Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic

good afternoon my name is Jerry McDowell from the Jepsen school of leadership studies and with my colleague Terry price on the co-director of the John Marshall International Center for the Study of statesmanship and it's our pleasure to welcome you this afternoon to this lecture by Gordon wood in our series of lectures on statesmanship and great events such as the American Founding we're more than pleased to have with us one of America's truly distinguished historians Gordon Wood is the Alva Way emeritus University professor at Brown University where he has taught since 1969 1969 was a momentous year that was the year when a lot of us who could have been rich lawyers became impecunious academics because he published the creation of the American Republic and it changed our lives immeasurably for good he's gone on to publish other things including the radicalism of the American Revolution for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and most recently the book we're here to celebrate tonight Empire of Liberty the history of the early republic 1789 to 1850 we're glad that you could be with us professor wood will speak and then we'll take questions and then we'll have a book signing and reception thank you for being with us Gordon welcome thank you very much Gary it's a great pleasure to beat my first visit to the University and I'm very impressed I also know you're your president and you made a good choice this book and that's what I'm going to talk about I'm bid on a book tour so this is the part of it but this book the title of which comes from Jefferson Empire of Liberty it's a term he used he was had a very expansive view of the United States in fact I think he probably was the most expansive minded president in our history and he had ambitions to take a lot of territory including at one point he thought Cuba would become part of the United States anyway that's his empire of Liberty he didn't think of empire in the conventional meaning of the term thought of his a vast government but but certainly was going to be a liberal government now I introduced the book with a short account of the famous story maybe not so famous to many of you younger people but Rip Van Winkle which was Washington Irving's best-selling story his most popular story he wrote it in the second decade of the nineteenth century and I think it the story of course his rip goes to sleep wakes up and finds as a consequence of the revolution everything's changed and he's totally bewildered by the changes I think this was her via the sensibilities his attempt to explain what had happened in his own lifetime that changes that had taken place in America the language was strange he says the rights of citizens elections members of Congress Liberty in other words were a perfect babylonia joggin to the bewildered VanWinkle when people asked him on which side devoted whether he was federal or a Democrat rip can only stare in vacant stupidity I think that was an exaggeration but nonetheless captured the feelings of lots of people because this story resonated with his readers and became as I say the most popular of his stories in a few short decades a mare had really transformed themselves before the Revolution Americans had been merely a collection of disparate British colonies composed of some two million subjects along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast European outposts whose cultural focus was still the metropolitan center in London by 1815 following the war of second war of Great Britain in this book of mine deals it's part of the Oxford history series the period I was given to write about a 1789 to 1815 so following that war with Britain these insignificant provinces had become a single giant Continental Republic with nearly ten million citizens many of whom were already spilling over the mountains into the into the west and their cultural focus was no longer London but instead was directed inward at its own boundless possibilities so Americans knew they were a great experiment in in republicanism and in Enlightenment in a sense they could believe that they could do anything they could solve any problem including the climate they could recreate what they believed what they thought their whole culture could be transformed and of course the revolution was was all about the fact that that people's birth did not limit what you might become hence the importance they gave to education more pamphlets more books more articles were written about education relative to population in this period than at any time in our history now they didn't get implemented Jefferson's planned for this state for example gets sight to put aside because it seemed to cost too much for the legislature but nonetheless the ideas were carried into the next generation and were influent began to be implemented in the 1840s and 50s but they were laid out Jefferson's three-tiered system is essentially what we have today he's not the only one he was just the most famous person who laid out ideas for education very much a part of this period they were faced real problem when you think about it how do you identify yourself what is an American even the term itself seemed vague after all all you know in South America North America everybody had a claim to the title Americans who lived in the new world so what would they call themselves they had recently been British how do they establish their identity it was a real problem they caught they started experimenting with names like Colombians that coincided with the 1792 celebration of Columbus's discovery but that didn't stick they Samuel Mitchell who was a senator a physician and a senator from New York came up with the idea of Freedonia pnes where Fredonia pnes and we live in Fredonia but of course that didn't stick either they ended up with the United States of America and we became Americans much the chagrin of the Canadians and the Colombians and the Venezuelans who feel well we were Americans too why should this big country claim that title they had ambitions that make looking back seemed seem grandiose utopian they thought they would capture that the the torch of Western civilization was going to be passed to them and that they would illuminate it even even more they would create the kind of illustrious culture that people since the Greeks and Romans had had only yearned for now little worked out the way they expected that the elites the founders as we often call them the society became much more popular much more democratic than they even expected and I think in a generations time this these people experienced as great a transformation as we've ever had in our history now those of us of a certain age know that the nineteen since the 1960's we've undergone immense transformation in American life race relations women's rights all sexual mores I mean think of the changes but I would submit that this generation that I'm talking about experienced even a greater transformation and without any technological at there are no railroads there are no computers there's no telegraph nothing of that sort but nonetheless they were transformed in I think an extraordinary way the population grew dramatically as it had been of course through the 18th century doubling every 20 years now that's a rate of growth that was twice as fast as any European country at the time so that was the kind of the major fundamental source of change but the people are also on the move spreading themselves unevenly over half a continent at astonishing speeds between 1790 and 1820 New York's population quadrupled Kentucky's multiplied nearly 8 times in a single generation Ohio which had virtually no white people in it the beginning of the 19th century grew from a virtual wilderness to to be as large as any of the colonial states if colonial colonies were on the eve of the revolution 500,000 people in a decade's time enormous kind of growth we occupied more territory in the single generation that I'm talking about than they did in the entire colonial period and of course in the process displaced tens of thousands of native peoples now although most Americans remain farmers 19 out of 20 were rural people living working a farm they had become particularly