Limits to Democracy in the Early Republic, Thesis

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limits to democracy in the early republic, as its first president George Washington reflected the elitist view of the federalists in his approach to the executive branch of government. As Patrick Henry stated in 1788, "The Constitution is said to have beautiful features, but when I come to examine these features…they appear to me horridly frightful…it squints towards monarchy," (p. 146). According to Henry, the "President may easily become King," a fact that should "raise indignation in the breast of every American," (p. 146). Henry was himself not concerned with issues related to race, class, or gender, but he did understand the ideals of the democracy when he lamented, "Whither is the spirit of America gone? Whither is the genius of America fled?" (146). This question can easily be posed to point out the gross hypocrisy in denying Constitutional rights to more than half the population living in the borders of the new nation -- to all of its people of color and to all of its women. At this stage of the Republic term limits for presidents had yet to be set, which is why Patrick Henry was alarmed. Even without framing the potential pitfalls of American government as related to race and gender, Henry did understand there were other pressing issues at stake. Those issues remained unresolved by the Constitution and would remain so even after many of the Amendments to the Constitution were drafted in the Bill of Rights. The most notable exceptions to the extension of rights and liberties to all American citizens were women and non-whites. Washington could not recognize his own hypocrisy when he stated that the United States would "give bigotry no sanction," (p. 147). The United States was formed a few years after the cotton gin was invented; the machine would transform the American economy and highlight the social, economic, and political injustices ironically built into the Constitution.

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As the early republic recognized the need for financial security and independence, given its recent break from the crown, it saw that one of its most lucrative industries was located on the Southern plantations. The South was producing tobacco and cotton in record output, thanks to a mechanical invention that single-handedly transformed the nature of the cotton industry. That invention was the cotton gin. The cotton gin promoted a rapid harvest, enabling early forms of division of labor even before the Industrial Revolution was in swing. Bailey points out that the cotton gin is directly linked to "the inhumane enslavement of African peoples to work as slaves and the impact of the slave trade and slavery in the South," (35).

The invention of the cotton gin would also highlight the ways the political imbalances of power were related to socio-economic status. Socio-economic status was in turn linked directly to race and gender. As early as 1791, Alexander Hamilton seemed to presage the way division of labor would become a central issue in American politics and economics. Division of labor creates a stratified society, far from the one that Patrick Henry and other idealists would have envisioned. The division of labor was not only manifest in the ways slaves occupied the lowest rung of the labor totem pole, but also in the ways women of all races were systematically excluded from participating in the burgeoning capitalist enterprise that was the United States. Matthaei, for example, points out….....

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