Democratic Societies (1793)
The first decade of the Early Republic was marked by vehement political debate over issues of fundamental importance to the new regime’s survival. Although constitutional ratification in 1789 had seemingly settled questions of constitutional order, many fundamental questions about that order and the legitimate parameters of public life were left unresolved: Did citizens have the right to organize themselves politically outside the channels of constituted governmental authority? How was the constituent power of the people to be legitimately represented or institutionally embodied? Who would hold ultimate interpretive authority over the constitution’s meaning and extent? What were the boundaries of legitimate political dissent in a republic? How should the United States align itself internationally, with Revolutionary France or with counterrevolutionary Britain? The democratic societies—voluntary political associations that organized against the policies of Washington’s Federalist administration—emerged in this fraught political context. The debates they sparked over the legitimacy of “self-created” societies in a republic touched on each of these fundamental questions. While the societies have been sometimes understood as important institutional precursors to the first party system, a closer inspection of their institutional background, their goals, and the heated controversy that emerged around them following the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion reveals a rather different impact on early American political development. The democratic societies exemplified a revolutionary tradition of popular constitutionalism and collective resistance that fell into steady decline in the following century, but their enactment of populist republican politics and a confrontational public sphere, along with their assertion of the legitimacy of voluntary political associations within republican government, prefigured the forms of mass democratic politics that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Assessing the democratic societies’ political legacy requires grappling with their double valence as both fading remnants of a Revolutionary past and harbingers of a partisan democratic future.
Revolution and Association
Over forty democratic societies emerged in the United States between the years of 1793 and 1795. Although they were concentrated in the mid-Atlantic region, the societies spread from Maine to Georgia, from Eastern seaboard cities to Kentucky’s frontier. The societies’ membership comprised a broad social stratum that included wealthy urban merchants, small and medium-sized frontier landowners, and also many middle-class artisans and mechanics. Most society members were “self-made men” of one sort or another, and they reveled in this fact. Despite their diverse social constituencies, all of the societies were united in their glorification of the French Revolution—which they understood as a principled continuation of the American Revolution’s struggle for liberty against tyranny—and in their opposition to what they understood as the Washington administration’s betrayal of Revolutionary principles. Society members believed that a host of domestic and international Federalist policies exemplified this betrayal.
Domestically, the societies were enraged by the perceived monarchical tendencies of Washington’s administration, especially Alexander Hamilton’s proposed funding program—the creation of a national bank, the federal assumption of war debt, the excise tax—but also in less formal arenas, such as the reverential celebration of Washington’s birthday or mandated robes for the judiciary. The societies lionized Jefferson and demonized his Federalist opponents. Like their Revolutionary forebears’ attacks on acts of Parliament in the decade preceding independence, society members understood Federalist policies as a part of a conspiracy of the aristocratic few against the hard-won liberties of the people—a quasi-monarchical attempt to roll back the revolutionary advances begun in America and now taking hold in the “Old World.”
Internationally, the societies railed against the administration’s turn away from the Revolutionary Franco-American alliance and its realignment with Britain, as exemplified by the Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) and Jay’s Treaty (1794). The infamous visit of the French ambassador Edmond Charles Genêt (“Citizen Genêt”) to America in April 1793, which unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the reluctant Washington administration to support the French Revolution, promoted the creation of popular societies throughout the country. Genêt appealed beyond the representative authority of Washington’s Federalist administration to the people themselves for support, leading to the frequent Federalist caricature of society members as foreign agents loyal to the French. Genêt also suggested using the word “democratic” to describe the societies’ overarching purpose. While the societies’ grievances were obviously local, they consciously participated in a transatlantic revolutionary context. Society members, great admirers of Thomas Paine and his Rights of Man, understood themselves as “citizens of the world.”
The societies’ institutional inspiration was also both domestic and international. The most immediate precedent, and that most frequently mentioned by Federalist critics, were the Jacobin Clubs and les sociétés populaires of Revolutionary France. However, the societies also modeled themselves on radical British precedents such as the London Corresponding Society, the Sheffield Society of Constitutional Information, or the societies that emerged in the 1770s in support of “Wilkes and Liberty.” While these European precedents were important, the most important precedent was indigenous: the extraparliamentary traditions and associational repertoires of the American Revolution itself, as societies made abundantly clear in their letters, minutes, toasts, and in some instances their very names, such as the “Sons of Liberty.” The societies understood themselves as a continuation of a colonial and revolutionary tradition of extralegal voluntary association and direct resistance composed of constituents claiming to speak in the people’s name.
