Affairs of Honor & Liberty

Jon Huntsman, seemingly the most reasonable Republican presidential candidate in the 2012 campaign, criticized his fellow candidates for their "scary" rhetoric about Social Security at the GOP debate this past Monday night: "We find ourselves sometimes at extreme ends politically kinda shouting past one other."  Lately I've been doing a lot of reading about the political culture in the early republic of the United States, especially the decade of the 1790s, and as the present-day campaign unfolds I can't help referring to those early raucous years of our nation which make today's extremes of rhetoric look quite tame in comparison.  We have this myth playing on the movie screens of our minds that the era of the "Founders" was somehow better and wiser and purer and our own and in some ways I agree with this.  But the thing about studying history and what people actually did and said is that it pretty much dissolves myth in a cold shower of reality.

Take the early republic. In her excellent study of this period, Affairs of Honor, Joanne B. Freeman relates the story of when the Federalist Alexander Hamilton tried to address a hostile Republican crowd in front of Federal Hall in New York City on July 18, 1795. The crowd was protesting the Jay Treaty between Great Britain and the United States. Hamilton informed them that it was "unnecessary [for them] to give an opinion on the treaty," a rather aristocratic put-down upon which someone threw a rock at him, hitting him in the head. Following this Hamilton got into an argument with the Republican James Nicholson, who denounced Hamilton as an "Abettor of Tories." The exchange escalated until the two were challenging each other to a duel. Then Hamilton, shaking his fist in the air in outrage, vowed to take on all of his Republican opponents, one by one, in duels. Fortunately for Hamilton this time, cooler heads prevailed and he was spared for his later appointment with destiny.

This wasn't an unusual occurrence at the time. A culture of honor, in which gentlemen "restrained their passions and controlled their words," as Freeman writes, was giving way to a political culture of popular opinion and popular will, and extreme rhetoric was becoming the norm, especially in the newspapers. How would we react if a newspaper editor referred to a sitting president as "a mock Monarch" who was "blind, bald, toothless, querulous" and "a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind." Such was the characterization of President John Adams in the partisan press. Pure, raw, unvarnished liberty. But certainly better than tyranny.