"A Brief History of the Word 'Democracy,' 1789-1803," by Seth Cotlar, Sons of the Revolution / Society of the Cincinnati Dissertation Fellow for 1998 at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies

President Lloyd then introduced the Society's guest speaker, Seth Cotlar, the Society of Cincinnati/Sons of the Revolution Dissertation Fellow for 1997-1998 at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Cotlar gave the following talk.

"A Brief History of the Word 'Democracy,' 1789-1803," by Seth Cotlar, Sons of the Revolution / Society of the Cincinnati Dissertation Fellow for 1998 at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies

When I began contemplating what I would say about democracy tonight, I went to the library in search of a book, which could start me on my way. Clearly, someone must have written a history of the meanings with which Americans over the past 200 years have invested the word democracy. I was startled to find that this obvious book did not exist. Indeed, I had trouble even finding an article on the subject. How could a term so central to America's self-conception have attracted so little historical attention? The most generous explanation would be that the meaning of the word 'democracy' has been so stable over time and is so obvious that there has been no need to analyze it. I do not buy this answer.

A more honest, though troubling answer, is that raising the question of what democracy has meant in other times and in other places forces us to confront the fact that we have very little idea what we mean when we use the word 'democracy' today. It has been able to become such a central part of our national self-conception precisely because it is so vague-just about any policy can be dressed up in patriotic garb by simply calling it 'democratic'. The word carries tremendous weight in our culture as a term of approbation, but as a category of analysis, it has become virtually meaningless. Americans invoke 'democracy' all the time, but we have ceased to have any serious, public conversation about what the word actually means.

When I ask my students at Northwestern University what 'democracy' is, they look at me as if it is a stupid question with an obvious answer. America is a democracy. So what does that mean? At this point, they shift in their seats, avert their eyes when I look toward them, and finally get indignant. They are uncomfortable, I think, because they know that democracy is an important, powerful concept, yet they have never really thought about what it means. At best, they can come up with only two vague definitions for it -a democracy is where there is a free market and where people can vote. The fact that this is all they can offer to fill the category of 'democracy'-a few undigested, well-worn cliches-would leave the late 18th century thinkers that I study flabbergasted. Tonight's talk is premised upon the assumption that these long-dead people still have much to teach us about what democracy should and could mean.

In the time remaining. I want to open this dialogue between the past and the present by revisiting the 1790s, the first decade in which some (but certainly not all) Anglo-Americans used the word 'democracy' with a positive connotation. First, I will sketch out in very broad terms what I think a history of the word 'democracy' between the years 1787 and 1800 would look like and explain how I came to see the need for such a history. Then, shifting from the general to the particular, I want to tell you a story about one 1790s democrat who you have probably never heard of, Morgan John Rhys.

In 1856 Samuel Goodrich, nephew of the staunch New Haven Federalist Elizur Goodrich, noted that "the word democracy .... has essentially changed its signification" since the first years of the new republic. Originally a term of opprobrium, "synonymous with Jacobinism," by the early years of the 1800s democracy had "put on clean linen, and affected respectability." The transformation was so dramatic that "it is difficult for the present generation to enter into the feelings of those days... We who are now familiar with democracy, can hardly comprehend the odium attached to it in the age to which I refer...[People] not only regarded it as hostile to good government, but as associated with infidelity in religion, radicalism in government, and licentiousness in society. It was considered a sort of monster."

I think Samuel's mini-history of democracy is half-right. It is true that most of the people that we today call the founding fathers regarded democracy as a monster. The minutes of the constitutional convention and the federalist papers are filled with statements clearly distinguishing the American republic from a democracy. Moreover, Samuel is also correct in noting that something happened over the course of the 1790s that transformed the word 'democrat' from an epithet into a compliment. However, when he claims that everyone in the early years of the new republic saw democracy in a negative light, he leaves out of the story those early advocates of democracy who so haunted people like his uncle. Democracy was not just a phantom dreamed up by American élites; it had many real, embodied advocates who have somehow disappeared from Samuel's story. Who are these people who insisted on using the word democracy to describe the new nation? Did they regard themselves as evil monsters? In addition, what did these people think about the clean linen their fellow Americans eventually draped over their initially rebellious term?

By telling his story from the perspective of his Federalist predecessors, Samuel missed a crucial irony, which lay at the heart of the history of American democracy. At the same time that the word democracy shifted from a term of abuse to a name one could proudly embrace in public, it was also being drained of its most challenging connota-tions. One could use the term democracy with a positive connotation in 1800, in part, because America truly was a more democratic place-at least less deferential and ex-clusive. However, the term 'democracy' was also acceptable because it no longer posed such a threat to the status quo. Put simply, over the course of the 1790s, democracy had been made safe for the new nation.

I came to these conclusions about the history of democracy while researching my dissertation-a study of American public political discourse in the first 15 years of the new nation in trans-Atlantic context. The subjects of my study are a group of several hundred British and Irish radicals who came to America in the 1790s as well as those Americans who eagerly sought out the latest radical ideas coming out of Europe in that tumultuous decade. This community of self-described democrats (the first Americans to embrace this term) formed and then dissolved between 1789 and 1803. Until now they have received very little attention from American historians and play no part at all in our public historical memory. I have many theories about why this is the case, but I will not bore you with them now. Nevertheless, one possible explanation, which is directly relevant to this talk, is that these people stand as a rebuke to our self-conception as a nation, which has become progressively democratic over time.

