Tom Paine's America

The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

Seth Cotlar

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813931067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Tom Paine's America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic."

One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities.

In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America's late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

1

Imagining a Nation of Politicians

Political Printers and the Reader-Citizens of the 1790s

VIRTUALLY every European traveler in 1790's America was struck by two unusual features of the new nation's culture: Americans were obsessive newspaper readers, and politics was all they wanted to talk about. From our twenty-first-century vantage point, such a state of affairs might look idyllic, but most eighteenth-century visitors were more annoyed than impressed by what the English aristocrat John Davis disdainfully referred to as the “loquacious imbecility” with which “the American talks of his government.”¹ The transplanted Frenchman Moreau de Saint-Méry, for example, found it infuriating that his American servants would “drop whatever [they were] doing to talk politics for an hour at a time with any passing acquaintance.”² Mery's fellow Frenchman, the duke de La Liancourt-Rochefoucault, was equally taken aback by the political presumptuousness of the people he met during his trip through the American countryside: “Every one here…takes an interest in state affairs, is extremely eager to learn the news of the day, and discusses politics as well as he is able.” From the perspective of this European gentleman-politician, there was something unseemly about a nation where ordinary people felt authorized to share their political opinions with strangers, and where “from the landlord down to the house-maid they all read two newspapers a day.”³ More democratically minded travelers viewed the American obsession with newspapers and politics through more sympathetic, though equally astonished eyes. The Englishman Henry Wansey, for example, found the Americans to be “great politicians,” who were “ready to ask me more questions than I was inclined to answer, though I am far from being reserved.” After spending a few weeks in New England in 1794, he noted with wonderment that “almost every town prints a newspaper,” and that the people “interest themselves very much in the News of Europe.”⁴ Whether European travelers found it inspirational or monstrous, the America conjured up in their accounts was a nation where the air swam with political chatter and where a steady stream of newspapers and cheap pamphlets fueled these conversations.

With a few notable exceptions, political historians have paid little attention to those seemingly ubiquitous citizen-readers who so intrigued and exasperated European tourists.⁵ The emergence of widespread popular interest in political matters is usually dated to the Jacksonian era of the late 1820s and early 1830s. According to such interpretations, popular politics flowered as a growing body of effective party operatives learned how to mobilize the passions and interests of ordinary voters in order to win elections. This model of politicization, however, does not fit the political landscape of the 1790s, where voting rates were low and where only the pale shadows of formal political parties were beginning to emerge. Indeed, those everyday “politicians” that European travelers regularly encountered were not running for office, nor were they campaigning for anyone. Actual campaigns and elections went largely unmentioned in these accounts. Instead, such musings about the political obsessions of America's citizen-readers were usually provoked by an encounter in a tavern or the umpteenth inquiry as to whether the travelers had any newspapers or recently issued pamphlets with them. Such observations suggest that something other than what we today would consider formal politics fired the imagination of this largely forgotten generation of non-elite “politicians.”

That “something other” was the French Revolution and the conversations it touched off around the Atlantic world about what a post-monarchical and post-aristocratic politics could look like. In the midst of this reconsideration of the role that ordinary citizens should play in politics, it made perfect sense for newspaper-reading farmers, merchants, housemaids, or artisans to consider themselves “great politicians.”⁶ Indeed, European travelers, and the Americans they described, attached a fairly vague, yet lofty meaning to the word “politician,” using it to describe someone who spent a significant amount of time discussing broad questions of political philosophy, as well as the potentially momentous day-to-day developments that we have now lumped together under the term “the age of democratic revolutions.”⁷ It was in this spirit that a writer in the democratic National Gazette suggested that “every…member of the republic ought to be a politician [to] a degree.”⁸ This peculiar and positive 1790's usage of that term would soon be replaced by a more familiarly cynical and constricted definition of the politician as someone engaged in formal politics who has “little if any regard for the welfare of the republic unless immediately connected with…their own private pursuits.”⁹ The cynicism of this 1823 comment made sense in an era marked by increasingly bitter partisan squabbling and interest-group politics. But in the early 1790s, when America's successful revolution was still a fresh memory, and when revolutionary movements throughout the Atlantic world seemed to be on the verge of creating a radically more egalitarian and democratic future, “politics” was not such a dirty word. Historians of popular political culture have uncovered a vibrant world of parades, public celebrations, debating societies, tavern conversations, and popular reading practices that ratify foreign travelers' impressions that a large number of Americans proudly identified themselves as politicians in the 1790's sense of the word.¹⁰ The optimism and excitement of a citizenry that felt itself newly authorized to discuss and learn about matters of national and international concern may appear naive in hindsight, but we should not let our knowledge of what lay in the future prevent us from seeing the first years of the early republic through the eyes of those caught up in the revolutionary moment.