in the North a especially commercial people I think the most highly commercialized society in the world meaning that most people were engaged in buying and selling not necessary just with the outside world but with one another and that was hard for people to believe was was a source of prosperity there was a took out it's counterintuitive to them that people selling I don't know say between Fredericksburg and Richmond could actually increase the I of the state of Virginia that the prosperity of Virginia could go up between that kind of trade if you think about it it doesn't make much sense how do you well they wrestled with that and and they finally by the early 19th century people had come to understand that trading between two cities two towns in the same state could enhance the prosperity of that state and that becomes a major intellectual breakthrough as they begin celebrating business and this is particularly in the true in the north of course not so much here in Virginia although in Richmond had a certain commercial center John Marshall King as a federalist came out of Richmond that celebration of work becomes very important and of course that made a as the north comes to celebrate work in a way that went way beyond anything that the French or the British were doing at the time that made the leisured slaveholding aristocracy in the south more and more anomalous slavery was widely condemned but of course it didn't die in the new United States and it flourished but only in the south by 1804 every northern state had moved to abolish slavery but slavery spread across the southern half of the country and and as it disappeared in the north became more deeply entrenched in the southern economy and in a variety of ways both cultural social and political the south began to see itself by the end of the period as a beleaguered minority in a bustling commercial nation not to understand Virginia your Virginia in 1790 was well it was the nation I mean it was a fifth of the population it dominated the country it was by far the biggest richest state in this new United States and it's not surprising that four out of the first five presidents were Virginians as Virginia went so went the nation it's not surprising too that the plan the working model for the Constitution was the Virginia plan if Virginia didn't go along with something it didn't happen that's the the and that's important it has a lot to do with with their attitude towards slavery because it in the outset in the 1780s and 90's virginia's were moving to abolish slavery it seemed and there were real steps taken and i think it led to misleading views of what was going to happen by 1815 virginia is still a larger state in population but it's a very different place its soil is depleted and it hasn't gotten it's not growing cotton the way south carolina or mississippi and alabama its principal export by the second decade of the of the 19th century unfortunately with slaves to mississippi and alabama those are some of the changes and i want to go through some of the basic points that occurred in this period you all know about the titanic struggle between hamilton on washington on one side and jefferson on another this is this is not just politics as usual it's not the first party system none of them are teas they didn't think parties were a good thing and the Federalists led by hamilton and washington never saw themselves as a party they were the beleaguered government being beset by these Radical Republicans there Jefferson's Republicans did see themselves as a party but a temporary one they said we are it's only necessary as the Whigs were in the in the the Patriot Whigs were in the 1760s and 70s to combat monarchism and as long as the threat of and they thought the Federalists were going where mana crats with some justification and as long as the mana Kratts are a threat we will be a party but as soon as that threat is removed our party will disappear that was the vision but they had two different conceptions of the state and so you have a fundamental fight in the 1790s over what kind of nation the United States should be Hamilton and Washington and Washington bought into it wanted a fiscal military state similar to those of Europe he wanted to make the United States the equal of Great Britain in every way have a bureaucracy standing army all of the a-10 and of naval force all of the attributes of a modern state so that we could take on the Brits at some later date on their terms that's his vision it's a he wants to be a European type state and had all kinds of implications for the way you treat power and and and particularly military force Jefferson and Madison had a very different view not just in agrarian state but a state that would not emulate Europe in any way they are ever really radical some would say utopian Hamilton thought it was a pie in the sky dream world they wanted a world a kind of state that would show the world that democracy and republicanism and democracy become interchangeable terms in this period they Republicans start as Republicans by the second decade they've been called the Democrats and they are the origins of the Democratic Party they had a very different vision of what the United States would be not a European type state we're not going to have a bureaucracy we're not going to have a huge army or Navy those are the sources of of executive power monarch achill type power and that's not where we want to go we are going to have alternatives to the use of military force we're going to and this of course lies behind the grand experiment with with what we would call economic sanctions the embargo it has really aversions in withholding of American trade goes back actually to the nonimportation agreements in the 1760s and 70s to bring pressure on the British withhold your trade use your trade your commerce as a weapon and and Jefferson saw that as an alternative to the use of military force we still do I mean that's what we're talking about with Iran we don't want to bomb Iran we want to somehow put pressure on them by using commercial forces commercial withholding trade of some sort so that Jefferson's dream was to be really a never said dream and awake shared by liberals all over the 18th century from Jefferson to Kant to create a universal peace to avoid war which they thought was the most terrible of things which had been the source of monarchical powers growth over the previous three centuries they're going to change history if you will by this these kinds of experiments so you have politics however becoming democratized under the feet so to speak of these founding fathers as more and more people gain the right to vote but but in in fundamental ways the gentry world of the 18th century where people stood for election is replaced by the second decade of this 19th century the period from 1810 to 1820 already replaced by a recognizably modern world of competing professional politicians who ran for office under the banners of a political party now I think we usually think of the Jacksonian era is the era of the common man but I think that's that's kind of a mistake I think the Jacksonian periods a period of consolidation trying to bring this licentiousness and err control when you think of jackson's use of the bureaucracy grow the bureaucracy grows by leaps and bounds under jackson also the use of bureau patronage where channel tonight using as a source of integrating to society the spoil system that that that jackson built up all of these are efforts to control the democracy that is already in existence and i think that is that democratization occurs very rapidly in the 1790s and and in the early decades of the 19th century mostly in the northern states and it's marked by the emergence of new man into authority men who lacked any of the social or moral credentials that the founders had you have interesting examples for example Daniel Tompkins this is a sign of what was happening as early as the first decade of the of the 19th century ordinary people coming in had been John Edmund Randolph complained that the current John Randall I'm sorry complained that the Congress was full of too many ordinary folk every Tom Dick and Harry he says the refuse of the retail trade of politics was getting into