American Experiment (28 page)

These early Americans, to be sure, had enormous energy and boundless optimism. They labored, each for himself, in the vineyard of liberty. But a vineyard, in eighteenth-century usage, was also a sphere of moral activity, and the new century might tell whether these Americans were laboring only for themselves, or also for humankind.

On the eve of the last year of the century, American leaders were intent more on political prospects than moral. The looming national elections were tending to focus their minds. The decisive figure in this election would be Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson hardly appeared decisive at the time. His political course during the late 1790s had mirrored the political uncertainties and party gropings of those years. Tentatively he looked for some kind of North-South combination.

“If a prospect could be once opened upon us of the penetration of truth into the eastern States; if the people there, who are unquestionably republicans, could discover that they have been duped into the support of
measures calculated to sap the very foundations of republicanism, we might still hope for salvation,” Jefferson had written Aaron Burr some weeks after Adams’ inauguration in 1797. “…But will that region ever awake to the true state of things? Can the middle, Southern and Western States hold on till they awake?” He asked Burr for a “comfortable solution” to these “painful questions.”

Immensely flattered, Burr requested an early meeting with the Vice-President in Philadelphia. Jefferson now became more active as party leader, working closely with Madison in Virginia and with Gallatin in the House of Representatives. Following the election setbacks to Republicans in 1798, he redoubled his efforts especially as a party propagandist. He asked every man to “lay his purpose & his pen” to the cause; coaxed local Republican leaders into writing pamphlets and letters to editors; stressed the issues of peace, liberty, and states’ rights; turned his office into a kind of clearinghouse for Republican propaganda. “The engine is the press,” he told Madison.

Hundreds of other men too were busy with politics, but like Jefferson earlier, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense. Intellectual leaders—clergymen, editors, and others—were still preaching against the whole idea of an open, clear-cut party and election battle. Party formations were still primitive in many areas. Even fiercer than the conflict between Federalists and Republicans was the feuding between factions within the parties—especially between the Adams following and the Hamilton “cabal.” Certain high Federalists were hinting at the need for armed repression of the opposition, particularly in the event of war, and Jefferson and Madison were openly pushing the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions—a strategy of nullification and even secession still in flat contradiction to the idea of two-party opposition and rotation in power. All these factors enhanced the most pressing question of all—could the American republic, could any republic, survive a decisive challenge by the “outs” to the “ins”? Or would ballots give way to bullets?

Not intellectual theorizing but heated issues, fierce political ambitions, and the practical need to win a scheduled national election compelled the political testing of 1800.

In Philadelphia, John Adams contemplated the coming test with apprehension and anger. Political and personal affairs had gone badly for him since the euphoria of ’98. Abigail was ill a good part of the time, and his beloved son Charles, a bankrupt and an alcoholic, was dying in New York. As proud, captious, sensitive, and sermonizing as ever, he hated much of the day-to-day business of the presidency, and he longed to take sanctuary in Quincy; but he desperately wanted to win in 1800, to confound his
enemies, to complete his work. He tried to lend some direction and unity to the Federalists, but he was handicapped by his concept of leadership as a solitary search for the morally correct course, regardless of day-to-day pressures from factions and interests. He sensed, probably correctly, that his party should take a more centrist course to win in 1800. But his own moderate positions on foreign and domestic policy left him isolated between high Federalists and moderate Republicans.

The Fries “rebellion” epitomized his difficulty. A direct federal tax on land and houses, enacted by Congress in 1798, touched off the next winter an uprising by several hundred Pennsylvanians—and especially by the women, who poured scalding water on assessors who came to measure their windows. John Fries, a traveling auctioneer, led a band of men to Bethlehem, where they forced the release of others jailed for resisting the tax. The President promptly labeled the act treasonable and ordered Fries and his band arrested. Unlucky enough to be tried before Justice Samuel Chase, the auctioneer was convicted of treason and, amid great hubbub, sentenced to die. Later the President, without consulting his Cabinet, pardoned Fries—only to arouse the fury of high Federalists. Not the least of these was Alexander Hamilton, who, his biographer says, would have preferred to load the gibbets of Pennsylvania with Friesians and viewed the pardon as one more example of Adams’ petulant indecisiveness.

