The Early Republic: An Introduction

Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 14, No 2
Winter 2000

Paul A. Gilje

The early republic often gets shortchanged. As we struggle to compress American history into the limited confines of the academic calendar, the period between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Jacksonian era seems all too easy to skip over. Exhausted by fighting the American Revolutionary War, and having sweated through the convention in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, we might say a few words about Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. We might even ask our students, "When was the War of 1812?" But we often get uneasy about explaining the so-called Era of Good Feelings. The sooner we can get to the rise of the common man with Old Hickory and "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," the better.

I know that many of the readers of this magazine serve this period better, explaining the intricacies of Hamilton's financial plan, fighting the Hamilton-Burr duel, tracing the path of Lewis and Clark, describing the multiple origins of the War of 1812, and detailing the decisions of the Marshall Court. Many explain Samuel Slater's introduction of the machine into the textile factory, the invention of Ely Whitney's cotton gin, the successful run of Robert Fulton's Clermont, and the digging of the Erie Canal.

But all too often, even when we get into the nitty gritty of the period, there is little time to integrate all of this material into a larger interpretive framework. Traditionally, textbooks look at this period and divide the political from the social and economic. Textbooks also fall into the presidential trap. After suffering through the colonial period, which lacked a national focus and a quadrennial election ritual, textbook authors seem to heave a sigh of relief and comfortably label everything from this point forward by this or that administration. Everything, that is, but social and economic developments, which often get swooped up, presented without a chronological framework, and brought forward to the eve of the Civil War.

This treatment is a shame. The early republic has become one of the most dynamic and compelling areas of scholarship in the last twenty years. One measure of the significance of the period can be seen at a recent Society for the History of the Early American Republic meeting which was attended by no less than four Pulitzer Prize winners--all of whose books touched upon the period and were published in the 1990s. Beyond this heralded work, there has been a huge wave of publications offering scholars a new way of looking at the early republic. The remainder of this essay is devoted to discussing this trend (1).

First, let us define the period. Scholars have discarded strict politically bound definitions--those dictated by political events and presidential elections--and have embraced issue oriented constructions instead. Chronologically, we can say that the period roughly encompasses the years 1780 to 1830. Conceptually, the period revolves around following the implications of the American Revolution--implications not limited to the political realm. One way to think about the era is to return to Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution in which he traced a dual revolution in Europe: a political transformation triggered by the Enlightenment and fostered by the French Revolution, and an economic change signaled by industrialization (2). The American situation, and over thirty-five years of writing and research by historians, calls for some refinement of this thesis. In particular, the political revolution was also a social revolution, marked by the move from a government and society dominated by hierarchy to a new egalitarian vision based upon the idea that all men really were created equal. The economic revolution in America was marked less by industrialization (although in some parts of the United States the factory does become important) and more by the rise of consumerism and capitalism.

Perhaps the best way to describe the political and social meaning of the American Revolution is to turn to a product of the early republic with which every school child is familiar: the short story "Rip Van Winkle." Washington Irving wrote this tale in June 1818. He took a German folk tale, placed it in the Hudson River Valley and the "fairy mountains" of the Catskills, and offered what he thought was a scathing critique of the new world created by the American Revolution. Little did he realize that his political meaning would be lost to generations of children who adore the story for its own sake, and that he provided fodder for historians seeking to understand the changes he deplored.

The basic outlines of the story are familiar. A hen-pecked husband, Rip, went off into the mountains to hunt squirrels. He stumbled upon a group of little men dressed in funny costumes bowling in a glen. Rip was compelled to serve the men their liquor. He snuck a drink and, as he "was naturally a thirsty soul," he repeated the draught. "One taste provoked another, and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head--his head gradually declined and he fell into a deep sleep." That sleep was so deep that Rip did not wake up for at least twenty years (3).

What is often lost when we read this story is that this extended nap did not take place during any generic period of time. Rip slept through the American Revolution. The changes described by Irving--and here the fact that the story was written in 1818 is significant--include more than the war; they encompassed a transition from a world that Irving thought lost to a world of equality that he detested.

