One evening in the summer of 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, a group of old friends gathered in Philadelphia for dinner. The talk turned to General Washington, now presiding with implacable dignity over the convention’s sessions. As the story goes, Gouverneur Morris of New York asserted that he could be as familiar with General Washington as with any other intimate acquaintance. Another guest, Alexander Hamilton, promptly offered to provide dinner for a dozen with the finest wine if, at Washington’s next reception, Morris would simply walk up to Washington, clap him on the shoulder, and say, “My dear General, how happy I am to see you look so well.” Hamilton, of course, had served closely on Washington’s staff during the Revolutionary War, and both he and Morris knew the general as well as any man did.

On the appointed evening, with a substantial crowd already gathered, Morris took up the bet. He walked over to Washington, bowed, shook hands, and then placed his left hand on Washington’s shoulder, while repeating the promised words. The response was immediate. Washington reached up, removed Morris’s hand, stepped back, and, in silence, fixed his eyes on Morris until the mortified offender retreated into the assembly. No one ever ventured such public familiarity with Washington again.

Yet, a mere thirteen years later, the third president of the United States took to answering the front door of the White House for himself clad in a lounging jacket. While Washington had held formal levees —stationed in front of the fireplace, he met his guests while dressed in black velvet, his hair powdered and gathered behind in a large silk bag, yellow gloves on his hands, holding a cockaded hat edged deeply with black feathers, resplendent in knee and shoe buckles, a sword peering from beneath his coat, bowing deeply from the waist—Jefferson had receptions where he circulated among the crowd shaking hands. It almost goes without saying that Jefferson was among the first to give up the powdered wig and to replace his aristocratic buckles with egalitarian trousers and shoe laces.

Democracy moved so quickly that by the time Dolly Madison became first lady in 1809, she adopted the practice of having “Hail to the Chief” played at state receptions simply to rouse guests to the proper respect for her husband. Perhaps nothing illustrates the direction of the new republic better than the Federalist Vice President John Adams’s doomed effort to find a proper title by which to address the nation’s chief executive; the senate rejected “His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties”—not to mention the classical Vir Amplissimus—in favor of plain “Mr. President.” In fairness, one should add that even Washington was relieved by the senate’s decision; only Adams grumbled morosely to his diary about the collapse of decorum.

Even from the vantagepoint of 1830, the world of the framers was impossibly distant. In 1790, the thirteen former American colonies of Great Britain, with a population of barely four million (including 700,000 black slaves) clung precariously to the Atlantic seacoast spread over an area roughly the size of France. Only six cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston, Baltimore, and Salem—had a population of 8,000 or more. Americans had not yet conquered the forest, and the difficulties of overland travel were so great that, as one text remarks, it was almost as difficult to assemble the first Congress of the United States as to convene church councils in the Middle Ages. It took twenty-nine days for news of the Declaration of Independence to reach Charleston from Philadelphia.

Society was different as well. Militia days, elections, weddings, even clerical ordinations were punctuated by the copious use of ardent spirits; the custom of toasting had an established life of its own. Men and women addressed their betters with their hats in their hands. Even in church, no one could forget who was among the governing “wise, good, and well-to-do”; pews were distributed by status in the community. In the same vein, class rank at Yale was determined not by grades but by family status.

By 1830, spurred by the opening of the Western Reserve and the Louisiana Purchase, men and women had poured across the Appalachians and Alleghenies into the trackless lands of the West. Between 1810 and 1820, population west of the Appalachians more than doubled. Missionary societies were formed to build up waste places, which included the rural farmlands of western Connecticut. The population boomed. Even the long-settled cities of the East grew exponentially; between the Boston Massacre and the 1820 census, Boston’s population tripled and New York’s grew sixfold. Perhaps most tellingly, in 1740 there was one lawyer for every 10,108 inhabitants of Massachusetts; by 1840 the ration was one for every 1153. At the same time, east-west transportation benefitted from a system of “internal improvements,” including the “national pike” that eventually ran from Baltimore to Vandalia, Illinois. Spurred by the federal government’s example, New York State broke ground on the Erie Canal in 1817. When it was finished in 1825, New York City became the principal gateway to the markets of the upper West.

