Selected quotes from Empire of Liberty (Wood)

Selected quotes from Empire of Liberty (Wood)

History's shores are littered with the wreckage of nascent nations that foundered before they could grow to stable maturity.

The Federalists like Washington, Adams, and Hamilton who presided over the first decade nationhood were often appalled by the egalitarian excesses unleashed by the Revolution. Ordinary men and women demanded to be addressed as "Mr." and "Mrs."—titles once reserved for the wealthy and highborn. Employers began to be called "boss," rather than "master." Indentured servitude, once common throughout the colonies, came to be regarded as an affront to democratic ideals and soon all but disappeared—though chattel slavery, the poisonous serpent in the American garden, stubbornly persisted, indeed, in these years began its fateful expansion westward.

Such an equality of condition was essential for republicanism. Since antiquity, theorists had assumed that a republican state required a general equality of property-holding among its citizens. Although most Americans in 1776 believed that not everyone in a republic had to have the same amount of property, a few radicals in 1776 did call for agrarian laws with "the power of lessening property when it became excessive in individuals." All took for granted that a society could not long remain republican if a tiny minority controlled most of the wealth and the bulk of the population remained dependent servants or poor landless laborers.

Most of the Revolutionary leaders thought of property in pre-modern, almost classical terms—as rentier property, what some eighteenth-century historians have called "proprietary wealth." They conceived of it as a source of authority and independence, not as a commodity or as the source of productivity and capitalistic investment. The most traditional kind of proprietary property was, of course, land; but it could take other rentier forms, such as government bonds or money out on loan.

Writing the Declaration, [Jefferson] said, did not involve setting out "new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," but simply placing "before mankind the common sense of the subject."

"State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor," said Jefferson; "the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he had not been led astray by artificial rules."

As the poet Joel Barlow noted, the very word "people" had come to mean something different in America than in Europe. In Europe the people remained only a portion of society—the poor, the canaille, the rabble, the miserables, the menu peuple, the Pöbel. But in America, as Fisher Ames pointed out, "the class called vulgar, canaille, rabble, so numerous there, does not exist." The people had become the whole society and were taking on a quasi-sacred character.

In the census of 1790 only 60% of the white population of well over three million remained English in ancestry. The rest were composed of a variety of ethnicities. Nearly 9% were German, over 8% were Scots, 6% were Scots-Irish, nearly 4% were Irish, and over 3% were Dutch; the remainder were made up of French, Swedes, Spanish, and people of unknown ethnicity. The Mid-Atlantic region was especially diverse.

Levels of literacy may not have been high by modern standards, but by eighteenth-century standards, at least for white Americans in the North, they were higher than almost any other place on earth and were rapidly climbing, especially for white women. All their reading made them enlightened. Jefferson was convinced that an American farmer rather than an English farmer had conceived of making the rim of a wheel from a single piece of wood. He knew it had to be an American because the idea had been suggested by Homer, and "ours are the only farmers who can read Homer."

Americans had a common language, unlike the European nations, none of which was linguistically homogenous. In 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. Englishmen from Yorkshire were incomprehensible to those from Cornwall and vice versa. By contrast, Americans could understand one another from Maine to Georgia.

Noah Webster, who would eventually become famous for his American dictionary, thought that language had divided the English people from one another. The court and the upper ranks of the aristocracy set the standards of usage and thus put themselves at odds with the language spoken by the rest of the country. By contrast, America's standard was fixed by the general practice of the nation, and therefore Americans had "the fairest opportunity of establishing a national language, and of giving it uniformity and perspicuity, in North America, that ever presented itself to mankind." Indeed, Webster was convinced that Americans already "speak the most pure English now known in the world." Within a century and a half, he predicted, North America would be peopled with a hundred millions of people, "all speaking the same language." Nowhere else in the world would such large numbers of people "be able to associate and converse together like children of the same family."

Others had even more grandiose visions for the spread of America's language. John Adams was among those who suggested that American English would eventually become "the next universal language." In 1789 even a French official agreed; in a moment of giddiness he actually predicted that American English was destined to replace diplomatic French as the language of the world. Americans, he said, "tempered by misfortune," were "more human, more generous, more tolerant, all qualities that make one want to share the opinions, adopt the customs, and speak the language of such a people."

[Madison's] tireless attention to detail and his range of activities were astonishing. Not only did he lead the House, but he was also the principal link between the legislature and the executive in these early months. He helped Washington draft his inaugural address to the Congress, then drafted the response of the House of Representatives to that address, and finally helped the president in his reply to that response.

Under the circumstances the states ratified the first ten amendments slowly and without much enthusiasm between 1789 and 1791; several of the original states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Georgia—did not even bother. After ratification, most Americans promptly forgot about the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights remained judicially dormant until the twentieth century.

Hamilton worked his remarkable program out in a series of four reports to Congress in 1790-1791: on credit (including duties and taxes), on a national bank, on a mint, and on manufactures. These reports, powerfully written and argued, established Hamilton as one of the greatest statesmen of his era.

Long before he became secretary of the treasury Hamilton had been thinking about the problem of the $79 million debt from the Revolutionary War. In 1790 the amount owed foreigners—the French and Spanish governments and Dutch bankers—was about $12 million, including the arrears of interest, and was easily calculated. The domestic debt, that is, the debt of states and the federal governments owed their citizens, was another matter. It was made up of a bewildering array of bills, notes, and certificates issued by various agencies of both the Confederation and state governments. Of the domestic debt about $42 million was owed by the federal government; the various state governments owed an estimated $25 million.