Irving nostalgically looked back upon the colonial era as a time when everyone knew his or her place, where even small towns had a hierarchy, and people did not reach beyond their stations. Whether such a society ever existed is beside the point. Irving in 1818 believed it had, and so did many others. Irving sarcastically described political debates, where the local school teacher, Derrick Van Bummel, expostulated on every issue undaunted "by the most gigantic word in the dictionary." But Van Bummel was poor--he was a school teacher after all--and as articulate and brilliant as he was, his opinions only carried so far. Of much greater weight was Nicholaus Vedder, the village patriarch and owner of the local tavern. Vedder hardly uttered a word. He controlled the conversation merely by the way he smoked his pipe. If he sent forth short, frequent, and angry puffs, everyone knew it was time to change the subject. If he merely sat there, allowing tranquil clouds to emit from the pipe, it meant he was pleased. In such a world, hierarchy predominated, and those on the bottom of society deferred to those on top. Those on top, in theory, paternalistically protected the interests of those on the bottom (4).

The American Revolution changed all of this. Rip came staggering down from the mountain to his old village to find it transformed. Bedraggled, long bearded, no doubt smelly, he entered the town, and almost immediately someone asked him if he was a federal or a democrat. In the early republic's world of equality even this old man's political opinions were important. When he asked about his old friends, he discovered that the patriarch Vedder died eighteen years before and was all but forgotten. So much for hierarchy. Talent was now what counted. Van Bummel went off to the wars, became a general, and was then elected to Congress.

Like the authors of twentieth-century textbooks, Irving gave too little credit to the years of the early republic by placing these changes within the context of the Revolutionary War. While the Declaration of Independence stands as a great statement of principle concerning equality, much of the political discourse--and even Irving's story of our friend Rip Van Winkle-- demonstrates that the debate over equality continued into the nineteenth century. From this perspective the Hamiltonian program was less an effort to create a large business-oriented state, and more an effort to tie the interests of those with money to the federal government in order to fabricate bonds of deference and paternalism throughout the country. The Jeffersonian opposition becomes not a paean to the yeoman myth, but an aggressive call for the independent man to become the unbridled capitalist (5).

Understanding this contrast allows us to see that what ties politics, economy, and society together during the early republic is a series of changes that set the stage for the rise and ultimate triumph of capitalism in American history. Independence, combined with the new ideology of equality, unleashed a burst of energy and expansion unimaginable before 1776. The early republic thus becomes more than a way for us to get from George Washington to Andrew Jackson. It is the transition period that leads to the creation of modern America.

What evidence is there for this transition? First comes the issue of capital itself: money. The colonies had suffered from a shortage of cash. During the Revolutionary War, Continental currency was so inflationary that much of this script became worthless. The Constitution reserved for the federal government the right to coin money, but it never did so before the Civil War. Nonetheless, a nascent capitalist economy needs capital, and this need provided for the expansion of the banking system. After the establishment of the Bank of North America during the 1780s, a half dozen or more banks sought and obtained charters from state and federal governments before 1800. Thereafter the number of banks grew at a phenomenal rate; by 1820 there were over three hundred. Each issued its own notes that passed as currency. This fabricated capital--fabricated since the specie behind the notes was just a fraction of the face value of the notes--led to investment in other important signs of the rise of capitalism: trade, land, transportation, and even industrial production (6).

Independence allowed the United States to take advantage of its role in neutral trade during the world war between France and Great Britain from 1793 to 1815 (with small interruptions). This is the real story behind all of the diplomatic shifts and problems confronted by the United States. Neutral trade meant employment for the poor, and great profits for the rich. American merchants also entered into trade with Latin America and began the invasion of the Pacific with whaling boats and trade to China. This expanded trade would become an important element of later American history (7).

