REPUBLICANISM

REPUBLICANISM is a term historians use to encompass the bundle of beliefs held by early Americans as they made the ideological transformation from loyal colonists to rebels and Patriots. Commonly applied to members of the elite, this protean word is easily adjusted to describe the ideological changes within the minds of common white men, Native Americans, African Americans, and women. Whether republicanism affects the structure of society from the top down or the bottom up is a matter of fierce debate. There is a consensus that republicanism infused the revolutionary generation and steered the debate over the writing of the Constitution—and the meaning of citizenship in the early republic.

The Basis of Republicanism

Classical republicanism insisted that civic virtue—the capacity to place the good of the commonwealth above one's own interest—became the key element of constitutional stability and liberty-seeking order. Only men who had a stake in society, preferably freeholder status of some magnitude, who were literate and familiar with major classical and Enlightenment thinkers, could lead society. Other people, including women, younger men, and the enslaved, had to depend on the elite's virtue to protect them against tyranny, conquest, and natural disasters. Americans understood that their newly arising state was part of history and thereby needed careful surveillance against the corruptions of time and excessive liberty. Ultimately, the American republican vision rested on four interlocking concepts. First, the ultimate goal of any political society should be the preservation of the public good or commonwealth; second, the citizens of a republic had to be capable of virtue, or the subordination of one's private interests in service of public needs; third, to be virtuous, citizens had to be independent of the political will of other men; fourth, citizens had to be active in the exercise of their citizenship.

Looking to the past for instructive examples, American thinkers searched the humanist legacies of Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, and others to bolster their beliefs that a simple, agricultural world nurtured civic humanism. Self-interest and patronage corrupted the simplicity of virtue and destroyed such past civilizations and would, if unchecked, ruin American society as well. While the American elite landed gentry and small farmers understood the advancing concept of capitalism and its concomitant qualities of self-interest, greed, and luxury, they believed that a hierarchical society led by the best men could curb excesses and preserve liberty for all.

A Struggle over Definition

As Joyce Appleby has noted, American scholars took to theories of republicanism as a chemist would to the discovery of a new element. For scholars, republicanism offered a solution for the divisive debate over the character of the revolutionary generation. One view, articulated during the Progressive Era by Charles and Mary Beard, was that interest groups were the "pistons in the engine of change," and that the Revolution was as much a conflict, as Carl Becker put it, over who shall rule at home as over who shall rule. Opposing this version of American exceptionalism were scholars who noted the preponderance of English folkways. Moreover, Perry Miller and then Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood favored taking American writings seriously and accentuating their wrangling over their place in the British Empire. By the era of the American Revolution (1775–1783), this dissension had reached, as J. G. A. Pocock reported, a "Machiavellian moment," in which a new republican comprehension of history among the Patriots produced a powerful anxiety over English corruption. The biggest problems were the new moneymakers in London, their "corrupt and venal ministry," and a desire to enslave Americans.

Once Bailyn and other scholars started looking at the pamphlet wars in late colonial America, they found much to bolster their beliefs. In words and in symbols, early Americans articulated their themes and ideology. Bailyn showed how colonial Americans felt their virtue stemmed from the country faction of English politics and identified with its anxieties over court corruption, luxury, degeneration, and fear of enslavement. They felt a kinship with the country faction's critique of merchants and lawyers who set up international networks that ensnared the needy and unaware small producers, enslaved them, and weakened their civic humanism. As the revolutionary crisis of the 1760s and 1770s picked up steam, colonists argued about these anxieties in newspaper articles and pamphlets that were distributed widely along the Atlantic Coast. As subjects of the Crown, they had to be careful about identifying themselves and made plain their convictions through a series of pseudonyms. About half of the writers adopted monikers borrowed from republican Roman thought such as Publius, Brutus, and Cato. Two other significant groups took names from English Commonwealth heroes such as Harrington and Sidney or from such Greeks as Lycurgus, Solon, and Timeon. These ideas were expanded upon during the constitutional debates of the 1780s. Republican themes may also be found in the paper money, coins, state seals, and membership certificates of the era.

Further complicating these debates were the advents of modernization, population growth, and capitalism. Americans, like their European counterparts, were changing rapidly. Yeoman and gentry farmers, the prize proponents of republican ideology, were becoming capitalists and individualists by the 1750s. Because of this, republicanism might be construed as the last, nostalgic beliefs of a dying class of agrarian traditionalists. The American Revolution ensured that there would be wider distribution of land for common white males, who could offer greater support for their gentry leaders. Tradition-bound republicans adhered to a hierarchy of power. Noble birth, refinement, and money enhanced the dignity and purity of politics.

