Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

IV. The Useful Mob

204 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution a still more scrupulous exactness.’’ When ‘‘party spirit’’ reigns, government can scarcely be expected to produce ‘‘harmony or the public good.’’ When Thomas Burke of North Carolina attacked Thomas Paine in a satirical poem, he pointed to the threat to the unity of the old elite posed by overdemocratic parvenus grasping at political roles: On envy’s altars hecatombs expire, And Faction fondly lights her Pupil’s fire. That pupil most devoted to her will, Who for the worthless wags his quibbling quill; And with true democracy of spirit Bravely attacks the most exalted merit.∑≠ Whether Loyalist or Revolutionary, Federalist or Anti-Federalist, the gentry typically shared the assumption that they were a single upper class uni- fied by property, education, entitlement to o≈ce, and immunity to interest— and as such uniquely qualified as guarantors of liberty. This identity was older, deeper, and stronger than even the most dramatic political di√erences of the day. It was a distressing sight for its members to watch rising divisions drive wedges into what they had confidently considered to be an enduring fixture in American society. IV. The Useful Mob Liberty consists in a power of acting under the guidance and controul of reason: Licentiousness in acting under the influence of sensual passions, contrary to the dictates of reason. —Moses Mather, America’s Appeal to the Impartial World, 1775 Looking back on the Boston Massacre nearly five decades after the event, John Adams still saw a clear distinction between the two categories of actors involved: the helpful but unreliable street crowd, also known as the mob; and the ‘‘virtuous, substantial, independent, disinterested, and in- usurpers and dupes 205 telligent citizens’’ who, led by Whig leaders, congregated to debate the event at the Old South Church. There was little doubt in his mind that the latter were predestined to lead the republic, and the former were expected to follow. Despite the invention of the idea of the ‘‘people,’’ the concept of the ‘‘mob’’ retained its utility in the Revolutionary era as a symbolic antithesis of republican virtue. As David Ramsay observed in one of his orations, ‘‘Genuine republicanism is friendly to order and a proper subordination in society,’’ but ‘‘it is hostile to mobs and licentiousness of every kind.’’ No amount of public identifying with the ‘‘people at large’’ could erase the elite’s deeply seated fear and loathing of the ‘‘common herd.’’ Corruption, the reverse of virtue, was increasingly identified with rudeness and simpletonness—in elite eyes, qualities of the common folk. Without erecting proper barriers to protect themselves, the American elite believed they too could easily degenerate into vulgarity. This thinking was bolstered by a new awareness of history that told them civilized people could slide back into ‘‘Indian savagery.’’ Ramsay, who in principle believed ‘‘all mankind to be originally the same and only diversified by accidental circumstances,’’ and who criticized Je√erson’s portrayal of Africans in his Notes on the State of Virginia for having ‘‘depressed the negroes too low,’’ was nevertheless convinced that ‘‘Our back country people are as much savage as the Cherokees.’’ Fear of the mob was widely shared among diverse eighteenth-century British elites—whether colonial or metropolitan, newly wealthy or old money, landed or commercial. For instance, the Loyalist Ann Hulton, sister of Henry Hulton, commissioner of customs in Boston in1769, had an all-embracing explanation for the rebelliousness of the colonists: the excessive power of the mob. ‘‘Tyranny of the Multitude,’’ she noted, ‘‘is the most Arbitrary & oppressive; there is no justice to be obtaind in any case, & many Persons awed by the people, are obliged to court Popularity for their own Security, this is only to be done by opposing Government at home.’’∑∞ One response to these fears was a new emphasis on an old cultural device used to depict the relationship between the elite and non-elite: refinement. Although in colonial British America social distinctions were much less complex than in England, by the end of the eighteenth century both countries increasingly witnessed a flattening of old hierarchies into a simpler opposition of the polite and the vulgar. It was a measure designed for an age of upward mobility, and its greatest success was soon to be witnessed among the fast-growing middle class in the nineteenth century. Social climbing and new 206...