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Prologue ConsentandCivilsocietyinthe ageof revolution  The American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement. It is an event which may produce a general diffusion of the principles of humanity, and become the means of setting free mankind from the shackles of superstition and tyranny, by leading them to see that “nothing is fundamental but impartial inquiry, an honest mind, and virtuous practice. . . .That the members of a civil community are confederates, not subjects; and their rulers, servants, not masters.—And that all legitimate government, consists in the dominion of equal laws made with common consent; that is, the dominion of men over themselves; and not the dominion of communities over communities, or of any men over other men.” —Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1784), in the Hudson Weekly Gazette, I, no. 1, Apr. 7, 1785. Aristocratic countries abound in wealthy and influential persons who are competent to provide for themselves and who cannot be easily or secretly oppressed; such persons restrain a government within general habits of moderation and reserve. I am well aware that democratic countries contain no such persons naturally, but something analogous to them may be created by artificial means. I firmly believe that an aristocracy cannot again be founded in the world, but I think that private citizens, by combining together, may constitute bodies of greater wealth, influence, and strength, corresponding to the persons of an aristocracy. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835; 1838) On April 7, 1785, printers Charles Webster and Ashbel Stoddard, newly arrived from Hartford at Claverack Landing, a small new settlement on the east bank of the Hudson River south of Albany, published the first issue of the Hudson Weekly Gazette. Two weeks later the Landing would be incorporated as the city of Hudson, and, in the year following, the hinterland to the east would be incorporated as the county of Columbia. As one of two papers published north of NewYork City, the Gazettewould serve as the public print for city, county, and a wide circuit in the mid-Hudson region.Thus Stoddard and Webster took some care in choosing the essay with which to open their new paper. They settled on an excerpt from Richard Price’s introduction to 2 ) Consent and Civil Society his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, published the year before in London and being reprinted throughout the new states. Price’s essay—with its paraphrasing of Montesquieu on inquiry, legitimacy, and consent—made a grand statement for these two young printers. The Revolution had forged a new basis for political legitimacy; governments were to be grounded in informed consent and equal participation among the wide body of the citizenry. Editor-printers such asWebsterand Stoddard looked forward to a very special position in this new polity. They placed Price’s Observations at the center of their front page, following both their promise “to the public ” of “this flourishing CITY” that they would conduct their paper “on truly republican principles” and a short advertisement for scythes, hoes, and axes.1 Forty-six years later, in May 1831, Alexis deTocqueville arrived in NewYork with his associate, Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly to study prisons but in fact to examine the wider civil society forged in this Revolution. After several weeks in the city, they began their tourof the American interior by taking first a sloop up the Hudson River to Albany, racing past the city of Hudson on the night of July 1. On July 2 they met with leaders of New York’s Jacksonian Democrats, known as the Albany Regency, and with a noted temperance reformer ; the next day they toured the Shaker community just north of Albany at Watervliet. Early the following morning they were swept into Albany’s Independence Day parade. In the midst of such festivities and in the company of men of note, Tocqueville was beginning to sketch his ambiguous portrait of equality and hierarchy in American civil life.2 The decades between Stoddard and Webster’s first Gazette in 1785 and Tocqueville’s upriver passage in 1831 marked the opening cycle of the evolving American revolutionary settlement, when both the ideals of Price’s political consent and the institutions of Tocqueville’s civil society became contested grounds in American public life. This study explores this story and its powerful contradictions from the Revolution to the age of Jackson in one American county, a countyaptly named for Columbia, the mythic figure...

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