authority even butchers were ending up in the in the Congress the federal Congress and even when they were not ordinary many this is what's most extraordinary many people now begin to find that it's good politics to pretend that you're a common man in his campaign for governor of New York 1807 Daniel Tompkins who was a successful lawyer a graduate of Columbia College portrayed himself as a simple farmer's boy that was his campaign slogan in contrast he said to his opponent Morgan Lewis who was an in-law of the aristocratic Livingston family in 1810 the Federalists New York federal is going to get back at Tompkins to combat Tompkins with their own plebeian candidate a man named Jonas Platt whose habits and manners said the Federalists were his plane and Republican as those of his country neighbors Platt was not a city lawyer like Tompkins who roles and splendor and wallows in luxury so already you've got that kind of anti-intellectualism anti elitism which became the stuff of American politics already by the first decade in the northern states spreading and of course that's still an aspect of our politics I mean the Sarah Palin business last year has a lot of that element and some of her appeal comes from the same kind of feeling that was being expressed in in in the first decade the the classic example of this is in Pennsylvania Simon Snider no education whatsoever never been to college had no he self educated he knows how to read he works himself up but he's not stupid he just is ignorant if you might say which a lot of people said about Sarah Palin she may not be very well-read but no one accuses her being stupid but Schneider works himself up to become governor of the state of Pennsylvania in 1808 and he wore his simplicity in his lack of sophistication as a badge of honor when his opponents mocked his obscure origins and called his followers clodhoppers he and his supporters shrewdly picked up the epithet and began wearing it proudly and so he's in a society of qalaat obviously says I am a clodhoppers and that's why you clodhoppers should vote for me and that's why he won I mean that's a very different kind of politics from anything that had occurred on a siscaly man is winning governorships by playing down his bike enhancing his obscure origins and playing to the fact that he is uneducated and just a clodhoppers and in fact I think Americans became so thoroughly democratic in the north in particular in this period that much of the periods political activity beginning with the Constitution itself which was an attempt to raise decision-making get it out of the states where you could get a better class of person making decisions at the federal government and most of the efforts were made through the whole period we're to finding means and devices to tame and mitigate the democracy one of the principal means for this and I spent two chapters in this huge book on on the courts and and you did you Sheree the Federalists probably the apart from creating the Constitution and maybe you can say Hamilton's financial program but one of the great achievements was creating a federal court system which is not prescribed in the Constitution all we all the Constitution's calls for is a Supreme Court it leaves the Congress to create court system and many many people felt that we don't need a separate federal court system we can rely on the state courts but the federal is created an elaborate court system which is essentially the kind of court system we have today a three-tiered system I think more important than the right to vote which is really not the crucial element of democracy you know with voting is hardly measure of any democratic society as we know from seeing it around the world what Americans develop in this period ordinary Americans is a keen sense of their own worth which was unprecedented in the history of the world with the with the call for equality using equality which had been made famous of course by the declaration all men are created equal but it becomes more than just being created equal equality becomes the means by which people challenge powerful entrenched elites and an equality of course becomes the most important ideological force in our entire history Lincoln uses it Martin Luther King uses it and it's used today by it used by women and gays and others it's a very powerful force intellectual force and the most I think in our history most important in our history Democritus the aristocracy is put on the defensive they didn't use the term elites but aristocracy was the term they used to describe anybody who had any pretensions to being superior to somebody else and it was a kind of Defense extraordinary moment where people could not take for granted their superiority to others you have democracies everywhere including the democratization of ambition which hitherto in Western culture had always been an aristocratic passion I mean think of Shakespeare's plays the the common people are comic characters they don't have real ambition its stomach deaths of the world that are do great things but they also a dangerous and of course that's how people thought about Hamilton or burr these are great men great sold men going back to Aristotle these are the sources of great achievement the heroic individuals but they're also dangerous and and that was the conception they're ambitious they're they're they they want to do mighty things now all of a sudden you have a kind of how to put in a taming or a democratization of this notion of ambition and people begin saying every American is ambition all I want to do is get ahead they don't want to do great deeds they just want to make a little more money and do better than their parents did now it's not the kind of ambition they were aware many of these founders began from very obscure origins John John Adams even Jefferson his father was not a college graduate but and Franklin of course is the most obscure origins but they assimilated to gentry status and become aristocratic but what you have with these common people now is that they're not becoming aristocrats not even becoming gentlemen in the usual sense of the term but they are ambitious and what I find there they've got small little increments that they want to have but they're not they're not people to be feared in the way you'd have to fear the ambition of a Hamilton or a bird what's most extraordinary is that they were aware of this James Sullivan governor of Massachusetts in 1807 grasped the significance of what he saw happening in his own society he suggested that a man who sought only to acquire property is not perhaps the great man for whom one would dare to die but he is a character whom one no need to fear indeed by advancing his own particular interest in an innocuous piecemeal way the ordinary man said Sullivan even advances the interest of the public so this is an incredible insight I think into what was happening in a way that that was unprecedented in the history of the world that ordinary people could actually see themselves moving up the social structure in this innocuous commercial ridden society now you have a this is only some of the great changes that I take to take place of it and I try to deal with them the society was so licensure so rambunctious really almost running out of control particularly in the North that it is instability everywhere and it shows up in a number of ways and let me just suggest some of those ways violence of all sorts increases to unprecedented levels personal violence became much more common than it was in England for example homicide rates in the Chesapeake area here reversed a century of decline increased dramatically in the decades following the Revolution homicides in New York take off in the 1790s sudden rise and you have a increase in family murders more family murders that as a husband killing his whole family his wife and his kids Charles Brockden Browns Whelan came out of that newspaper report of these more in this period than in any other time in the 19th century so urban rioting became much more destructive they'd been used to writing in the colonial period but it was always a leaked condoned or dominated now the riots are against the elite and much more destructive of lives and property drinking the Kate reached an