William Cobbett and American society in the age of the French Revolution

The Englishman William Cobbett is most often remembered as a politically radical and indefatigable social crusader who toured his early nineteenth-century homeland on horseback chronicling the suffering of the population imposed by a corrupt electoral and monetary system he called The Thing. His powerful writings have cast such a wide shadow that few remember Cobbett had once led a very different life as the greatly feared American pamphleteer Peter Porcupine.; With the same energy, muscular prose and combative instincts that characterized his later English writings, Peter Porcupine warned the Americans of social and political devastation. In 1790s Philadelphia, however, the source of misery was republicanism. Cobbett admonished Americans under the spell of Jefferson and French revolutionary ideology that such ideas would not lead to greater political stability, happiness, or personal liberty. He charged that the concept of popular sovereignty actually made a dangerously unstable foundation for government.; The United States offered a "pursuit of happiness" with the promise that republicanism provided the best chance of actually arriving at that illusive state. This rankled the Englishman who pointed to the widespread personal suffering unleashed by revolution on the continent. The republican state was a machine, he argued, that ground up individuals and tore apart families. By leveling the natural social hierarchy and flooding the nation with aliens whose republicanism was informed only by a desire to see the destruction of the old order, Jeffersonian republicanism would produce the same turmoil in the United States. One simply had to look at the miasma created by slavery, Cobbett challenged, to assess the strength of the promised republican brand of happiness.; The Porcupine writings were exceptionally popular. At its peak Porcupine's Gazette had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the United States and clearly resonated with readers of a conservative nature who viewed the brave new world of republican innovation with discomfort. There are few studies that devote attention to Cobbett's American work or consider it as reflecting the complexity of the Federalist era, the stress that accompanied the closing years of the eighteenth-century and the audacious project of forming the new republic.