So Hamilton's proposal for a national bank was bold and novel. He recommended that Congress grant a twenty-year charter to a corporation to be called the Bank of the Unites States (BUS). This central bank would be capitalized at $10 million, which was far more than all the specie, that is, gold and silver, in the country. One-fifth of the capital was to be provided by the government itself; the rest of the Bank's stock was to be sold to private investors, who could pay for up to three-fourths of the shares with government securities and the remaining one-fourth in gold or silver. This Bank of the United States, like its model the Bank of England, would be the only bank chartered by the national government.

Although the British had lost thirteen of their North American colonies in 1783, they had established a new colony, Canada, whose southern boundaries pointed like a dagger at the heartland of the United States. Moreover, the British refused to evacuate their forts in the Northwest Territory of the United States, even though they had promised to do so in the peace treaty in 1783. These forts—at Michilimackinac and Detroit in the west, at Niagara and Oswego on Lake Ontario, at Oswegatchie on the St. Lawrence, and at Dutchman's Point and Point-au-Fer on Lake Champlain—controlled both the Indian country in the Northwest and the waterways along the American-Canadian border.

Ultimately, this denial that the Indians actually cultivated the land became the white Americans' justification for taking it from them. Drawing from the legal thinking of the eighteenth-century theorist Emmerich de Vattel, political leaders maintained that no people had a right to land that they did not farm. This was one of the most important of the cultural misunderstandings that divided white Americans from the native peoples.

The first Indian treaty to be ratified by the US Senate was negotiated with a Creek chief named Alexander McGillivray, an educated "half-breed" who was as worldly and wily as anyone on the frontier. When McGillivray and twenty-six chiefs arrived in New York in the summer of 1790 they were greeted with the largest crowd since the president's inauguration. Weeks of official dinners and ceremonies more lavish than anything European diplomats ever received were followed by an elaborate signing ceremony... In the treaty the Creeks ceded two-thirds of the land claimed by Georgia but received in return a federal guarantee of sovereign control of the rest. In secret clauses of the treaty McGillivray received a trade monopoly and a position as agent of the United States with the rank of brigadier general in the US Army and an annual salary of $1,200. Washington backed up the treaty with a proclamation forbidding any encroachment on the Creeks' territory. But a corrupt Georgia legislature undid both the president's proclamation and the Treaty of New York. As early as January 1790, six months before the treaty was signed, it had announced the sale to speculators, calling themselves the Yazoo companies, of over fifteen million acres of land belonging to the Creeks. Before the bribed Georgia legislators were done doling out many more millions of acres, which included most of present-day Alabama and Mississippi, they had created the greatest real estate scandal in American history. The consequences of this outrageous land deal reverberated through the next three presidential administrations.

At a dinner arranged by Jefferson in late June 1790, Hamilton and Madison clinched a deal in which Southerners would accept the national assumption of state debts in return for having the permanent capital on the Potomac, the midpoint between Maine and Georgia. For ten years while that federal city was being built, Philadelphia was to be the temporary residence of the government.

[Hamilton] argued that Congress's authority to charter a bank was implied by the clause in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution that gave Congress the right to make all laws "necessary and proper" to carry out its delegated powers. Without such implied powers, Hamilton wrote, "the United States would furnish the singular spectacle of a political society without sovereignty, or of a people governed without government." That may have been Jefferson's ideal, but it was not Washington's. On February 25, 1791, the president signed the bank bill into law.

In this intimate world of competing gentlemen, political parties in any modern sense were slow to emerge. Because there were as yet no elaborate mechanisms for selecting candidates, raising money, and conducting campaigns, notable gentry used their personal reputations to gather supporters and followers. If a member of Congress found himself unable to be present in his district at election time, he might, as Madison did in 1790, write letters to influential fiends or relatives and ask them to look after his interest. Gentlemen generally stood, not ran, for election, and canvassing for an office, as Burr was said to have done for the vice-presidency in 1792, was widely thought to be improper. Any interference with the right of each citizen to think and vote independently was anathema.

With little competition for office, voter turnouts were often very low, sometimes fewer than 5% of the eligible electorate.

Most important in distinguishing the Southern states from the rest of the country was the overwhelming presence of African slaves. In 1790 black slaves constituted 30% of the population of Maryland and North Carolina, 40% of that of Virginia, and nearly 60% of that of South Carolina. They served their masters' every need, from making hogshead and horseshoes to caring for gardens and children. The planters' reliance on the labor of their slaves inhibited the growth of large middling groups of white artisans, who were increasingly emerging in the Northern states.

...in 1785 [Jefferson] outlined to a French friend his sense of the differences between the people of the two sections [of the US], which, following the intellectual fashion of the age, he attributed mostly to difference of climate. The Northerners were "cool, sober, laborious, preserving, independent, jealous of their own liberties, and just to those of others, interested, chicaning, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion." By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were "fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart." Jefferson thought that these characteristics grew "weaker and weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North," with Pennsylvania being the place where "the two characters seem to meet and blend, and form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue."

Not only did Jefferson believe that the success of the French Revolution would determine the fate of America's own Revolution, but if the French Revolution succeeded, he said, "it would spread sooner or later all over Europe." But if it failed, America was very apt to retreat "to that kind of Halfway-house, the English constitution," and the "revival of liberty" everywhere in the world would be seriously set back.

