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Inheriting the Revolution - The First Generation of Americans (00) by Appleby, Joyce [Paperback (2001)]
Inheriting the Revolution - The First Generation of Americans (00) by Appleby, Joyce [Paperback (2001)]
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First published January 1, 2000
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June 29, 2015From the springs of ardor and enthusiasm issued a powerful myth about America that metamorphosed ordinary labour into extraordinary acts of nation building. It also attached personal virtue to a narrative about human progress and claimed for liberty the protean capacity to sustain economic development and maintain democratic vigor. In the simplicity of this national narrative there was little room for alternative constructions of reality, no place for failures, scant concern for diverging truths, and insufficient attention paid to prophetic voices. Only one division could not be printed and papered over-that between the Northern and Southern states" (p266)
Appleby begins Inheriting the Revolution telling us that she "began this study inductively following the lives of several thousand American men and women born between 1776 and 1800" (p vii). A chapter or so in and I felt that what she in fact was writing was a US version of Portrait of an Age. However in the final chapter she explicitly tells us that she was writing about the emergence of an American nation.
This is a book that is at its best and its worst as a Portrait of an Age - a sketch of the character of a country over a particular period of time, yet the impression that we are given is distinctly white, northern, male, and strongly influenced by religious enthusiasm. So there is a fundamental issue over whether this is the image that is or has come to be representative and how typical it actually might have been. This problem stems, potentially, from the kinds of evidence that Appleby drew upon in this study.
Cohort study of the first generation of Americans
Appleby was lucky in having a largish, in the hundreds, trove of autobiographies to draw upon. Unfortunately this gave rise to several difficulties. For one except when she directly quoted or cited one of the autobiographies that she drew upon I found it impossible to know when I was being presented with the fruits of the study of this cohort of early Americans and when I was being presented with Appleby's personal opinion. A table of basic information about the people's lives that she was drawing upon: how many were men, how many women, how many white, how many from which states, would give the reader some idea of why the narrative was skewed in particular directions - and this really is a fundamental issue when she is discussing emergent American nationhood.
Secondly there is a self selection bias here. Why does one choose to write an autobiography? The person who stays close to their place of birth, does not change their status, or doesn't go through intense life events is perhaps less likely to write their life story or even to think that they have a life story than the person who travelled west, built up a business, escaped slavery, and battled the demon drink. In which case the heart of the book is shaped by the atypical. In that case what we have is, if I may have your forbearance and exaggerate slightly, something like a book that tells you that everybody in France during WWII was a member of the resistance and that everybody in the UK in 1968 was in London wearing a mini-skirt. This is an issue when we come to her last chapter "A New National Identity" because suddenly to be a white northern man who went to school before working partly as a pedlar, partly as an artisan and to have given up drinking under religious impulse was apparently the default historical experience - but I'll come back to that below.
Portrait of an Age
Here the book was at its best. We are shown in passing that the contemporary USA is considerably less divided on partisan lines than in the past when duelling was an accepted way of dealing with political differences and the newspapers were quick to name and shame those those who evaded their duty to attempt to kill those who held opposing views. The surprise is not that Alexander Hamilton died in a duel but rather it turns out that he managed to survive as long as he did having fought ten duels in the course of life, his just one of around one hundred estimated duelling deaths in the early years of the Republic (p41) .
Perhaps unsurprisingly alcohol was an important of daily life and boozing was in the earlier period considered a basic attribute of adult masculinity. This was to change with the Second Great Awakening - a huge religious revival movement that swept across the English speaking world - a consequence of its message of the need for a moral intensity in daily life was a tendency towards temperance in alcohol consumption.
There were great vignettes throughout the book, slaves who because they were hired out as skilled labour were able to save and buy their own freedom, young men and women perhaps seventeen or eighteen working as school teachers reminding us that this was a young country, men who split their year between artisan activity and peddling the things that they had made - but typically this was northerners trading into the south or the west so the other side of the story are these large areas of the country which lacked craftsmen during this period - again this is a young country in another sense still being settled.
Tellingly one young man bought his trading goods on credit, but then invested his profits in a new suit of clothes and a fancy watch before getting a new stock of trading goods on credit. There's no saving for a rainy day, perhaps wisely since the banks weren't safe places to deposit money. Not because of Jesse James' grandfather but because of their tendency to collapse. In something that reminded me of 23 things they don't tell you about Capitalism the early economy of the USA seems to have benefited from bank led inflation, a steady influx of forged bank notes (particularly from Canada), and the use of notes were were no longer tender - the trick here being to get as far away from the issuing bank as possible and to avoid returning to the place that you spent it.
Convincing also was how the period around 1800 marked a parting of the ways between northern and southern states with the former ending legal slavery but the latter particularly after the independence war in Haiti from 1804 and the beginnings of cotton farming moving in the other direction . This division effected the whole of society - at first preachers engaged in the Second Great Awakening were anti-slavery but over time in the south they became accepting of the institution.
