Intellectual context: republican liberty and inequality

With regard to the intellectual context, first and foremost, there is the republican tradition itself. There is no room here to make our way through the well-worn historiographical debates, but a few points must be made. Republicanism was originally understood, especially in historiography, as a politics of the common good, in which private interest was subordinated to civic virtue. J. G. A. Pocock famously understood republicanism as “civic humanism,” in which man “affirms his being and his virtue by the medium of political action.”Footnote ²⁴ Republican liberty was identified with self-government because to participate just was to be free. Public-spirited republicanism was thus at odds with the corrupting, self-interested spirit of modern commerce. This conception of republicanism has influenced the interpretation of early American republicanism, most famously Gordon Wood's,Footnote ²⁵ but also various historically informed investigations of American political and constitutional theory.Footnote ²⁶ The conflict between republican liberty and modern society, or virtue and commerce, has also influenced interpretations of early political economy, which, as we shall see, makes it difficult to understand Manning's defense of cheap credit as properly “republican.”Footnote ²⁷

However, Quentin Skinner's more recent revision of republicanism as a “neo-Roman” tradition can trace a path out of this dilemma. Skinner has demonstrated that there is a separate, “neo-Roman” theory of republican liberty that emphasizes independence, or absence of subjection to others. Unlike the Aristotelian assumptions of civic humanism, neo-Roman republicanism does not identify freedom with the exercise of political capacities.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, it is a modern “negative” theory of liberty, less hostile to modern commercial life. In the neo-Roman view freedom is independence, and independence requires self-government not because of our essentially political nature, but because it is the only way to avoid subjection to arbitrary rulers. This thought, originating in classic Roman texts, is developed by Italian humanists who argue that monarchy is a form of political slavery. This basic thought passes into the English-speaking republican tradition through figures like Harrington, Nedham, and Sidney, all of whom were important influences on American colonists.Footnote ²⁹ American republicanism inherited this particular way of speaking about freedom as independence, and dependence as slavery.

Unfortunately, the scholarly rediscovery of this neo-Roman tradition has not yet influenced historiographic debates about American republicanism. These debates remain rooted in the conflict between virtue and commerce in American republicanism.Footnote ³⁰ This thought lies behind Joyce Appleby's argument that Jefferson was more agrarian capitalist than republican,Footnote ³¹ and Gordon Wood's argument that figures like Manning, since they demanded cheap credit and access to markets, were democratic capitalists rather than republican anticapitalists.Footnote ³² However, from the neo-Roman perspective, there is no necessary conflict between republican liberty and commerce. The main concern is with independence, and the social, political and economic conditions that maintain that independence. Taking this thought seriously is a necessary condition for us to understand the way Manning's defense of credit and participation in market exchange is derived from a more fundamental, republican concern with independence.

Intellectual context: independence and servitude

It is important, however, to note that Manning inherited an aristocratic, inegalitarian republican tradition. The classical republics had slaves, precisely because the independence of some seemed presupposed the slavery of others. Though small, property-owning producers could be considered independent, the ideal condition of independence was that of the leisured, property-holding gentleman. Cicero wrote, “there is no kind of gainful employment that is better, more fruitful, more pleasant and more worthy of a free man than agriculture,” and made clear that by agriculture he meant not farming but landed wealth.Footnote ³³ Even the more egalitarian of early modern republicans, like James Harrington, inherited this kind of thought. Harrington insisted that all citizens must be equally independent freeholders,Footnote ³⁴ and that the first distribution of persons in a commonwealth was “into freemen or citizens, and servants.”Footnote ³⁵ The connection between a gentlemanly independence and property-holding was a defining feature of American republicanism,Footnote ³⁶ and came from a reading of the Classics as well as from British commonwealthmen like Harrington.Footnote ³⁷ Jefferson famously commented in his Notes on the State of Virginia, “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”Footnote ³⁸ Jefferson is clear that the “dependents” he has in mind are urban laborers, and that the “designs of ambition” were designs on property.Footnote ³⁹ Historians have observed that figures like Jefferson and Madison appeared to be trapped in a “paradox of slavery and freedom,”Footnote ⁴⁰ because the only substitute for mobs of laborer–citizens was rightless laborers, or slaves, who would not threaten property. Independence appeared to be a non-universalizable ideal.

