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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