As a portrait of an Age the book works quite well in so far as the election of Thomas Jefferson and the Second Great Awakening are presented as formative events, but the promise can not be delivered on because the premise of her book is too narrow. Without a discussion of the country before Jefferson, the changes attributed to his political victory come without any context. Unless the issue really is my ignorance. There is a limit to the audience a historian can bear in mind, the moderately educated US reader will certainly get more out of her discussion than I did.
Birth of a nation
Ah and here my woes were completed. Appleby has a tendency throughout to sweeping statements, a looseness in her use of anecdotal evidence, then finally the discussion on nationhood becomes awkward because despite alluding to Imagined Communities [spoiler] with its discussion of Creole national identities perhaps a near perfect starting point[/spoiler] she won't engage with any theoretical perspectives instead leaving us with the point that if there was a national identity then it was a self-consciously northern one that alienated the southern elite.
Again in good part the problem lies with me. After Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation we can see that one can easily write lengthy books about how national consciousness can be formed, contested over and reshaped. A thirty page chapter in a two-hundred and sixtyish page book that occasionally swishes its toe in the issues will fall foul of the mean-tempered reviewer who remembers that his Biology teacher said that irritation was one of the signs of life .
For me there are different levels of difficultly in Appleby's discussion. Firstly there is the possibility of an American nation today and what kind of nation that one might believe in. Appleby's nation is politically Jeffersonian, equal to all, includes native Americans and Blacks (who have agency). But is this a conception of a nation that the inhabitants of the newly constituted American Republic in the early days of the nineteenth century would have recognised or aspired too? We might even wonder, particularly after the death of Alexander Hamilton, what proportion of that population even aspired to be a nation in the singular as opposed to having a regional identity, and of those that did think in terms of an American nation how few might have included Blacks or native Americans in it? I had the inward version of a shocked gasp, not trapped wind but equally uncomfortable, when she mentioned Sequoyah inventing the Cherokee Syllabary as an example of the spreading literary in the new American nation - the same nation that was busily expelling Cherokees amongst others from the territories under its control. Would he and his fellow Cherokees have regarded themselves as exemplars of a growth in American literacy? There is an, er, interesting discussion that can be had here, maybe not for reasons of space in Appleby's book but she has endnotes, a bibliography, one can admit to there being degrees of nuance and complexity that one doesn't have space to detail.
Nation is something we can all believe in so long as we don't examine it too carefully. But at times I had the impression that Appleby was implying that the Americans in her study shared, by and large, her own vision of the American nation. This seems to me to be unlikely. Its also problematic when its clear to the reader that her archetypal American looks suspiciously like a white New England man. What about everybody else, one wonders, the British people who weren't wearing mini-skirts in 1968, the French people who were not in the Resistance during the Second World War. Ah for sure the national-self image may not be statistical accurate, it may even be completely wrong but then the author needs to be explicit about the difference between the formation of a national ideal self-image and the "typical" American. The implication as it stands is that there was no difference: there was a default American (white, male, northern, eventually a teetotaller) with a disturbing aberration in the south (also white and male, but tending to be boozier).
In anycase the book could have been easily improved by changing the title to "Inheriting the Revolution: the transformation of the Northern character in the USA" and using the very sparse material that Appleby seemed to have for free and enslaved southerners as a contrast to her main topic.
This is an unfortunately negative note to end on. I might blame Appleby for concluding with a chapter on nationhood and giving me an opportunity to pretend to be Vesuvius for a while. On balance I'd say as part of mixed diet of reading on the early American Republic Appleby offers a rich variety of anecdotal evidence of early American lives that serve to enliven and enrich one's awareness of the period, however perhaps out of a good hearted desire to squeeze in broad perspectives into a narrow frame, there's a lack of sophistication in her treatment.
Appleby begins Inheriting the Revolution telling us that she "began this study inductively following the lives of several thousand American men and women born between 1776 and 1800" (p vii). A chapter or so in and I felt that what she in fact was writing was a US version of Portrait of an Age. However in the final chapter she explicitly tells us that she was writing about the emergence of an American nation.
This is a book that is at its best and its worst as a Portrait of an Age - a sketch of the character of a country over a particular period of time, yet the impression that we are given is distinctly white, northern, male, and strongly influenced by religious enthusiasm. So there is a fundamental issue over whether this is the image that is or has come to be representative and how typical it actually might have been. This problem stems, potentially, from the kinds of evidence that Appleby drew upon in this study.
Cohort study of the first generation of Americans
Appleby was lucky in having a largish, in the hundreds, trove of autobiographies to draw upon. Unfortunately this gave rise to several difficulties. For one except when she directly quoted or cited one of the autobiographies that she drew upon I found it impossible to know when I was being presented with the fruits of the study of this cohort of early Americans and when I was being presented with Appleby's personal opinion. A table of basic information about the people's lives that she was drawing upon: how many were men, how many women, how many white, how many from which states, would give the reader some idea of why the narrative was skewed in particular directions - and this really is a fundamental issue when she is discussing emergent American nationhood.
