A History of the American People

export enough to pay for them.' Ebenezer Baldwin, a little more sharply, agreed: We have no such thing as a common People among us. Between Vanity and Fashion, the Species is utterly destroyed.' It was a short step from admitting ordinary folk had a right to the best to giving them a full share in government-and giving it to them not grudgingly but eagerly. Words like 'husbandman,' yeoman,' esquire' quickly dropped out of use, being replaced by 'citizen'-a decade before the French Revolutionaries took it up. Collectively, the citizens were the 'Publick,' a new word coming into fashion. 'Cato' wrote:Ordinary people [are] the best judges, whether things go well
or ill for the Publick.' Cato thought: Every ploughman knows a good government from a bad one.' Jefferson agreed:State a problem to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide
it often better than the latter, because he had not been led astray by artificial rules.' John Adams
invented a hick-farmer archetype, Humphrey Ploughjogger, and extolled his sense and
shrewdness in newspaper articles. He was made of as good a Clay as the so-called Great Ones of the world.'The mob, the herd and the rabble, as the Great always delight to call them,' were,
wrote Adams, by the unalterable laws of god and Nature, as well entitled to the benefit of the air to breathe, light to see, food to eat, clothes to wear, as the nobles or the king."" All that was necessary was to educate them, to add knowledge to their native wit. It was the great merit of the new egalitarian spirit in America that it consciously placed education right at the front of national priorities. Adams wrote that the settlement of America was part of a providential planfor the illumination of the ignorant and emancipation of the
slavish part of mankind,' first in America, then all over the world. Stanhope Smith, president of
Princeton, believed that a combination of 'republican laws' and education would effect a general
moral improvement in the population and create a society of habitual virtue.' Virtue, said Ezra Styles, could be taught, like any other art. And it was education, said Adams, which made the gentleman, not birth or privilege. He and most of the key men in the Revolution were first- generation gentlemen, made such by their ability to read and make use of books and by their mastery of the pen-Adams' cousin Sam, Jefferson, Rush, John Marshall, James Madison, David Ramsay, John Jay, James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin. Adams' father had beenan ungenteel
farmer'-he himself had become a gentleman by going to Harvard. Jefferson, though from a much
higher starting-place in society, had also been the first in his family to go to college. Ultimately,
all would do so: then indeed America would be a republican commonwealth of taste, art,
manners, and above all virtue. It was education which would make the republican structure and
the democratic content of the new union of states engines of peaceful progress. In the 1830s
Macaulay was to say that, in England, education was engaged in a race to civilize democracy
before it took over. But it is worth remembering that the American elite grasped this point-and
did something about it-half a century before.
In the meantime, the republican structure had to be created as a matter of urgency. The
wartime system was a series of improvisations and obviously not good enough. The original idea
of the United States was a coming together of the states, as sovereign bodies, to create an
umbrella-state over them, to do certain things as the states should delegate to it. The people did
not come into this process, except insofar as they elected state legislatures. It is important to
grasp the point: the original revolution, a military and political one, which produced this
improvised form of Congressional government, was followed by a second revolution, this time a
constitutional one, which produced the United States Constitution as we know it. The second
revolution began during the war and it was (in the old English tradition) an organic development,
in response to need. In October 1777 Congress decided it had to create Boards of War, Treasury,