Empire Of Liberty

Gordon Wood, “Empire Of Liberty” (A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815), Oxford Univ, 2008, 778 Pages

Empire of Liberty is the middle volume in the Oxford History of the United States. This volume of the three begins with the signing of the Constitution in 1788 and ends with the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, closing the War of 1812. The volumes on each side are: Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause, which covers the Revolutionary War era, and Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, which covers the cultural and technological transformations marking the years between the conclusion of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican War in 1848. When time allows I will have to read these as well. It’s a d*** good thing I am retired; so little time, so much to read. Today I pick up the babies for a four day stay—looks like a hiatus.

Empire of Liberty clearly documents the rapid process in which the United States shed the founder’s generation aristocratic notions of Republican government. The founders, other than Benjamin Franklin, believed that governing was an obligation of the elite and this elite did not campaign—they were solicited to rule; they believed we should have no political parties. Of course reality immediately set in and the country separated into two parties: the Federalists and the Republicans. The United States became a unique beacon, demonstrating that middle class people in a large country could rule themselves without a monarchy. The French revolution quickly dissolved into the Napoleonic dictatorship and then back to a Bourbon monarchy.

My Notes:

Pg. 8: Theorists from Plutarch in antiquity to Machiavelli in the Renaissance to Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century had argued that republics dependent upon the virtue of their citizens had to be small in size and martial in character; otherwise their citizens would have too many diverse interests and would not be able to cohere, defend themselves, and develop the proper spirit of self-sacrifice. The only republics existing in the eighteenth century—the Netherlands, the Swiss cantons, and the Italian city-states—were small and compact and no models for the sprawling United States. Large and socially diverse states that had tried to become republics—as England had in the seventeenth century—inevitable had ended up in military dictatorships like that of Oliver Cromwell. (Note: this book clearly shows how fragile the U.S. was during this period and was nearly destroyed by the New England states threats of secession. The War of 1812 served to forge the U.S. as one nation—albeit, with a Southern component quite distinct from the North).

Pg. 22: According to Aristotle artisans, agricultural workers, even businessmen, could not be citizens. For men must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen.’

Pg. 42: The four-stage theory of social progress prevalent in the eighteenth-century posited four stages of evolutionary development based on differing modes of subsistence: hunting and gathering, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. As societies grew in population, so the theory went, people were forced to find new ways of subsisting, and this need accounted for societies advancing from one stage to another. (Note: the U.S. experience would demolish this theory when they demonstrated that at least the last three stages could exist at the same time in the same people).

Pg. 129: In 1791 General Arthur St. Clair, the territorial governor of the Northwest, led a motley collection of over fourteen hundred regulars and militia against the Miami tribe villages. The Americans suffered nearly a thousand casualties, including over six hundred killed. St. Clair’s defeat was the worst the Indians ever inflicted on the U.S. Army in its entire history.

Pg. 154: In the 1790’s, Thomas Jefferson feared the ‘Monarchial federalist’ were using the new government ‘simply as a stepping stone to monarchy.’ This was also the central theme of the emerging Republican party. Jefferson had written these thoughts in a letter to Washington in a plea for Washington to stay on for a second term.

Pg. 160: With little competition for office, voter turnouts were often very low, sometimes fewer than 5 percent of the eligible electorate. Most could not afford to take office and when there was only one party, the Federalists, why bother.

Pg. 172: Hamilton’s federal program, including funding the Revolutionary debt, assuming the state debts, adopting excise taxes, establishing a standing army, and creating a national bank, alarmed Jefferson and his Republicans. They felt this was part of the plan to return the country to a monarchy.

Pg. 176: Some Federalist began to see in France the terrifying possibilities of what might happen in America if popular power were allowed to run free. The rioting in Paris and elsewhere, the horrific massacres in September 1792 of over fourteen hundred prisoners charged with being enemies of the Revolution, the news that Lafayette had been deserted by his troops and his allies in the Assembly and had fled France—all these events convinced the Federalists that the French Revolution was sliding into popular anarchy.

Pg. 298: 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.

Pg. 301: The Jeffersonian revolution was an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment in governing without the traditional instruments of power. Governments in the early nineteenth century were not supposed to cut taxes, shrink their bureaucracies, pay off their debts, reduce their armed forces, and diminish their coercive power. No government in history had ever voluntarily cut back its authority. Jefferson and the other Republican leaders believed that society would hold together because of people’s natural sociability and willingness to sacrifice their selfish interests for the sake of the whole.

Pg. 339: Distilling whiskey was good business because, to the astonishment of foreigners, nearly all Americans—men, women, children, and sometimes even babies—drank whisky all day long. Some workers began drinking before breakfast and then took dram breaks instead of coffee breaks. During court trials a bottle of liquor might be passed among the attorneys, spectators, clients, and the judge and jury.