Secondly there is a self selection bias here. Why does one choose to write an autobiography? The person who stays close to their place of birth, does not change their status, or doesn't go through intense life events is perhaps less likely to write their life story or even to think that they have a life story than the person who travelled west, built up a business, escaped slavery, and battled the demon drink. In which case the heart of the book is shaped by the atypical. In that case what we have is, if I may have your forbearance and exaggerate slightly, something like a book that tells you that everybody in France during WWII was a member of the resistance and that everybody in the UK in 1968 was in London wearing a mini-skirt. This is an issue when we come to her last chapter "A New National Identity" because suddenly to be a white northern man who went to school before working partly as a pedlar, partly as an artisan and to have given up drinking under religious impulse was apparently the default historical experience - but I'll come back to that below.
Portrait of an Age
Here the book was at its best. We are shown in passing that the contemporary USA is considerably less divided on partisan lines than in the past when duelling was an accepted way of dealing with political differences and the newspapers were quick to name and shame those those who evaded their duty to attempt to kill those who held opposing views. The surprise is not that Alexander Hamilton died in a duel but rather it turns out that he managed to survive as long as he did having fought ten duels in the course of life, his just one of around one hundred estimated duelling deaths in the early years of the Republic (p41) .
Perhaps unsurprisingly alcohol was an important of daily life and boozing was in the earlier period considered a basic attribute of adult masculinity. This was to change with the Second Great Awakening - a huge religious revival movement that swept across the English speaking world - a consequence of its message of the need for a moral intensity in daily life was a tendency towards temperance in alcohol consumption.
There were great vignettes throughout the book, slaves who because they were hired out as skilled labour were able to save and buy their own freedom, young men and women perhaps seventeen or eighteen working as school teachers reminding us that this was a young country, men who split their year between artisan activity and peddling the things that they had made - but typically this was northerners trading into the south or the west so the other side of the story are these large areas of the country which lacked craftsmen during this period - again this is a young country in another sense still being settled.
Tellingly one young man bought his trading goods on credit, but then invested his profits in a new suit of clothes and a fancy watch before getting a new stock of trading goods on credit. There's no saving for a rainy day, perhaps wisely since the banks weren't safe places to deposit money. Not because of Jesse James' grandfather but because of their tendency to collapse. In something that reminded me of 23 things they don't tell you about Capitalism the early economy of the USA seems to have benefited from bank led inflation, a steady influx of forged bank notes (particularly from Canada), and the use of notes were were no longer tender - the trick here being to get as far away from the issuing bank as possible and to avoid returning to the place that you spent it.
Convincing also was how the period around 1800 marked a parting of the ways between northern and southern states with the former ending legal slavery but the latter particularly after the independence war in Haiti from 1804 and the beginnings of cotton farming moving in the other direction . This division effected the whole of society - at first preachers engaged in the Second Great Awakening were anti-slavery but over time in the south they became accepting of the institution.
As a portrait of an Age the book works quite well in so far as the election of Thomas Jefferson and the Second Great Awakening are presented as formative events, but the promise can not be delivered on because the premise of her book is too narrow. Without a discussion of the country before Jefferson, the changes attributed to his political victory come without any context. Unless the issue really is my ignorance. There is a limit to the audience a historian can bear in mind, the moderately educated US reader will certainly get more out of her discussion than I did.
Birth of a nation
Ah and here my woes were completed. Appleby has a tendency throughout to sweeping statements, a looseness in her use of anecdotal evidence, then finally the discussion on nationhood becomes awkward because despite alluding to Imagined Communities [spoiler] with its discussion of Creole national identities perhaps a near perfect starting point[/spoiler] she won't engage with any theoretical perspectives instead leaving us with the point that if there was a national identity then it was a self-consciously northern one that alienated the southern elite.
Again in good part the problem lies with me. After Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation we can see that one can easily write lengthy books about how national consciousness can be formed, contested over and reshaped. A thirty page chapter in a two-hundred and sixtyish page book that occasionally swishes its toe in the issues will fall foul of the mean-tempered reviewer who remembers that his Biology teacher said that irritation was one of the signs of life .
For me there are different levels of difficultly in Appleby's discussion. Firstly there is the possibility of an American nation today and what kind of nation that one might believe in. Appleby's nation is politically Jeffersonian, equal to all, includes native Americans and Blacks (who have agency). But is this a conception of a nation that the inhabitants of the newly constituted American Republic in the early days of the nineteenth century would have recognised or aspired too? We might even wonder, particularly after the death of Alexander Hamilton, what proportion of that population even aspired to be a nation in the singular as opposed to having a regional identity, and of those that did think in terms of an American nation how few might have included Blacks or native Americans in it? I had the inward version of a shocked gasp, not trapped wind but equally uncomfortable, when she mentioned Sequoyah inventing the Cherokee Syllabary as an example of the spreading literary in the new American nation - the same nation that was busily expelling Cherokees amongst others from the territories under its control. Would he and his fellow Cherokees have regarded themselves as exemplars of a growth in American literacy? There is an, er, interesting discussion that can be had here, maybe not for reasons of space in Appleby's book but she has endnotes, a bibliography, one can admit to there being degrees of nuance and complexity that one doesn't have space to detail.
