successors on the Connecticut Mirror. “Of child-like disposition,” Brainard’s real love was sentimental poetry, and while he controlled the Mirror, the paper contained many verses on such subjects as the sublime beauty of Niagara Falls, but had little political impact.53
Joseph Dennie was less retiring than Brainard, but he shared a preference for literature over politics. The Port Folio would probably be slighted by “grave politicians,” Dennie poetized, but he would esteem himself fortunate if it pleased the “sprightly nymph who . . . / Finds, BROILS, and BATTLES, but neglects them all, / For SONGS, and SUITS, a birthday and a ball.”54 When Dennie and his contributors did write about politics, they were unwilling to deal with elections and candidates, or even to try to influence popular opinion. Dennie was “contemptuously careless of vulgar popularity, but anxiously ambitious of a nobler approbation,” and cited with approval a British aristocrat’s statement that there was “not a single action of my life, where the popularity of the times ever had the smallest influence on my determinations.”55
Dennie evidently meant all this, for his newspaper was filled with material that, far from being calculated to advance the Federalist cause, seemed ready-made Republican campaign fodder. Editing the journal under the pseudonym “Oliver Oldschool, Esq.,” the young attorney adopted the contrived stance of a haughty old aristocrat preserving the remnants of a noble ancien régime against the vulgar masses and their mistaken notions of progress. Thus, while supposedly engaged in trying to beat the Republicans with their own methods, he devoted much space to long disquisitions and intemperate paragraphs against the relative political equality and democracy enjoyed by American voters. Some early issues of the Port Folio contained a pedantic series of articles condemning the compositional style of the Declaration of Independence.
In late 1802 a series on equality ran, beating the long-dead horse of the radical phase of the French Revolution and lambasting the “extravagant” notion “that man could exist . . . without those shades of rank and dependence . . . hitherto . . . thought to constitute the organization of civil society.” (Of course, this was a notion that many ordinary Americans believed to have been the whole point of their own revolution.) “Aurelius” discoursed on what a “wild project” it was to create a polity in which “the rich and the poor, the high and the low, have equally a constitutional privilege, to direct the machine of government.”
A few months later, Dennie himself contributed the bon mot that democracy, said to be “on trial” in the Jefferson-ruled United States, was a “radically contemptible and vicious” system attributable to the “villainy of some men” and “the folly of others.” It “was weak and wicked in Athens . . . bad in Sparta, and worse in Rome.” England had justly rejected it and restored its monarchy. “No wise man but discerns its imperfections, no good man but shudders at its miseries, no honest man but proclaims its fraud, and no brave man but draws his sword against its force.” Not all Federalist journals were as high-toned as the Port Folio, but most of them shared a similar outlook. Fisher Ames’s New England Palladium, supposedly a model for the new, more effective Federalist press, ran a series by Ames himself that condemned voters in the South and the mid-Atlantic cities, who presumably needed to be won over, as “the squalid tribe of vice and want, and ignorance” and a “rabble, unfit for liberty”56
The contradictions between the mission of the new Federalist press and its rhetoric revealed the Federalist editors’ profound confusion about who their audience actually was. While Federalists boasted to each other about how the press could be used to turn back the Republican tide, much of their newspaper output appealed only to people like themselves—self-styled aristocrats, Anglophiles, chauvinistic New Englanders—while repelling or insulting nearly everyone else. Joseph Dennie was more clearheaded than many Federalist editors when he announced that the Port Folios prospectus was submitted to “men of affluence” and “men of letters.”57
Federalist journalism was typically addressed not to the republic of voting United States citizens, but to the older and socially much more restricted republic of polite letters. This was a severe political handicap, putting the style and concerns of the Federalist press at a severe variance with its purposes. The Federalist lawyer-literati were great admirers of the early eighteenth-century English “Augustan” writers, especially Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, also conservatives who saw themselves battling the forces of vulgarity, stupidity, corruption, and misguided innovation. The Federalists were drawn to the Augustans’ bitter, derisive tone and their signature genre, satire. In particular, they liked long, long poems, modeled on Pope’s Dunciad and Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. Under titles like Democracy Unveiled, “The Triumph of Democracy,” and most memorably, Sunbeams May Be Extracted from Cucumbers, but the Process Is Tedious, Federalist wits filled pamphlets, books, and newspaper back pages with poetry and sketches stuffed with literary allusions and current political references, often so stuffed that they had to be footnoted. While sometimes amusing to the expert reader, these works were like most polite literature in being written for insiders, people who shared the same reference points and would grasp the allusions, puns, and allegories. Young Federalists can be imagined chortling over such material on a slow day at the law office, reaffirming their feelings of superiority, but it is difficult to see how even they could have expected it to change their political fortunes.58