Manning was not formally educated, so he would not have known the aristocratic lineage just traced. Yet he was well enough aware of these problems. They would have appeared in his careful reading of the papers available to him, especially the Boston-based Independent Chronicle, to which subscribed, and to which he unsuccessfully submitted Key of Libberty for publication.Footnote ⁴¹ Though Manning mostly does not name his sources, we know he was especially interested in the history and theory of free republics, and read whatever he could get his hands on. We know he was especially taken with the writings of the “Free Republican,” author of ten learned essays on the history and theory of republics, published from mid-November 1785 through mid-January 1786 in the Independent Chronicle. The Free Republican we know to be Benjamin Lincoln, a Massachusetts Federalist, but Manning would not have known that.Footnote ⁴² Manning considered the Free Republican's ten essays “the gratest collection of historical accounts” of the “antiant Republicks” available.

Lincoln's essays were a perfect expression of the aristocratic republicanism Manning inherited. For instance, Lincoln wrote of “a difference of interests existing in all governments at the very moment of their institution . . . In republics they may all of them be easily and directly traced to the rights of persons and of property.”Footnote ⁴³ But Lincoln's view, unlike Manning's, was that the rights of person and of property thus deserved separate consideration. Lincoln's essays were most immediately an endorsement of the Massachusetts Constitution, where the Senate “represents [the] rights of property,” mainly through office-holding requirements and property restrictions, and in which members of the House “represent the personal rights of the Community” because all males could vote for them. Lincoln saw here a piece of eternal political wisdom: “that no law can take place, without twofold consent of persons and of property, [is] the essence of civil liberty.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Lincoln, Federalist that he was, here defended a long-standing aristocratic thought, traceable back to Cicero's claim that “it is the proper function of a . . . city to ensure for everyone a free and unworried guardianship of his possessions.”Footnote ⁴⁵ If republican government had the people as its basis, nevertheless, a mixed government was required to guarantee the rights of property, and to check the people's power.

Moreover, Lincoln took the position that, if the conflict between the Few and the Many threatened republics, “the cause, progress, and completion of their ruin” arose “from the ignorance and follies of the people” who ignored the “eminence” of the few, virtuous citizens, and instead fell into “faction and cabal.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Blaming decline on the ignorance of the Many is a further, long-standing, aristocratic thought, which, as we shall see, Manning was to invert. In all, then, the republicanism that Manning inherited assumed rather profound economic inequalities, and held that the Many were ignorant and untrustworthy. They were the legitimate foundations, perhaps, but not the regular springs of republican government.

Social Context: “class” and the early republic

To understand Manning's use of terms like “Few” and “Many” we need also to appreciate the more local historical conditions of the 1780s and 1790s that they were meant to grasp. It is well known that poor artisans and farmers, like Manning, adopted the revolutionary republican tradition to assert their own concerns, which created an environment in which a “democratization” of republicanism was possible.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, they did so in a socially extremely fluid moment, which makes the use of inherited “class” terminology difficult to interpret. Manning, owner of a tavern and investor in public works,Footnote ⁴⁸ would have experienced at first hand the postwar urbanizationFootnote ⁴⁹ and integration into national and global networks of trade.Footnote ⁵⁰ The general effect was to sunder local, town-based identifications, and lay the foundations for a nationalization of political and social identities. This would be crucial for the rise of a national, Republican Party in the 1790s, around the unity of large and small farmer interests, but also for an increasing sense of one's membership in a national society and economy, rather than just in a local social order.

Furthermore, revolutionary republicanism made “the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave,”Footnote ⁵¹ or all hereditary power, the object of political critique. This issued in the Constitutional abolition of “title[s] of Nobility,”Footnote ⁵² elimination of “the unjust and unnatural law of primogeniture,”Footnote ⁵³ and all other legal privileges. This, too, altered the social context. The modern conception of class, as an economically determined social position, presupposes the separation of property and sovereignty, itself only possible when privileges are eliminated. As Martin J. Burke has observed, “the changes wrought by the formation and articulation of the new state and federal constitutions did serve to remove the political and legal referents of the older taxonomic scheme.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The “older taxonomic scheme” was the “socioconstitutional” language of “orders” and “estates,” or legally determined positions that connected social status and political power. The newer “socioeconomic” language of class referred to occupations and to shared economic interests amongst different occupations. Thus the social referent for traditional categories like “the Few” and “the Many” had changed. It created the conditions in which someone like Manning could group merchants, speculators, judges, and lawyers into “the Few” and be referring to something closer to a modern class than to the medieval estate.

A quick comparison between Manning and the Free Republican clarifies the point. The Free Republican essays were almost entirely preoccupied with institutional questions—how the separation of powers, bicameralism, and federalism guaranteed republican liberty. Ten years later, though recalling these essays in his Key of Libberty, Manning makes no mention of these institutional questions. As we shall see, he focuses instead on social and economic questions regarding the economy, education, and political association. The terrain of debate over republican ideas had shifted in response to a growing awareness that the abolition of legal privilege, and the perfection of constitutional design, resolved one set of questions only to raise new ones.