Nation is something we can all believe in so long as we don't examine it too carefully. But at times I had the impression that Appleby was implying that the Americans in her study shared, by and large, her own vision of the American nation. This seems to me to be unlikely. Its also problematic when its clear to the reader that her archetypal American looks suspiciously like a white New England man. What about everybody else, one wonders, the British people who weren't wearing mini-skirts in 1968, the French people who were not in the Resistance during the Second World War. Ah for sure the national-self image may not be statistical accurate, it may even be completely wrong but then the author needs to be explicit about the difference between the formation of a national ideal self-image and the "typical" American. The implication as it stands is that there was no difference: there was a default American (white, male, northern, eventually a teetotaller) with a disturbing aberration in the south (also white and male, but tending to be boozier).
In anycase the book could have been easily improved by changing the title to "Inheriting the Revolution: the transformation of the Northern character in the USA" and using the very sparse material that Appleby seemed to have for free and enslaved southerners as a contrast to her main topic.
This is an unfortunately negative note to end on. I might blame Appleby for concluding with a chapter on nationhood and giving me an opportunity to pretend to be Vesuvius for a while. On balance I'd say as part of mixed diet of reading on the early American Republic Appleby offers a rich variety of anecdotal evidence of early American lives that serve to enliven and enrich one's awareness of the period, however perhaps out of a good hearted desire to squeeze in broad perspectives into a narrow frame, there's a lack of sophistication in her treatment.
June 12, 2009
This is probably the best recent "liberal" (as opposed to "republican") account of the early American republic. I think it succeeds brilliantly. Appleby's central source of evidence is autobiography; she draws on around 200 published autobiographies written by Americans born between 1776 and 1800. She also draws on travel narratives, including the observations of foreigners, to perhaps more striking effect. She weaves these accounts together to show how this generation of Americans responded to the uncertainties and opportunities of a nation without a past. During this generation's rise to maturity in 1800-30, she argues, "the autonomous individual emerged as an ideal" in the American imagination as citizens adjusted to displacement and chased after prosperity. This era saw the end of deference to custom and the birth of individualism.
On closer examination, however, this "national" mindset reveals itself to be a northern mindset, as Appleby points out. Faced with the ideological challenge of liberation and the greater profitability of cotton after 1793 (thanks to the invention of the modern cotton gin), southerners developed instead a distinctive regional identity based on ideals of "kith and kin, honor and gracious living." Thus, whether as a result or as a cause, northern reformers appropriated to themselves the responsibility for representing the nation at large. I wish Appleby had done more with this theme, actually -- but it is to her credit that, while clearly enamored of American liberalism as a whole, she acknowledges some of its paradoxes and downsides. For my part, I believe that there was actually a closer relationship between southern regional identity and the individualistic national identity; the South, I suspect, adopted only a slightly idiosyncratic version of the atomizing ideologies adopted elsewhere.
Appleby begins her account with politics, although politics functions less as a driving cause in her account than as a sort of permission. After 1800, when Federalism began its long but steady decline, partisan politics, carried on under the public eye through the press, became pervasive and (often literally) violent. More and more, Americans assumed that political participation was the birthright of all white males, not just of society's natural leaders or even of property owners. However, there was a hidden dark side to this tendency: as northerners began to emancipate their slaves, both the South and the North tightened restrictions on public participation by free blacks.
A more powerful cause of the individualization of America, Appleby writes, was commerce. America in 1800-30 was a land with a rapidly expanding market economy. Contributing factors included the integration of farms into the market, the use of steam power, the expansion of retail merchandising, the perfection of machine tools, the use of legal incorporation, and the proliferation of banks. This market economy, coupled with the ready availability of land, nourished individual ambition and a high degree of geographic and social mobility.
Although America remained an overwhelmingly agricultural nation, the expansion of the national market made possible the widespread reading of news, which in turn made possible the proliferation of literate careers. More Americans, including (in a few fields) women, now had the opportunity to pursue work as novelists, journalists, teachers, artists, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and independent preachers. This promoted an ethos of individual risk-taking and relentless self-fashioning.
Although political democratization was important, therefore, economic development was also a crucial stimulus for the elaboration of new social values. Old privileges based on birth or land gave way to egalitarianism because so many Americans had the opportunity for economic advancement. At the same time, however, many Americans responded to the availability of material comforts by aspiring to gentility, and southern planters, faced with the aspirations of slaves and poor whites, promulgated an aristocratic ideal -- defending slavery (abandoning an earlier tendency to treat it as a necessary evil) and turning it into a distinctive sectional institution.
