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

By Seth Cotlar

Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic."

One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities.

In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780813931067

Book preview

Jeffersonian America

Jen Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O'Shaughnessy, Editors

TOM PAINE'S AMERICA

THE RISE AND FALL OF TRANSATLANTIC RADICALISM IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Seth Cotlar

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2011 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2011

1  3  5  7  9  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cotlar, Seth.

Tom Paine's America : the rise and fall of Transatlantic radicalism in the early republic / Seth Cotlar.

p.     cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3100-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3106-7 (e-book)

1. United States—Politics and government—1783–1809.  2. Radicalism—United States—History—18th century.  3. Paine, Thomas, 1737–1809. I. Title.

JK171.C68 2011

320.51092—dc22

2010027336

To my family

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  Imagining a Nation of Politicians

Political Printers and the Reader-Citizens of the 1790s

2.  The Politics of Popular Cosmopolitanism

3.  Can a Citizen of the World Be a Citizen of the United States?

The Reaction against Popular Cosmopolitanism

4.  Conceptualizing Equality in a Commercial Society

Democratic Visions of Economic Justice

5.  The General Will Is Always Good…But by What Sign Shall We Know It?

Debating the Role of the Public in a Representative Democracy

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

There are many people and organizations who have contributed to the evolution of this book. From my graduate school advisor, T. H. Breen, I learned the craft of writing and the delicate art of textual interpretation. Professors Jim Oakes and Sharon Achinstein provided inspirational models of how to think and write about the history of political thought. Julia Stern and Josef Barton were kind enough to weigh in on my dissertation in its final stages, and their insightful comments were instrumental in helping me see how it could be transformed into a book. I was also fortunate to be part of a graduate student community that combined easy conviviality with sincere intellectual engagement. Bradley Schrager and David Bullwinkle left particularly strong marks on the shape of this project through their generously offered consultations over corned beef hash and beer (though not usually at the same time). The community of Early Americanists at Northwestern—especially Patrick Griffin, Chris Beneke, Chris Front, David Gellman, Chernoh Sesay, and Karen O'Brien—also deserve thanks for many stimulating conversations and moral support.

The first draft of this book was written while in residence at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. The center supplied material assistance, but it also provided an ideal environment for this neophyte student of early America. The now retired director, Richard Dunn, offered much-needed advice at some moments, and unqualified encouragement at others. The community of graduate students and faculty at the center was a never-ending source of ideas and inspiration. Albrecht Koschnik, the royal bibliographer, gave generously of his comprehensive understanding of 1790s Philadelphia and the political history of the early American republic. Konstantin Dierks lent a critical and knowledgeable ear at key moments. Sarah Knott and I labored side by side in the Philadelphia archives for months, and throughout this project's evolution she has served as a critical interlocutor, an insightful reader, and a supportive friend. Trish Loughran read every word of this project's first draft and pushed me, more than anyone else, to both clarify and expand my thinking. Her detailed and brilliant readings shaped these chapters in innumerable ways. I also want to thank the following people for their camaraderie and kindness during my time in Philadelphia: Rodney Hessinger, Ed Larkin, Ed Baptist, Nicole Eustace, John Smolenski, Randolph Scully, Evan Haefli, Carolyn Eastman, Paul Erickson, Heather Nathans, John Murrin, Susan Klepp, Michael Zuckerman, Dan Richter, Elizabeth Pardoe, and Karim Tiro.

