Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

In the summer of 1816, Americans turned on Congress. Citizens from Massachusetts to South Carolina staged raucous public meetings where “several hundred persons of both political parties,” according to one contemporary, gathered to draft denunciatory resolutions, deliver angry speeches and, in some cases, stage mock court proceedings against their local House members. With a stridency heretofore unmatched in American politics, they condemned “high-handed and arbitrary” lawmakers—politicians who forced a “wanton sacrifice of our interest to their own private emolument,” perpetrators of “wrong,” “unjustifiable” and “reprehensible” actions.

This article refers to Jeffersonian Republicans, to distinguish that early political party from the modern Republican Party. It refers to republicanism as an eighteenth-century political theory, not as the ideology of the Jeffersonian Republican or modern Republican Party.

The event that precipitated this resounding censure—the “daring and profligate trespass against … the morals of the Republic”—was Congress’ passage of the Compensation Act earlier that spring. With bipartisan support from Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, Congress had increased its pay from $6 per diem to a flat annual salary of $1,500 (approximately $25,000 in current dollars). Some members derided the action as an exercise in extravagance, but a majority argued that since congressional stipends had remained flat since 1789, and the cost of living approximately doubled, it was time for a raise.


From his retirement, former President Thomas Jefferson observed, “there has never been an instant before of so much unanimous an opinion of the people, and that through every State in the Union.” Jefferson predicted that “almost the entire” Congress “will go out, not only those who supported the law or voted for it, or skulked from the vote, but those who voted against the law or opposed it, if they took the money.”

He was more or less right. Roughly 70 percent of Congress was defeated in the fall election, including a full three-quarters of the New York delegation. As Jefferson foretold, it really didn’t matter how members voted. “I have been dismissed for voting for the bill,” one ex-congressman marveled, “one of my colleagues for voting against it, and another one for not voting at all on either side.”

Over the past several weeks, commentators have drawn comparisons between recent town hall meetings—some staged by GOP congressmen; others organized by angry constituents whose Republican congressmen have dodged the voters—and similar events, driven by the rise of the Tea Party, that bedeviled Democratic lawmakers in 2010. Inspired by increasingly strong support for the Affordable Care Act, the meetings have “flipped the script” on Republicans who just seven years ago profited mightily from such popular indignation. Marco Rubio spoke for other members of his party when he explained his refusal to meet with constituents: He doesn’t want to be put in a position where people will “heckle and scream” at him.

Time will tell whether today’s town hall confrontations augur poorly for Republican members of Congress in 2018. But the example of 1816 is instructive. On its surface, the Compensation Act was the spark that lit the fire. But the real drivers of the political uprising were changes in how the public viewed politics, politicians and elite actors—changes that took the nation’s governing leaders by surprise. In 1816, many Jeffersonian Republicans who had for years encouraged a democratization of politics and expertise suddenly found themselves the focus of populist rage. Similarly, today, GOP congressmen who recently benefited from public indignation now find themselves its target.

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Richard Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who later served one term as vice president, noted that the “poor compensation bill excited more discontent than the alien or sedition laws, the quasi war with France, the internal taxes of 1789, the embargo, the late war with Great Britain, the Treaty of Ghent, or any one measure of the Government, from its existence.” This observation was an understatement.

Two hundred years before cries of “lock her up” rained down on Hillary Clinton, citizens convened ad hoc grand juries to indict their congressmen. In Georgia, they burnt members in effigy. At Fourth of July celebrations, legislators were greeted with jeers and heckles. Angry editorial remonstrations and letters-to-the-editor filled local newspapers. One editor canvassed roughly 400 of his colleagues around the country and found that the Compensation Law was “the leading topic of discussion.”

Particularly disconcerting, a New York congressman noted, was that the people turning out for public meetings “seldom if ever have been seen before on the public theatre.” These were not paid protesters. They were real voters, and they were incensed.

The people had been “thrown into convulsions,” the publisher of the Philadelphia True America observed with worry. When Congress reconvened in the fall, a dazed member expressed bewilderment that, with the full range of pressing topics before the nation, “the great Leviathan, which slept under all these grievances, should be roused into action by the Fifteen Hundred Dollar Law?”

Strictly speaking, people were angry that Congress awarded itself a pay raise when so many ordinary families were still struggling. But there were deeper undercurrents beneath the surface.

It had been less than three decades since Americans ratified their Constitution, and in that short space of time, much had changed. The nation’s founding generation had structured the country to operate as a “republic,” not a democracy. Indeed, many of them feared the proliferation of “democracy”—a term that implied factions of self-interested men, not necessarily of the highest intellectual or social caliber, competing in the political sphere over crass material concerns.

By contrast, republican ideology held that society was organic and unified: All persons shared the same fundamental interests and outlook, regardless of region, profession, income or background. Such thinking delegitimized what we regard favorably today as popular politics. In a republican society, men of education and achievement would serve as neutral stewards of the common good. Such men were “disinterested”—meaning, they owned their own land, owed no debts, and enjoyed economic independence.