These reformers were carriers of a strand of late enlightenment democratic thought that was gradually excised from American public political discourse over the course of the 1790s. To a great extent, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were designed to silence these radical exiles who had fled political persecution in Pitt's Britain. Although on the grand scale of historical winners and losers these folks ended up in the loser's column, they are worth remembering because they pushed Americans to consider the most radically democratic implications of their revolutionary tradition. We severely misapprehend the struggles of the 1790s if we do not remember that this was a time of international, utopian fervor-- time when an infectious spirit of innovation and experi-mentation drifted both ways across the Atlantic. Democracy was more than just a specter, which haunted most of the founding fathers. It was also an inspirational term which fired the imaginations of thousands of ordinary and not so ordinary people in the 1790s. It was the outcome of the struggle between its supporters and detractors, which fixed the outer boundaries of the word democracy's potentially boundless meanings. We still live with these boundaries today, for better or worse.

Morgan John Rhys was born into a family of small freeholders in 1759 in a section of Southern Wales with deep ties to the Cromwellian dissenters of a century before. In 1787, after several years of preaching, he was ordained a Baptist minister. Forget what you think you know about Baptists, for Rhys was the type of Baptist that could only come out of the late 18th Century. His theology was a fascinating mixture of the Bible and Voltaire. Like many of his British dissenting compatriots — men like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley — he was a thorough-going enlightenment rationalist. Although Rhys lived in what most people considered a cultural backwater, he followed the latest theological and political debates of his day. In rural Wales Rhys wrote pamphlets against the slave trade and established Sunday schools modeled on those modern seminaries of radicalism founded by his fellow dissenters throughout Britain. Around 1790 Rhys headed to Paris with a crate of bibles. Convinced that the French Revolution was propelling the world toward regeneration, Rhys wanted to be there when it happened. After his sojourn in Paris about which we know almost nothing, Rhys returned to Wales in 1792, driven home by first stirrings of war in Europe.

Rhys soon made himself obnoxious to the British authorities. He began organizing political societies throughout Wales and providing them with radical tracts from Paris to London. In early 1793 he began the first Welsh political journal and filled its pages with sympathetic accounts of the French Revolution, excerpts of Thomas Paine, articles on freedom of religion in America, and withering attacks on the British government. In spring of 1794, when the Pitt administration began arresting scores of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh radicals Rhys suspended his journal and decided to flee to America. He headed to Liverpool, with a dozen or so compatriots, desperately in search of an American boat but they were already full with other, like-minded people. After several months of nervous waiting, he finally found passage to New York, arriving on October 12, 1794.

Rhys had come to America to escape persecution, but that was only part of his motivation. As early as 1785 he had contemplated the establishment of a Welsh home-land in the American backcountry-a place where his oppressed countrymen could speak their language, practice their religion, and govern themselves without interference from the British government. With the goal of finding an ideal spot for this Welsh settlement, Rhys purchased a horse in New York and began a twelve-month tour of his newly adopted country which would take him from New York to Georgia to Kentucky to Cincinnati and then across Ohio and Pennsylvania back to Philadelphia. What we know about this trip comes from Rhy's extensive and fascinating travel diary.

In many ways, he found America everything he had imagined. After a few months of conversations with the citizens of New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware he joyfully declared "What are improperly called French Principles pervade the universe and uni-versal emancipation must be the result." He was thrilled to find that "in America there are no dissenters...Free Inquiry is the Fountain of Freedom." Once he crossed into Virginia, however, his tone shifted and he became obsessed with a glaring contradiction: "This is a Land of Liberty full of slaves." On New Year's Day 1795, Rhys addressed the North Carolina House of Representatives on his favorite theme, universal emancipation. He made it clear that "the very Africans [were] not excepted'' from this glorious cause. He repeated this message many more times in sermons and public orations throughout the South, to audiences who listened with varying degrees of sympathy.

As he traveled through the south he met up with a surprising number of like-minded people - he dined with Mrs. White, a staunch democrat who had been burned out by the British in the war and hated aristocrats almost as much as the devil. He sang the Ca Ira and toasted the sans-culottes with sailors in a South Carolina tavern.

In Savannah, Georgia Rhys learned of a black Baptist congregation which had been mercilessly harassed over the years. In 1788, the minister and several of his flock had been publicly flogged and they were only allowed to worship together two days out of every year. Rhys quickly raised several hundred dollars to build a new meeting house for the congregation and rallied the local religious and reformist community to petition the government on behalf of his fellow Baptists. Heading Northwest into the South Carolina backcountry in March of 1795, Rhys encountered a group of a hundred Welshman who were on their way to Kentucky. After serving as the minister to this group of emigrants, he left them and rode on to Ohio to join General Anthony Wayne and his 1500 troops at Greenville.