Expansion within the continent of North America was also a major theme of this era, and a part of the rise of capitalism. What was it that drove men and women across the Appalachians and down the Ohio River? What was it that compelled white Americans to remove so-called civilized tribes out of the southeast to the "emptiness" of Oklahoma? It was not just land; it was also the profits derived from working the land. Trade with Europe included food products. The cotton kingdom--released by the cotton gin from limitations imposed by cotton with seeds--could feed the industrial production of Great Britain and the beginnings of industrialization in the northeastern United States (8).

In order to expand, people had to be able to move themselves and their products around the country. Improvements in the clipper ship, the invention of the steamboat, the building of highways, the digging of canals, and eventually the coming of the railway all facilitated this changing economic order. Sometimes states underwrote major internal improvements. Often they were left to the hands of private enterprise. The corporation emerged in this period, like the bank, as an important capitalist tool that allowed the pooling of vast quantities of money. Today we take the corporation for granted, but these grants of privilege initially needed a special legislative act and were justified by arguing that incorporation would benefit the greater good. Gradually, Americans came to see all economic enterprise as somehow connected to the greater good of society, and acts of incorporation moved out of the state house and became mere bureaucratic procedure. This crucial shift occurred during the early republic (9).

The factory also began in this era. Samuel Slater and other skilled artisans smuggled themselves out of Great Britain, and, like the corporate piracy decried by Americans today, they used technology developed elsewhere to begin their industrial revolution. By 1830 textile mills dotted the New England landscape, and the great experiment at Lowell, Massachusetts, was under way (10).

The factory would have been useless if the factory owners did not have some place to sell their products. The creation of a national market was therefore essential for the spread of capitalism. But people had to need new products. Starting in the eighteenth century, and accelerating during the early republic, consumerism grew. People wanted to sit in chairs instead of stools, eat off porcelain plates instead of out of wooden bowls, wear factory-spun cloth instead of homespun, and spend their evenings beside whale oil lamps rather than rely on the weak illumination provided by candles (11).

All of these developments entailed a change in attitude. Irving found the results distasteful. When Rip came down from the mountain he discovered that his quiet little village had become more of a town, with many strange new faces--for a mobile population was a hallmark of the early republic. The character of the people, too, had changed: "there was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility." This new character reflected a people on the move and on the make, seeking an entrepreneurial advantage, seeking, too, like Van Bummel the school teacher, upward mobility.

Out of this new attitude a special set of values emerged. Again, reference to Hobsbawm's dual revolution is instructive. Informed by the Marxism that was so influential to European scholars during the mid twentieth century, Hobsbawm identified the "'bourgeois' liberal" society as the wellspring of the political and economic changes during the 1789 to 1848 period he studied. American historians, less influenced by Karl Marx, have elaborated the emergence of a middle-class culture in the nineteenth century that emphasized capital accumulation, a work ethic, delayed gratification modified by a concern with material goods, evangelical fervor, self-discipline, and a desire to reform society in its own image. This middle class--comprised of lawyers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs--first came into prominence during the early republic. Their values defined the new domesticity that helped to mold gender relations in the nineteenth century and trumpeted the reification of the individual that ultimately led to the call for the abolition of slavery. It was also their ambition that drove Americans to come to dominate a continent. Finally, it was their world view that permeated all of American society, so that by the end of the twentieth century most Americans espoused their value system and labeled themselves as middle class.

Endnotes

1. The Pulitzer Prize winners and their books were: Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996); Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1995); Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990); and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992). For fuller citations on the period, see Paul A. Gilje, "The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic," in Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic, ed. Gilje (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997).

2. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1962).

3. There are countless editions of this story that any library will have. I have used Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Washington Irving, ed. Haskell Springer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 28-42.

4. The best description of the traditional society can be found in Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

5. See, for example, Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social

Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984); and Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

6. The best narrative on banks remains Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). See also Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

7. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961).

8. For a fuller discussion with citations on frontier expansion,

see John Lauritz Larson's essay in this issue.

9. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 318-22.

10. See Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

11. On consumerism, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992).

Paul Gilje is the author of Rioting in America and The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834. He has edited Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic and has co-edited three other books. He is currently working on a book about seafaring culture in America, 1750-1850, and he teaches history at the University of Oklahoma.