This is not to say that economic and social questions were therefore no longer seen as “political.” Quite the opposite. Hamilton's 1790–91 issuance of the “Report on the Public Credit” and “Report on Manufactures”Footnote ⁵⁵ famously led to his falling out with his former collaborator, Madison, whose rebuttal, “A Republican Distribution of Citizens,”Footnote ⁵⁶ pointed to a deep problem. It turned out that merely abolishing legal privileges, and designing a constitution, failed adequately to produce a republican society. That the ensuing debate over fiscal and economic policy occurred through the terms of “aristocracy” and “democracy” indicates the degree to which the republican tradition remained up for grabs.Footnote ⁵⁷

These were debates that Manning followed in the Independent Chronicle, and would have experienced at first hand as a selectman and then town constable and tax collector in Billerica in 1786–7.Footnote ⁵⁸ They were also vividly dramatized during the various agrarian uprisings or “Regulations,” including the famous Shays's Rebellion in Manning's home state of Massachusetts.Footnote ⁵⁹ Struggles over public finance, debt, and land had a long history in Massachusetts and the other recently formed states, before and during the Revolution.Footnote ⁶⁰ But they had acquired a new valence in the 1790s because access to credit and new tax burdens threatened the ability of small producers to retain control of productive property, thereby threatening their independence. It was the struggle to retain their independence, or republican freedom, which spurred these groups to deploy terms like “aristocracy” and “democracy.”Footnote ⁶¹ It is in this context that we can appreciate the way Manning yoked republican ideals to economic analysis.

Democratic capitalist?

According to Gordon Wood, Manning ought to be read against the background of a Jeffersonian Republican critique of the leisured gentleman.Footnote ⁶⁸ The ideal of leisured independence, inherited from antiquity via the Framers, was attacked as part of an aristocratic reading of republican principles. The great achievement of Jeffersonians like Manning was that they “brought aristocratic leisure into contempt and turned labor into a universal badge of honor.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The defense of “the Many” against “the Few” was never meant to attack anything like capitalism or economic inequalities. It aimed only at raising the dignity of the laborer—whether industrialist, farmer, or hired hand—and to critique the aristocratic pretensions of many Federalists, who continued to idealize the dignity and virtue of the propertied gentry.

According to Wood, Manning was a homespun, authentic version of the democratic attack on this ideal. He was one of those hardworking Republicans who deployed egalitarian language to usher in a new capitalist order. Manning “was much more than a small farmer in his little developing town of Billerica; he was as well an improver and a small-time entrepreneurial hustler.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Noting that Manning “was a fervent defender of paper money and of state banks,” Wood argues that “it was the energy and hard work of America's laboring people, and not any great resources of specie, that supported the credit of bank notes.”Footnote ⁷¹ Credit spurred technological investment, and the participation of small farmers and manufacturers in global markets. Thus Manning and his ilk defended the new, moveable, financial property of the market against the immobile, landed property of the gentry, who stood in the way of expanded markets.Footnote ⁷² Manning “and his hard-working Republican ‘laborers’ were the main force behind America's capitalist market revolution. For good or for ill, American capitalism was created by American democracy.”Footnote ⁷³

Wood's reading is powerful and corrective. It cautions against hasty, anachronistic readings, and reminds us of the way capitalism had to win acceptance. It conforms to Joyce Appleby's argument that when Republican “hoi polloi challenged and unseated the Federalist elite” in 1800, “they endowed American capitalism with the moral force of their vision of a social order of free and independent men.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The problem, however, is that Wood reads the rise of capitalism backwards into Manning's ideas. Wood implies that the “democratic” dimensions of Manning's republicanism are a moral superstructure, significant only for the way they ideologically defended the work ethic and free enterprise. When or if republican principles conflict with capitalism, the former give way to the latter. This, however, is a teleological reading of Manning, which reverses what is logically prior in Manning's thought. It thereby eliminates an appreciation of Manning's critical appropriation of republicanism, and of the intellectual possibilities of post-Revolutionary republicanism more broadly.

The political economy of dependence

A closer analysis of Manning's Some Proposals reveals that the relationship between republican ideals and economic analysis is considerably more complex. Contra Wood, Manning does not show unconditional respect for the pursuit of profit. Rather, Manning's main worry is a republican one regarding the independence of citizens. Some Proposals provides an analysis of how citizens can be made economically dependent, and defends state intervention in the market to maintain the equal independence of citizens. Manning's defense of cheap credit, which Wood uses to support his interpretation, must be read against the background concern with dependence. Read this way, we see the beginnings of a republican critique of modern forms of inequality.