Viewed from a broader historical perspective, the societies continued the British Commonwealth tradition where county conventions had acted as voluntary representations of the people’s voice. They were late eighteenth-century manifestations of the popular constitutionalist “anti-parliament.” The anti-parliament was an association defined largely by its claim to directly embody popular voice against the illegitimate claims of official representatives in state institutions. It was through such associations that eighteenth-century Anglophone radicals voiced discontent with government policy, circulated political information, petitioned, resisted law, and, as a last resort, organized revolution. Through the repertoires of the anti-parliaments, radicals created associational spaces for enacting and cultivating a radicalized, “self-created” practice of citizenship.
Associational life in the United States took off in the 1790s, and the democratic societies were the most politically visible of the resulting entities. Although the societies play an important early role in the history of American voluntary association—celebrated by Tocqueville—they are poorly understood as merely another association in an emerging civil society. A closer inspection of the controversies that surrounded them reveals why this is so.
Defending the Liberties of the People
Voluntary associations in the 1790s—from the secretive Freemasons and the elite Society of Cincinnatus to Benjamin Franklin’s Junto and the democratic societies themselves—justified themselves by emphasizing their educative or formative dimensions. The societies were neither political parties nor pressure groups. Instead, they sought what John L. Brooke has described as “the self-conscious construction of a public culture,” a widely disseminated public education for a free, independent citizenry. To this end, they disseminated of political information and provided forums for popular mobilization against the government’s purported violations of liberty. The societies believed that creating and perpetuating an informed, vigilant citizenry was essential to defending the people’s liberties against the tyrannical conspiracies of the few; they believed the government could never be trusted to check itself. In the place of the Federalist emphasis on order, national power, and deference, the societies hoped to foster widespread enthusiasm for politics, citizen mobilization, and vigilance. The public announcement of the very first democratic society, the German Republican Society of Philadelphia, clearly articulates these goals:
In a republican government it is a duty incumbent on every citizen to afford his assistance… that its principles may remain incorrupt; for this spirit of liberty…is to be kept alive only by constant action – It unfortunately happens that objects of general concern seldom meet with the individual attention which they merit… it is therefore of essential moment that political societies should be established in a free government, that a joint operation be produced, which shall give that attention and exertion so necessary to the preservation of civil liberty.
The societies hoped to foster this “attention and exertion” by organizing patriotic festivals and dinners (especially on July 4th and 14th), publishing announcements and circulars in the republican press, and organizing protests against Federalist policy.
The societies’ oppositional stance was not between one social constituency and another, but between people and government. “All governments,” one society circular announced, “are more or less combinations against the people.” While the conflict between society members and Federalists was remarkably vehement, it is misleading to describe this conflict as partisan: abiding by prevailing norms of civic republican political thought, both sides agreed that partisanship signified political corruption and was thus illegitimate. Each side of this political conflict claimed to represent the good of the whole society: in the 1790s there was not yet a sense of a loyal opposition in American politics. The refusal of legitimate partisan contention contributed to the vehemence of political debate in the period, as Federalists demonized society members as traitorous insurgents, loyal to the French, and society members framed Federalists as aristocratic loyalists conspiring with the British monarchy to rob the people of their revolutionary birthright. Some historians have argued that the conflict between supporters and critics of the Federalist administrations of the 1790s brought the country to the brink of civil war.
While each side accused the other of betrayal or treason, the societies embraced the legitimacy of political dissent within a republic to a much greater degree than their Federalist opponents. The Societies hoped to foster spaces of political dissent free from government interference; they were powerful advocates of the people’s civil liberties who affirmed the people’s right to challenge their governors’ policies. The Federalists, conversely, sought a public sphere where associations within civil society worked in concert with the government, with political disputes settled by duly elected officials and accepted by their constituents. For many Federalists, parliamentary deliberation over political questions made further public engagement in these questions unnecessary at best, subversive at worst. Washington exemplified this belief when he railed against the societies’ presumption that they might set themselves up as the government’s “permanent censors.”