all-time high in America a symptom of this kind of instability it reached five gallons per person per year the highest in American history before or since in fact it was the highest in the world coding to studies have been made of any nation in the Western world at least with the possible exception of Scotland who seemed and when you think about it if I gallons Germany doesn't see much we count every man woman and child but then also think of the fifth of the population was enslaved they didn't have much access to alcohol so that the figures are even higher and of course this breeds the temperance movement that emerges at the end of the 20s and and and takes off in the 30s that climax as a century later with nearly a century later with Prohibition John Adams was Freud nieces weren't becoming a nation of drunkards little town of peach in Vermont fifteen hundred people had 30 distilleries Washington was very upset about the growth of drinking but of course he had a distillery on at Mount Vernon we farmers grain farmers found it so much easier to because we did such a perishable grain is perishable it's not easily transported transportation problems were how do you get your Mart your stuff to market well you distill it into whiskey and it doesn't perish and it's a great product so people were drinking all day long DRAM breaks and stuff coffee breaks bottles of whiskey would be passed around the courtroom during a trial the judge would have some the jury the prosecuting I mean they were drinking all day long at huge drinking problem which led to all the abuses of alcohol as well women beaten what wives beaten and so on rioting among Charlotte college students never before or since have we had such rioting about students between 1798 and 1808 that decade the colleges were wracked by mounting instances instance of student defiance and rebellion on a scale as I say unprecedented and not duplicated since we always think of 1960s as a period of student unrest but that's tame compared to what happened back then colleges would be closed for weeks on end because they couldn't meet any classes whole classes are half a class would be expelled now the classes weren't that big 120 students but 60 of them expelled at one time Nassau Hall at Princeton burned to the ground as a result presumably it was bada during a student riot no one knows quite what happened so you have a incredible kind of period which befuddled everyone they didn't know what was the cause French thinking rich kids too much money too much drinking all of that and they worried about what's happening to our society with our youth the way we worried about the 1960s religion too was democratized and transformed we forget but you know prior to the Revolution there are no Methodists in the colonial period ladies need a 1760s not a single Methodist in America the dominant religions in the 18th century with the Anglicans established church weekly established except in this this colony but established church Anglicans or the Puritans in England Congregationalists or Presbyterians buy the first decade of the 19th century the dominant religion the mass of Methodists followed very closely by the Baptist's they come out of nowhere the evangelical Baptist and evangelical these new denominations that of Methodist Methodist proliferated so much because they had no trained clergy they had horse back itinerant preachers who barely could read but they could quote the Bible and they brought in converts by the by the thousands and it's a extraordinary change in a short period of time and this evangelical religion spread everywhere the most famous gathering of religious seekers took place in the summer of 1801 at cane Ridge Kentucky they are huge numbers of people numbering in tens of thousands with with ministers dozens of ministers preaching at the same time in different parts of the camp they came together at what some people thought was the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of Christianity huge crowds participated in a week you know twenty thirty thousand people in a week of frenzied conversions the heat the noise the the confusion were overwhelming ministers sometimes half dozen preaching at the same time in different Miller's Street tree stumps wagons and hundreds if not thousands of people fell on the ground moaning and groaning wailing and remorse and they sang laughed jerked in excitement now american-owned religious revivals before but nothing quite like this now of course the outpouring of the holy spirit was accompanied by the pouring out of lots of intoxicating spirits and critics of the excesses of this cane Ridge Spirit experience claim that the frenzied excitement resulted in more Souls being conceived than converted nonetheless it became the symbol of this new kind of evangelical the both the promises and the excesses of this new kind of evangelical Protestantism spreading particularly in the West and it touched off an outburst of religious chaos and inventiveness unmatched in American history not only did you have Baptist and Methodists who after all had European roots but you have new religions that nobody had ever heard of before like the shakers or the Universalists and lots of them that came up bloomed for a year or two and then disappeared and some of them we have not you know ever recovered some have in the next decade of course you have the Mormons but there were for every group like the Mormons who thrive there were others that have just been forgotten led by some charismatic leader particularly women German Mirjam ina wilkinson became a female Jesus Christ in the eyes of her followers and she until she died she had many many followers and when she died her her sect just disappeared but there were countless numbers of these kinds of evangelicals that we just forgot haven't been recovered by by historians but we know they there were lots of this kind of excess what's going on people are there are lots of people cut loose from the from the normal organized society and seeking solace in some kind of religious a land oh that sounds like Obama but I think that's probably true of this period that people are really lost but but finding in the message of these evangelical preachers some kind of comfort for their their sense of disconnectedness if you will at the same time the art in the literature of the period there were such high hopes for American art painting and writing that the torch of Western civilization was passed to them and so on and it all goes sour it became instead of shining brighter it becomes perverted democratized popular much to the chagrin of the elites I'll give you one example of this there are many many examples from paintings and so on but John Marshall our chief justice wrote a magnificently big be even bigger than my book volume 5 volume biography of George Washington no one wanted to read it's an object lesson in writing not too big a book instead they wanted to read parson Weems this short little biography which he got out right away and it is became the best-selling biography of George Washington still is it's still in print and everybody read it Marshall in his innocence dismissed Washington's youth in a single page and of course parson Weems devotes most of his book them to Washington's youth which he made up of course the cherry tree mint and all of the great myths of Washington's life come out of weeds but he sold Marshall didn't people and of course this seemed to be a to people who were aware of the great noble ennobling art of history writing this was a great perversion that someone like wings would be the would be the champion so by 1815 this world of the founders was passing and a new generation was taking over and and many of these founders who lived into the 19th century Franklin fortunately died in 1790 never saw any of these perversions we're disillusioned with what they had wrought they would disillusion because they had so many illusions now I think we need a little we must realize looking back at them why did they do this why did they think that but you know somebody's going to look back at us 200 years from now and say what wouldn't what could they have been thinking we live with illusions too and and we just don't know what they are they thought they could