762 Chapter XXXI
popular origin. They were not yet a political party but only a step in that direction;
most of them disappeared within two or three years, as a more organized Republi-
can party came into being. Some of the clubs did take part locally in elections, and
it was these clubs, apparently, that inspired the older Tammany societies with po-
litical interests. Their attitude was one of suspicion of government and of office-
holders, an anti- elitism, a class consciousness of a general sort pitting the “many”
against the “few.” The tone was suggested by the Ulster Democratic Club in the
Catskills of New York, which stood “on guard against designing men in office and
affluent circumstances, who are forever combining against the rights of all but
themselves.”^22 The clubs were opposed to Hamilton’s policies, to British influence,
and to fine gentlemen who used hair- powder or wore silk stockings. At a time
when the newspapers carried more foreign than local news, they were fascinated
by the great spectacle of the war in Europe. They were unanimously and excitedly
pro- French. On the success of the French Revolution against its armed enemies,
according to the prospectus of the Massachusetts Constitutional Society, in Janu-
ary 1794, depended the happiness of “the whole world of Mankind.”^23
To men who still conceived themselves as the proper guardians of society, suited
by wisdom, experience, and position to form a governing class—that is, to most of
the more articulate Federalists—this sprouting up of popular clubs, whose stock in
trade was the criticism of government, seemed novel and alarming, if not revolu-
tionary. When the farmers of Western Pennsylvania demonstrated against the new
federal tax on spirits (in the so- called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794), it was charged
that the clubs promoted insurrection, which was not true; but it was true that both
the formation of clubs and the resistance to taxes expressed an antipathy to Ham-
ilton’s program, and indeed to government itself. President Washington called the
clubs “self- created.” He meant that they were extra- legal, and that only duly con-
stituted bodies and duly elected representatives should deliberate or exert pressure
on public issues; the phrase recalled what the British authorities had said of Amer-
ican correspondence committees twenty years before, and were saying of the Lon-
don Corresponding Society at precisely this moment. So far as the Federalists
found themselves denying the legitimacy of any opposition to government arising
outside government circles, the emerging Republicans could rightly accuse them
of betraying the American Revolution.
The Federalists thought also that the clubs, since they appeared simultaneously
with Genet, were the result of his machinations. “Genet’s clubs,” the British min-
ister called them contemptuously in reporting to Grenville; and American Feder-
alists agreed. Many likewise insisted that “democracy” was a foreign and imported
idea. The bulldog of the Federalist press, William Cobbett, himself a foreigner
lately arrived from England, was especially emphatic in this opinion. The Pennsyl-
vania Democratic Society organized itself in the middle of 1793. According to
Cobbett, it was Genet who proposed the word “Democratic” for its title.^24 Two-
22 Ibid., 95.
23 C. D. Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1897), 194.
24 Link accepts this as a fact, citing Minnigerode, who gave no reference, but probably drew on
Cobbett, History of the American Jacobins Commonly Denominated Democrats (Philadelphia, 1796), 16.
Cobbett’s word cannot be accepted as evidence.