Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (review)

Taming Democracy might fairly be called a bold book. Author Bouton sweeps across Pennsylvania's history from the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 through John Fries's Rebellion in 1799. Two interrelated subjects dominate the rise and decline of democracy and of economic equality. Bouton asserts that Pennsylvanians reached a consensus by 1776, if not before, that their revolution should achieve the "twin goals of economic and political empowerment," what he calls "the 'vision of '76,' the ideal at the heart of what most Pennsylvanians thought the Revolution was about" (32). Above all else, their objective was to break free from imperial Britain's stifling economic constraints, including the squelching of a land bank to provide easy loans and a provincial paper currency to conduct everyday business. In turn, they adopted a new state constitution in 1776 designed to encourage the full development of their democratic, equalitarian vision.

So far, so good, asserts Bouton, but then rapacious evildoers came along, none more prominently than the wealthy, proto-capitalist merchant Robert Morris. Apparently, the focus of "Financier of the Revolution" Morris, who served as the Continental Congress's Superintendent of Finance (1781–1784), had little to do with finding the means to fund the new nation's war debt. According to Bouton, Morris's actual purpose was to enrich himself further through the Bank of North America (BNA), chartered by the Continental Congress late in 1781. As such, Morris and the BNA only made loans to other wealthy persons, those with the best credit ratings, while also squelching any plans for a Pennsylvania land bank that would make low interest loans to cash-starved farmers and urban working persons (often lacking in good credit). What Bouton does not explain is how Morris garnered such amazing power over the actions, or lack thereof, of the Pennsylvania legislature when he was not then serving in that body. Nor does it bode well for the author's argument that the legislature repealed the BNA's state charter in 1785 but still failed to adopt programs to alleviate the financial problems facing Pennsylvania's middling and poorer sort.

No problem for Bouton. Having identified a truly nefarious malefactor of wealth in Morris, the author next presents an engaging analysis of what he describes as seven "rings of protection" that rural Pennsylvanians employed to stop state officials from making these struggling farmers pay their debts and taxes, even to the point of seizing and selling off the property holdings of delinquents (145–67). Bouton then carries his story forward to the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries's Rebellion, which he prefers to call "regulation" movements. He states that "[f]or more than 200 years, historians have misinterpreted this protest" by using the word rebellion. Rather, those who rose up "believed that they were trying to 'regulate' their government to act on behalf of the ordinary many rather than the wealthy few" (217–18).

What these regulators really wanted, if we choose to follow Bouton's logic, was wealth redistribution so that everyone, not just Robert Morris and his ilk, could realize the Vision of '76. Not surprisingly in this kind of interpretive framework, the federal Constitution of 1787 came about because the wealthy few wanted to make sure they could contain the democratic excesses of the people. In its intent, then, the Constitution was little more than another powerful "barrier against democracy" more or less forced onto the good folk of Pennsylvania, who could not get organized quickly enough to stop the hasty ratification movement by the state's ever-manipulating Federalists (171).

In sum, according to Bouton, "before 1776, elite and ordinary folk united behind the belief that only an equal distribution of wealth would protect freedom and keep democracy healthy." However, corrupt despoilers like Robert Morris, backed by a bunch of self-aggrandizing proto-capitalists, not...