Nick’s Reviews > The Radicalism of the American Revolution > Status Update

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.

In the 1780s James Madison had his doubts about this moral capacity of the people stretched to the limit, but even he admitted that ordinary people had to have sufficicnt "virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom" or "no theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure."

Within decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world, and it remains so today, regardless of its great disparities of wealth.

These new popular leaders were exploiting the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality to vault into political power and to promote the partial and Tocal interests of their constituents at the expense of what the revolutionary gentry saw as the public good.

When an American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying that the United States did not make war on science.

Our Charity should be confined to no partialities, but should extend to our enemies as well as our friends, to the most remote, as well as to such as are in the vicinity...Such parochialism, bigotry, and narrowness of outlook were precisely what liberal education and refinement were designed to eliminate.

From the outset the new republican states thus tended to view with suspicion the traditional monarchical practice of enlisting private wealth and energy for public purposes by issuing corporate privileges and licenses to private persons. In a republic no person should be allowed to exploit the public's authority for private gain.