To begin with, recall that Manning's proposal was to pay current possessors national debt 40 percent of the value, and the original creditors (men like him, though he never bought a bondFootnote ⁷⁵) 60 percent.Footnote ⁷⁶ It then called for paper money, easier credit, and new notes funded by progressive taxation, all so as to ease debt burdens on farmers. Wood says that “these calls for paper money in the 1780s were the calls of American business,”Footnote ⁷⁷ but we can immediately see one problem with Wood's reading of Manning as a defender of credit and the free market: Manning wanted to use the power of the state to violate the legal claims that current owners of debt possessed, despite the legality of their transactions.

Moreover, Manning did not just make his proposal in the name of a moral limit on the market or “moral economy.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Rather, Manning wanted to show how the original creditors had been forced to sell their debt certificates, and thus expose underlying economic coercion. Manning first observes that many debt-owning soldiers discovered after the war that the government was unable to pay back-wages for military service. These peasant–soldiers had been “sent home to their Needy famelyes with nothing but Cirtificates.” They had little reason to value these certificates, since the “Government . . . had Brock their promoses Somanitimes [so many times].”Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet even as it left these creditors with unredeemable certificates, the same governments that had devalued their bonds was “compelling them to pay their private Debts & taxes in hard Money.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Manning's analysis was astute—historians have argued that Shays's Rebellion, and other “Regulations” from the 1780s, were a response to just these conditions.Footnote ⁸¹

Manning concludes from the way the government accentuated economic hardship, and from the way private speculators capitalized on it, that the original creditors, facing debtors’ prisons or starvation, were coerced into selling their certificates. Compelled by economic need, they thus “acted More Like persons beset with Robers & prudently Delivered up their purses Rather than their Lives.”Footnote ⁸² Formally free individual transactions concealed systematic economic compulsion. Average farmers may have been nominally independent, but were structurally dependent on creditors. The means by which economic policies “Destress the prices of Land Labour & produce” were what allowed the Few to “bring us in to Lordships.”Footnote ⁸³ Their structural dependence was the product debt law, tax policy, money supply, and property distribution.

It is clear, then, that Manning evaluates economic relationships from the standpoint of a republican concern with independence, and with a special eye to the way economic relationships can be systematically organized to create the dependence of some on others. Manning was later to generalize this thought to argue that “scarsety of money always brings the many Into distress & compels them into a state of dependance on the few for favours & assistance in a thousand ways.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Here it is especially clear that his defense of cheap credit, paper money, and progressive taxation was thus aimed at promoting citizens’ independence, or ability to maintain control of productive property.Footnote ⁸⁵

It is true that Manning does not follow the agrarian radicalism of Paine or Jefferson, and the republican tradition to which they appealed, in arguing against inheritance and for land redistribution.Footnote ⁸⁶ But that is at least in part because he thought that what mattered was the preservation of independence. Here is where credit, taxes, and money supply mattered most. It is also a sign that Manning was thinking about how not just farmers, but all laborers, could avoid debt-related dependency. Wood therefore moves too quickly when suggesting that Manning is a capitalist in democratic clothing. Manning's arguments for paper money and open markets is derived from a view that economic relations must promote independence.

In this respect, we can understand Manning as an antecedent to nineteenth-century labor republicans.Footnote ⁸⁷ Of course, Manning wrote before the rise of industrial capitalism. He could not possibly have gone as far as to argue that the only way to “engraft republican principles into our industrial system”Footnote ⁸⁸ is “to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefor.”Footnote ⁸⁹ However, like labor republicans, Manning sees the economy as a separate domain, onto which republican principles must be “engrafted.” Moreover, like later labor republicans, Manning insists on exposing the artificial, rather than natural, basis of inequalities. His antagonist, the Free Republican, saw the distinction between the Few and the Many as part of the immutable, natural order: “We are not to quarrel with the definition of things, but must take mankind as we find them.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Manning, on the other hand, showed how economic dependence was in fact the artificial product of law and policy, and thus subject to political control. This denaturalization of economic inequality was a key move for the development of a more egalitarian, democratic interpretation of republican principles.Footnote ⁹¹

In Some Proposals, Manning's critique of dependence is limited to an analysis of economic coercion. By the time he writes Key of Libberty his concerns have widened and deepened. It is to this political theory of the dependent classes that we now turn.

The “Causes that Ruen Republicks” and the interest in equality

Composing the Key of Libberty in 1797, Manning returns to the Free Republican's ten essays, published a decade earlier in the Independent Chronicle. In an opening passage of Key of Libberty Manning writes,

As we have noted, the Free Republican argued that “the cause, progress, and completion of their ruin” arose “from the ignorance and follies of the people” who ignored the “eminence” of the few, virtuous citizens, and instead fell into “faction and cabal.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Only the Few possessed the virtue and competence to put the public interest ahead of private benefit.

