Freedom’s Promise

In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published “Letters From an American Farmer,” in which he famously asked, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” Americans seeking to define their national character have wrestled with that question ever since, often with dubious results. At the least, they have tended to ransack the past for evidence of those characteristics that anticipate what they currently admire about themselves, thus underestimating the complexity and ambiguity of their ancestors’ identity and flattening their own understanding of American history. Knowing that the Civil War ended in the destruction of slavery, for example, latter-day Americans have often assumed that Yankee attributes of egalitarianism and industriousness defined the “true” character of the nation as a whole and have ignored the fact that prewar Northerners happily profited from the slave system and shared without any particular qualms the racist opinions of their Southern contemporaries.

To read the past in such an essentially teleological and self-serving way is bad enough, but it also tends to sustain the fallacy of “exceptionalism”--the notion that American history serves the United States’ special destiny as a beacon to lesser nations. Now Joyce Appleby, a professor of history at UCLA, has created a collective portrait of the generation of men and women born in the United States between 1776 and 1800, and on the basis of their lives and values ventures an answer to Crevecoeur’s query that is intriguing, sophisticated and anything but exceptionalist. Anyone curious about how Americans came to understand themselves as a people would do well to read this book.

Appleby maintains that Americans first defined their national identity by infusing meaning into the Revolution to which they were heirs. That massively complex war had led to the exile of a hundred thousand American loyalists, the massive destruction and displacement of Native American populations and the harsh repression of American slaves who strove to claim liberty and equality for themselves. When the men and women born between 1776 and 1800 looked back on their lives in autobiographies and memoirs, however, they associated the Revolution not with exclusion, violence and oppression but with the release of creative potential in their lives and the life of the nation. These writers, mainly Northerners who had experienced some degree of success in life, believed that the striving, reforming, individualist, commercial, democratic spirit of the early republic fulfilled the promise of the Revolution. In their view, American economic and social progress both vindicated revolutionary ideals and justified the sacrifices of their parents’ generation.

These contemporary assumptions, Appleby shows, had roots in reality. Enormous energies had been stored up in colonial British America as a consequence of the colonies’ cultural diversity and dynamic demography, but monarchical political culture and hierarchical social relations had held them in check. When imperial constraints vanished, revolutionary republicanism provided a vocabulary that replaced privilege (the cornerstone of the old order) with equality and individual rights. This new ideal became the basis on which the Revolution’s sons and daughters built their lives and described their achievements.

Had Appleby stopped there, she would in effect have put a scholarly foundation under the myth that the members of the post-Revolutionary generation were constructing--a story that identifies the United States as a nation uniquely chosen to lead all other nations to freedom. Exceptionalism is, however, no part of Appleby’s agenda, and she goes on to demonstrate that the Revolution was in fact an event with many meanings, some of which were quite contrary to the enterprising individualism that her memoirists placed at the core of American identity.

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Indeed, she points out, the men who framed the new republic’s institutions carefully designed them to allow slavery (and patriarchal white supremacy) to survive the Revolution. The Founding Fathers took special pains to endow slavery in the Southern states with no less claim to legal protection and constitutional legitimacy than the more open and egalitarian system that emerged in the Northern states during the early decades of the 19th century--the system celebrated by Appleby’s mainly Northern memoirists. How an ambiguous Revolutionary tradition split into Northern and Southern halves and how the Northern version came to define what we tend to think of as America’s “true” national identity form the heart of Appleby’s narrative.

She begins with politics, which emerged from the fierce partisan struggles of the late 1790s to embrace an ever-widening spectrum of participants. By the 1830s, virtually all white men could vote--the broadest suffrage in the world and the basis for a raucous political culture that situated equal rights at the heart of American life. This extension of suffrage among white men, however, excluded from citizenship the non-white and non-male persons who comprised the majority of the population. There was, in other words, nothing inimical to slavery or white patriarchy in the politics of the early republic. Indeed, the demise of the Federalists--whose leaders had objected to slavery on principled grounds and promoted gradual abolition in the Northern states in the post-Revolutionary years--signaled the death of open debate on slavery. Prudent national politicians now studiously ignored an irresolvable problem in the hope that it would somehow solve itself.

