NORTH CAROLINA’S FEDERALISTS IN AN EVOLVING PUBLIC SPHERE, 1790-1810 Scott King-Owen A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of North Carolina at Wilmington 2006 Approved by Advisory Committee _______Dr. Chris Fonvielle_______ _________Dr. Paul Townend__________ __________Dr. Alan Watson________ Chair Accepted by ______________________________ Dean, Graduate School TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.
v LIST OF TABLES. vi LIST OF FIGURES. 1 CHAPTER 1 – NORTH CAROLINA AND ITS FEDERALIST LEADERSHIP. 16 CHAPTER 2 – PRESS AND PUBLIC IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
44 CHAPTER 3 – WILLIAM BOYLAN, FEDERALIST PARTISAN. 68 CHAPTER 4 – THE WAR OF THE EDITORS. 124 ii ABSTRACT Frustrated by electoral defeat at the hands of Jefferson and his allies in 1800, North Carolina’s Federalists devised a plan in 1802 to send the Minerva, a Raleigh newspaper edited by William Boylan, to leading Federalists across the state. These Federalist leaders, including Duncan Cameron, William R.
Davie, and Alfred Moore, all prominent politicians and lawyers, believed that the public mind had been corrupted by the newspaper propaganda of the Jeffersonian Republicans. The dissemination of the Minerva, however, could restore the public to a deferential position as well as increase their knowledge about the true state of political affairs. Though the newspapers found their way to each judicial district in North Carolina, they failed to transform the public sphere. The editor of the Minerva, William Boylan, increased the rancor of his partisan invective throughout 1802 and 1803, even though Federalist electoral success still remained elusive.
Boylan also pursued the position of state printer, a job which he and his uncle had held for a number of years, but which had been given to Joseph Gales, an Englishman and Republican editor of the Raleigh Register. When Boylan failed to obtain the position of state printer in 1804, he became increasingly bitter toward Gales. When Gales accused Boylan of burning down the press of the Raleigh Register, Boylan responded by beating Gales savagely on the streets of Raleigh in 1804. Boylan, humbled in court by a fine in 1805, retreated from his former partisanship as his Federalist comrades abandoned him because of his attack on Gales.
The Federalists, therefore, failed in their attempt to control the public sphere because they could not imitate Jeffersonian propaganda without betraying their conceptions of disinterestedness, virtue, and reason. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I give gratitude first to Dr. Alan Watson, who graciously allowed me to pursue an independent study on North Carolina’s Federalists in the spring of 2005. With guidance, patience, and infectious enthusiasm for North Carolina history, Dr.
Watson nurtured this study from a short paper to a full-grown thesis. Chris Fonvielle I owe a tremendous debt. His keen eye for catching the infelicitous phrasing of many of my sentences has saved me from making a fool of myself. Even when I doubted myself, Dr.
Fonvielle did not. I had the pleasure of an independent study with Dr. Townend on liberalism and republicanism in Anglo-American politics, and I now I realize how fundamental that experience was to my understanding of early America. Townend’s criticism, always insightful, helped me to avoid errors in my conceptualization of Federalist politics.
To my other teachers—Drs. Berkeley, La Vere, McCarthy, Toplin, and Fain—I can only say that I hope I bear the marks of your teaching in my work. I have profited immensely from both from your example and prodding. To the archivists and support staffs at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, at the Perkins Library of Duke University, and the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, I owe thanks for assistance in bringing box after box of manuscripts.
To Carole Sutton, my colleague in the school system, what would have I done without the benefit of your indefatigable editing? Finally, I owe much to those North Carolina historians who have preceded me. Through both their insights and mistakes they have illuminated my path. iv DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my parents, Dl and Virginia Owen, for giving me an appreciation of my North Carolina heritage, to my wife, Melissa King-Owen, who has endured my fascination with the Federalists with uncommon grace, and, most importantly, to Dr. Milton Ready—my undergraduate mentor at UNC-Asheville—who encouraged me as a young scholar to find my own metaphors, analogies, and alternate hypotheses to explain the past.
v LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. North Carolina Federalists.22 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Prominent North Carolina Federalists. North Carolina’s Geography and Principal Urban Areas in 1800.
The Minerva and Raleigh Register Mastheads.84 vii INTRODUCTION “Federalism begins to look up. Very true, being now on its back, it can look no other way.” 1 The Federalists of North Carolina endured during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a beleaguered minority. They managed to achieve the adoption of the federal Constitution in North Carolina only after a second ratification convention, and, thereafter, maintained an ephemeral influence in state and national political offices. Descended from the conservatives who had wanted to rein in the excesses of the Revolution that raged from 1776 to 1781, these friends of authority, order, and stability attempted to lead a state whose democratic tendencies posed a serious challenge to eighteenth-century notions of deference to the aristocratic elite of society.
