Upon arriving at a Maryland tavern in 1744, Dr Alexander Hamilton (not to be confused with the more famous secretary of the treasury) found himself seated amid a ‘drunken club’ of lower-class men. He was revolted by the ‘Bacchanalians’ who were so intoxicated that ‘the only thing intelligible in [their conversation] was oaths and God damns’, and left the tavern only when they found ‘no more rum in play’. As an elite physician travelling North America’s eastern seaboard, Hamilton was not keen to mix with men of inferior social standing, especially when they were drunk. On the contrary, he hoped to control the masses from a safe distance: to ‘keep the great Leviathan of Civil Society under proper discipline and order … as that the frantic animal may not destroy itself.’ But when Hamilton complained to the tavernkeeper about the ‘disorderly fellows’, the publican could only reply: ‘Alas Sir! We that entertain travellers must strive to oblige everybody, for it is our daily bread.’
Dr Hamilton’s discomfort in mixing with the lower sorts exposes 18th-century colonists’ clashing conceptions of civil society. For self-styled elites such as Hamilton, ‘true’ civil society relied upon their ability to command their social inferiors. In 1760, an anonymous contributor to The Boston Evening-Post drove home Hamilton’s convictions, noting that
It is a truth acknowledged by all who have examined into the constitution of civil society, that the strength and vigour of the whole, depends on the union and harmony of the particular constituent parts.
But, as Hamilton’s experiences demonstrated, lower-class colonists were hashing out their own democratic vision of civil society, which their supposed superiors considered rough at best, damning at worst. Believing that ‘Societies, like individuals, have their periods of sickness,’ elitist men such as Hamilton did everything in their power to stave off the rising tide of ‘levelling’ and democracy.
Many elite colonists harboured a smouldering disdain for the populace at large, and a desire to bring them under some sort of order, which was exacerbated by feelings of inferiority compared with their brethren across the Atlantic Ocean. The American Revolutionary Period (1765-83) further compounded these anxieties as lower-class colonists violently resisted midcentury notions of hierarchy and order. Conflicts over civil society – namely, notions of Old World monarchy versus New World democracy – defined the birth of the United States of America. And one of the best ways in which to view this confrontation between different conceptions of civil society is where it often unfolded: the tavern.