Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

1. Imagining a Nation of Politicians: Political Printers and the Reader-Citizens of the 1790s

13 1 ߬ Imagining a Nation of Politicians Political Printers and the Reader-Citizens of the 1790s V IRTUALLY every European traveler in 1790’s America was struck by two unusual features of the new nation’s culture: Americans were obsessive newspaper readers, and politics was all they wanted to talk about. From our twenty-first-century vantage point, such a state of affairs might look idyllic, but most eighteenth-century visitors were more annoyed than impressed by what the English aristocrat John Davis disdainfully referred to as the “loquacious imbecility” with which “the American talks of his government .”¹ The transplanted Frenchman Moreau de Saint-Méry, for example, found it infuriating that his American servants would “drop whatever [they were] doing to talk politics for an hour at a time with any passing acquaintance .”² Mery’s fellow Frenchman, the duke de La Liancourt-Rochefoucault, was equally taken aback by the political presumptuousness of the people he met during his trip through the American countryside: “Every one here . . . takes an interest in state affairs, is extremely eager to learn the news of the day, and discusses politics as well as he is able.” From the perspective of this European gentleman-politician, there was something unseemly about a nation where ordinary people felt authorized to share their political opinions with strangers, and where “from the landlord down to the house-maid they all read two newspapers a day.”³ More democratically minded travelers viewed the American obsession with newspapers and politics through more sympathetic, though equally astonished eyes. The Englishman Henry Wansey, for example, found the Americans to be “great politicians,” who were “ready to ask me more questions than I was inclined to answer, though I am far from being reserved.” After 14 tom paine’s america spending a few weeks in New England in 1794, he noted with wonderment that “almost every town prints a newspaper,” and that the people “interest themselves very much in the News of Europe.”⁴ Whether European travelers found it inspirational or monstrous, the America conjured up in their accounts was a nation where the air swam with political chatter and where a steady stream of newspapers and cheap pamphlets fueled these conversations. With a few notable exceptions, political historians have paid little attention to those seemingly ubiquitous citizen-readers who so intrigued and exasperated European tourists.⁵ The emergence of widespread popular interest in political matters is usually dated to the Jacksonian era of the late 1820s and early 1830s. According to such interpretations, popular politics flowered as a growing body of effective party operatives learned how to mobilize the passions and interests of ordinary voters in order to win elections. This model of politicization, however , does not fit the political landscape of the 1790s, where voting rates were low and where only the pale shadows of formal political parties were beginning to emerge. Indeed, those everyday “politicians” that European travelers regularly encountered were not running for office, nor were they campaigning for anyone. Actual campaigns and elections went largely unmentioned in these accounts. Instead, such musings about the political obsessions of America’s citizen-readers were usually provoked by an encounter in a tavern or the umpteenth inquiry as to whether the travelers had any newspapers or recently issued pamphlets with them. Such observations suggest that something other than what we today would consider formal politics fired the imagination of this largely forgotten generation of non-elite “politicians.” That “something other” was the French Revolution and the conversations it touched off around the Atlantic world about what a post-monarchical and post-aristocratic politics could look like. In the midst of this reconsideration of the role that ordinary citizens should play in politics, it made perfect sense for newspaper-reading farmers, merchants, housemaids, or artisans to consider themselves “great politicians.”⁶ Indeed, European travelers, and the Americans they described, attached a fairly vague, yet lofty meaning to the word “politician ,” using it to describe someone who spent a significant amount of time discussing broad questions of political philosophy, as well as the potentially momentous day-to-day developments that we have now lumped together under the term “the age of democratic revolutions.”⁷ It was in this spirit that a writer in the democratic National Gazette suggested that “every . . . member of the republic ought to be a politician [to] a degree.”⁸ This peculiar and posi- imagining a nation of politicians 15...