The world of Early American historians is a small one, and many of its inhabitants have offered assistance and encouragement along the way. Andrew Robertson, Jeff Pasley, David Waldstreicher, John Brooke, David Shields, Joyce Appleby, Alan Taylor, Paul Mapp, Matthew Dennis, Lizzie Reis, Tony Iaccarino, Rachel Wheeler, Ben Mutschler, Cindy Cumfer, Paul Otto, Monique Bourque, Fredrika Teute, Catherine Kaplan, Scott Casper, Alfred Young, Harvey Kaye, Bernard Bailyn, and Bill Pencak have all given me valuable and formative feedback on various pieces of this project. Matthew Hale helped me out with many useful research leads and hours of fruitful conversation over the years, and his soon-to-be-published work has greatly enriched my understanding of the 1790s. In innumerable e-mails, phone calls, and conference klatches, Seth Rockman has helped me think through virtually every stage of this project. He and Tara Nummedal also deserve special thanks for their kind hospitality. Peter Onuf and an anonymous reader at the University of Virginia Press read the entire manuscript twice; and while they probably wish I had taken even more of their advice, their critical comments were instrumental in helping me refine this book's argument. Finally, Rosemarie Zagarri and Roderick McDonald deserve special thanks for both their tireless support of my scholarly pursuits and their friendship.

Over the past ten years, this book has taken shape within the genial confines of Willamette University. Friends and colleagues across campus—but especially in the History and Politics Departments—have offered nothing but encouragement as I struggled to finish this project. Bill Duvall read multiple chapters of the manuscript and provided the perfect combination of criticism and encouragement. Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda also merit special thanks for their stellar skills as critical interlocutors and dinner companions. During my time at Willamette I have had the opportunity to talk through the ideas in this book with the talented, hard-working undergraduates who have signed up for three of my classes—Foundations of American Thought, the Early American Republic, and Tom Paine and the Age of Democratic Revolutions. One particularly talented student, Alicia Maggard, spent the summer of 2007 digging through old newspapers to help me finish up the research on chapters 2 and 4. Her impeccable research skills and interpretive sophistication greatly enriched those chapters, and the entire book as well.

Numerous archives and funding organizations have supported this project along the way. Fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the North Caroliniana Society, the Huntington Library, the David Library of the American Revolution, the English Speaking Union, the Mellon Foundation, and the Northwestern University Graduate School enabled me to make numerous research trips which would not have been possible otherwise. The final stages of the manuscript were written with financial assistance from a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. I am thankful to the numerous archivists who helped me track down key sources, but Jim Green, Lauren Hewes, and Connie Cooper deserve particular mention for going above and beyond the call of duty. Many friends across the country generously hosted me when I swept through town for a research trip, but I must offer special thanks to Andrew Wetzler for letting me stay with him in Los Angeles for two months, all for the price of a coffee maker.

My family has been a constant source of support and encouragement. Nannette Cotlar-Rosenberg and Bill and Lois Mary Dunlap provided much-needed material support at key moments. Aunts, uncles, and cousins all listened patiently as I tried to explain why it took so long to write a book, and they always responded with a sympathetic grin, even when they may have been harboring doubts. My grandparents—Ruth and Bernie Covitch and Nannette Cotlar-Rosenberg and the late Chick Cotlar—were always on my shoulder as I wrote. Each of them, in their own way, has left an implicit mark on the pages that follow. My parents, Ken and Pam Cotlar, patiently watched and offered nothing but encouragement (and the occasional Is the book done yet? nudge). Their confidence in me and their support sustained this project through many a difficult moment. The latest addition to the family, Isaac Cotlar, has helped put it all in perspective in ways that are impossible to put into words.

Leslie Dunlap and I have lived with each other's research topics for too many years to mention. Her intellectual curiosity and literary panache have opened up worlds for me—worlds filled with the joys of bookstore browsing, the virtues of a well-turned phrase, and the art of alliteration. I can only begin to thank her for the comradeship, comfort, care, cacophony, and conversation that have carried me through this project.

Parts of chapter 3, in a slightly different form, first appeared in The Federalists' Transatlantic Cultural Offensive of 1798 and the Moderation of American Discourse, in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, edited by David Waldstreicher, Jeffrey Pasley, and Andrew Robertson (copyright © 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press; used by permission). Chapter 4 is a significantly revised and expanded version of Radical Conceptions of Property Rights and Economic Equality in the Early Republic: The Trans-Atlantic Dimension, which appeared in Explorations in Early American Culture, vol. 4 (copyright © 2000 by the Pennsylvania Historical Association, for the McNeil Center for Early American Studies). Chapter 5 originally appeared, in a different form, in Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, edited by Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon Harris (copyright © 2005 by the University of Tennessee Press; reprinted with permission).

