The American Revolution: A History (14 page)

Some fervent equality-minded citizens attacked distinctions of all kinds, including belonging to private social clubs and wearing imported finery. Gentlemen in some areas of the North found that the traditional marks of social authority—breeding, education, good manners—were becoming liabilities for political leadership. Ordinary citizens now claimed the right to the titles—
Mr.
and
Mrs.
—that had once belonged only to the gentry. In this new republican society no one wanted to be dependent on anyone else. In Philadelphia the proportion of white servants in the workforce, which at mid-century had constituted 40 to 50 percent, now declined precipitously; and by the end of the century indentured servitude had virtually disappeared. Foreign visitors were stunned by the unwillingness of American servants to address their masters and mistresses as superiors and by the servants’ refusal to admit that they were anything but “help.” For many Americans, living in a free country meant never having to tip one’s cap to anyone.

This growing egalitarianism did not mean that wealth was distributed more evenly in post-Revolutionary America. On the contrary: Wealth was far more unequally distributed after the Revolution than it had been before. Nevertheless, Americans felt more equal, and that was what mattered. After all, wealth as a means by which one person claimed superiority over another was more easily accepted than birth, breeding, family heritage, gentility, or even education, and it was the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion. Relationships were now more and more based on money rather than social position. Towns, for example, stopped assigning seats in their churches by age and status and began auctioning the pews off to the highest bidders. Wealthy men began to brag of their humble origins—something not commonly done before. When a South Carolina politician in 1784 was praised in the press for being a self-established man who “had no relations or friends, but what his money made for him,” a subtle but radical revolution in thinking had taken place. When Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography was posthumously published in the 1790s, the nineteenth-century celebration of the “self-made man” was born.

By the end of the eighteenth century the paternalism of the former monarchical society was in disarray. Apprentices were no longer dependents in the master’s family; rather, they became trainees within a business that was more and more conducted outside the household. Artisans did less “bespoke” or “order” work for particular patrons on whom they were personally dependent; instead, they increasingly produced for impersonal markets. Masters in the various crafts, instead of being patriarchs paternalistically tied to their journeymen, became employers paying their employees cash wages. As masters turned into employers and journeymen into employees, their interests became more distinct and conflicting than they had been before. In 1786 for the first time in American history, employees participated in a strike against their employers. In response, masters now resorted to the courts to enforce what had once been seen as a mutual and personal relationship.

REPUBLICAN REFORMS

Since the Revolutionaries believed that people were not born to be what they might become, they were confident that they had the ability, like no people in modern times, to remake themselves and the future as they saw fit. Dr. Benjamin Rush was very excited by the enthusiasm shown by Americans at a fete held in Philadelphia in July 1782 in honor of the birth of the heir to the French crown. He realized that Protestant Americans were now eagerly celebrating what they had been long taught to hate—the French Catholic monarchy. The fete, he said, “shows us in the clearest point of view that there are no prejudices so strong, no opinions so sacred, and no contradictions so palpable, that will not yield to the love of liberty.” Since free and republican America was “in a plastic state,” where “everything is new & yielding,” it “seems destined by heaven,” said Rush, “to exhibit to the world the perfection which the mind of man is capable of receiving from the combined operation of liberty, learning, and the gospel upon it.”

Americans in the years following their Revolution set about reforming their culture, in their strenuous efforts to bring their ideas and manners into accord with their new republican governments. Enlightened men could believe, as Samuel Stanhope Smith, soon to be president of Princeton, told James Madison shortly after independence, that new habitual principles, “the constant authoritative guardians of virtue,” could be created and nurtured by republican laws, and these principles, together with the power of the mind, could give people’s “ideas and motives a new direction.” By the repeated exertion of reason—by “recalling the lost images of virtue: contemplating them, and using them as motives of action, till they overcome those of vice again and again . . . until after repeated struggles, and many foils, they at length acquire the habitual superiority”—by such exertions it seemed possible for Americans to create a society of “habitual virtue.” From these premises flowed the Revolutionaries’ efforts at moral and social reformation, much of their republican iconography, and, perhaps most important, the republicans’ devotion, in Smith’s words, to “the great importance of an early virtuous education.”

Americans knew that tyranny was founded on ignorance. As the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 stated, “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue diffused generally among the people . . . [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” The consequence of this Revolutionary thinking was a torrent of speeches and writings on the importance of education that has rarely been matched in American history. America’s national obsession with education was born with the Revolution.

Although by 1776 there were only nine colleges in America, sixteen more were founded in the next twenty-five years. At the same time, many Revolutionary leaders drew up elaborate plans for establishing comprehensive publicly supported school systems. Although little immediately came of these plans, the republican ideal of the state’s fundamental responsibility to educate all of its citizens remained alive and was eventually realized in the common school movement of the early nineteenth century.

Formal schooling, of course, was only a part of what the Revolutionaries meant by education. Americans formed numerous scientific organizations and medical societies and flooded the country with all sorts of printed matter. Three quarters of all the books and pamphlets published in America between 1637 and 1800 appeared in the final thirty-five years of the eighteenth century. Between 1786 and 1795 twenty-eight learned and gentlemanly magazines were established, six more in these few years than in the entire colonial period. Since Americans sought to become a civilized and genteel people, they wanted advice manuals for everything—from how to write letters to friends to how to rise on one’s toes before a curtsy. Two thirds of all the American spelling books published in the eighteenth century were issued in the final seventeen years of the century between 1783 and 1800. By the early nineteenth century Noah Webster’s comprehensive speller, first published in 1783, had sold 3 million copies.