Thanks to a confluence of economic and political changes largely unrelated to events in revolutionary Europe, these reader-citizens found it increasingly easy to get access to newspapers and other forms of political print that bore news and ideas from around the Atlantic world. The United States Congress gave a de facto subsidy to the newspaper industry when it passed the Post Office Act of 1792, allowing printers to exchange their papers with each other free of cost and setting the price of sending a newspaper at one cent for any distance under 100 miles, and one and a half cents for any distance over that. At the same time, the nation had substantially improved its system of roads and had expanded other forms of inter- and intrastate transportation networks, thereby creating an environment that encouraged a growing number of printers to establish their own shops and produce their own newspapers.¹¹ Thanks in large part to these economic and political developments, the number of newspapers produced in the United States grew from about one hundred in 1790 to over two hundred and fifty in 1800.

The book trade witnessed a similar expansion in the 1790s, as the nation recovered from the currency crisis of the 1780s. As booksellers found credit easier to come by, they began importing European pamphlets and books at a rapid rate, granting American readers expanded access to the European world of ideas at precisely the moment that the French Revolution began transforming political thought around the Atlantic world. The Philadelphia bookseller Matthew Carey, for example, had poured most of his resources in the 1780s into an unsuccessful magazine comprised of largely American texts, but in the 1790s he looked across the ocean to enrich his business. In 1793 he asked the Irish bookseller Patrick Byrne to send him “two or three copies…of every new work” published in Britain, “even without orders.”¹² After sampling these texts, Carey picked a large number to reprint in American editions. Carey also created an extensive network of local booksellers and itinerants that spanned much of the nation, allowing him to disperse these imports and American reprints across a wide geographical area and giving readers in the nation's cities and hinterlands access to the latest texts flowing out of revolutionary Europe. Carey's business contacts linked him to political printers and booksellers in virtually every state of the union, and he was just one of several active and prolific democratic printers.¹³ The fluid and decentralized networks of exchange such democrats established created the primary conduit through which news and opinion from Europe filtered into American public discourse.

This chapter explores how this increasingly cohesive network of political printers, and the texts they disseminated, catered to, and, in the process, helped generate a new community of reader-citizens. Political pamphlets had played an important role in the American Revolution, but most of these pamphlets had been written and priced for an educated elite. Paine's Common Sense—one of the most widely read pamphlets of the Revolutionary era—is the exception that proves the rule. Few other pamphlets matched its popular tone or range of readership. In the 1790s, Paine's Rights of Man—which sold at least as many copies in America as Common Sense—was just one of scores of democratic pamphlets aimed at a popular audience. Likewise, explicitly political newspapers had first flowered during the American Revolution, but these publications served narrowly local audiences, and the connections between the few political papers scattered across the colonies were very thin. In the 1790s, the relationship between newspapers and politics changed dramatically, as a growing number of democratically minded printers began to think of their publications as a means of incorporating their readers into a national, and even international, community of the like-minded. While the world of formal electoral politics was still highly deferential and dominated by a social elite, the newspapers offered readers a space for political discussion that promised to be far more egalitarian. They also offered people who generally led locally oriented lives—urban mechanics as well as farmers in the countryside—a way to feel connected to and in dialogue with other people hundreds if not thousands of miles away. By disseminating a relatively shared set of ideas, stories, and interpretations of those stories, the loose network of democratic printers that emerged in the early 1790s was able to cobble together what the literary critic Stanley Fish has called an “interpretive community” of reader-citizens.¹⁴

To a striking extent, these political printers succeeded in generating a cohort of engaged and sympathetic readers. They created a political culture in which reading and identifying with a particular newspaper became one of the principal ways in which ordinary citizens related to a newly created polity comprised of millions of people whom they knew not as neighbors, but as abstract and theoretically equal fellow citizens. It would certainly be an exaggeration to claim that all Americans, regardless of race, class, gender, region, and ethnicity, became like-minded democrats in the 1790s, for stridently democratic newspapers never comprised more than one-fourth of all newspapers in that decade.¹⁵ All the same, it would be equally false to claim that these highly influential newspapers spoke only to the interests of narrowly defined segments of the population. As we will see in the chapters that follow, the utopian and egalitarian atmosphere of the revolutionary 1790s made it possible for an increasingly coherent and effective network of democratic editors to shape the terrain of public debate and to incorporate an unprecedentedly wide range of readers into their interpretive community. In the long run, their journalistic efforts made only modest strides toward leveling the hierarchies that structured American society. As the French Revolution devolved into chaos and counterrevolution, the democratic enthusiasm that sustained these newspapers faded and their political vision became increasingly pragmatic and incremental. By the end of the 1790s, the four most important democratic printers of the decade—Benjamin Franklin Bache, Eleazar Oswald, Thomas Adams, and Thomas Greenleaf—had all met untimely deaths, and they were replaced by a new generation of editors who identified themselves primarily as Democrats (capital “D”) who served a political party rather than as democrats (lowercase “d”) with more utopian aspirations. Nonetheless, the efforts of this short-lived generation of democratic printers, and the forceful backlash against them, tell us much about the possibilities and limits of popular politics in the early national period.