The general dislocation of Americans, who struck European observers during the period as strangely restless people, also affected emotional life in the United States, Appleby argues. Individuals sought new bonds of affection to replace old social ties of authority and obligation. The passions -- marital, maternal, associational, and religious -- helped fill a void formerly occupied by custom. There was a detectable generational revolt of ambitious sons against authoritarian fathers (though also a growing tenderness toward mothers, as well as expressions of gratitude by many women on the fathers and husbands who promoted their education), an ostentatious tenderness between young spouses, and a nationwide wave of evangelical enthusiasm. All of this is evident, she argues, in the memoirs and fiction written by members of this generation.
(That chapter, the sixth, is probably Appleby's most interesting and distinctive chapter, but I think it needs work to be fully persuasive. She needs to address how [or whether:] American emotional life differed from European emotional life during the same period. Was American sentiment following the same course as European sentiment in the age of Romanticism, in a general revolt against the Enlightenment? Were Americans somehow different and more individualistic than Europeans? Was European Romanticism the product of similar market forces to those shaping America? I don't think this lacuna actually hurts the chapter's argument much; Appleby's goal is to show change within America, not to demonstrate that America was different from Europe. But the question needs to be answered in order to rule out the possibility that emotional demonstrativeness in the United States was the result of some other trend in Western thought rather than her market economy.)
Most visibly of all, the Second Great Awakening changed the way Americans addressed themselves to social questions. The revivals spread zeal for moral reform, and convinced individuals that they were responsible for influencing others. Spurred on by their Christian ardor, Americans launched an astonishing number and variety of voluntary associations to advance reform causes like temperance and sabbath observance. Appleby argues that this movement provided a vision of order for a country in flux; we see it "shifting loyalties from home and habit to self and progress." Then again, the most contentious and powerful reform issue was slavery, which tended to divide the nation rather than unite it.
In this setting of uncertainty and change, Appleby concludes, a recognizable new national identity emerged thanks to individual initiative, the growth of commerce, and the expansion of print culture. It was an identity based on the autonomous, prosperous, socially active individual. This created a stark division between the identities of the South and the North, and handed over to northern reformers (at least in their own estimation) the responsibility for speaking for the nation at large. For the moment, however, this first generation of Americans chose to imagine that they had explained what their nation was about.
On closer examination, however, this "national" mindset reveals itself to be a northern mindset, as Appleby points out. Faced with the ideological challenge of liberation and the greater profitability of cotton after 1793 (thanks to the invention of the modern cotton gin), southerners developed instead a distinctive regional identity based on ideals of "kith and kin, honor and gracious living." Thus, whether as a result or as a cause, northern reformers appropriated to themselves the responsibility for representing the nation at large. I wish Appleby had done more with this theme, actually -- but it is to her credit that, while clearly enamored of American liberalism as a whole, she acknowledges some of its paradoxes and downsides. For my part, I believe that there was actually a closer relationship between southern regional identity and the individualistic national identity; the South, I suspect, adopted only a slightly idiosyncratic version of the atomizing ideologies adopted elsewhere.
Appleby begins her account with politics, although politics functions less as a driving cause in her account than as a sort of permission. After 1800, when Federalism began its long but steady decline, partisan politics, carried on under the public eye through the press, became pervasive and (often literally) violent. More and more, Americans assumed that political participation was the birthright of all white males, not just of society's natural leaders or even of property owners. However, there was a hidden dark side to this tendency: as northerners began to emancipate their slaves, both the South and the North tightened restrictions on public participation by free blacks.
A more powerful cause of the individualization of America, Appleby writes, was commerce. America in 1800-30 was a land with a rapidly expanding market economy. Contributing factors included the integration of farms into the market, the use of steam power, the expansion of retail merchandising, the perfection of machine tools, the use of legal incorporation, and the proliferation of banks. This market economy, coupled with the ready availability of land, nourished individual ambition and a high degree of geographic and social mobility.
Although America remained an overwhelmingly agricultural nation, the expansion of the national market made possible the widespread reading of news, which in turn made possible the proliferation of literate careers. More Americans, including (in a few fields) women, now had the opportunity to pursue work as novelists, journalists, teachers, artists, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and independent preachers. This promoted an ethos of individual risk-taking and relentless self-fashioning.
Although political democratization was important, therefore, economic development was also a crucial stimulus for the elaboration of new social values. Old privileges based on birth or land gave way to egalitarianism because so many Americans had the opportunity for economic advancement. At the same time, however, many Americans responded to the availability of material comforts by aspiring to gentility, and southern planters, faced with the aspirations of slaves and poor whites, promulgated an aristocratic ideal -- defending slavery (abandoning an earlier tendency to treat it as a necessary evil) and turning it into a distinctive sectional institution.
