The Democrats They Buried
A MANIFESTO FOR THE REPUBLIC
ISSUE TWO OF 9
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Young, Cannon, Husband, Paine — the founders you were never taught
“Government shouldn’t just stop favoring wealth over labor. It should start favoring labor over wealth.”
— Thomas Young, Philadelphia, 1776 — considered subversive then; considered subversive now
There was a democratic movement at the American founding. It was strong, organized, visionary, and American to its core. Its leaders are not in the textbooks. They have no monuments. Their names are not on currency or aircraft carriers. They were suppressed, impoverished, and in some cases imprisoned by the republic whose independence they made possible. But they existed. And their tradition — buried for two and a half centuries — is the one worth claiming.
Thomas Young grew up on a small farm in the Catskill foothills and taught himself Greek, Latin, medicine, and radical politics. He spent his life hounded from place to place in deepening poverty, advising tenant farmers rioting against the great landlords, helping Samuel Adams network the Massachusetts town meetings, and arriving in Philadelphia where he connected with the surging democratic movement. His view went beyond mere political reform: government shouldn’t just stop favoring wealth over labor. It should actively favor labor over wealth. This was subversive in 1776. It is still called subversive now.
James Cannon was a quiet Philadelphia math teacher who built the American Manufactory as an alternative to the Bettering House — the Quaker institution that took in destitute families and set them to work for the institution’s profit, calling it charity. Cannon’s factory let families stay together, let women work on their own terms, and gave workers seats on the board. When it outcompeted the Bettering House, Cannon turned his organizing genius to the militia privates — the poorest men, the vast majority of Pennsylvania’s fighting force — and built the Committee of Privates into the most powerful political organization in the state.
Herman Husband walked away from his Maryland plantation, from slaveholding, from the Anglican church, and from the dedication to wealth that unified his class. He became an abolitionist, a Quaker briefly, a leader of the North Carolina Regulation — the uprising of ordinary farmers against predatory government. When royal troops crushed the uprising and hanged rebels on the battlefield, he fled to the remotest mountains of western Pennsylvania and lived there as a fugitive under false names, in the grip of biblical visions, writing down what American democracy should look like.
His plan prefigured the New Deal by 150 years. Progressive taxation. A publicly managed universal retirement fund. Democratic control of the money supply. Term limits. Popular election of judges. Universal basic income including for women. Abolition of slavery. Fairness for indigenous people. Written in a log cabin in the Alleghenies by a man living under an alias. This is the founding document of American social-contract liberalism, and it was buried so effectively that most progressives today have never heard his name.
Herman Husband’s democratic platform — written alone in the mountains, a fugitive from Crown justice — prefigured the New Deal by 150 years. He died of pneumonia in the jail where George Washington put him.
Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 with nothing and found, in Young and Cannon and the democratic movement, his people and his purpose. Common Sense — the pamphlet credited with tipping public opinion toward independence — contained a section almost never discussed: a plan for national government based on egalitarian principles. John Adams called it “democratical, without any restraint” and had a shouting match with Paine over it. Yet Adams needed Paine to rouse the streets while Adams worked to deliver independence in the Congress. It was an arrangement of mutual necessity between democracy and elite ambition — and once independence was won, elite ambition discarded its partner.
The Pennsylvania constitution of 1776 — produced by this movement, the most radical governing document in American history — had no property qualifications for voting or office, a democratic executive committee rather than a single powerful president, and an elected judiciary. Herman Husband served in the assembly under it. Then came Philadelphia 1787, and the Constitution designed specifically to destroy it.
Paine died in 1809. Six people came to his funeral. Husband was arrested in 1794 during the Whiskey Rebellion — which he had helped inspire by preaching against Hamilton’s excise that taxed small whiskey producers to pay interest to wealthy bondholders. Washington personally marched an army over the mountains to suppress it. Husband was acquitted but caught pneumonia in prison. He died on his way home.
These are the founding fathers of American democracy. The tradition did not die with them. It went underground. And it has surfaced in every generation since, in every movement that has pushed this republic toward the promise it made and has never fully kept.
NEXT WEEK
Issue 3: Four Hundred Years of White Trash — Nancy Isenberg’s history of the permanent American underclass, the mechanism that keeps it in place, and why the people most destroyed by the system defend it most fiercely.
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