The Democratic Printers of the Early 1790s

While the numbers of newspapers produced nearly tripled over the course of the 1790s, the structure of the printing trade remained largely unchanged. The vast majority of printers had risen up through the artisanal ranks and were thus men of moderate means and middling social standing. The technology they used to produce their newspapers and other texts had not changed in centuries, and would not until the advent of the steam press in the 1830s. The limitations of that technology, and the modest amount of capital to which printers had access, ensured that print runs of any particular text rarely exceeded 2,000 issues.¹⁶ But even though the technology and the labor system behind the production of newspapers remained fairly constant, the American Revolution had set in motion a series of changes that would profoundly transform the nature of printing in the early republic. The geographic expansion of the new nation drew young printers into new settlements in search of economic opportunities. Printing presses, once the preserve of towns along the Atlantic Coast, were dragged westward by young men, who began producing newspapers that kept their neighbors abreast of developments in the wider world. Likewise, thanks to a rapid increase in the numbers of printers, booksellers, and libraries (266 of which opened in the 1790s),¹⁷ the market for non-newspaper print, especially in the hinterlands, expanded dramatically. The nation's appetite for print had never been greater, yet the machinery to serve that demand remained largely unchanged.

The printers of this era were thus at the nexus of two contradictory forces. A good number, particularly those under consideration in this chapter, imagined the texts they produced as powerful agents that could bind an expanding nation together. Even as they sought to build a sense of community among their ever more geographically dispersed fellow citizens, however, the technology they had at their disposal was woefully inadequate to the task. There was no central clearinghouse for books or pamphlets to ensure easy distribution. No news agency existed that could gather and sort through the latest bits of information from around the world and transform them into easy-to-read digests. All of these tasks had to be taken on individually by hundreds of largely self-educated printers scattered across the country, with the assistance of a postal service that was only beginning to function effectively. Thus, if we want to understand the emergence of the politically charged world of avid newspaper readers that European travelers encountered, we must look not to economic or technological explanations, but rather to the concerted, yet highly improvisational efforts of the cohort of printers who sought to democratize America's emerging political culture.

The most nationally prominent democratic editor of the 1790s was also the least representative, in terms of his social background. Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of Philadelphia's Aurora, had spent much of his youth in Paris with his grandfather Benjamin Franklin. His first newspaper, the General Advertiser, began as a fairly moderate publication, but as the democratic momentum of the French Revolution built in 1791 and 1792, Bache's political convictions became more pronounced and radical. In 1793 he changed the name of his newspaper to the Aurora and began publishing pieces that were increasingly critical of the Washington administration and supportive of the French Revolution and its radical sympathizers throughout the Atlantic world. These political commitments made Bache a pariah in the Philadelphia high society of which he once had been a part, but it gained him the respect and support of democratic readers and politicians throughout the nation. His fellow democratic editors turned to the Aurora more than to any other paper when they were looking for copy for their own papers, while Federalist editors and politicians singled out Bache and the arguments put forward in his paper for attack.¹⁸ Bache is one of the few newspaper printers of the 1790s whose personal papers have been preserved, and from these documents we get a clear picture of the trials that democratic printers had to face in advocating radical political change. Even though Bache came from a much more privileged background than all of his fellow democratic printers, he spent most of the 1790s on the edge of financial ruin. He seems to have put his political convictions ahead of the need to make money, devoting most of his resources to printing political tracts that sold well, but because they were priced for popular consumption, did not produce large profits. He identified himself as an explicitly political bookseller, and his shop became a gathering place for Philadelphia democrats and a target for their opponents.¹⁹ Indeed, Bache and many other democratic printers suffered numerous physical assaults on their persons and their property throughout the 1790s.

The social backgrounds of the editors of the 1790's two other most important democratic newspapers—the New-York Journal, published by Thomas Greenleaf, and Boston's Independent Chronicle, published by Thomas and Abijah Adams—were more typical, in that they came from the ranks of middling artisans. Greenleaf's father had been an active Patriot and justice of the peace in Abington, Massachusetts, during the Revolutionary War. The younger Greenleaf had served his apprenticeship with Isaiah Thomas, one of the leading Patriot printers in Massachusetts, and then became the owner and editor of the New-York Journal in the mid-1780s. Greenleaf's Boston counterparts, the Adams brothers, came from an even more humble background: their father was the clerk of the Faneuil Hall marketplace. There is no record of Thomas Adams's previous employment before he began work as a newspaper printer in the late 1770s; his brother Abijah, however, had languished as an impoverished tailor until Thomas brought him into his newspaper business in 1791. In the mid-1790s, Thomas Adams took as another partner one of his former apprentices, Isaac Larkin, whose father had worked as a ferryman between Charlestown and Boston. Considering that these printers lacked Bache's social standing, family ties, and relatively easy access to capital, their repeated decisions to privilege their political commitments over economic security, and even personal safety, indicate how inseparable were their professional and political identities.²⁰

The print shops of democrats like Greenleaf, Adams, and Bache were more than just workplaces. They functioned as “rallying point[s]”²¹ for local groups of democratic readers, providing a physical embodiment of this new community and supplying it with a never-ending supply of material to read and discuss. John Prentiss, whose...