Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic

1. The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic

jeffrey l. pasley 1 The Cheese and the Words Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic President Thomas Je√erson and his guests rang in the new year of 1802 as many later generations of Americans would celebrate New Years’ Day, by consuming some snacks and watching a spectacle. In this case, however, the snack was the spectacle: the long-awaited ‘‘Mammoth Cheese’’ from Cheshire, Massachusetts, four feet in diameter, eighteen inches tall, 1,200 pounds, and already an American icon.∞ The cheese and its saga were several months old by the time they reached President Je√erson. The ‘‘Ladies of Cheshire’’ had made the cheese back in August as ‘‘a mark of the exalted esteem’’ in which Je√erson was held by a small Berkshire County farming community that was monolithically Baptist in religion and Democratic Republican in politics. The Cheshire Baptists’ esteem for Je√erson was especially exalted, and his accession to the presidency especially sweet, because they were members of an embattled religious minority in New jeffrey l. pasley 32 England, at odds with the Congregational establishment that still reigned and collected tax money in most of the region. Exalting God even above Je√erson (most of the time), the Baptists of Cheshire believed that no government or other human institution should have authority over matters of faith, which were God’s alone. Allegedly following the example of a similar large dairy product made in Cheshire, England, to celebrate George III’s recovery, they had gathered ‘‘the milk of 900 cows at one milking’’ in a vat six feet wide and used a giant cider press to actually create the cheese. A few weeks later, a bemused but admiring newspaper report of the project appeared in Rhode Island, where most of the Cheshire Baptists were born. It ended with the warning that ‘‘if some of the high toned Adams men do not soon turn and become friendly to Je√erson and the ladies,’’ they might ‘‘have to eat their bread without cheese’’ in the future.≤ The reporting newspaper was a strongly Republican one, but it was the Federalist press opposing Je√erson that was most active in spreading word of the cheese. Embittered by defeat but convinced that Je√erson’s manifest unfitness and incompetence would soon drive him from public favor, Federalists could not believe their luck. ‘‘If we were not convinced of the stupidity of the Jacobin encomium-mongers,’’ wrote one editor, ‘‘we should imagine the whole introduction to the cheese vat to be conceived in a vein of irony.’’ In a seemingly endless stream of reports, comments, and satirical poetry that continued long after their subject was delivered and consumed, Federalist writers lampooned Cheshire’s gift as the ‘‘Mammoth Cheese,’’ after the mastodon bones that Charles Willson Peale had unearthed in New York during 1801 with aid from the Je√erson administration. It was considered a devastating stroke to link Cheshire’s tribute to Je√erson’s well-known interests in natural history and scientific research , which Federalists considered intolerably frivolous and had often satirized before.≥ The leader in cheese-bashing seems to have been Joseph Dennie’s prestigious Federalist literary journal, the Philadelphia Port Folio.∂ Dennie and his contributors did some clever send-ups, especially ‘‘Reflections of Mr. Je√erson, Over the Mammoth Cheese,’’ a poem in which Je√erson is depicted as seeing his ‘‘life and fortunes in this useless mass. / I curse the hands, by which the thing was made, / To them a cheese, to me a looking-glass.’’ Federalists saw particular significance in the fact that the Mammoth Cheese, as unsealed, unrefrigerated foods will, attracted an appropriately mammoth share of insects and spoilage. (Republican papers responded with satirical charges that the Federalists now feared a ‘‘maggot insurrection’’ along with their other worries about Je√ersonian rule.) In the Port Folio, the decaying cheese became a metaphor for Je√erson’s hypocrisy and inner turpitude. ‘‘Like to this cheese,’’ says the poem’s Je√erson, ‘‘my out- The Cheese and the Words 33 side [looks] smooth and sound / . . . When nought but rottenness within is found / . . . midst this shew of greatness and of ease, / Ten thousand vermin gnaw this wretched heart.’’∑ More often, the Port Folio simply spat contempt on ‘‘the mummery of the Cheshire simpletons,’’ suggesting on at least two occasions that the cheese was really ‘‘made of asses’ milk.’’ Eventually...