The general dislocation of Americans, who struck European observers during the period as strangely restless people, also affected emotional life in the United States, Appleby argues. Individuals sought new bonds of affection to replace old social ties of authority and obligation. The passions -- marital, maternal, associational, and religious -- helped fill a void formerly occupied by custom. There was a detectable generational revolt of ambitious sons against authoritarian fathers (though also a growing tenderness toward mothers, as well as expressions of gratitude by many women on the fathers and husbands who promoted their education), an ostentatious tenderness between young spouses, and a nationwide wave of evangelical enthusiasm. All of this is evident, she argues, in the memoirs and fiction written by members of this generation.
(That chapter, the sixth, is probably Appleby's most interesting and distinctive chapter, but I think it needs work to be fully persuasive. She needs to address how [or whether:] American emotional life differed from European emotional life during the same period. Was American sentiment following the same course as European sentiment in the age of Romanticism, in a general revolt against the Enlightenment? Were Americans somehow different and more individualistic than Europeans? Was European Romanticism the product of similar market forces to those shaping America? I don't think this lacuna actually hurts the chapter's argument much; Appleby's goal is to show change within America, not to demonstrate that America was different from Europe. But the question needs to be answered in order to rule out the possibility that emotional demonstrativeness in the United States was the result of some other trend in Western thought rather than her market economy.)
Most visibly of all, the Second Great Awakening changed the way Americans addressed themselves to social questions. The revivals spread zeal for moral reform, and convinced individuals that they were responsible for influencing others. Spurred on by their Christian ardor, Americans launched an astonishing number and variety of voluntary associations to advance reform causes like temperance and sabbath observance. Appleby argues that this movement provided a vision of order for a country in flux; we see it "shifting loyalties from home and habit to self and progress." Then again, the most contentious and powerful reform issue was slavery, which tended to divide the nation rather than unite it.
In this setting of uncertainty and change, Appleby concludes, a recognizable new national identity emerged thanks to individual initiative, the growth of commerce, and the expansion of print culture. It was an identity based on the autonomous, prosperous, socially active individual. This created a stark division between the identities of the South and the North, and handed over to northern reformers (at least in their own estimation) the responsibility for speaking for the nation at large. For the moment, however, this first generation of Americans chose to imagine that they had explained what their nation was about.
November 11, 2019
Using several hundred autobiographies of men and women born during the Revolutionary era, INHERITING THE REVOLUTION examines the hopeful, optimistic society these lucky Americans created in the nineteenth century. In the manner of Gordon Wood's RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION and her own CAPITALISM AND A NEW SOCIAL ORDER, Joyce Appleby argues that American independence and the Jeffersonian "Revolution of 1800" turned colonial America into an unbound Prometheus. Invention and entrepreneurialism flourished, professionally trained man found a "career open to talents," settlements expanded into wilderness, men and women explored new domains of sentiment and religious fervor, politics became more raucous and unrestrained (as did political dueling, Appleby notes in a useful aside), and reformers explored the possibilities offered by voluntary self-improvement. Appleby's argument does not lack for consistency and dedication, but I find her relentless positivism grating after a while. At the very least a story without a unifying central conflict and without much tragedy isn't a very good story. Appleby acknowledges the existence of slavery but indicates that it belonged to a society, the South, increasingly out of touch with the capitalist American mainstream; Edward Baptist would counter that slavery was a capitalist institution, and that northerners were both economically and culturally complicit in it. Appleby mentions Indian Removal only in passing; her narrative would have benefited from considering the post-revolutionary generation's complex attitudes toward Native Americans, as well as the impact of capitalism and expansion on those Indians who left memoirs, like Blacksnake or Catherine Brown. Finally, it's worth considering Walter McDougal's point that so many Americans found their new nation a land of opportunity because many of them were con men, sharpers, and swindlers. Appleby probably affords entrepreneurs too much trust. I don't ask that the author write a different book or lose her optimistic tone and stories, but deeper shadows usually make for a stronger contrasts and thus, in the end, the more artful narrative.
March 5, 2008
An interesting conglomeration of biographies of "ordinary" Americans circa 1800. At its best when interpreting anecdote - at its worst when simplifying the dichotomy between North and South/overemphasizing the transformative role of Thomas Jefferson.
Read
October 3, 2023I've always been interested in the concept of generations and books written about them are few and far between. The subject lacks much rigor and the most prominent writers on generations, Strauss and Howe, base their work on vibes. Mrs. Appleby's book is a sophisticated and beautifully written expository on the generation born between the 1770s and 1790s, those that could be said to be the first to fully live within the American system and explores how they defined American culture.
Overall, the book was well worth the read and engaged into a number of topics about an often glossed over age. Although I couldn't help but think there were some problematic issues. Perhaps due to the lack of records of the age, it's mostly based on autobiographies rather than data about the generation. Mrs. Appleby also states in the first chapter that she focused more on autobiographies that were the exception rather than the rule. Chapter 7 on reform is a good case in point. As Mrs. Appleby briefly mentions that most Americans were not members of churches, she expounds at great length of the efforts within the Second Great Awakening. The same could be said of the high level of drinking, which this generation were the greatest imbiber (before or after) but Mrs. Appleby focuses on the fledgling temperance movement.