By the spring of 1800 Adams’ wrath against the Hamiltonians in his Cabinet—especially Pickering and McHenry—was about to burst out of control. Politically the President faced a dilemma: he wished to lead the Federalists toward the center of the political spectrum, in order to head off any Republican effort to pre-empt the same ground, but he feared to alienate the high Federalists and disrupt his party when unity was desperately needed. His uncertainty and frustration only exacerbated his anger. One day, as he was talking with McHenry about routine matters, his anger boiled over. He accused the frightened McHenry to his face of being subservient to Hamilton—a man, he went on, who was the “greatest intriguant in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin.” Adams accepted McHenry’s resignation on the spot. A few days later he demanded that Pickering quit. When the Secretary of State refused, Adams summarily sacked him. Oddly, he did not fire Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott, who was Hamilton’s main conduit to the high Federalists in Adams’ administration.

Thomas Jefferson, watching these events from his vice-presidential perch, had the advantage of being close to the government, if not inside it, with little of the burden of power and none of the responsibility. By early 1800 he was emerging clearly as the national leader of the Republicans.
Gone were the doubts and vacillations of earlier days. He was eager to take on the “feds,” as he called them, to vanquish their whole philosophy and practice of government, to establish his party and himself in control of Congress and the presidency. He consciously assumed leadership of his party. Unable to campaign across the country—stumping was contrary to both his own nature and the custom of the day—he cast political lines into key areas through letters and friends.

His meeting with Burr paid off handsomely. The dapper little New Yorker set to work uniting New York Republicans against the divided Federalists. Then he organized his lieutenants tightly on a ward-by-ward basis; had the voters’ names card-indexed, along with their political background, attitudes, and need for transportation on election day; set up committees for house-to-house canvassing for funds; pressed more affluent Republicans for bigger donations; organized rallies; converted Tammany into a campaign organization; debated Hamilton publicly; and spent ten hours straight at the polls on the last day of the three-day state election. He won a resounding victory in the election of state assemblymen—and got full credit for it from Republican leaders in Philadelphia.

The New York victory buoyed Jefferson’s hopes. He recognized the critical role of the central states, and how they hung together. “If the
city
election of N York is in favor of the Republican ticket, the issue will be republican,” he had instructed Madison; “if the federal ticket for the city of N York prevails, the probabilities will be in favor of a federal issue, because it would then require a republican vote both from Jersey and Pennsylva to preponderate against New York, on which we could not count with any confidence.” What Jefferson called the “Political arithmetic” looked so good after the New York victory that he shrugged off the Federalist “lies” about him. He would not try to answer them, “for while I should be engaged with one, they would publich twenty new ones.” He had confidence in the voters’ common sense. “Thirty years of public life have enabled most of those who read newspapers to judge of one for themselves.”

Doubtless Jefferson was too optimistic. The Federalists in 1800 were still a formidable party. While they were losing some of the vigorous younger men to the Republicans, they were still the party of Washington and Adams and Jay and Pinckney and Hamilton, and the vehicle of a younger generation represented by men like John Marshall and Fisher Ames. The Federalists had never been a purely mercantile or urban party; their strength lay also in rural areas and along the rivers and other avenues of commerce into the hinterland, such as the Connecticut Valley. Adams as President had immense national prestige, if not always popularity, and his “move toward
the middle” broadened the party’s appeal. Stung by losses in New York, the Federalists rallied their forces in other states. In New Jersey, where women were not expressly barred from voting, they “marched their wives, daughters, and other qualified ‘females’ to the polls,” in one historian’s words, and won the state’s seven electoral votes.

Not only was the parties’ popular support crucial, but also the manner in which that support was translated into presidential electoral votes. The selection of presidential electors was not designed for accurate translation. For one thing, state legislatures set selection of electors on a statewide basis or on a district basis, or took on the task themselves, according to a guess by the party dominating the legislature as to which system would help that party’s candidate. More and more legislatures moved to choose electors themselves, rather than by popular vote. Electors were supposed to exercise some independent judgment. But more important in 1800, the electoral system was still so novel as to be open to flagrant rigging, such as changing the method of choosing electors. Broaching to John Jay such a scheme for New York, Hamilton said that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be over-scrupulous.” It was permissible to take such a step to “prevent an atheist in religion, and a fanatic in politics, from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay was not impressed.