Manning's own “General Description of the Causes that Ruen Republicks”Footnote ⁹⁹ self-consciously inverts the Free Republican's formulation. In Some Proposals, Manning had already begun developing the argument that the partial interests of the Few are permanently at odds with republican equality, while the partial interests of the Many are consistent with the republican commitment to equality. As we shall see, he picks up and extends this argument's political implications. It is for this reason that Manning believes that the destruction of republics “always arises from the ungoverned dispositions & Combinations of the few, & the ignorance of the Many.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Aware that this formulation could mislead the reader to blame the Few and the Many in equal proportions, Manning subsequently clarifies that “the Reasons why a free government has always failed is from the unreasonable demands & desires of the few.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This clarification is possible because of the way Manning links basic interests to political agency. The Few, given their interests, are fundamentally the agents of destruction because, if the Many knew their interests, they would not willingly undermine republican institutions. It is worth dwelling separately on Manning's analysis of each—the Few and the Many—to appreciate the way he connects partial interests and the common good.

The interests of the Few

In Manning's account, since the Few maintain their independence only by keeping laborers dependent, their basic interest is in maintaining inequality. If “they are interested in having mony scarse & the price of labour & produce as low as possible,” this is not just because this increases their “interest, rents, salaryes, & fees,”Footnote ¹⁰² but because their ability to earn such profits rests on their ability to make laborers dependent. Importantly, here Manning has expanded the analysis of Some Proposals, where he was mainly concerned with credit and money supply. In Key of Libberty the one unchanging interest is not in a specific monetary or fiscal policy but in the kinds of economic inequality that make laborers dependent on the Few. Since a republic is based on equal independence, this means that the Few must be “ever opposed to the prinsaples & operations of a free Government.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The basic interests of the Few influence both their subjective dispositions and their political activities. At the level of opinion,

For Manning, the clearest evidence of the Few's aristocratic aspirations is the effort to elevate the status of their occupations. “All these professions naturally unite in their skems to make their callings as honourable & lucrative as possible,” while disparaging common labor as a sign of mental and moral inferiority.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Moreover, since the Few enjoy the rare luxury of “ease & rest from Labour,” they develop “a sense of superiority” and “look down with two much contempt on those that labour.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Here fundamental interests shape opinion and political will.

Shared interests and create common opinions, which draw the Few together in associations for advancing their collective ends. Thinking of the Society of Cincinnati, a post-Revolutionary association of gentlemen seeking to defend their privileges,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Manning recalls the argument from Some Proposals regarding the way “powerfull Men Combine”:Footnote ¹⁰⁸ “these orders of men generally asotiate together” to protect these interests.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These associations are the purest expression of the Few's political agency. That is why Manning believes that the historical role of the Few is that “by their combinations, arts & skeems [they] have always made out to destroy [republican liberty] soner or later.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ If the Few are not always and everywhere openly hostile to republican principles, they are perpetually driven to undermine them by eroding equality as much as possible.

To be sure, Manning states that “their is a large number in all orders who are true frinds to Libberty,”Footnote ¹¹¹ but he qualifies even this concession: “I also believe that a large majority of them are actuated by very different prinsaples.”Footnote ¹¹² Thus Manning's argument is an inversion of the conventional republican formula. The interests of the Few are antagonistic to republican freedom and equality. By deriving opinions and political agency from these shared interests, Manning casts doubt on the capacity of the Few to act in the common interest.

The expansiveness of Manning's argument can be appreciated in comparison with other Jeffersonians. For instance, Benjamin Austin, writing as “Honestus” in the Independent Chronicle, also criticized the Free Republican's ten essays for overlooking how the Few kept the Many in dependence. Yet Austin focused narrowly on how “the distress of the people” was caused by “the conduct of some practitioners of the law,”Footnote ¹¹³ and Austin's own ten essays were an overwrought screed against the legal profession.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Matthew Lyons, a Vermont Republican and editor, penned “Twelve Reasons against a Free People's Employing Practitioners in the Law, as Legislators” to express the familiar complaint that lawyers preserved their privilege by making the law as complicated as possible.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Unlike these republicans, Manning's perspective was structural, defined by an analysis of fundamental interests that unified distinct “orders” into a kind of class. To be sure, a few Republicans, like George Logan, used the broader language of the Few and the Many.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But, as we shall see, in Manning's hands this republican discourse moved beyond the familiar Republican critiques of privilege or defenses of the free press to a deeper theory of the Many as bearers of the common interest.