Introduction

I arrived at Baltimore on the 30th October, and you can have no idea of the agitation which my arrival occasioned. From New Hampshire to Georgia (an extent of 1500 miles), every newspaper was filled with applause or abuse.

—THOMAS PAINE TO THOMAS CLIO RICKMAN, MARCH 8, 1803

IN the fall of 1802 America's taverns, coffee houses, and newspapers buzzed with the news that Thomas Paine was sailing back across the Atlantic after his fifteen-year sojourn in revolutionary Europe. In Philadelphia, James Perhouse, a British merchant who was friends with the city's leading Federalists, followed Paine's story closely, even recording in his diary the newspaper accounts of that notorious Jacobin and infidel's departure from Europe. Perhouse traveled to Baltimore so he could be there when Paine's ship arrived, and he described the scene in a letter to his brother:

News came, that the Ship London…was beating up the bay, having the precious charge of Tom Paine on board. Tom upon his landing, immediately proceeded with a fellow passenger to the principal inn, but to the honour of the Landlord he wou'd not give him admittance. He then try'd another inn, but met with the same reception. Nay in this latter tavern the inmates of the house went in a body to the Landlord & told him that his admitting Paine would be a signal for one & all of them to leave his house. In this dilemma Tom was kept wandering thro the town for some time, at last, an honest hibernian, probably of congenial sentiments, admitted him into his tavern, & a paltry one it is. Great numbers of people, waggoners, porters, &c &c crouded round the house to have a peep at this famous animal.¹

This story of Paine's humiliating return to America has much to tell us about what had happened during his absence. The standard account holds that Paine's religious unorthodoxy, expressed most forcefully in his 1795 pamphlet The Age of Reason, drove an increasingly evangelical American public to reject Paine and everything for which he stood.² While accurate to an extent, this religious explanation tells only part of the story. In this book I argue that the reaction against Paine and his writings in the late 1790s—partly spontaneous and partly nurtured by a concerted effort to disgrace him—was also an important chapter in the history of American political thought. As influential Americans buried Paine's political reputation, they built a moderate, non-revolutionary vision of American politics upon the foundation of his disrepute. Paine and his American supporters refused to lie quietly in the political grave that had been dug for them, but in the counterrevolutionary climate of the late 1790s and early 1800s, they had difficulty being heard or taken seriously, even by many who had once supported Paine's vision. The author of the Rights of Man—the Atlantic world's most widely read pamphlet of the 1790s—came to inhabit a newly fashioned space in the public imagination. He was the foreign agitator, the atheistic anarchist who roamed the radical fringe of American politics. But marginality is not the same as irrelevance. Though many of his ideas had been discredited, the image of Thomas Paine remained absolutely central to how Americans defined their political identity.

James Perhouse was just one of thousands of people in the new nation who wrote private letters, newspaper essays, and even entire pamphlets representing Paine as a sideshow freak, a political writer not worth being taken seriously.³ The sheer weight of these hyperbolic denunciations, however, suggests that, despite the wishes of many Americans, it was impossible to declare Paine irrelevant and move on. As the chorus of anti-Paine sentiment grew louder, Paine himself detected that his enemies seemed strangely obsessed with him: I am become so famous among them, they cannot eat or drink without me. I serve them as a standing dish, and they cannot make up a bill of fare if I am not in it.⁴ Perhouse unintentionally enacted this point in his semiannual letters to his brother in England. Between 1802 and 1810 virtually every letter included some comment on Paine's latest escapades, only to be followed by an insistence that Paine was laugh'd at…by all sensible men, and had sunk into that obscurity which he merits.⁵ Perhouse, and the other sensible Americans who aggressively denounced and ridiculed Paine, protested a bit too much. For such people, Paine was not just one among many external threats to the nation. He was, to borrow the historian Alexander Saxton's useful phrase, the indispensable enemy.⁶