"The United States," wrote Hamilton, "are a young nation." (Note the use of the plural verb, which remained common usage until after the Civil War.)

But most important in stimulating support for Federalism in the mid-1790s was the increasing growth of American prosperity. Hamilton's financial program was working wonders. The federal government's assumption of the states' war debts had indeed reduced the states' need to tax their citizens, and the states lowered their taxes to between 50 and 90 percent of what they had been in the 1780s. But the mid-1790s the burden of taxation in the states had returned to pre-Revolution levels, which were considerably lower than those of the European nations. By 1795 some states had done away with poll taxes and other direct taxes altogether.

With more money to spend, Americans were consuming more. The value of American imported consumer goods went from $23,500,000 in 1790 to $63,000,000 in 1795. Thanks in part to Jay's Treaty, America was well on its way to becoming Britain's best customer. Americans were selling more goods abroad too. The value of domestic exports rose rapidly—the prise of a bushel of wheat exported from Philadelphia more than doubled between 1792 and 1796. The war in Europe created an ever expanding demand for American products, especially food, and opened up new opportunities for American neutral shipping.

Life everywhere was a struggle for superiority. In this struggle only a few made it to the top, and once there, these aristocratic few, who were rarely the most talented or virtuous, would seek only to stabilize and aggrandize their position by oppressing those below them. Those on the bottom of society, driven by the most ambitious, would in turn seek only to ruin and replace the few aristocratic social leaders they hated and envied. Hence arose, said Adams, an inevitable social division between the few and the many, between gentlemen and commoners, between "the rich and the poor, the laborious and the idle, the learned and the ignorant," between those who had attained superiority and those who had aspired to it.

Indeed, argued Adams, almost a half century before Tocqueville made the same penetrating observation, Americans were more driven by the passion for distinction, by the desire to set themselves from one another, than other peoples. In a republican society devoted to equality "there can be no subordination." A man would see his neighbor "whom he holds his equal" with a better coat, house, or horse. "He cannot bear it; he must and will be on a level with him." America, Adams concluded, had thus become "more Avaricious than any other Nation."

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

Still, most Americans accepted the idea that America represented an asylum for the oppressed of the world, and during the 1790s nearly one hundred thousand immigrants poured into the United States. During the debates in the Congress over naturalization, Americans struggled with their desire to welcome these immigrants on one hand and their fears of being overwhelmed by un-American ideas on the other.

Although Jefferson's extremely rare able secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, persuaded the reluctant president to keep the Bank of the United States, the government was under continual pressure to reduce the Bank's influence, especially from state banking interests. When the Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791, there were only four state banks; but since then their numbers had frown and were continuing to grow dramatically, twenty-eight by 1800, eighty-seven by 1811, and 246 by 1816. Despite the hopes of some Federalists that the branches of the BUS might absorb the state banks, that had not happened.

The only real money, of course, was specie or gold and silver. But since there was never enough specie and it was unwieldy to carry, the banks issued pieces of paper (that is, made loans) in their own names, promising to pay gold and silver to the bearer on demand. Yet most people, confident that the bank could redeem their notes at any time, did not bother to have them redeemed and instead passed the notes on to one another in commercial exchanges. The banks soon realized they could lend out two, three, four, or five times in paper notes the amount of gold and silver they had in their vaults to cover their notes. Since the banks made money from these loans, they had a vested interest in issuing as many notes as they could.

Jefferson never really accepted the idea of a bank ("a source of poison and corruption") or the paper it issued. Such paper, he said, was designed "to enrich swindlers at the expense of the honest and industrious part of the nation." He could not comprehend how "legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth or hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce but nothing."

But the more important enemies of the BUS were the state banks. By regularly redeeming the outstanding notes of the state banks, the BUS had checked their ability to issue notes too far in excess of what they could cover with specie, that is, their reserves; and this had become a deep source of anger. In addition, the state banks resented the monopolistic position the BUS had in holding the national government's deposits and condemned it for being Federalist and British-dominated.

With the demise of the BUS, America suddenly went wild in creating new banks. Seventy-one banks, including the BUS, had been created in the two decades between 1790 and 1811. In the next five years 175 additional state-chartered banks were established. These banks, unlike the original Bank of North America or the BUS, were not just sources of credit for government, not just commercial banks, handling short-term credit for merchants, but banks for all the different economic interests of the society that wanted easy, long-term credit—mechanics and farmers as well as governments and merchants.

Indeed, since, unlike today, the federal government did not issue any paper money, without these increasing bank notes (that is, credit) the society could never have commercialized as rapidly as it did. By 1815 over two hundred banks had deposits and note liabilities of about $90 million backed by only $17 million of specie. In 1808 the Farmers' Exchange Bank of Glouchester (now Glocester), Rhode Island, emitted over $600,000 in paper; it had, however, only $86.45 in specie to support these notes. This was too much, even for Rhode Island, which had a notorious reputation for excessive paper emissions or loose credit; and in 1809 the state legislature closed the bank, making it the first bank to fail in United States history.

The American economy floated on paper. "The circulation of our country," Senator James Lloyd of Massachusetts declared in 1811, "is at present emphatically a paper circulation; very little specie passes in exchange between individuals."

By 1810, even with the $15 million in cash and claims spent on the Louisiana Purchase, the Republicans had reduced the federal debt to half of the $80 million it had been when they took office. Jefferson was obsessed with the power of debt. It was not only a matter of preventing a present generation from burdening its descendants or of reducing the wherewithal of waging war. He also wanted to destroy what he considered an insidious and dangerous instrument of political influence. Eliminating the public debt was part of his ultimate desire to create an entirely new kind of government, one without privilege or patronage.