deal with the native peoples the Indians in a humane and respectful manner they thought that the settlement in the West could be controlled and orderly and that and Henry Knox wrote the letter after letter to he was Secretary of War in charge of Indian Affairs he wrote letters to Washington telling outlining what he thought ought to be done these letters would be respected by a modern anthropologist he's very sensitive to Indian culture we don't want the Indians to go the way they did apparently in New England he thought that Indians had been wiped out in in New England they hadn't been entirely wiped out as we know from the new gambling casinos that have arisen in the last 3040 years but they but but he was concerned about these Indians and he these letters were really quite remarkable in their sensitivity to acute to the peculiar peculiarities of Indian culture of course he never conceded that the Indians could keep all of this land for hunting and gathering they would have to become farmers because that would be just too much land but he wanted to somehow have the settlement of the West be so orderly that we could keep the Indians intact the Indian culture could be maintained of course he had he had nothing he's writing back in Philadelphia and what's going on as we say on the ground is a very different thing these white settlers were not about to respect Indian lines boundaries and they they simply moved in and created problems that led to gun to bloodshed and force the Washington ministration to to protect them to send in the army to protect them and at the same time the states in vaio York particularly in violation of the Constitution was negotiating all kinds of deals with the Indians because the Constitution says Indian Affairs is an exclusive monopoly of the of the federal government but New York and other states pay no attention to that they're paying for it now because they have to pay them off with casino rights but that that it was simply uncontrollable because it because of what people wanted on the ground they also thought that slavery would naturally disappear especially with the ending of the International slave trade in 1808 although and as I say slavery was abolished in the North it expanded in the southern states and they couldn't have been more wrong about the future of slavery but there was misleading evidence as mentioned in the in in this state in particular and of course in the eyes of northerners as Virginia went well then the whole South will go and there were lots of manumissions in this state in 1780 about thirty thousand freedom suits were being brought by anti slave societies in Virginia and in the upper South generally Maryland freedom suits brought by anti slave societies which were more numerous in the upper south than in the northern states and these would buy these societies and if you could if a black could show that he had and he or she had an Indian ancestor the whole line would be freed the Indian blood could cleanse the whole thing and that included and meant a lot of slaves were gaining their freedom through these freedom suits which usually brought by anti slave societies so you have a misleading notion that slavery was was dying that that the South was was about to as Virginia go so don't want the rest of the south and the north was was confused the awakening of course occurs with a Missouri the missouri problem the north comes to realize the sort the south is not getting rid of slavery sort of scales from fall from their eyes how could they have not known but nonetheless they had this misleading notion that slavery was going to die and some of us come to realize that the North really does care about abolishing slavery and I think from that moment on the civil war of some sort the sectional split is becomes apparent and become serious and it seems almost inevitable that some kind of conflict would have to have to take place so there are lots of allusions of that sort of the period and but I think we need a lot of humility and going back to look at the past because as I say we live with allusions to in fact I think the best lesson that history can teach teach us is not particular things how to deal with the with particular events because nothing is repeatable in quite that sense but but humility I think history teaches wisdom it teaches you to understand if you a tragic sense of life of the limitations of life that everything is not immediately possible it in that sense it's not it's not something that the Americans have much favorite we're not a historically minded people because we have a lot of confidence in what we can do but I think that acts as a history as a discipline acts as a kind of restraint on some of that exuberance some of that it takes you off the roller coaster of emotions that you can do this or you can't do that and gives you a more Levitt level-headed approach a more wise approach to the future so I think that is what I would say is the is the ultimate lesson of history thank thank you very much I'd be delighted to take questions about any aspect of this period yes sir as well population doubled every generation geographic expansion about States doubled every generation before that slavery was in Princeton the south 19 or employment period two religious revivals well whether you write about the population increase although the geographical expansion did not occur in the colonial period there really bottled in by the mountains and they don't cross the Appalachians in religion I think the changes are enormous the what was although there are no political parties as such there are factions of a sort always condemned in the colonial period and of course there's no national system at all your these are colonial colonies separate colonies whose tie is to London and they don't know much about each other they're tied to to the metropolitan center there is of course some I mean compared to Britain compared to the mother country America is already a much more popular loose society so I don't mean to say that it suddenly comes out of nowhere there certainly is anticipations of the kind of changes that the intensification is great it's what I'm saying of course the society is very weak by European standards there's no European pipe aristocracy they talked about aristocrats but Alexander Hamilton is hardly an aristocrat in a European sense of the term there are no great houses similar to what you have in in Great Britain any of you have been to England seeing these country houses these country houses like the Duke of Rockingham's house in Northumberland that's his country house is 650 feet long that's longer than two football fields there's nothing like that in Virginia which had a very substantial aristocracy of a sort but the west over at bird's house and west over on the James River was what 90 feet long I mean the scale of our aristocracy is is kind of minor Gentry now Jefferson even for all of his slaves Washington despite having two or three hundred slaves is still by European English standards is a is minor gentry so you're quite right about that but still the there's a good deal of deference still people expect the people to go to the House of Burgesses to be major landowners to be substantial people the same is true in the North you just don't have people who are going to be at the top making decisions who have no education and our proud of it that Franklin's rise is often looked back on but Franklin you know assimilated into Gentry status immediately I mean he became a wealthy gentleman he's not the it doesn't go around talking about the printer his art of being a printer his autobiography is is published after his death and is used by entrepreneurs in the north to justify their own rise but Franklin in his own lifetime is seeing they knew but that he had started as an obscure person but so didn't Thomas Cromwell so didn't Cardinal Wolsey that isn't the important point the important point is that the that you now have obscure people who are proud of their obscure origin and make no effort to hide it that's a real big difference so I don't disagree with you that the society is a much looser one compared to to Europe or England but it is the intensification of this popularization it's almost as if the society