With the economic and political ferment, old social distinctions broke down. No longer “servants,” but “hired hands” or “help,” ordinary men and women styled themselves “sir” and “madam,” titles formerly reserved for the gentry. A new term, “career,” was adapted from horseracing to describe the life patterns of these people, who no longer automatically followed the trades of their forebears. Flush with prosperity, ordinary people painted their barns, stencilled their furniture, laid down carpets in their newly appointed parlors, and subscribed to newspapers and magazines in record numbers. The literary genre of etiquette manuals arose to teach these rootless strivers how to behave in a new world of democratic mores and bourgeois comforts. It was the politician Henry Clay, father of the “American system,” who coined the phrase “self-made” to describe these new individuals.

At the same time, new social constraints replaced the old. The religious revival, with its overtones of romanticism, replaced the Enlightenment as the major factor in the cultural landscape. With the resurgence of evangelical religion came an ethos of sentimentalism, a cult of domesticity that extolled women’s role as moral educators in the home, and a growing temperance movement that would eventually coin the slogan “Lips that touch wine will never touch mine.” When not engaged in making money, this bumptious cold-water army of men and women busied themselves in voluntary associations and social reform movements, ranging from anti-slavery to anti-immigration.

In her rich new book, Inheriting the Revolution, [1] Joyce Appleby adds her voice to the debate on the origins and meaning of our national character, how the colonial Englishmen of 1776 became the Americans of 1830. She argues that the first generation of Americans—those who came of age and dominated American life from 1790 to about 1830—experienced a degree of political and social change unrivalled before or since. This single generation made the transition from a medieval world of hierarchy and deference to the modern market-dominated society we still inhabit. More important, Appleby contends, this first generation reached a kind of closure about the meaning of democracy that has made it difficult for succeeding generations to articulate a vision of America other than the one they created: a society devoted to individualism and free enterprise.

Appleby draws her story primarily from two-hundred autobiographies selected to represent people “who did something in public—started a business, invented a useful object, settled a town, organized a movement, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication, if only an autobiography.” In fact, she had a remarkably large field to draw from; there are nearly four-hundred autobiographies by men and women in her age “cohort,” itself a telling indication of their self-conscious individualism and their own sense that they had lived in extraordinary times.

Inheriting the Revolution is divided into seven chapters devoted in succession to the themes of responding to the revolutionary tradition, enterprise, careers, distinctions, intimate relations, reform, and a new national identity. As a result, it is less a sustained narrative than a series of analytic essays centering around case histories and anecdotes. Unfortunately, since Appleby rarely dates the events she discusses, a non-specialist may be hard pressed to place them in a meaningful historical context—an important consideration in a book whose theme is the rapidity of change over forty years. This is especially regrettable because Appleby’s use of first-person sources might prove engaging to the general reader curious about what life was like for ordinary people in the early republic. Yet, for the specialist, as is perhaps inevitable in such a synthetic work, the author merely glosses the surface of such topics as the growing influence of sentimental fiction, the place of women’s friendships in an increasingly circumscribed culture, the growth of Methodism, the rise of professionals, the status of blacks in the North—all of which have been treated with much greater depth and perceptiveness elsewhere in the literature.

The book is serviceably, if not elegantly, written, with a relentless tendency to run-on sentences. It is also studded with a series of truly disconcerting clinkers. These raise questions ranging from the author’s sensitivity to the idiom—one entrepreneurial subject “hitched his star to the wagon of industrial development,” while another is described as an indefatigable “projector,” by which I assume the author meant builder of projects, while “enterprising men knocked against enterprising men like so many billiard balls”—to her sensitivity plain and simple. Referring to the period’s preoccupation with mortality, for example, she writes that “death became a kind of investment capital in the emotional economy of the day”! Nevertheless, when all is said and done, what emerges is a striking tale, on its face one of the most celebratory accounts of American gumption in recent historiography.

