Status Updates From The Radicalism of the Ameri...

Thus many Republicans concluded that all political opinions, even those opinions that were "false, scandalous and malicious," ought to be allowed, as Jefferson put it, to "stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

"'Commerce, that is exchange, being in truth society itself, it is the only bond among men; the source of all their moral sentiments; and the first and most powerful cause of the improvement of their mutual sensibility and reciprocal benevolence." And nowhere more than in republican America had commerce been allowed such full and fair play.

With these new ideas and practices came the greater participation of more ordinary people in politics. If men were all alike, equal in their rights and in their interestedness, then there were no specially qualilfed gentlemen who stood apart from the whole society with a superior and disinterested perspective. All people were the same: all were ordinary and all were best represented by ordinary people. That was democ

Many of them, in fact, saw a society more pluralistic, more diverse, and more fragmented with interests than even someone as hardheaded and realistic as James Madison had. Society, they said, was not a unitary entity with a single common interest but a heterogeneous mixture of "many different classes or orders of people, Merchants, Farmers, Planters, Mechanics, and Gentry or wealthy Men,"' all equal to one another.