comes apart in the north and I think that those changes that I'm talking about occur in a relatively short period of time but they have antecedents there's no doubt of that and it all starts right from the first you know the aristocracy never the nobles never came here there's an important point that Lois Hart made 50 years ago that somehow the migration was always at most you know John Winthrop was just minor gentry he becomes governor of the Commonwealth or the colony of Massachusetts when they tried to get you know in Virginia and Jamestown the authority was already so skewed they gave they gave a knighthood to one of the first governors hoping that that will instill some authority in them we had a major problem through our whole history of a weak aristocracy it's the secret to American social life anybody who wanted to be a leader from the very beginning was vulnerable to challenge there's always someone else who said why are you there and not me now what happens in the revolution is an acceleration and intensification of that process so the point where it really confused Europeans who saw it they couldn't believe it that this clodhoppers could become a governor of the state a big state like Pennsylvania so that you're right about the antecedents does that stop that's the main theme of American social history is the weakness of our leadership of our aristocracy they just don't have the credentials to avoid being challenged constantly governor Berkeley here Berkeley you know with Bacon's Rebellion was all about that he he didn't have enough for bacon had more credentials in his mind then Berkeley did and he says why is he running the show and not me that kind of challenge was built in from the beginning that's a long-winded answer to your question was a big question an important yes sir oh it ii to do surprises that's very slavery yeah this was the most important thing that happened puzzles version or what happened the South has transportation revolution those sort of transforming Kentucky Ridge sun-filled so I wonder how you would explain that slavery pivot so apparently I agree that all the vacations are going to play a way to really in a really short time 15 years just like that right well I think that yeah the changes in in terms of religion for example it isn't is from this scholarship that's been written recently the Venn Jellicle religion doesn't spread as rapidly in the south at the first it runs into the slavery really dictates the contours of the social structure Authority remains relatively hierarchical the the crop even if it's cotton new cotton is similar to what tobacco was it's not it has limited markets it's very important for patronage patrons small cotton farmers need to look up to it they have no access to the Liverpool market so they have to deal with big shots on in the way that small farmers had to deal with with the birds and the LEAs in Virginia earlier with tobacco very similar kinds of crops in limited markets and you don't need distribution centers that's why there are no towns growing up in in the south relatively few towns when when Northern Virginia turns to wheat as Washington did then norfolk emerges because you we does not is a perishable crop and it has diverse markets so you have very different developments the South remains I think for a long period of time much more stratified much more hierarchical when the South says on the eve of the Civil War and you're the expert on this I'm not but I when they say look we've been more faithful to the founders and the world of the founders than you northerners have they were absolutely right it's the North that goes really goes changes now it's true the southern economy export economy is is is allowing for the importation of goods from Britain and it really it's the Sioux it's our export major export and it's feeding the economy but the dynamic economy of middle class society is taking place in the north and measured in a host of different ways number of newspapers number of lawyers if that's a measure of commercial development a number of middling sorts of people engineers everything I mean there are more newspapers in Ohio within the first few years of of its existence then existed in Georgia after a hundred years of its existence so all these measures of what we call a modern commercial society are growing much faster in the north but it is sustained by the export of of cotton now that's why the tariff becomes so important on when I was in high school or college and people said my god we almost came through a civil war over the tariff it always seems strange to me why would the southerners give a damn about but what's the Nullification controversy why would they care about the tariff when you have to understand if the if the if if the Brits can't sell their manufactured goods to the United States they're not going to buy southern cotton I mean it's that kind of simple that South was not stupid in its fear of tariffs they just didn't think the northerners were a sufficient market for their continent if they cut off the British ability to buy to sell their own goods in the United States which was a great market then then the south would get hurt so that's my oh the cotton gin would have happened I mean Whitney gets all the credit but look is a problem the old trying to get that cotton that I forget the name of the kind of cotton it is but to do it by hand I mean you measured your day's work in ounces and it was sooner or later some bright mechanical mind guy is going to invent some kind of engine which is what gin means and and do that so I wouldn't he just gets a lot of credit for it but somebody else would have done that but that did revolutionize the production of this short fiber cotton ya know that's the term and and and of course within a decade it really is enormous growth of cotton exports yes yeah why Alvers right right they don't have to supply this should anticipate it now they're there they did have a notion of stages of development which were made famous by the Scottish philosophers writing at the time Smith and Hume and others from hunter-gatherer to herding to agriculture to commercial activities so people like Hamilton anticipated commercial activity but he thought it would be how to put it would not be as as as Democratic as it was you know he never his biggest political mistake Hamilton's biggest political mistake is to ignore the middling artisans in Pennsylvania in New York elsewhere he simply is he has a high lack of conception of society and he concentrates on the big merchants the big-money men he ignores these artisans who are really the future businessmen and they become they were natural allies of the Federalists they they really are responsible many of the cities for carrying the Constitution they vote for this new constitution but under the Hamilton's regime they're ignored and they've become rabid Republicans the army of the business is extraordinary Jefferson's leading a party he the southern leadership has no a win there's no real awareness of what they're creating in the North the northern Republicans are petty businessmen small middling sorts of people who are bring out the founders I don't think anticipated the kind of democratization of commercial activity that took place no one could have I mean it doesn't have it's not happening in Britain Britain is having an industrial revolution but what's extraordinary in Britain is that the political leadership remains in the hands of the landed gentry and the whole transformation of England occurs so to speak under this political landed leadership that doesn't happen in America there is nothing comparable to that landed gentry leadership except in the south and the closest you got to it is the Virginia Gentry the southern aristocracy the South remains as close to a European model in terms of political leadership as you would have but the North goes wild it's just unbelievable licensures to mull Chua s-- behavior with all kinds of odd characters getting to be governors and a celebration of work unprecedented in the history of the world and in by European standards Europeans come to this much more slowly to the south the idea that work is a good thing you know through history the hours read Aristotle he says people