The interests of the Many

If the fundamental interests of the Few make them hostile to equality, the opposite is true of the Many. That is because their relationship to their labor gives them an interest in avoiding dependence, and puts them in a position to recognize the political tendencies of the Few. As Manning puts it,

The laborer's immediate interest in not being exploited is what makes him attentive to those conditions that tend to produce dependence. Moreover, this interest creates a specific idea of what kind of equality matters in a republic: equal independence.

To be clear, Manning is concerned with more than identifying the conditions of a republican political economy, and of showing how his society fails to realize these conditions. He also wishes to identify the agents within society that have an interest in realizing those conditions. This is essential to the development of a political theory of the dependent classes. Manning does not put much faith in the state, on its own, sustaining a commitment to republican principles. Indeed, Manning writes well before constitutionalism is understood purely through the idea that higher law is itself implemented by a branch of the state.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In this sense, Merrill and Wilentz may be too quick to suggest that Manning prefigures a kind of constitutional-democratic politics of social reform. They emphasize that “constitutionalism” here means seeking social change within procedural limits determined by higher law. Manning, however, draws on a republican tradition that understands the constitution as the entire social order, articulated in its distinct institutions and orders. Consistent with republican thinking, he believes that a free state requires virtuous citizens.

Importantly, though, Manning does not conceive of civic virtue in terms of a distinction between partial interests and common good. As we saw in the first section of this essay, the distinction between private interests and the common good has informed a great deal of historical work on republicanism. Manning, however, takes a different approach. He accepts that interests cannot be evacuated from politics. However, he believes that he has successfully distinguished between those partial interests that threaten a republic and those partial interests that, when perceived correctly, are consistent with and promote the public good. Manning thus confidently states that his political theory is valid “so long as Selfe Interest governs Men.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The key to Manning's political theory lies with this fusion of interest and virtue. The general interest is not suspended above all particular interests. The general interest is, rather, an identity of interests between those of the dependent class and the republic as a whole. That is why Manning thinks that liberty will be best defended when the “Labourer [will] watch the other with a jelous eye.”Footnote ¹²⁰

What is so striking about this argument is that Manning subverts the conventional understanding of the relationship between virtue and dependence without stepping outside republicanism itself. On one account, embraced by thinkers like Jefferson, dependence is equivalent to the lack of virtue: “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”Footnote ¹²¹ On Manning's argument, we can only consistently expect virtue from the potentially dependent class, insofar as they are the only ones likely to defend republican equality from aristocratic aspirations. Of course, dependence is not a virtue so much as a condition to be resisted. But it is most likely to be resisted by those who have an interest in avoiding it, i.e. the potentially dependent themselves.

The deep question, then, is why, given Manning's analysis, the laboring classes do not always act in this way. Here is where Manning's arguments regarding the “ignorance of the Many,” and ideas about education and public opinion, round out his analysis of interest and virtue.

“The Ignorance of the Many” and mental dependence

One of the most innovative elements of Key of Libberty is the expansion of Manning's analysis of dependence to include mental, not just economic, subjection. This analysis of mental dependence arises out of the attempt to analyze how the Many are made “to act Conterary to their own interests.”Footnote ¹²² He concludes that they hold mistaken opinions about these interests because of their mental dependence on the Few: “the Ignorance of the Many,” and monopolies on “Larning” and “knowledge,” are some of the key “Meens by which the few Destroy” republics.Footnote ¹²³ Here again, Manning reworks republican themes. Rejecting the long-standing republican distrust of the “mob,” which he detected in the Free Republican,Footnote ¹²⁴ Manning blames the Few for keeping the Many mentally, not just materially, dependent.

Ignorance, the constitutive principle of despotism

Manning considered ignorance a despotic principle: “it is the universal custom & practis of monorcal & dispotick government to train up their subjects as much in ignorance as they can in matters of government.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The spirit of ignorance, for Manning, is despotic, not merely monarchical, because all non-republican governments are founded on dependence, and thus servility. In a tacit swipe at Federalists, Manning argued that revolutionaries did not always carry through on their promise to overthrow despotic practices. Revolutions are initially controlled “by the influence of a few leeding men”Footnote ¹²⁶ because, under the ancien régime, the Many were kept in ignorance. In the revolutionary aftermath, the Few lose touch with republican ideals. They “can neaver receive compensation & honours anough from the people for their services,” and exploit the habitual “reverence & respect” ingrained in the people under the ancien regime.Footnote ¹²⁷ The continued ignorance of the Many means that “they go on old ways & neglect to search & see for themselves & take care of their own interists.”Footnote ¹²⁸

In this last quote, Manning makes the important connection between mental dependence and his analysis of fundamental interests. Ignorance is the constitutive principle of despotism because it keeps the Many from acting in their true interests. Thus even if the “ignorance of the many” has brought down some free republics, the Many are only a proximate agent. They have no fundamental interest in other forms of government, and thus would not naturally develop opinions favoring servile forms of government. Ignorance is not a natural characteristic of most persons, but rather maintained by contingent features of the social order. What, specifically, are these features?

