President Lloyd
then introduced the Society's guest speaker, Seth Cotlar, the Society
of Cincinnati/Sons of the Revolution Dissertation Fellow for 1997-1998
at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania. Mr. Cotlar gave the following talk.
"A Brief
History of the Word 'Democracy,' 1789-1803," by Seth Cotlar, Sons
of the Revolution / Society of the Cincinnati Dissertation Fellow for
1998 at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies
When I began
contemplating what I would say about democracy tonight, I went to the
library in search of a book, which could start me on my way. Clearly,
someone must have written a history of the meanings with which Americans
over the past 200 years have invested the word democracy. I was startled
to find that this obvious book did not exist. Indeed, I had trouble
even finding an article on the subject. How could a term so central
to America's self-conception have attracted so little historical attention?
The most generous explanation would be that the meaning of the word
'democracy' has been so stable over time and is so obvious that there
has been no need to analyze it. I do not buy this answer.
A more honest,
though troubling answer, is that raising the question of what democracy
has meant in other times and in other places forces us to confront the
fact that we have very little idea what we mean when we use the word
'democracy' today. It has been able to become such a central part of
our national self-conception precisely because it is so vague-just about
any policy can be dressed up in patriotic garb by simply calling it
'democratic'. The word carries tremendous weight in our culture as a
term of approbation, but as a category of analysis, it has become virtually
meaningless. Americans invoke 'democracy' all the time, but we have
ceased to have any serious, public conversation about what the word
actually means.
When I ask
my students at Northwestern University what 'democracy' is, they look
at me as if it is a stupid question with an obvious answer. America
is a democracy. So what does that mean? At this point, they shift in
their seats, avert their eyes when I look toward them, and finally get
indignant. They are uncomfortable, I think, because they know that democracy
is an important, powerful concept, yet they have never really thought
about what it means. At best, they can come up with only two vague definitions
for it -a democracy is where there is a free market and where people
can vote. The fact that this is all they can offer to fill the category
of 'democracy'-a few undigested, well-worn cliches-would leave the late
18th century thinkers that I study flabbergasted. Tonight's talk is
premised upon the assumption that these long-dead people still have
much to teach us about what democracy should and could mean.
In the time
remaining. I want to open this dialogue between the past and the present
by revisiting the 1790s, the first decade in which some (but certainly
not all) Anglo-Americans used the word 'democracy' with a positive connotation.
First, I will sketch out in very broad terms what I think a history
of the word 'democracy' between the years 1787 and 1800 would look like
and explain how I came to see the need for such a history. Then, shifting
from the general to the particular, I want to tell you a story about
one 1790s democrat who you have probably never heard of, Morgan John
Rhys.
In 1856 Samuel
Goodrich, nephew of the staunch New Haven Federalist Elizur Goodrich,
noted that "the word democracy .... has essentially changed its signification"
since the first years of the new republic. Originally a term of opprobrium,
"synonymous with Jacobinism," by the early years of the 1800s democracy
had "put on clean linen, and affected respectability." The transformation
was so dramatic that "it is difficult for the present generation to
enter into the feelings of those days... We who are now familiar with
democracy, can hardly comprehend the odium attached to it in the age
to which I refer...[People] not only regarded it as hostile to good
government, but as associated with infidelity in religion, radicalism
in government, and licentiousness in society. It was considered a sort
of monster."
I think Samuel's
mini-history of democracy is half-right. It is true that most of the
people that we today call the founding fathers regarded democracy as
a monster. The minutes of the constitutional convention and the federalist
papers are filled with statements clearly distinguishing the American
republic from a democracy. Moreover, Samuel is also correct in noting
that something happened over the course of the 1790s that transformed
the word 'democrat' from an epithet into a compliment. However, when
he claims that everyone in the early years of the new republic saw democracy
in a negative light, he leaves out of the story those early advocates
of democracy who so haunted people like his uncle. Democracy was not
just a phantom dreamed up by American élites; it had many real,
embodied advocates who have somehow disappeared from Samuel's story.