During the opening decades of the nineteenth century, especially after Jefferson retired from the presidency, the United States government was weaker than at any other time in its history. Foreign immigrants were astonished that the national "government" in America made "no sensation." "It is round about you like the air," said a startled William Sampson fresh from Ireland, "and you cannot even feel it."

Perhaps the most radical change resulting from the Jeffersonian election of 1800 was in politics. Popular voting took on a significance that it had never quite had before, and the increased numbers of contested elections for both federal and state officials sent the turnout of voters skyrocketing. In many places, especially in the North, the participation of eligible voters went from 20% or so in the 1790s to 80% or more in the first decade of the nineteenth century. At the same time, states that had not already done so began to expand the franchise by eliminating property qualifications or transforming the requirement into the mere paying of taxes... By modern standards the system was far from democratic, but by the standards of the early nineteenth century America possessed the most popular electoral politics in the world.

Many Southern gentlemen possessed hair-trigger tempers and were acutely sensitive to any perceived insult, however slight. In 1806 Andrew Jackson, son of Scots-Irish immigrants from northern Ireland, a sometime congressman and US senator from Tennessee, and a great lover of horse racing and cockfighting, ended up killing a man in a duel that began with a quarrel over a horse wager... Since Southerners bet on everything, they bet on the outcome of duels. In Nashville bets were feely made on Jackson's duel, mostly against Jackson since his opponent was considered the better shot. Jackson took a bullet that remained lodged in his chest for the rest of his life.

To add to worker solidarity, journeymen in one craft and city began calling on journeymen in other crafts and cities to come together in a union to protect their mutual interests against hostile masters. Between 1786 and 1816 at least twelve major strikes by various journeymen craftsmen occurred—the first major strikes by employees against employers in American history.

Although Jefferson had the most extensive library in the world on geography, cartography, natural history, and ethnology of the American West, he nevertheless assumed in 1800 that the Rockies were no higher than the Blue Ridge Mountains, that mammoths and other prehistoric creatures still roamed along the upper Missouri among active volcanoes, that a huge mile-long mountain of pure salt lay somewhere on the Great Plains, that the Western Indians may have been the lost tribes of Israel, or wandering Welshmen, and, most important, that there was a water route, linked by a low portage across the mountains, that led to the Pacific—the long-sought northwest passage.

Jefferson's west was, of course, still inhabited by Indians, who were as fascinating to him as the West itself... No other president in American history was as interested in the indigenous people as Jefferson. He collected every scrap of information about them—their bodies, their orations, their habits, their languages; in fact, he spent most of his life collecting and studying Indian vocabularies. [Footnote: Unfortunately, most of Jefferson's thirty years of work on Indian vocabularies was stolen during his move back to Monticello at the end of his presidency.] Jefferson's obsession with the Indians was shared by most of his fellow Americans. Indeed, never before in American history had the Indians become so central to the hopes and dreams of educated white Americans. And never before was the Indian so admired and celebrated as he was by Jefferson's generation. Since this was the generation that essentially destroyed the society and culture of those Indians living east of the Mississippi, this fixation becomes all the more curious and ironic.

Perhaps, it was true, conceded Jefferson, that America had twice as much rain as Europe, but in America, he said, it fell "in half the time."

Jefferson, of course, never questioned that the Indians might not want to become civilized and participate in the progressive course of history. In his mind and in the minds of most enlightened Americans, his intentions were always pure. "We will never do an unjust act towards you," he told a visiting delegation of Northwestern Indians in 1809 just before he left the presidency. "On the contrary we wish you to live in peace, to increase in numbers, to learn to labor as we do, and furnish food for your ever increasing numbers, when the game shall have left you. We wish to see you possessed of property and protecting it by regular laws. In time you will be as we are; you will become one people with us. Your blood will mix with ours; and will spread, with ours, over this great land."

The colonists had not usually regarded the judiciary as an independent entity or even as a separate branch of government... The colonial courts in most colonies had assessed taxes, granted licenses, overseen poor relief, supervised road repairs, set prices, upheld moral standards, and all in all monitored the localities over which they presided. Consequently, it is not surprising that many colonists had concluded that there were really "no more than two powers in any government, viz. the power to make laws, and the power to execute them; for the judicial power is only a branch of the executive, the CHIEF of every country being the first magistrate." Even John Adams in 1766 had regarded "the first grand division of constitutional powers" as "those of legislation and those of execution," with "the administration of justice" resting in "the executive part of he constitution."

Even Jefferson acknowledged [John] Marshall's talent, but he scarcely respected it. Jefferson told [Justice Joseph] Story that "when conversing with Marshall, I never admit anything. So sure as you admit any position to be good, no matter how remote from the conclusion he seeks to establish, you are gone. So great is his sophistry you must never give him an affirmative answer, or you will be forced to grant his conclusion. Why, if he were to ask me whether it were daylight or not, I'd reply, 'Sir, I don't know, I can't tell.'"

Instead, [Marshall] turned the Court into "a band of brothers" and worked at building consensus through friendly discussion and more than an occasional glass of wine. The Court had a rule that it would indulge in wine-drinking only if it were raining. Marshall would look out the window on a sunny day and decide that wine-drinking was permissible since "our jurisdiction extends over so large a territory that the doctrine of chances makes it certain that it must be raining somewhere."