And so the presidential campaign proceeded, in its noisy, slightly manipulated, but nonviolent way. During the summer candidates for state legislatures toured the districts and talked to crowds where they could find them—“even at a horse race—a cock fight—or a Methodist quarterly meeting.” Then a shocking event broke in on the game of politics.

Through the darkness and the driving rain they made their way, some on horseback but more on foot, most armed with clubs and scythes, hearth-wrought swords and crossbows, a few with guns and homemade bullets. Streaming in from all directions—some from Richmond, others from farms and plantations in the county, still others from more distant places—they gathered at a “briery spot” near a brook six miles outside the Virginia capital. These black men, perhaps a thousand strong, were fired by a common purpose: to wrest liberty from the white slavocracy. The election was as remote to them as they were remote to the politicians counting and recounting electoral odds. They were the voteless, the politically impotent, the socially outcast. But they could not be immunized against the contagious idea of liberty. A few years after the Revolution an enslaved Afro-American, using the pseudonym “Othello,” had demanded:
“After a long, successful, and glorious struggle for liberty,” could Americans “meanly descend to take up the scourge?”

Against the stinging whip, the “nigger boxes,” the violation of their women, the disruption of their families, the black people had found little protection. They safeguarded one another in their families where their families remained intact. They formed plantation communities that were in many respects extended families or kin networks carried over from the original African culture. Black leaders organized secret associations to meet communal needs. Black preachers ministered to both the survival and the moral needs of their people. “The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil,” Du Bois noted. “A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist.” Preachers and congregations met, often secretly, to celebrate life, ease suffering, and talk of deliverance from subjection in this life or hereafter.

Black men and women found other ways of defying their masters or sealing off their own lives. They tried slowdowns and stoppages, truancy and self-injury; they pretended illness or pregnancy. They boycotted work entirely, hid out in woods or swamps, pilfered food, destroyed tools and crops, committed arson, assaulted and sometimes killed owners or overseers, fled North. But none of these worked for large numbers over time, as the slavocracy mobilized sheriffs, overseers, posses, dogs, sometimes the gibbet and usually the whip. Resistance and whipping came to be locked together in a brutal symbiosis; some masters tried to reduce their dependence on the whip, but found it essential to the system.

For black leaders there was one other way. In 1791, the same year that the Bill of Rights had been adopted—but not for the enslaved—news trickled into slave quarters about the black uprising in St. Domingue. This electrifying example of black liberation, combined with the contagious rhetoric and values of the American and French revolutions, powerfully raised the expectations and aspirations of enslaved Afro-Americans. Throughout the 1790s rumors of black plots to burn and kill kept white officials on edge in Virginia and elsewhere. Late in 1797 three black men were executed on suspicion of having conspired to set Charleston afire.

Then, early in 1800, black leaders in the Richmond area began secretly to plan their own insurrection. Most active of the group was Gabriel Prosser, a tall, twenty-four-year-old blacksmith, “a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life,” a contemporary wrote. Other leaders were Jack Bowler, four years older and three inches taller than Gabriel and a ditcher by trade, who had been hired out to a white woman who lived about fifty miles from Richmond. In an election called by Bowler, Prosser was
chosen “General” by the black rebels and Bowler “captain of light horse.” Activity centered in Gabriel’s family circle on the plantation of Thomas Prosser, alleged to be an unusually harsh master. Gabriel’s brother Solomon, also a blacksmith, helped make swords and other crude weapons, and his wife, Nanny, and Martin, another brother and a preacher, helped organize the revolt. Moving stealthily between plantations, reconnoitering the city with the aid of forged passes, the rebels were able to reach a large number of black people in southeastern Virginia. They recruited supporters at funerals, prayer meetings, barbecues.