A Change in Power

Scholars of republicanism disagree sharply about when its power dissipated. Gordon Wood has contended that the defeat of the AntiFederalists in the constitutional vote of 1787 was the last gasp of classical republicanism. Disagreeing with Wood are such scholars as Lance Banning and Joyce Appleby, who have uncovered the resurgence of classic ideals among the Jeffersonian republicans of the 1790s. While the Jeffersonians, Appleby contends, were capitalist and liberal, they used classical republicanism as a reaction to the more aristocratic forms of republicanism practiced by Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists.

Whenever republican power faded, its shadow fell across many people that Charles Beard might consider interest groups. One of the big tasks of social historians who have reacted to Bernard Bailyn's sweeping thesis has been to prove that ordinary Americans held ideologies as well and considered themselves fit to share power or displace the older elites. The Revolution did unleash greater expectations among the middling ranks of Americans. Because republicanism demanded more than mere mechanical exploration of the changes in power, scholars needed to identify the ideological power seeking of the middling and lower orders. Jesse Lemisch began this by showing how seamen in New York City felt grievances against the Crown as surely as did Virginia landowners. Richard Hofstedter argued that the Revolution actually produced a "status shift" in power, a concept used expertly by Edward Countryman in his A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (1981) , about the change in political power in post revolutionary New York. Sean Wilentz subsequently showed how artisans added equality to the four precepts of republicanism listed earlier. The American Revolution instilled in common Americans the liberal idea that all citizens, at least all white male citizens, should be entitled to their natural civil and political rights under a representative, democratic system of laws. Artisan republicanism, as Wilentz described it, set off a generation of conflicts between elite politicians and ambitious mechanics over office holding, suffrage, and patronage. As capitalism transformed the craft traditions, these battles reared up between masters and journeymen as well.

Even groups who might be considered targets of enslavement or guided by the heavy hand of patronage, and thereby lacking in virtue, were capable of their own brand of republicanism. Consider the sturdy cartmen of New York City, who gained a monopoly on their semiskilled position by a bond of attachment via a freemanship with city officials. Throughout the colonial period, the carters, who gained the vote under the freemanship, exerted sizable political power alongside such brethren as butchers, bakers, and tavern keepers. After the Revolution, when the Federalist Party tried to channel the carters' votes, they rebelled because they believed that their stake in urban society came from their long-standing residence and their status as licensed workers.

Similar brands of republicanism could be found among African Americans. Republican-minded Americans often mentioned their fears of enslavement. The real slaves of early America responded with frustration over the lack of interest in their status displayed by republicans. African Americans found throughout the American Revolution and the constitutional period that conservative or radical republicans rarely gave much thought to the plight of enslaved Africans. Accordingly, they transferred their loyalties to the Crown. This does not mean that blacks were clients of the British. Rather, during the American Revolution, just as their white brothers did, African Americans sought participation in politics and demanded citizenship. When their hopes were rebuffed, several thousand of them sailed away with the departing British army in 1783, headed first to Nova Scotia, then to Sierra Leone to form a new nation in which they were the republican elite. Those left behind tried valiantly to persuade republicans in power to end the moral corruption of slavery and admit African Americans into the republican society. That they failed to convince speaks more about the sins of the founding fathers than of black inadequacies.

White American women were bound to a lesser status in the United States by their sex. During the American Revolution and its constitutional aftermath, little attention was paid to the political hopes of women. For many years, the colonial concept of the feme covert limited female political aspirations. As scholars have recently shown, however, women, in the same ways as African Americans, learned to exert their republicanism in churches, benevolent societies, schools, and above all, as the mothers of republicans. Their ideology stemmed perhaps from a protopsychology or from morals, but by the early nineteenth century, American women, white or black, were prepared to demand greater leadership.

Outside of European American society and well before the American Revolution, Native Americans created a unique brand of republicanism. In the Middle Ground, situated in the present-day upper Midwest, Indian republics coalesced from the migrations of survivors of war and plague. Outside of the French alliance and well beyond the shards of English power, Native American republicans in the 1740s and 1750s established an egalitarian political power that helped them defend against European incursions.

What these examples demonstrate is that republicanism is a protean concept with almost limitless possibilities. Early in the discussion about republicanism, scholars were delighted at its consensual potentials to explain Revolutionary and constitutional politics. The separateness of the examples described does not deny that consensual quality. Rather, each group, as American politics always does, requires the respect and understanding of its position.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the Revolutionary War. New York: Garland, 1996.

———. New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850. New York: New York University Press, 1986.

Pangle, Thomas L. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Pettit, Phillip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Sellers, M. N. S. American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Graham RussellHodges

See alsoAgrarianism ; Equality, Concept of ; Liberty, Concept of ; Locke's Political Philosophy .