Paine was such a magnet for attention because he embodied America's and the Atlantic world's ongoing democratic revolution. In this way, he posed a particularly difficult problem for those struggling to define a stable, moderate vision of American politics, and thus declare America's democratic revolution successfully finished. This is where that sympathetic hibernian (i.e., Irishman) and the laborers who gathered around his Baltimore tavern reenter the story. Such people haunted Perhouse and his American friends. Though the dwindling number of American Painites had been largely driven to the margins of American politics by 1802, their radical Enlightenment visions of a more democratic future survived in workingmen's clubs, in a few Universalist churches, and in small, radical newspapers in urban areas.⁷ These groups preserved Paine's legacy during the first decades of the nineteenth century until the resurgence of labor radicalism in the 1820s and ’30s rekindled more widespread interest in Paine's writings.⁸ But the irony remains that two years after America had supposedly witnessed its democratic revolution with the election of 1800, the man who had spent his life articulating and popularizing some of the Atlantic world's most democratic principles had a hard time finding a drink in a town full of sailors. The chapters that follow seek to explain how the most widely read theorist in the age of democratic revolution could become persona non grata in the modern world's first self-described democracy.

The solution to this problem lies not just in Paine's history, but also in the history of the word democracy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1856, Samuel Goodrich, nephew of the staunch New Haven Federalist Elizur Goodrich, would note that the word democracy…has essentially changed its signification since the first years of the new republic. Originally a term of opprobrium, synonymous with Jacobinism, by the first decade of the 1800s democracy had put on clean linen, and affected respectability. The transformation was so dramatic that it is difficult for the present generation to enter into the feelings of those days…. We who are now familiar with democracy, can hardly comprehend the odium attached to it in the age to which I refer, especially in the minds of the sober people of our neighborhood. They not only regarded it as hostile to good government, but as associated with infidelity in religion, radicalism in government, and licentiousness in society. It was considered a sort of monster, born of Tom Paine, the French Revolution, foreign renegados, and the great Father of Evil.⁹

Goodrich's mini-history of democracy gets the story only half right. It is true that most of the people we today call the founding fathers regarded democracy as a monster. The minutes of the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers are filled with statements clearly distinguishing the American republic from a democracy. And Goodrich also correctly noted that something had happened over the course of the 1790s that transformed the word democrat from an epithet into a compliment. But by implying that everyone in the early years of the new republic saw democracy in a negative light, he left out of the story those early advocates of democracy who so haunted people like his uncle. Democracy was not just a phantom dreamed up by American elites. It had many real, embodied advocates who somehow disappeared from Samuel's story. Who were these people who insisted on using the word democracy to describe the new nation? They probably did not think of themselves as advocating monstrous political ideas, so what sort of new political vision did they espouse? And what did they think about the clean linen that their fellow Americans eventually draped over this initially rebellious term?

By telling his story from the perspective of his sober neighbors, Samuel missed a crucial irony that the following chapters seek to illuminate. At the same time that democracy shifted from a term of abuse to a name one could proudly embrace in public, it was also being drained of its most challenging connotations. In 1800, one could use the term with a positive connotation, in part because America truly was a more democratic place for ordinary white men—or at least one less deferential and modestly less exclusionary. But the term democracy was also acceptable because it no longer posed such a threat to the status quo. Put simply, over the course of the 1790s democracy had been made safe for the new nation, and that transformation had been accomplished, in part, by the demonization of those individuals, like Paine, who advocated more radical interpretations of the concept. In this way, the clean linen that Goodrich referred to did more than just make the term democracy palatable for large numbers of Americans, it also fundamentally constricted the range of possible meanings for that protean concept.