It just so happened that Rhys found himself present at a pivotal moment in the history of Native American-white relations — the signing of the Treaty of Greenville, which opened up much of the Midwest to white settlement. He spent most of his time with the officers — dining, drinking tea, and conversing with them. But the descriptions of these men take up very little space in his journal. Rhys was much more interested in the hundreds of Native Americans who were daily arriving in the fort in preparation for the treaty signing ceremony. He thought the Indian leaders were much better orators than the whites. Their sense of religion — though not directed into the 'proper channel' — stood in direct contrast to the vanity and dissolute manners of the white officers he observed. On July 4 he delivered an oration in which he pleaded with the Americans to "purchase the right of soil from the Indians" for "every nation of tribe [has] an indefeasible right of soil, as well as a right to govern themselves in what manner they think proper." He imagined a day when "the love of conquest and enlargement of territory [would] be sacrificed" so that "the Americans and Indians could become one people" who no longer murdered each other over land, but lived together in peace. What effect this oration had on his audience (or even who his audience was) we will never know. Either way, this would not be the last time that Rhys' utopian vision would lead him into a seriously misguided historical prediction.

In late 1795 Morgan John Rhys returned to Philadelphia and began making the arrangements for his Welsh settlement called Beula. In October 1796 Rhys purchased 17,400 acres of land in Western Pennsylvania (200miles from Philadelphia) and placed advertisements in local papers to attract settlers and investors. He led the first set of settlers to the land in the spring of 1797 and then headed back to Philadelphia to gather more support for the venture.

By no means were Rhys' promotional efforts unique-towns and speculative land ventures were springing up daily in the 1790s. However, what set Rhys' project apart was the idealism with which he undertook it. The ambitious town plan which he drew up before he had even seen the land was a perfect, Enlightenment grid with street names such as Truth, Zeal, Hope, Free, and Joy. At the center of the town lay a non-denominational seminary and a library, which by 1800 supposedly held 1500 books - quite unusual for a frontier town. Settlers could pay for their land in cash, or with books for the library. This library contained multiple copies of Voltaire, Locke, Blackstone, Brissot, Godwin, Grotius, and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. 'Citizen' Richard Lee — another radical émigré who had settled in Philadelphia — donated Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman and her sympathetic history of the French Revolution as well as scores of radical pamphlets which he had published in London. Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Rush, Mathew Carey and many other prominent Jeffersonian bought town lots as symbolic gestures of their support for Rhys project.

This is where the story takes a turn for tragic. When Rhys returned to Beula in the spring of 1798, he found a town of demoralized settlers. Unable to cope with a harsh, hungry winter and the collapse of their gristmill, many settlers had moved on to Ohio or had turned to, in Rhea's words, "the stinking God, whiskey." Over the next few years, he tried to keep the town moving forward -twice rebuilding the mill only to have it swept away by the floodwaters each time. Sinking deeper into debt, he finally had to take a state job in Somerset 40 miles away in order to support himself and his family. When he died suddenly in 1804 at the age of 45 there were fewer than 200 people living in Beula and by 1808, it was essentially a ghost town. Morgan John Rhys, along with his vision of a town of roughly equal, rationally religious, and exceedingly well read citizens, had literally disappeared from the American map.

So had Rhys's particular brand of democracy. In 1792, one would have been hard pressed to find a 'democrat' who actively supported slavery. By 1800, one could be a democrat and a slaveholder with little sense of the contradiction between the two. By the time of Jackson, the democrats favored the most virulently anti-Indian policies. Whereas Rhea's democracy was Universalistic and cosmopolitan, American democracy became increasingly anti-intellectual and localistic -- witness John C. Calhoun's states rights arguments, which defended slavery in the name of local democracy. Perhaps it was inevitable or even best for the country that Rhys and his like-minded compatriots lost the struggle over the meaning of American democracy. Nonetheless, I think their story has much to tell us about precisely how American democracy came to take the peculiar shape that it did.

One mile from Beula a town named Ebensburg, a less ambitious settlement of mostly Welsh immigrants, became the seat of the newly created Cambria County and gradually grew into a moderately prosperous town. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Ebensburg, and in that entire time, I learned only two things about Beula. One, it was supposedly haunted by "the white lady" who had a penchant for carrying away small children. Two, it was that fields in the woods near the junkyard where high school kids had their parties. Morgan John Rhys’ utopian vision of universal emancipation has been erased from the county public memory. In the 1920s when Cambria County had one of the highest per capital ratios of Ku Klux Klan members in the country, it might have done it some good to remember Rhys’s July 4, 1795 credo that the good citizen "is every person's neighbor, the White, the Black, the Red, are alike to him; he recognizes in each a brother." I only hope that in telling his story and the stories of countless others like him, I can contribute in some way to our understanding of what American democracy has been, and what it could be.

At the conclusion of his remarks, Mr. Cotlar responded to several interesting questions from the audience. President Lloyd thanked him for his informative talk, presented him with a gift from the Society, and wished him success in his scholarly career.

President Lloyd then asked Captain Salisbury to retire the flags. The officers and members of the Society rose as the flags were paraded out of the room.

The 1998 Annual Meeting adjourned at approximately 6:15 p.m.