The one more problematic subject is the subject of the economy. Again, Mrs. Appleby briefly mentions that were many who failed within the Jeffersonian libertarianism, of the age, but over all describes a glow boom period, with high demand for food and cotton coming from Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. Well, I believe that Mrs. Appleby is correct that greater wealth was entering the country, it doesn't mean it was well distributed. The Great Wave by American historian David Hackett Fischer also has a short but contradicting message to Mrs. Appleby. "The growth of inequality was an international trend in the late eighteenth century. It appeared in Europe, Great Britain and even in the United States, where many studies have found a rapid increase in the concentration of wealth during the period of 1760 -1830."
Also, Mrs. Appleby also discusses the increase in the number of banks around the nation but does not discuss much of what effect they had. Sarah Quinn's book on the American History of mortgages explains that banks were not providing (what we would consider today) reasonable loans to the common person, they were to facilitate the investments of larger stake holders.
Overall, Inheriting the Revolution was very much work the read if you're interested in a cultural study of early American history but like all accounts of generations it has its short comings.
Overall, the book was well worth the read and engaged into a number of topics about an often glossed over age. Although I couldn't help but think there were some problematic issues. Perhaps due to the lack of records of the age, it's mostly based on autobiographies rather than data about the generation. Mrs. Appleby also states in the first chapter that she focused more on autobiographies that were the exception rather than the rule. Chapter 7 on reform is a good case in point. As Mrs. Appleby briefly mentions that most Americans were not members of churches, she expounds at great length of the efforts within the Second Great Awakening. The same could be said of the high level of drinking, which this generation were the greatest imbiber (before or after) but Mrs. Appleby focuses on the fledgling temperance movement.
The one more problematic subject is the subject of the economy. Again, Mrs. Appleby briefly mentions that were many who failed within the Jeffersonian libertarianism, of the age, but over all describes a glow boom period, with high demand for food and cotton coming from Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. Well, I believe that Mrs. Appleby is correct that greater wealth was entering the country, it doesn't mean it was well distributed. The Great Wave by American historian David Hackett Fischer also has a short but contradicting message to Mrs. Appleby. "The growth of inequality was an international trend in the late eighteenth century. It appeared in Europe, Great Britain and even in the United States, where many studies have found a rapid increase in the concentration of wealth during the period of 1760 -1830."
Also, Mrs. Appleby also discusses the increase in the number of banks around the nation but does not discuss much of what effect they had. Sarah Quinn's book on the American History of mortgages explains that banks were not providing (what we would consider today) reasonable loans to the common person, they were to facilitate the investments of larger stake holders.
Overall, Inheriting the Revolution was very much work the read if you're interested in a cultural study of early American history but like all accounts of generations it has its short comings.
May 14, 2018
In Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Professor Joyce Abbleby seeks to answer two key questions: Firs, how did Americans born in the generation after the American Revolution define their new society? Second, what sort of society did this new generation produce?
To answer this question, her study draws upon written biographies of several hundred Americans. Rather than a social science methodology, Dr. Appleby seeks to provide a nuanced and individualized description of patterns across a range of areas of life and, eventually, regional differentiation.
These areas of life include (a) the development of a wide range of (primarily) evangelical Christianity denominations and a number of new faiths of American origin (such as Mormonism) (drawing on Nathan Hatch and those building on his insights: (b) the decline of deference to one's social "betters" and the rise of more vibrant, turbulent political scene (building on Gordon Woods and similar scholars); (c) the movement west into the Gulf Coast South and Upper Mid-Western regions (with some attention to the impact on and response of Native Americans and African-Americans; (c) the rise of reform movements, particularly anti-slavery and abolitionism, temperance, women's rights, and Sabitarianism; and (d) the development of an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture and civil society, particularly in the North and Mid-Western territories and states.
Dr. Appleby's study provides a solid overview of patterns noted by other historians and thus a useful synthesis of these trends. She also provides a solid argument that these social changes which took hold in the North and Mid-West provide the foundation for the regional distinctions which lay at the root of the American Civil War.
This later argument is not developed in full, probably due to the author's stated focus on this first generation. She does provide a good overview of the Missouri Crisis of 1820 and usefully noted that the positions taken by members of Congress in this dispute quite well foreshadow many of those which would follow, starting with the new position taken by Congressmen from the northern states that slavery was a moral wrong and should be acted against rather than allowed to spread.
In summary, this book has much to recommend. Dr. Applebly brings together various interrelated threads of historiography without breaking a substantial amount of new ground and brings out the stories of a great number of very interesting figures, some well-known, others well so.
To answer this question, her study draws upon written biographies of several hundred Americans. Rather than a social science methodology, Dr. Appleby seeks to provide a nuanced and individualized description of patterns across a range of areas of life and, eventually, regional differentiation.