William Marbury was one of the "midnight judges" appointed at the last minute by President Adams to be a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia. Adams, however, left office before Marbury's commission could be delivered, and President Jefferson refused to deliver it. Marbury then brought suit in the Supreme Court seeking a writ of mandamus (a judicious command) requiring Secretary of State Madison to deliver his commission. (It was actually Secretary of State Marshall who had failed to deliver Marbury's commission on time, which made it awkward, to say the least, for Chief Justice Marshall to hear the case.) Many thought that the Court might openly challenge the authority of the president. But in a direct contest with the president the Marshall Court could only lose: if the Court refused to order Jefferson to deliver the commission, the Republicans would win by default; if, however, the Court did order the president to do so and he refused, the Court would be humiliated. The Court thus had to move in a roundabout way to assert its authority.

Since the American people regarded their written Constitution as "the fundamental and paramount law of the nation," wrote Marshall for the Court, then it followed that "a law repugnant to the Constitution," such as part of the 1789 Judiciary Act, "is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument."

Since Marshall had not explicitly claimed that the Court had an exclusive right and duty to interpret the Constitution, his assertion of judicial authority in the Marbury decision was limited and ambiguous. In fact, it was the only time in Marshall's long tenure as chief justice in which the Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional; indeed, no other Supreme Court did so until the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

[American judges] in effect collapsed the earlier distinction between fundamental and ordinary law and turned constitutions into a species of statutes, super-statutes, no doubt, but statutes nonetheless. American judges could not construe the all-too-brief words of the Constitution in relation to subject matter, intention, context, and reasonableness, as if they were the words of an ordinary statute. The result was the beginning of the creation of a special body of textual exegeses and legal expositions and precedents that Americans have come to call constitutional law. Considering the Constitution as a kind of law that was cognizable in the regular courts (and not, as in some other countries, in special constitutional courts) permitted American judges not only to expound and construe the Constitution according to existing rules of statutory construction but also to expect regular enforcement of the Constitution as if it were a simple statute.

Once the Constitution became a legal rather than a political document, judicial review, although not judicial supremacy, became inevitable. The secret of Marshall's success in his Marbury decision was his unquestioned assumption that the Constitution was simply a law. Because, as he said, it was "emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," treating the Constitution as mere law that had to be expounded and interpreted and applied to particular cases like a statute suggested that American judges had a special authority to interpret constitutions that other branches of the government did not possess.

Ultimately, what made all of this new thinking about the judiciary comprehensible—what gave the judiciary equality with the legislative and executive branches in a tripartite system of government—was the Americans' peculiar conception of representation, that is, the unusual way that American people embodied themselves in the institutions of government. By the time the new federal judiciary was being established in 1789, some Federalists were even coming to regard judges as another kind of agent or representative of the people. Such a remarkable conclusion followed from the logic of the Americans' conception that sovereignty—the final, supreme, and indivisible lawmaking authority in the state—remained with the people themselves. In England, sovereignty rested in Parliament because it embodied the whole society, all the estates of the realm, within itself, but the sovereign American people were never eclipsed by their governments. They remained legally viable even after doling out bits and pieces of their power, but never all of it, to their various agents in the state and federal government.

Americans, said Hamilton, had no intention of allowing "the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents." In fact, it was "far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned their authority." The authority of the judges to set aside acts of the legislatures, said Hamilton, did not "by any means suppose a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both; and that where the will of the legislature declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the constitution, the judges... ought to regulate their decisions by the fundamental laws, rather than by those which are not fundamental."

Prior to its decision in McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819, the Marshall Court did not attempt to build up the power of the federal government positively. That enhancement of governmental power would have aroused Republican hostility everywhere. Instead, it moved to reduce governmental power, not at the federal but at the state level. It declared a large number of state judicial interpretations and state laws invalid because they violated the national Constitution. In doing so it indirectly augmented the supremacy of the nation and its own authority as well.

In his opinion in [Fletcher v. Peck (1810)] Marshall decided that the Georgia legislature's rescinding of a previous corrupt legislative sale of the Yazoo lands had violated the contract clause in Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, and was thus invalid. The legislature's original sale, however, corrupt, was in the nature of a contract that gave the buyers vested rights in the property, and no subsequent state law could divest those rights. Not only was this the first major Supreme Court decision to declare a state statute in violation of the Constitution, but Marshall also shrewdly states that the Court had no business getting into the motives of the Georgia legislature, thus helping to underline the idea that law and politics were separate spheres.

Jurists and politicians in the early Republic began to draw lines around what was political or legislative and what was legal or judicial and to explain the distinctions by the doctrine of separation of powers. In his Marbury decision Marshall clearly drew this distinction. Some questions were political, he said; "they respect the nation, not individual rights," and thus were "only politically examinable." But questions involving the vested rights of individuals were different; they were in their "nature, judicial, and must be tried by the judicial authority." By turning all questions of individual rights into exclusively judicial issues, Marshall appropriated an enormous amount of authority for the courts.

The legislatures incorporated not just banks but insurance companies and manufacturing concerns, and they licensed entrepreneurs to operate bridges, roads, and canals. The states issued 11 chapters of incorporation between 1781 and 1785, 22 more between 1786 and 1790, and 114 between 1791 and 1795. Between 1800 and 1817 they granted nearly 1,800 corporate charters. Massachusetts alone had thirty times more business corporations than the half dozen or so that existed in all of Europe. New York, the fastest-growing state, issued 220 corporate charters between 1800 and 1810.