This argument about the reining in of democratic possibilities in the 1790s runs counter to how the story of democratization in the early republic is generally told. According to historians such as Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby, the 1790s witnessed the unleashing of democratic urges that had been bottled up by a more-constricting colonial culture. Democracy, in their accounts, manifested itself in the aggressive individualism and rampant entrepreneurialism of ordinary white men, who publicly and proudly asserted their equality with their social betters and pursued their economic and political self-interest without apology. A democratic society, in the minds of these upwardly mobile white men (and in the interpretations of Appleby and Wood), consisted of little more than unfettered access to economic opportunity and the right to vote into office people whose social backgrounds most closely mirrored their own.¹⁰

But as with any abstract concept, democracy meant different things to different people. In this book, I view that concept not through the eyes of Wood's and Appleby's subjects, but from the perspective of those many people in the 1790s who had more utopian and, in the end, unrealized, aspirations for America's democratic future. It is difficult to generalize about the members of this community of radical democrats. Several hundred of them were political exiles from Britain and Ireland, driven across the ocean after having been persecuted for their support of a democratic revolution in Europe. Many had been born in America, but for a variety of reasons disagreed with the direction and tenor of the Washington administration. Many of these democrats were poor to middling laborers and farmers, while others were quite well-off and well-known political leaders. What held this community together was not a shared class, ethnic, regional, or even partisan identity, but rather a shared enthusiasm about the sudden upsurge of political and intellectual experimentation going on around the Atlantic world in the 1790s. Their enthusiasm did not necessarily result in a consensus about what democracy might mean, but it focused peoples' attentions on a shared set of questions. What role should ordinary citizens play in the day-to-day governance of a democracy? What economic arrangements were most likely to sustain a democratic polity? How should democrats balance their allegiance to abstract principles with their allegiance to duly elected leaders who might sometimes go against those principles? What, if any, forms of social inequality were compatible with a democracy, and which needed to be eradicated? The self-styled democratic newspapers that emerged in the 1790s sought to keep questions like these at the forefront of the national debate, providing an expanding community of citizen-readers with the sense that they were part of a new and burgeoning national conversation about how they could contribute to a more just and egalitarian future.

It was, oddly enough, an event on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean—the French Revolution—that did the most to touch off these potentially radical conversations about democracy in America. If we could take a snapshot of American political discourse in 1789 as the debates surrounding ratification of the Constitution came to a close, we would see an intellectual world where the concept of democracy had very little place, and where the nation's intellectual leaders had pronounced most of the key questions of political theory settled. Certainly, many politically minded Americans had criticisms of the Constitutional settlement, but the pressures of national consolidation and a desire to move forward made it difficult for such critics to gain much of a public hearing. And then the Bastille fell, and French republicans (who quickly began calling themselves democrats) started issuing increasingly radical interpretations of the key concepts that had motivated the American Revolution only a few years earlier. As Irish and British radicals joined in the movement in the early 1790s, they added their own visions of what vague yet powerful terms like democracy, equality, and liberty could mean in practice. So while North America had been the site of much original and creative political theorizing in the 1770s and 1780s, the Atlantic world's center of intellectual gravity shifted to revolutionary Europe in the 1790s, and a significant number of Americans found much inspiration in the new ideas flowing across the ocean. The tenuous consensus that had emerged regarding the fundamental principles of the new American nation was quickly unsettled by this wave of radical experimentation in Europe. What ensued was a struggle over what the abstract and unstable concepts that had legitimated the American Revolution would mean in practice, a struggle that would have occurred anyway, but which was given particular urgency by the utopian (or, for some, dystopian) atmosphere of the 1790s. The central purpose of this book is to sketch out the intellectual history of how politically minded American citizens engaged in this Atlantic-wide debate over first principles.¹¹