Who are these people who insisted on using the word democracy to describe
the new nation? Did they regard themselves as evil monsters? In addition,
what did these people think about the clean linen their fellow Americans
eventually draped over their initially rebellious term?
By telling
his story from the perspective of his Federalist predecessors, Samuel
missed a crucial irony, which lay at the heart of the history of American
democracy. At the same time that the word democracy shifted from a term
of abuse to a name one could proudly embrace in public, it was also
being drained of its most challenging connota-tions. One could use the
term democracy with a positive connotation in 1800, in part, because
America truly was a more democratic place-at least less deferential
and ex-clusive. However, the term 'democracy' was also acceptable because
it no longer posed such a threat to the status quo. Put simply, over
the course of the 1790s, democracy had been made safe for the new nation.
I came to these
conclusions about the history of democracy while researching my dissertation-a
study of American public political discourse in the first 15 years of
the new nation in trans-Atlantic context. The subjects of my study are
a group of several hundred British and Irish radicals who came to America
in the 1790s as well as those Americans who eagerly sought out the latest
radical ideas coming out of Europe in that tumultuous decade. This community
of self-described democrats (the first Americans to embrace this term)
formed and then dissolved between 1789 and 1803. Until now they have
received very little attention from American historians and play no
part at all in our public historical memory. I have many theories about
why this is the case, but I will not bore you with them now. Nevertheless,
one possible explanation, which is directly relevant to this talk, is
that these people stand as a rebuke to our self-conception as a nation,
which has become progressively democratic over time.
These reformers
were carriers of a strand of late enlightenment democratic thought that
was gradually excised from American public political discourse over
the course of the 1790s. To a great extent, the Alien and Sedition Acts
of 1798 were designed to silence these radical exiles who had fled political
persecution in Pitt's Britain. Although on the grand scale of historical
winners and losers these folks ended up in the loser's column, they
are worth remembering because they pushed Americans to consider the
most radically democratic implications of their revolutionary tradition.
We severely misapprehend the struggles of the 1790s if we do not remember
that this was a time of international, utopian fervor-- time when an
infectious spirit of innovation and experi-mentation drifted both ways
across the Atlantic. Democracy was more than just a specter, which haunted
most of the founding fathers. It was also an inspirational term which
fired the imaginations of thousands of ordinary and not so ordinary
people in the 1790s. It was the outcome of the struggle between its
supporters and detractors, which fixed the outer boundaries of the word
democracy's potentially boundless meanings. We still live with these
boundaries today, for better or worse.
Morgan John
Rhys was born into a family of small freeholders in 1759 in a section
of Southern Wales with deep ties to the Cromwellian dissenters of a
century before. In 1787, after several years of preaching, he was ordained
a Baptist minister. Forget what you think you know about Baptists, for
Rhys was the type of Baptist that could only come out of the late 18th
Century. His theology was a fascinating mixture of the Bible and Voltaire.
Like many of his British dissenting compatriots — men like Richard
Price and Joseph Priestley — he was a thorough-going enlightenment
rationalist. Although Rhys lived in what most people considered a cultural
backwater, he followed the latest theological and political debates
of his day. In rural Wales Rhys wrote pamphlets against the slave trade
and established Sunday schools modeled on those modern seminaries of
radicalism founded by his fellow dissenters throughout Britain. Around
1790 Rhys headed to Paris with a crate of bibles. Convinced that the
French Revolution was propelling the world toward regeneration, Rhys
wanted to be there when it happened. After his sojourn in Paris about
which we know almost nothing, Rhys returned to Wales in 1792, driven
home by first stirrings of war in Europe.
Rhys soon made
himself obnoxious to the British authorities. He began organizing political
societies throughout Wales and providing them with radical tracts from
Paris to London. In early 1793 he began the first Welsh political journal
and filled its pages with sympathetic accounts of the French Revolution,
excerpts of Thomas Paine, articles on freedom of religion in America,
and withering attacks on the British government. In spring of 1794,
when the Pitt administration began arresting scores of English, Scottish,
Irish, and Welsh radicals Rhys suspended his journal and decided to
flee to America. He headed to Liverpool, with a dozen or so compatriots,
desperately in search of an American boat but they were already full
with other, like-minded people. After several months of nervous waiting,
he finally found passage to New York, arriving on October 12, 1794.
