was particularly taken with Lincoln’s essay Number V, which had drawn “the dividing line between the Few and Many as they apply to us in America.” “Two distinct and different orders of men,” the Free Republican had written,
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“seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a “spirit of jealousy and distrust,” would always be in dispute with one another. “Whether the parties to the contests style themselves the Rich and the Poor, the Great and the Small, the High and the Low, the Elders and People, Patricians and Plebeians, Nobility and Commons, still,” the Free Republican had claimed, “the source and effects of the dispute are the same.”9
All of the Free Republican’s descriptions of the two contending interests was fodder to Manning, who in 1799, writing as “a Laborer,” saw himself as a spokesman for the many working plebeians struggling against the aristocratic elite of Massachusetts. Borrowing straight from young Lincoln’s account of the “two general divisions” existing in all societies, which “with us … are described by the gentlemen and the common people,” Manning concluded that the struggles in America at the end of the eighteenth century had boiled down to a conflict “between those that labor for a living and those who do not.”10
This was a common division emerging out of the Revolution between common middling men who worked for a living and leisured gentry that ran through much of the polemics of the early Republic. Eventually this social conflict ended up, in the North at least, with the middling sort more or less coming to dominate the society and culture. Not only did most members of the emerging middle class of workers—commercial farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, teachers,
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editors, petty traders, and businessmen—come to claim the title of gentlemen, rendering the traditional distinction virtually meaningless, but they turned the North into a middling society that honored labor as the supreme human activity. By contrast, southern society remained frozen in the eighteenth century. The South’s leisured patrician aristocracy clung to the ancient notion that labor was mean and despicable and fit only for slaves.11
Although the Harvard-educated Lincoln had had no intention of supporting the arguments of the likes of Manning, nevertheless, he set forth in graphic terms the two opposing social interests that undergirded the middling assault on the leisured aristocracy that bedeviled American politics for decades. The many, said the Free Republican, were those who possessed only the rights of persons; their “subsistence is derived from their bodily labours.” The few, on the other hand, were those who obtained “their riches and support, not from their own, but the labours of others.” These men of property, wrote Lincoln, who certainly saw himself as one of them, were “the merchant, the physician, the lawyer and the divine, and in a word, all of every kind whose subsistence is not derived from the labours of their body.” Because the few gentry derived their support from the same source, that is, the labor of others, they collaborated and supported one another. “As a union of interests is the strongest cement of friendship, we find them, not only united in publick life, but associating together in private.” Since these gentlemen possessed a sense of superiority and seldom stooped except with
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reluctance, they rarely associated with the laboring many and inevitably courted the society of their own genteel kind.12
Since Lincoln, a full-fledged member of the gentry elite, scarcely imagined that a middling laborer like Manning might read his essays, let alone comment on them in writing, he was more frank and candid than he otherwise might have been. His arrogant tone and his presumption that social inequality was part of “the great arrangement of nature” were infuriating to the likes of Manning. Although Lincoln admitted that labor was “the sole parent of property,” he turned that principle around to emphasize how dependent the many were on the property of the few. If the few had less wealth, he said, then “the labour necessary for the subsistence of the labourer” would be diminished. In effect, Lincoln saw the few in traditional terms as the necessary patrons of the many. “Were the rich not to be lavish,” Montesquieu had written, “the poor would starve.”13 The leisured few, Lincoln conceded, might at first blush even be regarded as “useless, the mere drones of the hive; but it is to be remembered that we are not to quarrel with the destination of things, but must take mankind as we find them.” It was because of the greed, maladies, and vices of the many that the few gentry flourished.14
No wonder Manning so deeply resented what he took to be the Free Republican’s brazen bias in favor of the aristocratic few. The Free Republican, he said, “tries to prove that unless the Few have weight and influence in the government
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according to their riches and high station in life, the government cannot be free; and he proposes great alterations in the constitution in order to better accommodate the interests of the Few.” Although these sentiments—“urged in such a masterly manner just before the adoption of the federal constitution”—had continued to dominate American politics through the Washington and Adams administrations, they were, in fact, wrote Manning in 1799, “directly contrary to the principles of liberty and were no doubt written to destroy it.”15
It was too bad, Manning noted, that the essays of the Free Republican were no longer in print; he wished they could be republished in 1799 so that the falseness of their arguments could be more fully exposed and refuted. At any rate, Manning himself was determined to prove that the Free Republican was wrong in thinking “that the destruction of free governments arises from the licentiousness of the Many or their representatives.” Instead, he claimed, “their destruction always arises from the unreasonable dispositions and combinations of the Few, and the ignorance and carelessness of the Many.… Finding their schemes and views of interest borne down by the Many, to gain the power they cannot constitutionally obtain, the Few,” wrote Manning, quoting the Free Republican directly, “endeavor to get it by cunning and corruption.”16
Manning was not mistaken in seeing the essays by the Free Republican as original and provocative and openly partial to the rich. They directly challenged the principle of equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the
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principle that presumably lay at the heart of the Revolution. In fact, claimed the Free Republican, given “the various dispositions of men, the diversity of their genius, their abilities, their activity and spirit, it is impossible to conceive, that an equality should long exist among them, either, as to the extent of their property or the improvement of their minds.”17
But Manning was mistaken in thinking that the Free Republican was simply defending the few against the many. On the contrary, Lincoln argued, perhaps with a good deal of disingenuousness, “our government will certainly cease to be free whenever the few deprive the many of their share in the administration of it. For it will then at once become an aristocracy.” Although Lincoln realized that the many commoners would think that most of what he had to say “favor too much the principles of aristocracy,” he wished to make clear that he feared the power of the few nearly as much as the power of the many.18 This was the kind of deceptive self-deprecating argument the gentry sometimes used to justify their own distinctiveness and their separate representation in the upper houses of the legislatures.
Lincoln showed more of his true colors by contending that “men possessed of property are entitled to a greater share in political authority than those who are destitute of it.” If this privilege were not publicly acknowledged and given institutional form, the government would never be free and long lasting. Too much “democracy”