The North Carolina Federalists, as self-proclaimed men of virtue, learning, and talent, suffered constant rejection at the ballot box during the early days of the American republic. Electoral failure led to an especially bitter partisan spirit in the days after the election of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1801. Davie, North Carolina’s arch-Federalist, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, former governor, and ambassador to France during the Quasi-War crisis of 1798-1799, predicted in 1802 to John Steele, the Salisbury merchant and Comptroller of the United States Treasury, that “we shall never see one clear day.”2 For Davie, Steele, and the other Federalists in the state, the storm clouds had indeed cast their dark shadows over the future of good and orderly government in the United States. Seeking to explain the disastrous election of 1800, many Federalists concluded that Republican newspaper editors had captured the public mind with their insidious propaganda.
The proliferation of Republican 1 Quoted in James Broussard, The Southern Federalists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 80. de Roulhac Hamilton and Kemp P., “William Richardson Davie: A Memoir,” James Sprunt Historical Monograph 7 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1907), 49. newspapers had filled the public sphere with misinformation designed to discredit the friends of government. Duncan Cameron, a Federalist lawyer in Hillsboro, in 1802 indicted the Republican newspaper editor William Duane, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, as a primary culprit: “the political opinion of a great portion of our citizens seems to me to grow out of hatred and party principles they are in the habit of reading and I am strengthened in this belief from an assurance that Duane published and sent into all part of the United States many papers that never were subscribed for.”3 The election of 1800, therefore, galvanized Federalist intent to reverse Jeffersonian democracy.
The intensively partisan nature of the election and its aftermath, which Federalists viewed in almost apocalyptic terms, portended the end of the revised republican experiment launched at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Davie wrote to John Steele in 1801 that “the Federalists own the destruction of the Constitution as an event certain under the administration of Mr.”5 John Cameron, brother of Duncan Cameron, noted in the summer of 1800 that the “people seem bent on their own Destruction, which, may the Supreme Governour of the Universe avert—by frustrating the Machiavellian & diabolical schemes of those Evil-designing men & Jacobinical infidels by whom the Profanus Vulgus are, at present, led astray!”6 The people, by this account, did not possess the requisite virtue to distinguish truth from lies as printed in Republican newspapers. Only those eighteenth-century gentlemen 3 Duncan Cameron to John Moore, 1802, John Moore Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. 4 For the apocalypticism of the Federalists, see Michael A.
Bellesiles, “The Soil Will Be Soaked with Blood: Taking the Revolution of 1800 Seriously,” in The Revolution of 1800, ed. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 59-86, and Joanne B. Freeman, “Corruption and Compromise in the Election of 1800: The Process of Politics on the National Stage,” in The Revolution of 1800, ed.
James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. 5 Hamilton and Battle, “William Richardson Davie: A Memoir,” 43. 6 John Cameron to Duncan Cameron, June 12, 1800, Cameron Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (SHC). Figure 1: Prominent North Carolina Federalists.) John Steele 3 pursuing a civic life in which they subordinated their private interests for the public good displayed virtue.7 The common people could only emulate these gentlemen through enlightenment.
Otherwise, they were helpless against the beguiling yet insidious falsehoods that North Carolina Federalists believed emanated from the pens of William Duane and James Callender, a scandalmonger who desecrated the names of both Washington and Adams in his pamphlet The Prospect Before Us. Republican print propaganda consequently threatened to undermine the stability of the republic by soiling the public mind.8 If Republican print propaganda bore the onus for leading the public astray, Federalists in North Carolina came to believe that their own newspaper machinery could undo the damage. Davie induced Charles W. Harris, mathematics tutor at the University of North Carolina, to address Duncan Cameron in 1801 with a plan that would “do away with those misrepresentations which have been circulated with inconceivable industry and received with too much credulity.” Harris requested that Cameron furnish names of “firm federalists, men of influence” with whom a state-wide correspondence could be constructed, much as the revolutionaries of 1776 did with the committees of correspondence.
9 This epistolary phalanx could gather and share vital information which might allow the Federalists to outflank the Republicans. Creating an informed Federalist elite became the first step towards creating an informed citizenry, and North Carolina’s leaders found support for their plans in a national movement aimed to roll back the Jeffersonian revolution. Alexander Hamilton called for a meeting of leading Federalists in 1802 in conjunction with a meeting of the Society of 7 Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (Autumn 1987), 37-58; Andrew S.
Trees, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 78, 86-94. 8 For an overview of Republican print propaganda, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). Harris to Duncan Cameron, January 9, 1801, Cameron Family Papers.
4 Cincinnati, a group that furnished many Federalists because of its connection with George Washington and military men of the Revolution. Hamilton invited William R. Davie to participate in creating a plan that would remove from “among us incorrect men with very incorrect views; which may lead to combinations and projects injurious to us as a party, and very detrimental to the Country. Davie left no record of his attendance, and Hamilton’s meeting failed to produce concerted action on a national scale.10 Even though a national plan for action did not emerge in 1802, North Carolina’s Federalists wasted no time in furthering their aims for a properly informed citizenry.
In August of that year, probably while the Superior Court met, leading Federalists gathered at Hillsboro to work out the details of how they would curb the excesses of ignorance resulting from Jeffersonian democracy. If Republican newspapers spread the pestilence of ignorance, then Federalist newspapers might provide inoculation. Duncan Cameron and others proposed to raise a subscription in each of the state’s judicial districts to purchase ten newspapers for each county in the district.