Rhys had come
to America to escape persecution, but that was only part of his motivation.
As early as 1785 he had contemplated the establishment of a Welsh home-land
in the American backcountry-a place where his oppressed countrymen could
speak their language, practice their religion, and govern themselves
without interference from the British government. With the goal of finding
an ideal spot for this Welsh settlement, Rhys purchased a horse in New
York and began a twelve-month tour of his newly adopted country which
would take him from New York to Georgia to Kentucky to Cincinnati and
then across Ohio and Pennsylvania back to Philadelphia. What we know
about this trip comes from Rhy's extensive and fascinating travel diary.
In many ways,
he found America everything he had imagined. After a few months of conversations
with the citizens of New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware he joyfully
declared "What are improperly called French Principles pervade the universe
and uni-versal emancipation must be the result." He was thrilled to
find that "in America there are no dissenters...Free Inquiry is the
Fountain of Freedom." Once he crossed into Virginia, however, his tone
shifted and he became obsessed with a glaring contradiction: "This is
a Land of Liberty full of slaves." On New Year's Day 1795, Rhys addressed
the North Carolina House of Representatives on his favorite theme, universal
emancipation. He made it clear that "the very Africans [were] not excepted''
from this glorious cause. He repeated this message many more times in
sermons and public orations throughout the South, to audiences who listened
with varying degrees of sympathy.
As he traveled
through the south he met up with a surprising number of like-minded
people - he dined with Mrs. White, a staunch democrat who had been burned
out by the British in the war and hated aristocrats almost as much as
the devil. He sang the Ca Ira and toasted the sans-culottes with sailors
in a South Carolina tavern.
In Savannah,
Georgia Rhys learned of a black Baptist congregation which had been
mercilessly harassed over the years. In 1788, the minister and several
of his flock had been publicly flogged and they were only allowed to
worship together two days out of every year. Rhys quickly raised several
hundred dollars to build a new meeting house for the congregation and
rallied the local religious and reformist community to petition the
government on behalf of his fellow Baptists. Heading Northwest into
the South Carolina backcountry in March of 1795, Rhys encountered a
group of a hundred Welshman who were on their way to Kentucky. After
serving as the minister to this group of emigrants, he left them and
rode on to Ohio to join General Anthony Wayne and his 1500 troops at
Greenville.
It just so
happened that Rhys found himself present at a pivotal moment in the
history of Native American-white relations — the signing of the
Treaty of Greenville, which opened up much of the Midwest to white settlement.
He spent most of his time with the officers — dining, drinking
tea, and conversing with them. But the descriptions of these men take
up very little space in his journal. Rhys was much more interested in
the hundreds of Native Americans who were daily arriving in the fort
in preparation for the treaty signing ceremony. He thought the Indian
leaders were much better orators than the whites. Their sense of religion
— though not directed into the 'proper channel' — stood in
direct contrast to the vanity and dissolute manners of the white officers
he observed. On July 4 he delivered an oration in which he pleaded with
the Americans to "purchase the right of soil from the Indians" for "every
nation of tribe [has] an indefeasible right of soil, as well as a right
to govern themselves in what manner they think proper." He imagined
a day when "the love of conquest and enlargement of territory [would]
be sacrificed" so that "the Americans and Indians could become one people"
who no longer murdered each other over land, but lived together in peace.
What effect this oration had on his audience (or even who his audience
was) we will never know. Either way, this would not be the last time
that Rhys' utopian vision would lead him into a seriously misguided
historical prediction.
In late 1795
Morgan John Rhys returned to Philadelphia and began making the arrangements
for his Welsh settlement called Beula. In October 1796 Rhys purchased
17,400 acres of land in Western Pennsylvania (200miles from Philadelphia)
and placed advertisements in local papers to attract settlers and investors.