Though republicanism always reflected more myth than reality, it was easy in the mid-18th century for Americans to convince themselves of its broad applicability. In a nation of small, coastal towns populated mostly by farmers—relative to later years, homogenous in ethnic and religious background—the idea of single commonweal made sense.

But the country had evolved in the years since 1776 or 1787. It grew more ethnically diverse, with a large influx of German and Scotch-Presbyterian immigrants pushing the frontier ever westward, up to and across the Alleghenies and Appalachian Mountains. More people were engaged in manufacturing and trade. There were more landless farmers, more regional economic interests, more diversity. When in 1786 the Pennsylvania legislature debated whether to recharter a state bank, a legislator from the western part of the state—William Findley, a Scotch-Irish immigrant and former weaver—challenged claims by the state’s eastern elites that they, not he, could speak to the broader common good, given their higher degree of achievement and economic independence. In fact, Findley argued, the bank’s advocates were stockholders—they “feel interested in it personally, and therefore by promoting it [are] acting as judges in their own cause.”

Far from deriding his opponents for pursuing parochial concerns, Findley argued that politics should operate as a system by which to broker competing interests. “Any others in their situation … would do as they did,” he claimed. Rather, his objection was that the eastern elites refused to drop their republican pretense. They continued to insist that men of good breeding and high achievement were somehow the guardians of public virtue. They should admit that “it is their own cause they are advocating.” In fact, Findley argued, there wasn’t just one public good; there were many public goods, and each had to be balanced against the other.

This argument presaged much of the divide between Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists over the next three decades. The former group was more comfortable with popular politics; the latter, still wedded to the spirit of republican government by the elite.

In the years leading up to the debate over the Compensation Act, the country continued to grow economically, regionally and ethnically diverse in ways that made the idea of a single organic community less plausible. Notably, in these years many states began a longer process of loosening voting requirements; whereas states originally permitted only landowning men to participate in elections, most gradually extended the ballot to white men who paid taxes or satisfied residency requirements. This trend accelerated as new territories sought to attract settlers in order to achieve statehood (and, conversely, as older states attempted to retain their residents). Consequently, elite actors gradually lost their lock on government. “The direct action of great minds on the character of our community is unquestionably less at the present period, than in former days,” observed one self-styled “great mind.”

Jeffersonian Republicans tended to encourage this democratic spirit—a spirit that also enlivened a broader sense of self-determination on the part of individuals. If elites were not the guardians of a fictitious public good, equally, they had no lock on truth or fact. In parallel with the democratization of politics and government, over the first half of the 19th century, professions like the law, medicine and ministry underwent a similar, dramatic democratization, with states loosening educational and licensing requirements. Not everyone approved of these developments. A college president in Pennsylvania anticipated with worry book titles like, “Every Man his own Lawyer,” “Every Man his own Clergyman and Confessor,” or “Every Man his own physician.”

“Truth,” grumbled a concerned Federalist, “has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.” It wasn’t for each man to make his own determination whether the Earth was round or the weather rainy.

Another opponent of this new hyper-democratic, relativist spirit warned against a world in which “the unalienable right of private judgment involves the liberty of thinking as we please on every subject.”

Yet once unbottled, the democratic spirit was tough to recapture. Americans, as Herman Melville would later write with derision, would no longer take elite opinion at face value, for “nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs.”

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In 1816, the popular revolt over the Compensation Act sounded a clarion warning that American politics was changing. To be sure, relative to the hyper-charged form it would take 20 years later during the Age of Jackson, the democratic impulse that drove public rage was still blossoming. Even as voters unseated their members of Congress by the drove, the electoral college—still comprised of the “best men” bestowed the presidency on James Monroe, the last chief executive of the founding generation, who still wore the customary breeches and powdered wig of that earlier age. The Age of Jackson would place on steroids what was still a slow-building sentiment.

For today’s Republicans, the example of 1816 offers some lessons. To be sure, the comparison is imperfect. The American party system during the early Republic was not as rigid or developed as our current system. Voters punished both Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, as the vote on the Compensation Act was bipartisan.

But the parallels are equally compelling. In the early 19th century, Jeffersonians avidly encouraged a spirit of democratic revolt. It was a revolt against elite governance, to be sure, but also against the notion that there was one common good, or one single truth. They encouraged Americans to think and act for themselves and to reject the republican faith in elite opinion and control.

Over the past 10 years, many in the Republican Party and its broad apparatus—from Fox News and Breitbart News, to the Freedom Caucus and now the Trump White House—have stoked a latter-day populist message. They have waged a war on “coastal elites,” be they climate scientists, university professors, mainstream journalists, economists or government officials. At Town Hall meetings and rallies, on cable news and radio, they’ve encouraged every voter to believe that truth is a personal and malleable concept.

Now, that same party controls every branch of government. They are the elite. And they may soon find, like members of Congress 201 years ago, that the forces of democratic populism are hard to contain, indiscriminate in whom they target and unforgiving of powerful people when they believe that those powerful people have betrayed them.