Surprisingly enough, historians of the early republic have paid scant attention to the transatlantic dimensions of political thought in that era. This is especially glaring, considering that most intellectual histories of the 1760s and 1770s emphasize the extent to which the American revolutionaries were in dialogue with their European predecessors and contemporaries.¹² When the historiographical scene shifts to the 1790s, however, the political tracts of that period suddenly seem cut off from intellectual developments elsewhere in the world. Thus, most studies of ideological change in the early republic focus on the particularities of the American case: the transformation of the Revolution's republican ideology, changing economic conditions, a truncated social hierarchy, or America's unique variety of partisan conflict. Such interpretations imply that Paine's departure in 1787 signaled the end of the new nation's critical engagement with contemporary European thinkers, and they frame the post-Constitutional era as a time when Americans crafted a unique political tradition out of earlier, Revolutionary-era ideas. Indeed, with only a few exceptions, most historians of the early republic seem to agree with Joyce Appleby's conclusion that the new nation shed its borrowed European ethos in the 1790s.¹³

There are several reasons to be skeptical about such American exceptionalism. First of all, the historians Michael Durey, Richard Twomey, Maurice Bric, and David Wilson have demonstrated that hundreds of experienced European radicals emigrated to the United States in the 1790s.¹⁴ Many of them became intensely involved in the American political struggles of the decade. Indeed, Durey has found that approximately one-fifth of the most influential Jeffersonian newspaper editors and pamphleteers of the 1790s had received their political educations in Europe, not America. Second, these prominent and vocal émigrés were joined by tens of thousands of other European immigrants, some of whom had been active in organizations like the United Irishmen or the London Corresponding Society.¹⁵ Third, the newspapers, magazines, and book shops of America were filled with the latest works of Europe's most influential thinkers. American readers eagerly followed French experiments with direct democracy and that country's attempts to take the idea of equality to unprecedented extremes. Americans read hundreds of proclamations and pamphlets issued by radicals in Ireland and Britain that put forward their own, French-inspired visions of social transformation. Americans were active participants in the decade that produced the formative debate between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke over the meaning of the French Revolution, the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft, the anarchism of William Godwin, the radically populist deism of Volney, and the proto-socialism of John Thelwall and Thomas Spence, as well as the romantic and evangelical anti-Jacobinism that sought to delegitimate all of this radical experimentation. Yet if one only read the secondary literature on America's 1790s, one would think that Americans hardly knew that these European thinkers existed. In contrast to such accounts, I demonstrate that in Paine's absence American political discourse continued to evolve within a dynamic, transatlantic world of ideas.

In this reinterpretation of the political thought of America's 1790s, I look not just across the Atlantic Ocean, but also across the socioeconomic spectrum. The political newspapers and pamphlets of that decade differed from those of previous years in that an increasing number of them were written and priced for readers outside of the traditional leadership class. More conservative writers regarded this as an unfortunate side-effect of the Revolution, but those of a more democratic bent saw the emergence of a broad-based, politicized reading public as the most promising development of the era. Thomas Paine and the writers and editors who identified with his cause never tired of telling their readers that it was the ideas and actions of ordinary citizens, not those of their leaders, that would usher in a more democratic world. Thus, while most eighteenth-century accounts of the American Revolution emphasized the role of military and political leaders, the democratic writers of the 1790s increasingly represented the French Revolution as a people's movement, a general revolution carried forward by a current of opinion too powerful to be resisted as well as too sacred to be treated with Neglect.¹⁶ Whether or not this was an accurate analysis, such interpretations inspired many readers to think of themselves anew as empowered participants in a popular intellectual and political movement that was gaining adherents throughout the nation and the world.