He led the first set of settlers to the land in the spring of 1797 and
then headed back to Philadelphia to gather more support for the venture.
By no means
were Rhys' promotional efforts unique-towns and speculative land ventures
were springing up daily in the 1790s. However, what set Rhys' project
apart was the idealism with which he undertook it. The ambitious town
plan which he drew up before he had even seen the land was a perfect,
Enlightenment grid with street names such as Truth, Zeal, Hope, Free,
and Joy. At the center of the town lay a non-denominational seminary
and a library, which by 1800 supposedly held 1500 books - quite unusual
for a frontier town. Settlers could pay for their land in cash, or with
books for the library. This library contained multiple copies of Voltaire,
Locke, Blackstone, Brissot, Godwin, Grotius, and Jefferson's Notes on
the State of Virginia. 'Citizen' Richard Lee — another radical
émigré who had settled in Philadelphia — donated
Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman and her sympathetic history of
the French Revolution as well as scores of radical pamphlets which he
had published in London. Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Rush, Mathew Carey
and many other prominent Jeffersonian bought town lots as symbolic gestures
of their support for Rhys project.
This is where
the story takes a turn for tragic. When Rhys returned to Beula in the
spring of 1798, he found a town of demoralized settlers. Unable to cope
with a harsh, hungry winter and the collapse of their gristmill, many
settlers had moved on to Ohio or had turned to, in Rhea's words, "the
stinking God, whiskey." Over the next few years, he tried to keep the
town moving forward -twice rebuilding the mill only to have it swept
away by the floodwaters each time. Sinking deeper into debt, he finally
had to take a state job in Somerset 40 miles away in order to support
himself and his family. When he died suddenly in 1804 at the age of
45 there were fewer than 200 people living in Beula and by 1808, it
was essentially a ghost town. Morgan John Rhys, along with his vision
of a town of roughly equal, rationally religious, and exceedingly well
read citizens, had literally disappeared from the American map.
So had Rhys's
particular brand of democracy. In 1792, one would have been hard pressed
to find a 'democrat' who actively supported slavery. By 1800, one could
be a democrat and a slaveholder with little sense of the contradiction
between the two. By the time of Jackson, the democrats favored the most
virulently anti-Indian policies. Whereas Rhea's democracy was Universalistic
and cosmopolitan, American democracy became increasingly anti-intellectual
and localistic -- witness John C. Calhoun's states rights arguments,
which defended slavery in the name of local democracy. Perhaps it was
inevitable or even best for the country that Rhys and his like-minded
compatriots lost the struggle over the meaning of American democracy.
Nonetheless, I think their story has much to tell us about precisely
how American democracy came to take the peculiar shape that it did.
One mile from
Beula a town named Ebensburg, a less ambitious settlement of mostly
Welsh immigrants, became the seat of the newly created Cambria County
and gradually grew into a moderately prosperous town. I spent the first
18 years of my life in Ebensburg, and in that entire time, I learned
only two things about Beula. One, it was supposedly haunted by "the
white lady" who had a penchant for carrying away small children.
Two, it was that fields in the woods near the junkyard where high school
kids had their parties. Morgan John Rhys’ utopian vision of universal
emancipation has been erased from the county public memory. In the 1920s
when Cambria County had one of the highest per capital ratios of Ku
Klux Klan members in the country, it might have done it some good to
remember Rhys’s July 4, 1795 credo that the good citizen "is
every person's neighbor, the White, the Black, the Red, are alike to
him; he recognizes in each a brother." I only hope that in telling
his story and the stories of countless others like him, I can contribute
in some way to our understanding of what American democracy has been,
and what it could be.
At the conclusion
of his remarks, Mr. Cotlar responded to several interesting questions
from the audience. President Lloyd thanked him for his informative talk,
presented him with a gift from the Society, and wished him success in
his scholarly career.
President Lloyd
then asked Captain Salisbury to retire the flags. The officers and members
of the Society rose as the flags were paraded out of the room.
The 1998 Annual
Meeting adjourned at approximately 6:15 p.m.
Cocktails and
a seated dinner followed in the Meade Room.
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