Pg. 400: In 1801 the Republicans had taken control of two-thirds of the federal government—the presidency and the Congress—but the judiciary remained in the hands of the Federalists. Consequently, some of the most rabid Republicans would have liked to do away with the judiciary altogether.

Pg. 419: Although the Federalists had lost the election I n the late fall of 1800, the new Republican administration did not take office until March 1801, and the new Congress would not be seated until December 1801 (not changed until the Twentieth Amendment adopted in 1933 eliminated the December to March lame-duck session of Congress). So in February 1801 the lame-duck Federalist-controlled Congress passed a new judiciary act. The act eliminated circuit court duty for the justices of the Supreme Court by creating six new circuit courts with sixteen new judges. On the assumption that the work of the Supreme Court would be lessened, the Federalist Congress reduced the Court’s membership from six to five justices with the next vacancy. This meant that Jefferson would be prevented from naming a Supreme Court justice until two vacancies occurred. Of course, Adams before surrendering the presidency to Jefferson appointed a number of Federalist judges to this newly enlarged federal judiciary. Jefferson believed that the Federalists had ‘retired into the judiciary as a stronghold…, and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.’ After a long and bitter debate in the Congress, the Republicans in 1802 repealed the Federalist law, thus at a stroke destroying the newly created circuit courts and for the first and only time in U.S. history revoking the tenure of federal judges as well. The Republicans then tried to impeach Chief Justice Chase--this failed.

Pg. 442: In 1803, few saw the significance in Marshall’s Marbury v Madison decision which set the precedent for the Supreme Court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional.

Pg. 492: Since few colonists had believed that criminals were capable of being reformed, capital punishment had been common not only for murder but for robbery, forgery, housebreaking, and counterfeiting as well. The republican Revolution of 1800 challenged these traditional notions of punishment. In Massachusetts in 1785 a counterfeiter was no longer executed. Instead, he was set in the pillory, taken to the gallows, where he stood with a rope around his neck for a time, whipped twenty stripes, had his left arm cut off, and finally was sentenced to three years hard labor.

Pg. 517: During the first half of the eighteenth century most Americans had simply accepted slavery as the lowest and most base status in a hierarchy of legal dependencies. The prevalence of hundreds of thousands of bonded white servants tended to blur the conspicuous nature of black slavery. With as much as half of colonial society at any moment legally unfree, the peculiar character of lifetime, hereditary black slavery was not always as obvious as it would become in the years following the Revolution when bonded white servitude virtually disappeared. All the states, in fact, stopped importing slaves on their own during the 1790s—actions that reinforced the conviction that slavery’s days were numbered. Homegrown slaves were sufficient at the time to meet the needs—importation would begin again when cotton became the prevalent crop.

Pg. 577: Contrary to the experience of eighteenth-century Europeans, whose rationalism tended to erode their allegiance to religion, religion in America did not decline with the spread of enlightenment and liberty. Indeed, as Tocqueville was soon to observe, religion in America gained in authority precisely because of its separation from governmental power.

Pg. 583: The First Amendment was held to only prohibit Congress, and not the states, from interfering with the free exercise of religion, the states felt free both to maintain establishments and to legislate I religious matters. Not only did Connecticut and Massachusetts continue their tax-supported Congregational establishments, but the Revolutionary constitutions of Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia authorized their state legislators to create in place of the Anglican Church a kind of multiple establishment of a variety of religious groups, using tax money to support ‘the Christian religion.’ Man of the states outlawed blasphemy, which they defined as attempts to defame Christianity, and they sought to retain some general religious qualifications for public office. Five states—New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia—required officeholders to be Protestant. Maryland and Delaware said Christian. Pennsylvania and South Carolina officials had to believe in one God and in heaven and hell; Delaware required a belief in the Trinity.

Pg. 646: Between 1803 and 1812 Britain and France and their allies seized nearly fifteen hundred American ships, with Britain taking 917 to France’s 558. These seizures however did less damage to American commerce than Jefferson’s 1807 embargo act that forbade all Americans from sending any of their ships and goods abroad. Perhaps never in history has a trading nation of America’s size engaged in such an act of self-immolation with so little reward. This embargo came close to causing the New England states to secede from the Union.

Pg. 733: The antebellum South never became a middle class commercial-minded society like that of the North. Its patrician order of large slaveholders continued to dominate both the culture and the politics of the section.

Pg. 735: By the end of the War of 1812 the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in America was clearly over. France no longer influenced American thinking, and with the demise of the Federalists, the cultural authority of England lost much of its influence.