This narrative gave new political meaning to the seemingly prosaic act of reading a newspaper. With their frequent ruminations on political philosophy and detailed coverage of contemporary political developments, the democratic newspapers of the 1790s held out the promise of realizing Thomas Paine's hope that all citizens would become active proprietor[s] in government, not just passive subjects.¹⁷ In hindsight, we know that the printed page—even when more widely available and accessibly written—does not have such magical powers. The historical subjects under investigation here, however, had no way of knowing that, swept up as so many of them were in a transatlantic revolutionary moment that evoked what the historian Robert Darnton has described as a sense of boundless possibility, built upon the conviction that ordinary people can make history instead of suffering it.¹⁸ Fantastical visions of an emerging nation of reader-citizens shaped the behavior of both the producers and consumers of democratic texts in the 1790s. Thus, if we are to understand these texts, we must try to read them as they did—not as mere reportage or as cynical engines of partisanship, but as powerful agents of opinion and community-formation. Indeed, Painite democrats devoted so much time and energy to the production and dissemination of print because they regarded it as the best way to create a world where political ideas and decisions would emerge out of conversations among ordinary citizens and not just filter down from their leaders.

We need not take this utopian claim at face value to acknowledge that political texts aimed at a popular audience played an important role in shaping the terrain of public political discourse in the early republic. Until recently, most historians of political ideas have paid little attention to the thoughts of ordinary citizens, basing their interpretations instead on the writings of prominent political leaders. Recent works of social and cultural history, however, have shown that we can no longer assume that the broad mass of American citizens either reflexively agreed with or were blissfully ignorant of the political ideas that their leaders articulated in their speeches, letters, pamphlets, and books.¹⁹ As we will see, the first years of the early republic were marked by a tremendous degree of intellectual ferment and change, but we misapprehend the nature of that change if we see only political elites as its primary agents. Like Paine and the other democrats under investigation here, this study proceeds from the assumption that the story of ideological transformation in the 1790s must include the actions and opinions of ordinary citizens.

Writing a history of ideas from the bottom up is difficult, however, for ordinary readers did not leave a large archival record behind. The many prominent and prosperous participants in this transatlantic democratic moment—men like the scientist and reformer Joseph Priestley, the Irish American printer Matthew Carey, the American diplomat and author Joel Barlow, and, of course, Thomas Paine—left reams of essays and letters behind with which we can reconstruct their actions and ideas. The histories of such people have already been written, but that is not yet the case for the thousands of less-prominent people who thought of themselves as the compatriots of Priestley, Carey, Barlow, and Paine. The historical record is littered with scattered anecdotal evidence of the political consciousness of such people in the 1790s, but it is hard to cobble together a coherent and convincing story out of such materials. The Massachusetts tavern-keeper and self-described citizen of the world William Manning left behind one of the most extensive pieces of such evidence, a political treatise entitled The Key of Libberty, and it provides one of the central pieces of evidence in chapter 5. Manning's writings grant us a tantalizing window onto what historians Sean Wilentz and Michael Merrill have called an extensive political subculture, centered on…taverns and plebian meeting places,²⁰ but there is only so much one can generalize from this single exceptional text. The other glimpses into the world of popular politics that we have are equally suggestive, but far less detailed. We know, for example, that many journeymen pooled their resources to purchase subscriptions to their local democratic newspapers, and that they probably read these papers aloud and discussed them as they worked. These conversations are the stuff of everyday political inquiry that I seek to uncover, yet the only concrete evidence that has survived is in the form of the newspapers themselves, and not the laborers' interpretations of them. But if our mission is to understand the political subjectivities of such people—to grasp the meanings they attached to terms like equality or democracy—then it is to the world of political print, comprised predominantly of newspapers, that we must turn our attentions.

But how do we get from the words on the page of a 1790s newspaper to the range of meanings that contemporary readers produced during their interactions with those words? There is admittedly a degree of speculation involved in this process, but it is speculation informed by careful contextualization. As the historian Michael Schudson has argued, newspapers have never served as a neutral medium of information delivery; rather, they create and cement new communities of readers and writers who over time develop a relatively shared understanding of the world.²¹ While individual editors played the most important role in deciding what material would appear in the newspapers on a day-today basis, they did not make these decisions in a social and intellectual vacuum. In order to sell newspapers and