who work for a living are ignoble they're incapable of virtue that's not a message that northern Americans buy into southern can summon is considered continue to think like that because they were elysian aristocracy once you celebrate work then slavery becomes more anomalous you know in the colonial period slavery is not as conspicuous as it would become in the early 19th century there's lots of degrees of unfreedom and slavery it existed in societies for thousands of years not necessarily like the plantation slavery of the new world but nonetheless slavery was a fact that went back to as far back in history as you could imagine and the first criticism of the serious criticism occurs with the American Revolution and as the North grows and becomes more commercial celebrating work than the idea of a leisured aristocracy becomes more more of an aberration an anomaly and the institution gets to be called a peculiar institution nobody called slavery of peculiar in the colonial period there were whites who were being bought and sold now they didn't have hereditary white white servants weren't and they didn't serve for life except in some cases prisoners and convicts maybe but by and large there was a sense that this was just the most base and level of a whole society filled with on freedom you know half the society had experienced servitude so servitude disappears almost entirely by 1800 in the north you know half the society in Philadelphia were servants in the colonial period so what does that mean to get rid of all your servants people are no longer bonded they can't be bought and sold they're free this what freedom meant to people that's gone suddenly slavery is gone suddenly the self looks very different and from that moment on the South is on the defensive I think trying to defend itself against a North which is got very different cultural and economic activities they just couldn't have anticipated that yes ma'am well the Indians in New England had seemingly disappeared actually they didn't - married with blacks and they were lost so to speak - to history they get recovered in our own time actually the Pequod's when the you know Foxwoods is in connecticut the biggest gambling outfit single out in the world 500 Pequod's came out of the woodwork claim claim but they so indians didn't die away and they're making a great deal of their presence now but they did seem to die away but most people did not experience indians in a day to day basis Jefferson loved to talk about Indians he made he knew more about Indians than any other single person probably in America collected their languages unfortunately lost in a accident but I don't think day to day life except on the frontier was where you'd have much contact with Indians and in the West it was it turned bloody it was just a they would they were their land was being taken from and and whites were encroaching on it and they reacted by by killing and then the whites reacted by killing back and you had an escalation and and Washington for example most of his foreign policy was devoted to dealing with Indians this Indian problem and he had to send troops there to end it it's it's a tragedy from beginning to end because there was no I don't think there was any way of averting the tragedy because the lights were not going to allow all this land to remain for hunters and the Indians had a hard time adjusting to agriculture Cherokees did but most Indians took the view that that's for women their women did their farming and they were hunters they had an aristocratic notion males did we hunt we fight we don't do farming that's what women do very hard to convince them culturally that they should do behave differently it's just a possible cultural impasse and I don't the numbers that demographic numbers were you know we're talking about 4 million people 1790 in their whites and you've got what at most east of the Mississippi 70,000 Indians you know the demographics are working against them and half work right right through our whole history yes sir oh and thence yeah go ahead well we were the United States of America and we were a plural nation these united states are until the Civil War the Civil War is a very important change in our national people thought about the states see this is the problem that Washington faces most people's loyalty were to their country my country is Virginia that's what John Randolph would say Matt and that's what John Adams said my country's Massachusetts so think of it in terms of the EU today trying to build loyalty for something abstract called the called Europe how do you do that for the United States now the one thing we had an advantage over the Europeans we had the revolution which acted as a ideological force that gave Americans a sense of distinctiveness and and that was a very powerful force that gave national consciousness but by and large people thought about their States the way the Brits would think about Britain or the Germans would think about Germany today that's where their loyalties went they went back a century or more so how do you get this new country to have any this is the problem that Washington faced how do I develop the seenu's of Union and he uses that term over over again we got to hold the Union together how do I I mean he and neither engaged in matchmaking they would fix up northern congressmen with a southern belle hoping that and he thought of marriage and dynastic terms and this will help unite the nation but they already saw a sectional split so by 1810 after Jefferson comes in and eliminates almost virtually all of the matter of Hamilton's program except the bank which he was stuck with because it was a contract but but he soon they shouldn't get rid of when the when the the charter expires you wouldn't know you lived in the United States you would know there was a federal government except for the delivery of the mail how would you know there are no taxes tariffs aren't felt by you they're paid at the port so you except for your mail delivery you would have no sense you were living in a in a federal government the world is totally different today obviously and there's no going back to that although there I suppose there people would like to do that but I just don't think that's going to happen that's the federalism yes sir you had push your tongue yeah right most historians the extent of the factors thirteen is 13 well they were there were 22 colonies British colonies these 13 well well they were they were the continental colonies obviously there's Jamaica and there's Barbados and but you could and if you read their objections to the Stamp Act in 1765 from Jamaica Barbados from their assemblies they're indistinguishable from those objectives but when push came to shove for obvious reasons these islands don't participate you can almost guess what the reasons would be slavery but the population of Jamaica was was 10 to 1 black / white so that's the revolution isn't exactly what you think of doing besides their island their islands their islands and Britain controls the ocean so there's a lot of reasons now there is a small British colony in in Canada but it's so insignificant and so so small without any they might have agreed not they don't like taxes and so on but they're not about to lead a revolution so it's understandable that these continental colonies would be the ones now they you know Georgia feels very threatened they're very anxious to to be with the others they don't be isolated so I think but Florida for example is is well that's a consequence of they had Florida but it's not a colony yet not really a British colony so it's I think you can make a case that but why the revolution becomes so important because it's not just a colonial rebellion like the Algerians breaking away from France in the 1960s they come it occurs at a peculiar moment in history the so-called Enlightenment we historians call it when optimism the sense that the future could be remade by human beings I mean we take that for granted but that very few people in the history of the world ever thought that they they were controlling their society and culture in the way people did in the 18th century so Americans come to this with this vision that they're leading the world towards a new kind of of