In 1804 the Marshall Court grappled with the nature of a corporation for the first time. In Head v. Providence Insurance Company, Marshall stressed the traditional view of a corporation, that it was a public entity that presumably could be changed by the legislature that originally chartered it. By a corporation the Court meant all entities chartered for public purposes—towns, turnpikes, canals, insurance companies, and colleges. This stress on the need for a "public purpose" behind the state's activity, however, eventually forced the Supreme Court in Terrett v. Taylor (1815) to separate corporations into two kinds, public and private, a distinction new to American law. Legislatures could modify charters of public corporations, declared Justice Joseph Story, who wrote the decision; but such public corporations included only counties, towns, and cities. The charters of all the other corporations, including businesses and colleges, were private property.

If corporations such as banks and other businesses were indeed private, and not public, then it could be intelligibly argued that their charters were actually kinds of private property protected from subsequent violation or regulation by state authority. No one doubted the capacity of the legislature to take private property for public purposes with compensation, that is, using the power of eminent domain, but this power, it was now argued, could not be extended so far as to abridge rights expressly vested prior to the legislature's assertion of its power—at least not without some sort of compensation for such abridgments.

In his creative decision Marshall contended that Dartmouth was a private corporation as defined by Story in Terrett v. Taylor. He then went on to declare (he said "it can require no argument") that the college's original charter was a contract under Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution and was thus immune to any state violation.

Although Marshall and his Court could scarcely have grasped the momentous implications for American business of their Dartmouth College decision, the decision did result in placing all private corporations under the protection of the United States Constitution. All private corporations, not just the four dozen or so educational institutions existing in 1819, but the hundreds of business corporations that had been created since the Revolution, had become different from their monarchical predecessors: most were no longer exclusive monopolies, and most were no longer public. They became private property belonging to individuals, not the state.

Since [Benjamin] Rush came to believe that "the science of medicine was related to everything," he considered everything within his intellectual domain and had something to say about everything. In the decades following the Revolution Rush carried on what historian has called "a one-man crusade to remake America." "Mr. Great Heart," Jeremy Belknap called him, after the character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who attacked all the giants and hobgoblins that stood in the way of getting to the Celestial City. Believing that he "was acting for the benefit of the whole world, and of future ages," Rush campaigned for every conceivable reform—for a national university, churches for blacks, temperance, healthy diets, the emancipation of the slaves, prison reform, free postage for newspapers, enlightened treatment of the insane, the education of women, animal rights, and the abolition of hunting weapons, oaths, dueling, and corporal and capital punishment. He even hoped eventually to eliminate all courts of law and all diseases. He was not so utopian, he said in 1786, as to think that man could become immortal, but he did believe that "it is possible to produce such a change in his moral character, as shall raise him to a resemblance of angels—nay, more to the likeness of God himself."

The republican Revolution challenged these traditional notions of punishment. Many of the Revolutionary state constitutions of 1776 evoked the enlightened thinking of the Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria and promised to end punishments that were "cruel and unusual" and to make them "less sanguinary, and in general more proportionate to the crimes." Jefferson and other leaders drew up plans for liberalizing the harsh and bloody penal codes of the colonial period. In fact, Jefferson devoted more time to his Virginia bill for proportioning crimes and punishments than to any of the other reform bills he drafted during the Revolution.

[The Revolution] forced those Southerners who chose to retain slavery to fall back on the alleged racial deficiencies of blacks as a justification for an institution that hitherto they had taken for granted and had never before needed to justify. The anti-slavery movement that arose out of the Revolution inadvertently produced racism in America.

Elbridge Gerry tried to change Samuel Adams's opinion of the theater by stressing that it was nothing more than a "school for morality." In fact, plays had to be advertised as "moral lectures" or run the risk of being closed down. Shakespeare's Othello was billed as "a Series of Moral Dialogues in Five Parts, depicting the evils of jealous, and other bad passions." So too was Richard III advertised as "The Fate of Tyranny," Hamlet as "Filial Piety," and Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer as "Improper Education." American theater managers cut and edited the imported British plays to the point where, as one critic complained, "the English comedy is reduced to the insipidity of a Presbyterian sermon."

In all of his writings Washington rarely mentioned Christ, and, in fact, he scrupulously avoided testifying to a belief in the Christian gospel. Many of the Revolutionary leaders were proto-Unitarians, denying miracles and the divinity of Jesus. Even puritanical John Adams thought that the argument for Christ's divinity was an "awful blasphemy" in this new enlightened age.

Following his inauguration as president, [Washington] exchanged salutations with twenty-two major religious groups and continued the practice he had begun earlier of attending the services of various denominations, including Congregational, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and Roman Catholic. He expressed toleration for all religions, including the religious of Muslims and Jews. Except for an unknown number of African slaves who may have been followers of Islam, there were not many Muslims in America at the time of Washington's inauguration—perhaps only a small community of Moroccans in Charleston, South Carolina. But in 1790 several thousand Jews lived in the country, most of them in the cities of Newport, New York, Savannah, and Charleston. Washington went out of his way to make Jews feel they were full-fledged Americans.

During the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 Franklin proposed to call in a minister each day to calm the rancor of the debates. Hamilton is supposed to have replied that the Convention did not need any "foreign aid." When Hamilton was later asked why the members of the Convention had not recognized God in the Constitution, he allegedly replied, "We forgot."