The societies were figured by their Federalist opponents as illegitimately self-appointed political representatives. As the Whiskey Rebellion transformed political dissent within the public sphere into armed insurgency, debates over the legitimacy of “self-created” societies turned to the most fundamental of political questions. Although all agreed that in a republican government public authority was to be based in the sovereignty of the people, many came to disagree fundamentally over how that sovereignty was to be legitimately represented or institutionally embodied.
“Self-Created Societies” and the Whiskey Rebellion
When the societies asserted that “combinations of the sovereignty of the people, are the only security for general liberty and happiness,” the only way to fix “the Rights of Man upon an immovable basis,” their central claim was that government institutions only imperfectly represented the people and that claims could always be made against these constituted powers by appeal to the authority of the people themselves. Federalists saw these assertions as a radical denial of the legitimacy of constitutionally sanctioned political authority. Fisher Ames, an influential Federalist congressman from Massachusetts and an ardent foe of the societies, said in a speech before Congress in 1794 that the societies “have arrogantly pretended sometime to be the people, and sometimes the guardians, the champions of the people. They affect to feel more zeal for popular Government, and to enforce more respect for republican principles, that the real Representatives are admitted to entertain.” For Ames and other Federalists, in a republican government, when that power of the people is properly organized, there is no need for extraparliamentary politics. “Self-created societies” were needed only during a time of “total renovation.”
The events of the Whiskey Rebellion seemed to underscore the threat that the societies posed to the new constitutional order. As insurgents collectively resisted the imposition of the excise tax in western Pennsylvania—attacking tax collectors, suspending court proceedings, threatening armed assault on Pittsburgh—Federalists responded that such resistance was the logical outcome of the societies’ activities. Shortly after ordering roughly 13,000 federal troops to quell the Rebellion, Washington delivered his Sixth Annual Address to Congress, in it assailing “certain self-created societies,” which had “assumed a tone of condemnation” against government officials, and had encouraged “crimes which reach the very existence of social order.” Washington claimed that the Rebellion was the “first ripe fruit” of the societies. Washington’s address sparked a resonant debate over the legitimacy of “self-created societies” in a republican government, but his accusations against the societies’ direct role were overstated, and sometimes have been by historians as well.
The Whiskey Rebellion was supported by several members of two local democratic societies, one at Washington Town and the other at Mingo Creek. The support of these society members, however, does not make the Rebellion an outcome of the societies’ activities. In fact, most societies immediately condemned the Rebellion, while remaining firm opponents to the Federalist policies they believed had incited it. While most societies continued to argue for the right to organize the citizenry politically and to contest acts of government, they rejected “irregular and illegal opposition to existing law.” In the wake of the Whiskey Rebellion, the societies distanced themselves from popular constitutionalist traditions of direct resistance and more openly accepted the legitimacy of formal governmental procedures and the laws proceeding from them. Self-created societies came to be seen as legitimate so long as they did not directly challenge the authority of duly constituted government and law; in this way, the societies began to appear closer to pressure groups or what would become political parties. This marked an important step towards the routinizing of political life in the Early Republic.
Conclusion
The societies declined rapidly near the end of 1794, and over the course of the following year they almost completely disappeared. The broader political context that had conditioned their emergence also disappeared. By 1795 the initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution had been considerably deflated by the Genêt debacle and revelations about the Jacobin Terror. The successful Federalist association of the societies with the Whiskey Rebellion also contributed to their decline. While the societies successfully legitimated an oppositional public sphere and fostered a more assertive and populist understanding of republican citizenship, in the wake of the Whiskey Rebellion the Federalists successfully circumscribed the bounds of political opposition within a formal legal framework. The traditions of popular constitutionalism that the societies exemplified were further limited over the course of the decade, particularly with the emerging practice and norm of Supreme Court judicial review. Increasingly, the people , could be makers of law through constitutionally sanctioned procedures, but they could no longer organize themselves as interpreters or, especially, as direct enforcers of law. Legal limits to collective action helped routinize popular politics in the early republic and transform the people into an electorate. Although traditions of popular constitutionalism, and concomitant associations, began to fade with the increasing legal formalization of politics, these traditions did not entirely disappear. American political history has been punctuated time and again by oppositional associations claiming to speak in the people’s name, even as they break from the legally established procedures for representing popular voice—the Dorr rebellion, nullification, and radical abolitionism, to name a few. In these moments we see the radicalism that underwrites the claims of a self-created society and that the democratic societies so powerfully exemplified in the first decade of the Early Republic.