well democracy they use Republic but that's confusing to us now because we talk in terms of democracy but that's what they meant democracy the world is dominated by monix you got to get rid of monix create republics Jefferson felt do that and you'll end war he thought war was was was was was caused by monarchies you get rid of monarchs and you'll have peace Universal peace it's a grand dream and we still live with that I mean the revolution created everything we believe in equality Liberty the institutions of our government and the sense that we have a responsibility to bring democracy to the whole world not necessary by sending troops but when Reagan talked about a city on the hill when Wilson talked about it when Bush justified going into Iraq he said we're bringing democracy to the Middle East that's drawing on this history that goes back to the Revolution so our revolution was a world historical event not an ordinary little colonial rebellion it has all of these ideological elements and we are the most ideological people on one of the most ideological peoples in the world in the history of the world and we've our whole history has been an effort to promote that kind of democracy you know we through the 19th century with one exception we were the first state in the world to recognize the new Republican regimes most of them were aborted the Latin Americans we supported French Revolution we were the first the one exception you can all know Haiti right didn't recognize it until Lincoln for obvious reasons but otherwise we did 1848 we were we were right there well it's amazing to me when you read the diplomatic messages of say someone like Daniel Webster Secretary of State the austrian-hungarian empire is protesting the encouragement the United States is giving to these new Republican regimes have been set up they eventually are overturned but for a moment there it looked as if all of Europe was aflame and what does Webster do he doesn't hide behind anything Vatican Isis he says yes we take full responsibility for the spread of republicanism or democracy in the in the in the austrian-hungarian empire we are the source of their of their revolution and then he adds in a the incredible sentences besides he says compared to the United States the austrian-hungarian Hungarian Empire is but a patch on the Earth's surface I mean this kind of bombast this is a diplomatic bombast of a sort that just no other Diplo maseeh of the Europeans was not like that at all it's sort of similar to what the Russian the Soviets were were like when they first created their revolution now that's another story how we reacted to 1917 I'll tell you because it's interesting because it reveals a lot about ourselves the first rebellion in revolution in Russia takes place desire resigns seven days later we recognize the new Russian Republic the first state in the world to do so we think Wilson thinks she's got a fit partner now for his first league of democracies I mean it's fulfills our greatest dream we expect the whole world monarchies to crumble everywhere and here's the Russian Revolution doing just that then the Soviets tickle I mean the Communists take over the Bolsheviks take over in the fall everything changes completely different not we're not the first state with a last state major state Ireland I think was the last last major state in the world to recognize the Soviet regime incredible change why we'd always been the first the changes because the Soviet Union offered a counter Universalist vision of the future all of the other revolutions in our mind were species of the revolutionary genus Americana so we've that's why we could accept them we even told grant terrific grant sends a message to the French after their Republican revolution of they overthrow the third French Empire in 1870 established a third Republic and he grant sends a message say congratulations on adopting American prince of republicanism as if the French had no Republican Tricia's so that was our vision the Soviet Union represented a real challenge to that vision that's why when the Cold War starts in Sept 19 17 this is a rival revenue revolutionary ideology with the same kind of universal aspirations that we had and that really explains a lot of our behavior over the subsequent three-quarters of a century when you rip go back to Kennedy's inaugural address will bear any burden pay any price in defense of Liberty we fought the Soviet Union many people thought it was the future China where communists I mean the Marshall Plan was based on keeping France and Italy from going communist we really were scared that the world was going off in this other direction and there were intellectuals in this country who said yes that's the future and that's the way we should go so it was a terrifying moment for a country that was built on a dream that we were the future and I think he can explain the Cold War why we were in Vietnam now that's all gone in 1989 it collapsed and we don't know what we're supposed to do I think that's confusion history will sort it out for us but we just don't know what quite what we're supposed to do anymore we're supposed to be you know the end of history Fukuyama told us is the end of history and others said no clash of civilizations Huntington said no the Islamic world it's hard to believe that the terrorists from Islam are a real threat to the United States in any fundamental sense except in our own minds but we're living through this and I don't think we know what what's happened one will I'll get this one fella it's kind of a personal question oh I think it's Washington he's the president he developed a sense of how he would operate he gave an enormous amount of authority to Hamilton because the Constitution sort of suggested that you know how the Constitution provides for the for the secretary of the Treasury to report directly to the Congress and so Washington paid a lot of deference to him and he'll Hamilton thought saw himself as a kind of Robert Walpole a kind of prime minister to Washington the president but Washington really developed an executive practice of having these individuals which were his appointees were put to him he's kind of the hub of a wheel he took a lot of advice but I think he was the perfect executive in a sense if you can talk about executive leadership and Jefferson you know for all of his dislikes of the Federalists he tells his ministers cabinet when he takes office as president he says I'm going to tell you how mr. washer President Washington did it and I think that's a good way of running an administration and so he so in that sense where Washington was very crucial and setting up treating these these men who reported to him essentially as his his agents he never except the slight deference towards Hamilton which he did anyhow because Hamilton was so smart so bright and knew about economics in a way that no other certainly not Jefferson another the other founders understood banking or any of that so he deferred to him but he accepted Hamilton's judgment but but he was also a nationalist he wanted to do what Hamilton London we wanted to build up the united states and and in the meantime it's going to take four decades let's avoid war I think Washington deserves the credit as being the first in in in many respects the best present the first president in our listing if we do that because of the challenges that he faced and the way he worked out the nature of the office it could have developed somewhat differently he knew that we're setting precedents he said very self-conscious about their okay professor would I know I speak for everyone here when I thank you for a great story greatly told it's a wonderful evening to be with you we now have a reception on this side and we have books available and signing on this side so thank you for being with us and thank you for being with us a sense of there you go

Channel: University of Richmond

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Keywords: universityofrichmond, University, Richmond, college, Virginia, UR, leadership, Jepson, Jepsonleadership, gordsonswood, sandrapeart, leader, garymcdowell, empireofliberty, terryprice

Id: AGW6jdvwHVw

Length: 78min 51sec (4731 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2009