Even some of the Federalists’ seemingly most aggressive and political uses of newspapers were deeply entangled in polite literary conventions. Harry Croswell’s Hudson Wasp and its fellow temporary smear publications have been labeled “Federalist electioneering newspapers” and interpreted as a sign of the Federalists’ embrace of modern political methods.59 In fact, these satirical journals bore only superficial similarities to the “campaign newspapers” of later decades, and are better understood as particularly elaborate examples of Federalist journalism’s Augustan and traditionalist tendencies. One of Harry Croswell’s stated motives for starting the Wasp was his desire to minimize the partisan politics in his main newspaper, the Balance, which he declared “will not be soiled with a personal contest.” In the first Wasp, he explained that “respectable federal papers” should not try to engage with the “swine” and “unprincipled adventurers” who ran the “democratic presses.” Therefore, he had set up the Wasp “for the purpose of meeting my democratic neighbors on an equal footing.”60
The very names of several other Federalist attack papers suggested that their goal was not so much electoral victory as vengeance and social discipline. Names like Switch and Scourge carried an unmistakable note of beating rebellious children, appropriate to the Federalist self-image as “fathers of the people.” (Republican editors never invoked such images in their titles, except for an occasional Scourge of Aristocracy.) While less coherently named, the Worcester Scorpion was no less paternalistic in its outlook, correcting the grammar of Republican toasts and the translation of Latin phrases used in the National Aegis while belittling the social status of local Republican leaders. The Scorpion labeled the Aegis editors “an apothecary, a Cobler and a Stage-Man,” and made the supposedly damning allegation that Levi Lincoln was once an apprentice blacksmith.61
Rather than electioneering or even smearing political candidates, the Wasp concentrated on insulting Charles Holt and other neighboring Republican editors, usually in rather generic, stylized terms. Croswell also ran plenty of the usual “Augustan” literary fare, including “hudibrastic” poetry and allegorical sketches written in such characters as “Bumbasticus Bumbernickle, Esq.,” “Simon Sleekjacket,” and “Philo Parodisticus.” Meanwhile, the Balance remained resolutely highbrow, as planned. Croswell later affirmed his allegiance to genteel culture by becoming an Episcopal priest and making a name for himself as rector of an upper-class New Haven parish.62
Misapplied literary conventions may have been only a manifestation of a deeper problem for the Federalist press, namely, the basic contradiction between newspaper politics and the Federalists’ most basic values, especially in New England. Disapproving of democracy and political competition, pessimistic about the mental and moral capacities of the common voter, deep down they saw no road to political victory that did not involve demagoguery, a game they could not and did not want to win. New England Federalists were plagued by old Calvinist fears that, given mankind’s inherently sinful nature, allowing ordinary people free rein in their political choices could lead to nothing but the reign of sin. Still calling for the outright suppression of Republican newspapers in 1801, an unusually frank piece signed “Novanglus” argued that boycotts and other economic pressures would never eliminate the offending journals because they were truly popular with the people. The source of that popularity was the intrinsic appeal of sin to the common person. Thus it was useless for the wise and good to respond in kind, with wise and good newspapers. Democratic newspapers would “be read and approved by multitudes, as long as there are base and unhallowed passions in human nature to be gratified by them.”63
Because of this attitude, Fisher Ames found that his calls “to form a phalanx to write . . . produced some ridicule, more disgust, no cooperation.” But Ames himself was unsure of what he wanted. He grew disenchanted when Warren Dutton’s Palladium became slightly less elevated, meaning more attuned to partisan and electoral politics. Favoring aggressive action, but wedded to the notion that the public sphere should be an abstract arena in which only arguments fought, Ames withdrew his patronage and began organizing another journal that would be more purely literary and philosophical.64
When Federalist editors did try to play to the loose and unhallowed passions that they imagined roiling in the people’s hearts, it made for some of the party’s darkest hours. Despairing of regaining national power, editors joined many Federalist statesmen in trying to hold New England at any cost, whipping up sectional hostility, especially toward Virginia. In many cases, Federalist editors were quite consciously preparing the ground for New England’s secession from the union, probably in full knowledge of the plots being hatched by extremists such as Timothy Pickering. Before and during the War of 1812, it was not only the wild Federal Republican that actively hampered the war effort, discouraging army enlistments and subscriptions to federal loans when troops and money were badly needed, but also the most prominent and establishment-oriented Federalist newspapers, including the Evening Post, Connecticut Courant, and Columbian Centinel.65