The reproduction of mental dependence: education and the press

Manning's analysis of the residual effects of monarchy—a real concern in his time—is but a prelude to his analysis of how the Many are kept ignorant: the restriction of learning and public knowledge. For instance, one of the means by which the Few destroy republics is by transforming learning into a privilege rather than a universal right. They play up “the advantages of costly collages, national acadimyes & grammer schools” but they “are always opposed to cheep schools & woman schools, the ondly or prinsaple means by which larning is spred amongue the Many.”Footnote ¹²⁹ One of Manning's most novel proposals is for universal, state-funded public schools: “no student or scholer to pay anything for tuition.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Alongside free public education, equally important “for a free man to have” is knowledge of contemporary affairs. This is best guaranteed “by the liberty of the Press, or publick Newspapers.”Footnote ¹³¹ Here too Manning believes that the Few limit access. Manning was aware that Federalists thought that freedom of association and of the press should be limited when they threaten social order.Footnote ¹³² Washington's notorious critique of “certain self-created societies,”Footnote ¹³³ nominally an attack on Democratic-Republican societies, appeared to sanction generalized hostility to republicans and their presses.Footnote ¹³⁴ Manning may also have been thinking about the debates, heating up just as he finished the second draft of the Key of Libberty, over what became the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.Footnote ¹³⁵

Yet more original is Manning's analysis of the way, even when legal restrictions are absent, the Few effectively constrain a free press by attempting to make the press “as costly as posable” and by generating propaganda. They produce as much “falsehood” as possible so as “to contradict everything in them that favours the interests of the Many.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Manning had most immediately in mind the money poured into supporting Federalist papers.Footnote ¹³⁷ In a draft of the Key Manning identifies the “promiscuous pile of Contradictions & nonsence as is printed nowadays” as the “Very Reason” why laborers need their own sources of information.Footnote ¹³⁸ With their ability to control what is published, the Few make the formal freedom of the press serve their interest by burying good information in a pile of misinformation. This insight drove Manning past many republicans, who merely emphasized formal freedoms of speech and press. Manning gave theoretical grounds for creating separate, affordable papers for laborers “that can be red with confidence as to their truth.”Footnote ¹³⁹

Beyond mental dependence

With his analysis of ignorance, Manning extends his account of dependence to include mental, not just material, subjection. This allows him to further develop his argument that dependence is not natural but artificial, and thus subject to change. Richard Hofstadter thus woefully misread Manning's arguments here as “a current of anti-intellectualism” to be “found in some of the earliest expressions of popular political thought.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This was not some populist critique of education, but rather a political critique of mental dependence. Indeed, it is important that, when Manning argues that the “the ondly Remidi is knowledge,” he has in mind is not just basic skills required to succeed in business. Manning is evaluating education in republican terms, i.e. the requirements of citizenship. Hence the “Knowledge nesecary for every freeman to have” includes knowledge of human nature, of social organization, of the “prinsaples of the government & Constitution,” of “all the laws that immediately consarnes his conduct & interests,” and of political debates and activities.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Some of this knowledge undoubtedly can be learned through public schooling. But Manning has little faith that any but the laborers themselves will generate the forums within which this knowledge can be acquired. That is why Manning makes the core of his political theory a call for a self-consciously organized “Sociaty of Labourers,”Footnote ¹⁴² which he called the “Labouring Society.”Footnote ¹⁴³ This organization takes the disaggregated, ignorant masses and combines them into agents who recognize their shared interest as laborers. Manning's critique of mental dependence thus culminates in this dramatic proposal for a national political organization of laborers.

“The Labouring Society” the agency of the dependent classes

At the end of the Key of Libberty Manning argues that the “Remidy against these evils”—of an aristocratic society existing within a formally republican government—is a “Labouring Society.” This Laboring Society is imagined as a national association “composed of all Republicans & Labourers in the United States,”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ organized in local chapters. Its main activity would be the production of a magazine that would supply “The Knowledge nesecary for every freeman,”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ the monitoring of officials, and the organization and instruction of laborers. Manning was so convinced of the value of a political organization of laborers that he even hoped that “this Society might be organised throughout the world.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Only if the dependent classes were able to organize and articulate their majoritarian will would governments around the world be forced to act in the interests of all, not the few.

