In Georgia, Jefferson had equal cause for satisfaction. There were small farms, poor industrious men, ardent republicans, with the frontiersmen’s natural democracy and the debtors’ suspicions of concentrated wealth allied with governmental power. And there to lead them was James Jackson, idol of the people, a boisterous, impassioned orator whose eloquence often gave more heat than light. Historians have been prone to sneer at him, but this man who came as a child from Devonshire in England to take his place three years later in the army of Washington, and to receive the keys of Savannah from the British ten years after his arrival, was something more than an upstart. He who refused the governorship of his State when twenty-one, and six years after leaving his English home, to take his chances in the field, was scarcely an object for jest. He was a power as a leader and was to strike Titan blows in the cause that Jefferson nationally led.[573]

In South Carolina, dominated by rich commercial Charleston, Jefferson long looked in vain for a leader for his cause. A friend of the Pinckneys and the Rutledges, they held aloof or joined their fortunes with Hamilton. Only toward the close did Charles Pinckney, the most eloquent, resourceful, and magnetic of his family, part company with his cousins to lunge and lash with gusty joy for the man of Monticello.

Such were the leaders on whom Jefferson was dependent in welding the popular parties in the various States into a strong national army marching in step, with a common policy and purpose.

III

Had Jefferson been even richer than Hamilton in brilliant leaders, he would not have made the latter’s fatal blunder of assuming them to be enough. He was too much the practical politician to be impressed with a brilliant staff of officers—without privates. He set out to arouse the masses, mobilize, drill, and lead them. Above all, it was his intention to lead. Within a year, Ames was to observe with desperation and disgust the divisions among the Federalists and to comment that ‘Virginia moves in a solid column ... the discipline of the [Jefferson] party is as severe as the Prussian’ and ‘deserters are not spared.’[574]

The first necessity was to get the men to discipline. A vast number of the masses had no conception of their political power and were indifferent to the vote. Thousands over the country were disfranchised by property qualifications, and one of the prime purposes of the new party would be to break these down. The immediate problem was to awaken the interest of those who, having the vote, did not appreciate the privilege. With many of these, this was due to the lack of political consciousness; with others, to the feeling that it was useless for the unimportant to attempt to influence governmental action. To the latter it would be necessary to prove the possibilities of the concerted action of large numbers of uninfluential men—and there was the Society of Tammany pointing the way. No squeamishness in the mobilization either—the possession of the vote was enough. Soon, very soon, strange, disturbing things would be seen even in New England—cabinetmakers, shoemakers, mechanics perking up on politics, with evidence of organization here and there. Federalist leaders would soon be complaining that organization was conspiracy against the ‘government.’ In New Hampshire they would be calling those uniting for political action ‘insurgents.’ The insolence of the Jeffersonians appealing to the people for support would be frowned upon as degrading. ‘Of course,’ said a Massachusetts paper, ‘there can be but two parties in a country—the friends of order and its foes.’[575]

And such people! The very riff-raff that one would never invite into one’s parlor—‘desperate, embarrassed, unprincipled, disorderly, ambitious, disaffected, morose men.’[576] Were not these the propertyless who wasted their earnings in a grogshop?[577] And who were these petty agitators? Who but ‘Jacobins’ holding forth ‘in the bar-rooms of Rhode Island and Vermont and trying to stir up opposition.’[578] Wretched offal after all—but what a pity that Jefferson should countenance, least of all cultivate, such people. ‘Mr. Jefferson appears to have shown rather too much of a disposition to cultivate vulgar prejudices,’ wrote Wolcott, and ‘accordingly he will become popular in the ale-houses.’[579]

Miserable ‘Jacobins!’ Disreputable clowns of the bar-rooms! And such unthinkable methods! Here—there—everywhere, when a few men could be gathered together, some one appeared to deliver free lectures on practical politics. And such subjects! ‘Discipline’; ‘How to Make Men Follow their File Leaders.’[580]

IV

In arousing and consolidating the widely scattered democrats, Jefferson instantly appreciated the importance of a national newspaper to the end that the farmer in Georgia, the planter in Virginia, the frontiersman in western Pennsylvania, the mechanic in Boston, the shopmen of Rhode Island, and the reds of Tammany sipping their ale in the New York tavern, might all talk the same language at the same time. True, the Jeffersonians were not without able editorial support. There was Thomas Greenleaf pounding away vigorously in the ‘New York Journal’; Thomas Adams hammering merrily in the Boston ‘Independent Chronicle’; and in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Bache was making a mild show of opposition in his ‘Pennsylvania Daily Advertiser.’ But these were independent supporters, not ‘organs,’ and it was an ‘organ’ that was needed—something to meet the Hamilton organ which was becoming increasingly offensive to the democrats.