Although writing and spelling were important, they were not as important as reading. The few private libraries that had existed in the large cities in the colonial period were now supplemented by publicly supported libraries, which in turn sponsored increasing numbers of reading clubs, lectures, and debating societies. Although newspapers were relatively rare prior to the Revolution, they were soon being created at astonishing rates, which soon made the American people the greatest newspaper-reading public in the world.

Because Americans thought of themselves as peculiarly a people of sentiment and sensibility, they were eager to create charitable and humanitarian societies. Indeed, there were more such humanitarian societies formed in the decade following the Revolution than were created in the entire colonial period. These charitable societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from “suspended animation,” that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not.

Jefferson and other Revolutionary leaders drew up plans for liberalizing the harsh penal codes inherited from the colonial period. Pennsylvania led the way by abolishing the death penalty for all crimes except murder. Instead of, as in the past, publicly punishing criminals by such bodily penalties as whipping, mutilation, and execution, Pennsylvania began the experiment of confining criminals in solitary cells in penitentiaries that were designed to be schools of reformation. Other states soon followed with these new kinds of prisons. Nowhere else in the Western world were such penal reforms carried as far as they were in America.

Schools, benevolent associations, and penitentiaries—all these were important for reforming the society and making it more republican. But none of them could compare in significance with that most basic social institution, the family. By rejecting monarchy and the older paternalistic ties of government and asserting the rights and liberties of individuals, the Revolution inevitably affected relationships within the family. It abolished the older English patterns of inheritance and the aristocratic legal devices that had sought to maintain the stem line of the estate (entail) and to sacrifice the interests of younger children to the eldest son (primogeniture). Many of the states passed new inheritance laws that recognized greater equality among sons and daughters. Everywhere novelists and others writing in the post-Revolutionary years stressed the importance of raising children to become rational and independent citizens.

Although there was little legal change in the authority of husbands over their wives, the traditional relationship was now questioned in ways that it had not been earlier. The Revolution made Americans conscious of the claim for the equal rights of women as never before. Some women now objected to the word “obey” in the marriage vows because it turned the woman into her husband’s “slave.” Under pressure, even some of the older patriarchal laws began to change. The new republican states now recognized women’s rights to divorce and to make contracts and do business in the absence of their husbands. Women began asserting that rights belonged not just to men, and that if women had rights, they could no longer be thought of as inferior to men. In 1790, Judith Sargent Murray, daughter of a prominent Massachusetts political figure, writing under the pseudonym “Constantia,” published an essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes.” Popular writings everywhere now set forth models of a perfect republican marriage. It was one based on love, not property, and on reason and mutual respect. And it was one in which wives had a major role in inculcating virtue in their husbands and children. These newly enhanced roles for wives and mothers now meant that women ought to be educated as well as men. Consequently during the two decades following the Revolution, numerous academies were founded solely for the advanced instruction of females, a development unmatched in other parts of the world. Even though women were almost everywhere denied the right to vote, some of the upper strata of women began to act as political agents in their own right, using their social skills and various unofficial social institutions to make connections, arrange deals, and help create a ruling class in America.

ANTISLAVERY

No institution was more directly affected by the liberalizing spirit of the Revolution than chattel slavery. To be sure, the enslavement of nearly half a million blacks was not eradicated at the Revolution, and in modern eyes this failure amid all the high-blown talk of liberty and equality becomes the one glaring and even hypocritical inconsistency of the Revolutionary era. Indeed, far more blacks lived in slavery at the end of the Revolutionary era than at the beginning, and slavery in parts of America, far from declining, was on the verge of its greatest expansion. Nevertheless, the Revolution had a powerful effect in eventually bringing an end to slavery in America. It suddenly and effectively ended the social and intellectual environment that had allowed slavery to exist everywhere for thousands of years without substantial questioning.

The colonists had generally taken slavery for granted as part of the natural order of a monarchical society and as one aspect of the general brutality and cheapness of life in those premodern and prehumanitarian times. Originally, slavery had been regarded merely as the most base and degraded status in a hierarchy of many statuses and ranks of freedom and unfreedom, and that attitude had lingered on. Bondage and servitude in many forms had continued to exist in pre-Revolutionary America, and the colonists had felt little need to defend slavery any more than other forms of debasement. Now, however, republican citizenship suddenly brought into question all kinds of personal dependency. For the first time in their history Americans were compelled to confront the slavery in their midst as an aberration, as a “peculiar institution,” and, if they were to retain it, to explain and justify it.

Even before the Declaration of Independence, the libertarian atmosphere of the imperial controversy had exposed the excruciating contradiction of slavery. James Otis in 1764 had declared that all the colonists were “by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black. . . . Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black?” How could white Americans contend for liberty while holding other men in slavery? As the crisis deepened, such questions became more and more insistent.

The initial efforts to end the contradiction were directed at the slave trade. In 1774, the Continental Congress urged abolishing the slave trade, which a half-dozen northern states quickly did. In 1775 the Quakers of Philadelphia formed the first antislavery society in the world, and soon similar societies were organized elsewhere, even in the South. During the war Congress and the northern states together with Maryland gave freedom to black slaves who enlisted in their armies. In various ways the Revolution worked to weaken the institution.