"A Principle of Authority. . . Must Always Occur"

The complex conversation about whales that Graham Burnett so eloquently and amusingly and insightfully explains came at a particularly complex moment in the social and intellectual history of New York and, indeed, the nation as a whole. Whether the topic was whales or just about anything else, an emerging faith in individual judgment—itself a product of both social change and a good deal of democratic rhetoric—posed a large question: Whose voice can claim authority?

Maurice v. Judd occurred at the front end of a quest for forms of cultural authority compatible with political democracy and a vocal (but not actual) commitment to equality of persons. The issue was defined by Alexis de Tocqueville. When he arrived in New York in 1831, the challenge that a pluralistic, outspoken democracy posed to intellectual life and public ethics immediately captured his interest and prompted his reflections.

A principle of authority must . . . always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has . . . . Thus the question is not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in an age of democracy, but simply by what standard it is to be measured.¹

From William W. Campbell, The Life and Writings of De Witt Clinton (New York, 1849).

In the trial of 1818 we can see the first confused efforts to identify that location. In the years that followed the trial, the era of so-called Jacksonian Democracy, artists, literary gentlemen, and scientists had to identify the location of authority, or better, find a way of locating it in their own hands.

This quest played itself out over the next several decades. Samuel Latham Mitchill and other scientists were awkwardly feeling their way toward a rudimentary pattern of the cultural authority we live with today. They were anxious to avoid two forms of authority: "patrician" authority on the one hand, and democracy on the other.

The increasingly self-conscious scientists, writers, and artists of the city rejected the aristocratic claims of the presumptive patriciate, represented by the the New York Institution of Scientific and Learned Societies, established in 1815 on the initiative of Mayor DeWitt Clinton. Intended to represent the city's commitment to intellect, the building's pretense was undermined by the knowledge that it was not originally built for science and learning. Rather it was the old Alms House situated behind City Hall, something noted by the poet Fitz Greene Halleck in a poem of 1819:

                          . . . It remainsTo bless the hour the Corporation took itInto Their heads to give the rich in brains,The worn out mansion of the poor in pocket.²

This jest suggested, among other things, the weakened claim of the old patriciate's general authority across the domains of politics, economy, and culture in this period of emergent democracy.

For our purposes DeWitt Clinton, who at various times was both mayor of the city and governor of the state, can serve as the representative patrician. New York is much indebted to him. As governor he undertook the construction of the Erie Canal, probably the most important public investment ever made by New York. It literally made New York the "emporium" of the New World, to use Clinton's word. Clinton presumed that his elite standing gave him authority in all areas of public concern. He articulated this in a celebration of himself that he published anonymously:

Mr. Clinton, amidst his other great qualifications, is distinguished for a marked devotion to science: few men have read more, and few men can claim more various and extensive knowledge . . . . It was natural that such men should have high rank in literary institutions; and he was accordingly elected first President of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York.³

For whatever reasons—modesty was not one of them—he did not in this instance list other honors, including the presidency of the American Academy of Fine Arts or his establishment of the New York Institution of Learned and Scientific Societies. Clinton was also a...