This new post-millennial thinking represented both a rationalizing of revelation and a Christianizing of the enlightened belief in secular progress. Hopkins's predictions of a new world of "universal peace, love and general and cordial friendship" were not much different from those hopes for the future held by Jefferson and other secular radicals. This post-millennial thinking was optimistic and even at times materialistic; it promised not the sudden divine destruction of a corrupt world but a step-by-step human-directed progression toward perfection in this world. Every move westward across the continent and every advance in material progress—even new inventions and canal-building—was interpreted in millennial terms. Such millennial beliefs identified the history of redemption with the history of the new Republic.

The United States was born amidst a world at war. From 1792 to 1815, except for some brief armistices, Europe was torn apart by a ferocious struggle for dominance between revolutionary and later Napoleonic France and her many European enemies, especially Great Britain. It became the longest sustained global war in modern history. Before it was over, it had killed or maimed more than two million persons, overthrown numerous governments, and transformed boundaries throughout Europe. Fighting took place in nearly every part of Europe and in various regions of the world, including the Middle East, South Africa, the Indian Ocean, the West Indies, and Latin America. Almost every European country was involved at one time or another, either in alliance or at war with Britain or France.

All of this re-export trade turned the United States into the largest neutral carrier of goods in the world. In 1790 American ships had carried only about 40 percent of the value of all goods involved in America's foreign trade; by 1807 American ships were carrying 92 percent of a much larger volume—from combined imports and exports of $43 million in 1790 to $246 million in 1807. Between 1793 and 1807, the value of American imports and exports increased nearly sixfold, and American ships tonnage tripled. Even accounting for a price inflation of 26 percent between 1790 and 1807, these were impressive figures.

Not only did Jefferson, aristocratic Southern planter that he was, express disdain for what he thought were the low pecuniary motives of merchants, but he hated and thought "absurd" the fact that commerce was "converting this great agricultural country into a city of Amsterdam,—a mere headquarters for carrying on the commerce of all nations."

"War is not the best engine for us to resort to," said Jefferson; "nature has given us one in our commerce, which, if properly managed, will be a better instrument for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice." Peaceful coercions, using commercial discrimination against foreign enemies and backed ultimately by the withholding of American commerce, were, said Madison, "the most likely means of obtaining our objects without war." In other words, most Republican leaders, especially Jefferson and Madison, believed in the use of economic sanctions—something that even today is often invoked as an alternative to the direct use of military force.

The most humiliating grievance for Americans, the one that made them seem still under the thumb of the former mother country, was the British impressment of American seamen, a practice that John Quincy Adams labeled an "authorized system of kidnapping upon the ocean." British captains of warships often stopped and inspected American commercial vessels even in American waters to see if there were any British subjects among the sailors. Such actions, said Jefferson, threatened American sovereignty... The actual numbers of sailors that Britain impressed from American ships over this war period are unknown, the British admitting to more than three thousand, the Americans claiming at least double that figure.

Since a suffocating trans-Atlantic Englishness existed everywhere in the Americans' culture, it is not surprising that the Republicans came to see the British impressment of American sailors as a glaring example of America's lack of independence as a nation. The practice aroused so much anger precisely because it threw into the faces of the Americans the ambiguous and fluid nature of their national identity.

During the first year of the embargo the Massachusetts fleet, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the nation's total tonnage, lost over $15 million in freight revenues alone, a sum equal to the entire income of the federal government in 1806. During 1808 American exports declined nearly 80 percent (from $103,343,000 to $22,431,000) and imports declined nearly 60 percent (from $144,740,000 to $58,101,000). Most of the decline in exports took place in the last three-quarters of 1808, as stricter enforcement of the embargo steadily took effect.

On August 9, 1814, all the Creeks were forced to sign the harsh Treaty of Fort Jackson. Despite instructions from Washington to the contrary, Jackson sought to punish even those Indians who were allies of the United States. They had, he said, "forfeited all right to the Territory we have conquered." The treaty gave to the whites over twenty-two million acres of land—more than half of the territory belonging to the Creeks. Although his superiors in Washington were furious, Westerners were elated... Although victory in this Creek war did not strategically affect the war with Great Britain, it "could fairly be described," concludes one historian, "as the most decisive and most significant victory won by the United States in the entire War of 1812."

In the fall of 1814 Treasury Secretary George W. Campbell said the government needed $50 million, but he had no idea how to raise it. In October he resigned as secretary of the treasury, and in November the government defaulted on the national debt. For all intents and purposes the public credit was defunct, and the United States government was bankrupt. Campbell was replaced by Alexander Dallas, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican. Dallas stunned his fellow Republicans with his recommendations for new internal taxes and a national bank that was an enlarged version of the bank the Republicans had only recently done away with. Although Congress reluctantly agreed to the new taxes, including a whiskey excise tax that was heavier than the one that had precipitated the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, it rejected Dallas's proposed bank, at least for the time being. President Madison, reversing his earlier strict constructionist view of 1791 that a national bank was unconstitutional, now favored such a bank modeled on the Bank of England.

The treaty was signed on Christmas Eve 1814. News of the peace treaty did not reach Washington until February 13, 1815. In the meantime, on January 8 at New Orleans, Andrew Jackson and a force of about 4,700 achieved a smashing victory over five thousand British regulars, commanded by General Sir Edward Pakenham, the brother-in-law of the duke of Wellington... The American victory at New Orleans was so overwhelming—the British suffered two thousand casualties, including the death of General Pakenham, to Jackson's seventy—that the Americans came to believe that the United States had really won the war and dictated the peace terms, even though the peace treaty had already been signed. But Jackson's victory did in fact clinch the treaty, and news of it thoroughly discredited the report of the Hartford Convention, which many thought was a treasonous act. The Federalists were scorned and ridiculed, and they never recovered politically.