How the South came to be understood as an exception to the American norm began with the economic transformation of the Northern states. The extension of the values of commercial capitalism among Northerners accompanied the exuberant economic growth of the early 19th century. The New England countryside had been one of the least commercialized parts of colonial America, but the War of 1812 made that region the spearhead of capitalism. Entrepreneurs, from country peddlers to industrialists, enjoyed a new status as exemplars of the commercial virtues--calculation, hard work, self-control and self-interested striving. Appleby’s first generation embraced these values, which radically altered the conditions of material and social life in the North. Family background and family ties receded in importance as individualism became the sine qua non of commercial life. Careers in business, law, medicine, teaching and preaching proliferated, offering openings to men (and even women) whose credentials consisted of modest educations and extravagant ambitions. Northerners embraced new means of fixing social status: the possession of money and the appearance of refinement came to matter more than lineage and college degrees.

These changes, and the dawning awareness that individuals could move abruptly up and down the social scale, seemingly undermined community and threatened moral order throughout the North, creating anxieties that fueled a massive revival of religion, the so-called Second Great Awakening. The newly awakened discerned a moral compass within themselves and saw God’s grace as a means to achieve the self-control for which they had longed. Because conversion stimulated the desire to fight sin in the world as well as within one’s own heart, the Awakening also gave birth to the reform societies that many of Appleby’s memoirists joined, along with hundreds of thousands of other Northern evangelical women and men.

And what of the South? That region had its own anxieties, its own evangelicalism, its own reform impulses; but they were structured and constrained by slavery. Reliant on a fabulously profitable export crop, cotton, for their fortunes, the great Southern planters had no notion of the striving individualism, adaptability and enterprise that characterized Northerners; instead they emphasized the values of hierarchy, patriarchy and honor. While Northern families cultivated conscience to give children inward control, Southern parents emphasized family duties and stressed the importance of fulfilling the roles of father and master, son, daughter, wife--and slave. While Northerners preferred to seek social and economic discipline by promoting the individual’s ability to recognize sin and feel guilt, Southerners used public shaming and violence to impose order on their altogether less dynamic region.

The values and principles that structured life in the South grew more and more repellent to Northerners--and thus more and more mesmerizing to Northern reformers eager to conquer what they increasingly saw as America’s greatest sin: slavery. The politicization of that issue in the 1850s, when the members of the post-revolutionary cohort had ceded power to their more radical descendants, brought on the Civil War. But it was the cultural chasm that opened in the 1820s and 1830s, during the adult years of Appleby’s memoir-writing generation, that made the conflict irrepressible as Northern and Southern writers increasingly demonized each other.

The fact that the vast majority of the lives that can be followed from this period were those of Northerners (who had more printing presses and a stronger tradition of universal literacy) thus becomes significant, for the sheer number of Northern autobiographies and memoirs testifies to their success in claiming normative status for their own life stories as quintessentially American. Southerners, who were equally heirs of the Revolution but who remained locked into a colonial economy that their Northern counterparts had shaken off, were less aggressive in claiming precedence for their regional understanding of the nation’s meaning. In this way, Southerners found themselves written out of the national identity that Northern writers were busily constructing in the 1820s, ‘30s and ‘40s. By the 1850s, Southerners realized that their way of life would ultimately be crushed by a Northern juggernaut that was no longer merely cultural but also economic and political. Rejecting Northern values, Southern leaders invoked what they understood to be the principles of 1776 and declared independence. This time, however, the nation-state, not the localities, would emerge victorious. With that triumph, the Northern variant of the Revolutionary tradition perforce became normative.

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General readers sometimes complain that academic history is overspecialized and fragmented, lacking the narrative qualities that have traditionally made histories appealing as literature. Some historians reply by staking out a postmodern position that abjures grand narrative schemes as reductionist and intellectually illegitimate. Appleby rejects that position and with it the option of merely recounting individual stories without searching out their transcendent meaning.

Instead, she phrases a sophisticated argument in terms of human lives and thus synthesizes a great deal of scholarship without sacrificing the appealing qualities of narrative history. That achievement alone should earn her book a wide audience. Because she provides a rigorous and provocative answer to Crevecoeur’s question, “Inheriting the Revolution” must also command the respect of all scholars who seek to understand the origins of American culture and identity.