On Manning's account, there are a number of ways the Laboring Society could form laborers into a politically effective body. The society's cheap magazine would reach and educate laborers who “cannot bear the Expence of the time & Money they [ordinarily] cost.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Once laborers are “furnished with the meens of knowledge” then the deceptions of the Few will be “detected & surprised.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ It would also keep to a minimum those whose are “Easily Bribed to act Conterary to their own interests,” in part by publicizing these ignorant practices.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It would give organizational form to that “Large Majority that would Read-See-&-think & act in Elections for their true Interest & would Jealously Seport a free government.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The society would “pay close attention to the choice of jurimen & make a common cause of detecting male administration & breaches of law by the Juditial & Executive officers,”Footnote ¹⁵¹ and at election time counsel its members on how to vote only for those who “are true Republicans.”Footnote ¹⁵² If public officials still ignored the laborer's voice, the society could resort to “Conventions, Remonstrances & petition,”Footnote ¹⁵³ and even “manage impeachments.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The overall effect would be to make all public officials “feel as acting in the presents of their Constituants & act as servents & not masters.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In this way, the society could reverse the relationship of dependence between laborers and representatives.

It is worth recalling the political environment in which Manning made such a startling proposal for political organization. The Democratic-Republican clubs, which had set the precedent for national clubs organized through state-level chapters, had peaked and were in some decline. Washington had condemned these“self-created societies” and blamed them for the Whiskey Rebellion.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Federalists appeared to have the upper hand, as they were on the verge of restricting the political activities of Republicans through the Alien and Sedition Acts.

While Manning embraces some of the political positions of the Democratic-Republican clubs, he nonetheless proposes something significantly new. He takes as his model not the Democratic-Republicans but the Society of Cincinnati, whose members included Federalist luminaries like Washington and Hamilton, which was international in character, and which Manning saw as a self-aware political organization of the Few.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Manning wanted one of these for the Many. And in making such a proposal, Manning was also departing from a good deal of the Republican mainstream, who could only theorize partial associations as attempts to claim privileges. For instance, George Logan, in his Five Letters Addressed to the Yeoman, which Jefferson distributed as campaign material for the Republican Party, distinguished between the Few and the Many, but placed all his emphasis on the fact that the “numerous, laborious, and useful class of citizens, have never come forward to Government to solicit partial privileges; have never sought to be incorporated as a distinct body, forming a separate interest from the community at large.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ That was because to Logan, and many Republicans, all combinations were an attempt to reconstitute aristocratic privilege: “it is not the distinctions of titles which constitutes an aristocracy: it is the principle of partial association.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Manning was in a sense more forward-looking and realistic than this. Manning rejected the thought that mere legal protections against combinations of the few, or abstract arguments against “partial associations,” could guarantee the general interest. A theory of the agents whose “separate interests” were most closely aligned with the common good was necessary, along with an understanding of how they could grasp these shared concerns and act on them. This required forming just one of those “distinct bodies” Logan disliked. Manning's Laboring Society is a self-organization of laborers on the basis of their common, generalizable interests. That Manning purposefully proposed an alternative both to the Democratic-Republican clubs, who were still active, and the dominant thinking of the Republican Party suggests that the Laboring Society is a new contribution to thinking about the kinds of political organizations and social associations compatible with republican politics.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The Laboring Society was to form and express the political agency of the dependent classes.

In this light, Merrill and Wilentz are correct to say that Manning thinks that the political will of the society, ideally speaking, is best articulated through means of a “free elective government.” But it is incomplete for them, and other interpreters, to claim that “the heart of Manning's political critique . . . was an abiding faith in the ideals of constitutional democracy.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ To be sure, interpreters like Merrill and Wilentz have suggested that Manning's view of “constitutional democracy” includes extra-institutional activities like petitioning and the press as essential, not peripheral, means of political action,Footnote ¹⁶² and, moreover, that Manning seeks “a vehicle that would help turn the Few and their friends out of office and replace them with reliable democratic republicans.”Footnote ¹⁶³ However, “the heart of Manning's political critique” is the way he theorizes how dependent classes can transform themselves into agents in their own emancipation. That is the role of the Laboring Society, and of the press and public activities in which the society engages. He seeks to prove wrong the “Enemies to free government [who] have always bin crying out that there is not Virtue or knowledge enough among my brother Labourers.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ It is for this reason that it is legitimate to see Manning as anticipating those nineteenth-century democratic movements, like the Workingmen's Parties of the 1830s and 1840s, or the Knights of Labor of the 1870s and 1880s, which used republican principles to criticize exploitation and to defend the political participation of laborers.