Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania

American Political Thought

by Andrew Shankman

Arguments over what democracy actually meant in practice and how it should be implemented raged throughout the early American republic. As Andrew Shankman shows, nowhere were those ideas more intensely contested or more representative of the national debate than in Pennsylvania, where the state’s Jeffersonians dominated the day.

Pennsylvania Jeffersonians were the first American citizens to attempt to translate idealized speculations about democracy into a workable system of politics and governance. In doing so, they revealed key assumptions that united other national citizens regarding democracy and the conditions necessary for its survival. In particular, they assumed that democracy required economic autonomy and a strong measure of economic as well as political equality among citizens. This strong egalitarian theme was, however, challenged by Pennsylvania’s precociously capitalistic economy and the nation’s dynamic economic development in general, forcing the Jeffersonians to confront the reality that economic and social equality would have to take a back seat to free market forces.

Seeking democracy became a debate about the desirability of capitalism and the precise relations between majority rule and the pursuit and protection of individual rights and interests. From this struggle to fuse egalitarianism and free enterprise in Pennsylvania emerged most subsequent mainstream beliefs concerning the respective roles of democracy and capitalism in American society. In fact, it did much to shape the boundaries of permissible thought in the Jacksonian era concerning political economy and the extent of popular democratic power.

Shankman’s illuminating exploration of the Pennsylvania experience reveals how democracy arose in America, how it came to accommodate capitalism, and at the same time forced egalitarian assumptions and dreams to the margins of society. A resonant work of intellectual and political history, his study also mirrors the aspirations, fears, hatreds, dreams, generous impulses, noble strivings, selfish cant, and enormous capacity to imagine of those who first tried to translate the blueprint for democracy into a tested foundation for the nation’s future.

310 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2004

Reviews

[Lawrence A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good monograph on the schism in the Jeffersonian, or "Democratic-Republican," party in Pennsylvania from the 1790s to the 1820s. Pennsylvania was the most economically developed northern state during that era, with a large population of rural freeholders and free urban "mechanics," or artisans, who combined the ideologies of classical "republicanism" (stressing virtue, civic engagement, and equality of condition) with growing classical "liberalism" (stressing individual freedom, the right to acquire property, and economic growth. These groups thus rejected the notion that acquisitiveness bred luxury, thereby corrupting republican virtue and leading to the unwarranted control of the polity by completely self-interested moneyed individuals (cf. 2015). Meantime, a third group in Pennsylvania, known as the "Tertium Quids" (or "third whats"), consisting of men in the learned professions and the growing merchant class, but who had rejected the more aristocratic Federalist party for Jeffersonianism, were more protective of acquired private property and more solicitous of "balanced" government and legal traditionalism---with a large role for the executive and judiciary---than the urban workers, who believed the democratically elected State Legislature to be paramount, and believed that democratic majorities should be empowered to break apart improvident concentrations of private wealth. The three groups---the rural Snyderites, the urban artisan Philadelphia Democrats, and the Quids---jockeyed for political supremacy over the period in question, with victory ultimately going to the Quids'/Snyderites' ideology of balance of powers, a government geared to the encouragement of private industry and agriculture, government support for private development of roads and canals, and the protection of private property from the influence of "leveling" urban radicals, with important ramifications for American history. As with many historical actors, they knew not what seeds they had planted, which, according to the author, was the marriage of classical republicanism to liberal capitalism and, most likely, the preclusion of a more socialist political economy in 19th-century America.