Gentility notwithstanding, Federalists editors and writers also far outdid their Republican opponents in scurrilous and viciously personal defamation, though neither side ever matched the now-departed William Cobbett. Benjamin Bache and William Duane had often accused Washington and Adams of holding monarchical views and running corrupt, repressive administrations, but they almost never descended to sexual or strictly personal innuendo. For Federalists, however, the personal immorality of Republican leaders and journalists was an unshakable core belief and (they hoped) a strong issue with the voters. Federalist editors also tended to believe they were slumming in taking up the editorial pen, both in the sense of pursuing an occupation beneath their station and in the sense of pitting themselves against vulgar, degraded characters like the Republican editors. In this frame of mind, Federalist editors tended to forget their well-bred inhibitions. Thus priest-in-training Harry Croswell could remark that, since he had “undertaken the chastisement of a set of fellows who are intrenched in filth,” he was resolved to “wade knee-deep in smut” that he might “meet his enemies on their own ground.”66
This penchant for righteous prurience showed up most clearly (though not solely) in Federalist press commentary on Thomas Jefferson. Though Federalist editors had long derided James T. Callender as a “common drunkard” and “a bloated lump of corruption,” they eagerly disseminated and embellished Callender’s various aspersions on President Jefferson’s personal and political morality: that the president kept a slave mistress named Sally Hemings and had fathered children by her, that he had once tried to seduce the wife of a close friend, that he had paid Callender himself to smear Washington and Adams. Despite their almost militant refinement, Federalist literati particularly enjoyed working sexy references to “sooty Sal” into their sketches and poetry. Joseph Dennie envisioned a scene in which Jefferson orders “Black Sall ... to display all her charms,” all her charms, for Tom Paine on a visit to Monticello.
John Quincy Adams and many other Federalist luminaries also poetized on the subject. Though northern Federalists made much of Jefferson’s hypocrisy as a slaveholding apostle of freedom and usually professed opposition to slavery, their satirical uses of the Hemings controversy were palpably racist. They lampooned Jefferson more for having sex with a black woman than for taking advantage of a slave. The message seemed to be that, having abandoned their gentlemanly commitments to decency and order, there were no limits to the depths that democratic demagogues like Jefferson would lower themselves to, politically or personally. Another interpretation of the racist satires is simply that Federalists wanted to equate Republicans with what they imagined to be the lowest order of humanity. Hence one issue of the Worcester Scorpion featured a sort of blackface parody of a Republican meeting, in which dialect-speaking members of the “Black Brethern of the Tammany Society” toasted “Old Massa Tammany” and leered over African American poet Phyllis Wheat-ley.67
Amidst and often obscured by the Augustan stylings of the more prominent Federalist editors, there were a modest number of Federalist newspaper politicians who were much like their Republican counterparts: printers who edited their newspapers, got involved in politics through journalism, and built careers as political professionals and, sometimes, officeholders. Good examples can be found in the three Federalist printers who ended up as congressmen later in their lives: John Holmes Prentiss of New York, John Crafts Wright of Ohio, and Charles Miner of Pennsylvania. Wright and Miner went to Congress as Adams-Clay supporters in the 1820s, Prentiss as part of a wave of Jacksonian editors elected to Congress in the 1830s. In their Federalist days, none of these editors were secessionists or violent antidemocrats, and they easily embraced competitive electoral politics. All were transplanted Yankees who came into the printing business after 1800 and ran their own papers without overbearing sponsors. Prentiss was a journeyman printer and foreman at Coleman’s Evening Post who was tapped by Judge William Cooper to edit the Cooperstown Federalist. Cooper soon died, however, and Prentiss became a locally prominent Federalist leader in his own right.
Prentiss, Miner, and Wright had plenty of differences with the Republican editors on policy matters such as the embargo and the war, but in terms of political style and the shape of their careers, the distinctions were incremental. These Federalist editors were more deferential to their party superiors than Republicans typically were, less strident in their campaigning, more self-consciously genteel in their own values and deportment, and quite a bit more commercially oriented: Wright became a railroad director and a prominent attorney, Prentiss a bank director, and Miner a major developer of anthracite coal mining. They all achieved their later eminence, however, by following the Republican model of newspaper politics. That was doubtless a key factor in their politically outliving the party of their youth.68