The fundamental—and perhaps unanswerable—question is where did this explosion of energy come from? By and large, Appleby seems to argue that it all came from the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, that Jefferson and his Republican supporters bore primary responsibility for democratizing American politics and commercializing the United States. Throughout her distinguished career, Appleby has been one of the most important affirmers of Jefferson’s role in American history. In a series of articles and in her 1984 book, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Appleby set herself the task of rescuing Jefferson from his image as a nostalgic agrarian, fearful of commercial development. Instead, she argued that Jefferson was the spokesman for the mass of American farmers, already individualistic and commercial-minded, so different from Old World peasants that European observers constantly remarked on their restless energy and enterprise.

In the early nineteenth century, as Appleby now relates, these farmers, along with ordinary mechanics and tradesmen, abandoned their ancestral lands and ways to engage in “boot-strap manufacturing ventures.” She argues forcefully that it was this small-scale manufacturing activity—with its premium on novelty and inventiveness— that fuelled the commercial boom that made America’s internal market the largest in the world and created the material conditions for a democratic society.

But, in current American academia, there can be no unalloyed celebration of capitalism, much less a celebration of the connection between capitalism, democracy, and the bettering of ordinary people’s lives. To her credit, Appleby does not downplay the connection, but she is compelled to remind the reader constantly of those left behind: the enslaved, Native Americans, women, even those who experienced commercial failure and went bankrupt in the boom and bust economy of the time. She also, if rather belatedly, points out that this egalitarian commercial ideology was largely confined to the North. By the 1820s—after the opening of the old Southwest and the rise in cotton prices reinvigorated the slave economy—the two regions drew further apart, with the South increasingly intent on preserving its peculiar institution. This gives an ironic turn to Appleby’s account, since Jefferson was the South incarnate to the Northern Federalists he defeated and who figure in the standard literature as the party of Hamilton and nationalistic capitalism.

Indeed, there is a certain inadvertent quality to the book as a whole; its most obvious lessons do not appear to be the ones that the author wishes us to draw. As the eminent historian Gordon Wood pointed out in a review of Inheriting the Revolution, in a 1994 book, Telling the Truth About History (co-authored with Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob), Appleby appreciatively discussed the development of social history and the concomitant influence of multiculturalism on the profession. Approvingly, Appleby related how historians who have studied the lives of ordinary people have found “tales of frustration and disappointment” that placed them “on a collision course with the conventional accounts of the American past.” In their fiercer incarnations, Appleby saw these radicals claiming that “national identity is a chimera created by the elite to indoctrinate other groups in society with its self-serving conception of the country’s purposes.” As a result, Appleby acknowledged “the disturbing possibility that the study of history does not strengthen an attachment to one’s country.” As Wood observed, Appleby herself seems to believe that if she shows that America’s traditional identity was an imagined social construction based on the experience of a few Northern white men she can clear the way to shedding that identity for something new and multicultural, something perhaps that will reflect the mores of the academy. And, in her current work, she conscientiously devotes herself to the methods of social history, casting her net widely to find the ostensibly dispossessed. Yet, almost despite her own intentions, what she uncovers is something quite the reverse of frustration and disappointment. The book is filled with tales—from the lives of ordinary people—of enterprise and energy, courage and determination, optimism and hope even in the face of reverses. In giving voice to this faith and tenacity, Appleby actually goes far to explain the continued vitality, pace academia, of America’s self-image as a land of individual opportunity. There is something bracing about seeing the transformation of Englishmen into Americans not as a work of government—even Jeffersonian government—but as the result of a million acts of ordinary people who, in this regard at least, led their leaders.

Notes
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1. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, by Joyce Appleby; Harvard University Press, 322 pages, $26. Go back to the text.