With the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Ghent between the United States and Great Britain, however, the Americans were finally free to take action, and on March 3, 1815, Congress declared war on Algiers. The United States sent two squadrons, totaling seventeen warships, into the Mediterranean, the largest naval fleet the country had ever assembled. After losing several vessels to the American forces, the Algerines capitulated and signed a treaty with the United States. Threatened by the powerful American naval squadrons, Tunis and Tripoli soon followed the Algerian example. The Americans demanded the release of not only their own prisoners but the prisoners of other nations as well. "To see the stars and stripes holding forth the hand of retributive justice to the barbarians, and rescuing the unfortunate, even of distant but friendly European nations, from slavery" filled an American observer on the spot and Americans back home as well with pride. By ending the Barbary practices of tributes and ransoms, the Americans accomplished what no European nation had been willing or able to accomplish. John Quincy Adams, from his new post in London as minister to Great Britain, thought that America's "naval campaign in the Mediterranean has been perhaps as splendid as anything that has occurred in our annals since our existence as a nation."

With the embargo and the non-intercourse acts, far fewer manufactured imports from Britain were available, and this meant rising prices for such manufactured items. This in turn led both to a sudden increase in the number of patents and also to an inducement for more and more investors to shift their capital out of overseas shipping into domestic manufacturing. Before 1808 only fifteen cotton mills existed in United States; by the end of 1809 eighty-seven mills had been added. Everywhere in the North, but especially in New England, small factories were springing up.

Unlike Britain and Europe, this American rural manufacturing was not usually the result of mercantile capitalists subcontracting work to impoverished cottagers and landless laborers in so-called putting-out systems; it was more often the consequence of ongoing farm families becoming part-time manufacturers and entrepreneurs in order to better themselves by making some extra money. Even farmers who were not growing crops for export abroad were nonetheless scrambling to create goods to exchange in local markets—working with their wives and children spinning cloth or weaving hats, dressing deer skins and beaver pelts, making hoops and barrels, distilling whiskey or cider, and fabricating whatever they might sell to local stores.

By 1815 the United Staes thus remained a predominately rural, agricultural society, on the surface not all that different from the society of the eighteenth century. Yet beneath that surface much had changed. The early Republic may have been still overwhelmingly rural, still overwhelmingly agricultural, but it was also now overwhelmingly commercial, perhaps, in the North at least, the most thoroughly commercialized society in the world. The Americans' desire to trade was "a passion as unconquerable as any with which nature has endowed us," Henry Clay told the House of Representatives in 1812. "You may attempt to regulate—you cannot destroy it."

The rapid development of domestic trade created the heightened demand almost everywhere for internal improvements—new roads, new canals, new ferries, new bridges—anything that would help increase the speed and lower the cost of the movement of goods within the country, and, as John C. Calhoun said in 1817, in a common opinion, help "bind the republic together." All this worked to convince Americans, as the governor of Pennsylvania declared in 1811, that "foreign commerce is a good but of a secondary nature, and that happiness and prosperity must be sought for within the limits of our own country."

Instead of defining "commerce" as Montesquieu had—"the exportation and importation of merchandise with a view to the advantage of the state"—many Americans, at least in the North, now equated "commerce" with all the exchanges taking place within the country itself, exchanges in which not only both parties always gained but the society did as well. "There is no word in the English language that more deceives a people than the word 'commerce,'" wrote Hezekiah Niles in his Weekly Register in 1814. People everywhere "associate with it an idea of great ships, passing to all countries—whereas the rich commerce of every community is its internal; a communication of one part with other parts of the same... In the United States, (were we at peace) our foreign trade would hardly exceed a fortieth or fiftieth part of the whole commerce of the people."

The eighteenth-century abstractions of the Enlightenment no longer seemed relevant. As the Jeffersonian chemist and emigre from England Thomas Cooper declared in 1817, "The days of metaphysical philosophy when the learned argued from generals to particulars... are gone by." Knowledge was acquired from the bottom up and could no longer deal "in abstract propositions" and be the exclusive business of the learned, elevated few; it belonged to everyone and had to enter "into our everyday comforts and conveniences." Cooper even justified the study of chemistry for its usefulness in the preparing and marinating of food. He was not alone in this desire to give chemistry a down-home usefulness, a peculiarly American desire that British critics enjoyed mocking. Jefferson urged Cooper to apply his chemistry "to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the making of bread, butter, cheese, soap, to the incubation of eggs, etc." John Adams agreed. He told John Gorham, professor of chemistry at Harvard, that chemists ought to forget about "deep discovery" and instead concentrate on giving "us the best possible bread, butter, cheese, wine, beer, and cider."

Following [Charles Willson] Peale's death the museum passed into the enterprising hands of PT Barnum, becoming part of his traveling circus—a romantic ending for an Enlightenment institution.

The War of 1812 was no sooner concluded than the country became seriously divided over the admission of Missouri as a slave state. That crisis stripped away the illusions that both the North and the South had entertained about slavery. Suddenly, Northerners came to realize that slavery was not going to disappear naturally, and Southerners came to realize that the North really cared about ending slavery.