Essays by “The Free Republican,” 1784–1786. Benjamin Lincoln, Jr.

      [print edition page vi]

      [print edition page vii]

       INTRODUCTION

      These ten essays by the “Free Republican” were written by Benjamin Lincoln, Jr., son of the Revolutionary War general, Benjamin Lincoln, from Hingham, Massachusetts.¹ Lincoln was obviously a talented young man. He was born in 1756, graduated from Harvard in 1777, and by the mid-1780s was well on his way to establishing himself publicly. After clerking for three years with two important judges, he set up his law practice in 1782 in Cambridge. He had spent thirty months in Worcester studying under Judge Levi Lincoln; later he moved to Boston to study with John Lowell, one of the key figures in the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1780 and a friend of John and Abigail Adams. At the outset of the Revolutionary War in 1775, young Lincoln had temporarily left Harvard to serve as an enlisted soldier in General John Thomas’s Regiment in Roxbury. In 1777 he spent several months in Albany as medical assistant to his father, helping him recover from a leg wound received at the battle of Saratoga. The father and son were close, and in their wartime correspondence General Lincoln had encouraged

      [print edition page viii]

      his son to write on political and constitutional questions, which helps account for the appearance of the young man’s Free Republican essays.²

      The publication of these essays enhanced what was already a impressive public career. By 1784 not only was Lincoln a trusted member of the Massachusetts Bar practicing before the state’s court of common pleas but he had become a Freemason in a prestigious lodge. In 1785 he married Mary Otis, youngest daughter of the Revolutionary patriot, James Otis, and was moving in genteel circles with many powerful political and judicial figures, including John Lowell, Edmund Trowbridge, and other members of what the followers of Thomas Jefferson later called the “Essex Junto.” By 1787, he was corresponding regularly with Washington’s aide Tobias Lear and at least once with Washington himself.³

      [print edition page ix]

      But unfortunately in January 1788, just two years after the Free Republican was published, Lincoln’s promising career was cut short. He died of a sudden illness, leaving his wife Mary to raise their two infant sons. His father’s shaky finances forced the sale of Lincoln’s superb library that he had painstakingly acquired over the previous decade.⁴ With the proceeds, Mary and the children moved to Hingham to live with her in-laws, the general and his wife.⁵

      [print edition page x]

      Lincoln’s first six essays of the Free Republican first appeared in seven monthly issues of the Boston Magazine throughout the year 1784.⁶ Apparently the essays were so well received and considered so important that Lincoln decided that they ought to have a wider readership. This could be done by bringing them out in the popular Boston newspaper, the Independent Chronicle. So between November 24, 1785, and February 9, 1786, the Independent Chronicle republished the first six of Lincoln’s essays and then subsequently published the four additional essays.

      The publication of the Free Republican essays was indeed a significant intellectual event in Massachusetts politics. Benjamin Austin in his Observations on the Pernicious Practice of the Law (1786) immediately took on the Free Republican.

      [print edition page xi]

      Austin challenged the Free Republican’s contention that lawyers were a “necessary order in a republic.” Austin devoted his fifty-two-page pamphlet uncovering “the many pernicious practices in the profession of the law” in order to make a case for abolishing what he believed was anything but a necessary order; in fact, he claimed, the order of lawyers was both “useless” and “dangerous.” And more than a dozen years later the self-educated New England farmer William Manning in his “Key of Liberty” written in 1799 vividly recalled the significance of the Free Republican’s essays, even as he passionately disagreed with them.⁷

      Those essays by the Free Republican, Manning said, were the “the greatest collection of historical accounts” of the “feuds and animosities, contentions and bloodsheds that happened in the ancient republics” that he had ever encountered. By setting forth the many struggles that had taken place through history “between the Few and the Many, the patricians and plebeians, rich and poor, debtor and creditor,” the writings of the Free Republican framed Manning’s own thinking about society.⁸

      Manning was particularly taken with Lincoln’s essay Number V, which had drawn “the dividing line between the Few and Many as they apply to us in America.” “Two distinct and different orders of men,” the Free Republican had written,

      [print edition page xii]

      “seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a “spirit of jealousy and distrust,” would always be in dispute with one another. “Whether the parties to the contests style themselves the Rich and the Poor, the Great and the Small, the High and the Low, the Elders and People, Patricians and Plebeians, Nobility and Commons, still,” the Free Republican had claimed, “the source and effects of the dispute are the same.”⁹

      All