These areas of life include (a) the development of a wide range of (primarily) evangelical Christianity denominations and a number of new faiths of American origin (such as Mormonism) (drawing on Nathan Hatch and those building on his insights: (b) the decline of deference to one's social "betters" and the rise of more vibrant, turbulent political scene (building on Gordon Woods and similar scholars); (c) the movement west into the Gulf Coast South and Upper Mid-Western regions (with some attention to the impact on and response of Native Americans and African-Americans; (c) the rise of reform movements, particularly anti-slavery and abolitionism, temperance, women's rights, and Sabitarianism; and (d) the development of an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture and civil society, particularly in the North and Mid-Western territories and states.
Dr. Appleby's study provides a solid overview of patterns noted by other historians and thus a useful synthesis of these trends. She also provides a solid argument that these social changes which took hold in the North and Mid-West provide the foundation for the regional distinctions which lay at the root of the American Civil War.
This later argument is not developed in full, probably due to the author's stated focus on this first generation. She does provide a good overview of the Missouri Crisis of 1820 and usefully noted that the positions taken by members of Congress in this dispute quite well foreshadow many of those which would follow, starting with the new position taken by Congressmen from the northern states that slavery was a moral wrong and should be acted against rather than allowed to spread.
In summary, this book has much to recommend. Dr. Applebly brings together various interrelated threads of historiography without breaking a substantial amount of new ground and brings out the stories of a great number of very interesting figures, some well-known, others well so.
July 27, 2022
Appleby wrote a very informative book on the generation that grew up after the Revolutionary War. Their parents witnessed the Revolution and all of the hardships, misery, and fighting that occurred. This new generation now began to enjoy the fruits of their parents' labor as hey lived the so called American dream. But in their quest to live out their lives in this new nation, they transformed it way past the intent of the Founding Fathers. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton all were dismayed for different reasons in the directions that the new nation was heading. Only Madison remained cautiously optimistic. The growth of industry, religious fervor, populism, and many other ideas began to transform the new nation and at the same time created a greater divide between the North and South over slavery. It was then left to the next two generations that followed them to pick up the pieces and also fight a vicious war over what freedom actually meant to all Americans. It is a great book to read. I conclude with Appleby's last sentence. "Rather than abandon the cherished object of an American truth, they accepted the half loaf of a half truth wrapped in a covering myth about the land of the free".
December 29, 2020
"Productive, inventive individuals were presented as powerful nodes of attention and admiration, their lives serving as models of innovation in a society losing all desire to replicate past ways of doing things. This functional, future-oriented social blueprint replaced the older picture of communities unified around a stable social order. The personal qualities of intelligence, honesty, commitment, and enterprise came to be seen as animating the social whole." (144)
"The unexpected eruption of confrontational politics, the sweeping success of religious revivals, and the extended reach of communications were highly interactive in the first decades of the nineteenth century and their effect cumulative, even though they emanated from different popular sources, sometimes working at cross purposes." (236)
"The unexpected eruption of confrontational politics, the sweeping success of religious revivals, and the extended reach of communications were highly interactive in the first decades of the nineteenth century and their effect cumulative, even though they emanated from different popular sources, sometimes working at cross purposes." (236)
April 7, 2025
What a book. Very in depth look at the first generation of Americans and how their decisions impacted society. It was interesting to explore all the contradictions within early American society that these people had to somehow rationalize. Very good book.
November 9, 2017
Enjoyable book. Reinforces how different North and South were from the start. Covers a number of topics based on original sources.
Read
April 17, 2022Very informative, not a generation that one thinks about much.
July 17, 2016
An interesting read, though I found myself frustrated with it at times. Being based largely on autobiographies and memoirs written by members of the titular first generation, the book primarily reflects the perspectives of that era's winners, as the author herself acknowledges. Still, her methods do enable her to tell an informative story of how many of America's enuring national myths came to be constructed and may even have been somewhat true for a time.
One thing that felt sorely lacking was Native American perspectives. While the author does occasionally note the existence of indigenous peoples and the results of westward expansion by white settlers on their societies, such references were so fleeting as to be almost insulting. Even an indigenous leader as significant as Tecumseh only apparently warranted a mere two paragraphs near the end. Perhaps if Native Americans of the time had published more autobiographies she would've thought their experiences were more important.
One thing that felt sorely lacking was Native American perspectives. While the author does occasionally note the existence of indigenous peoples and the results of westward expansion by white settlers on their societies, such references were so fleeting as to be almost insulting. Even an indigenous leader as significant as Tecumseh only apparently warranted a mere two paragraphs near the end. Perhaps if Native Americans of the time had published more autobiographies she would've thought their experiences were more important.
May 9, 2012
An interesting take on an era of history that tends to be overlooked. The premise is absolutely fascinating, the idea that the revolutionary generation directly effected the generation born/coming of age in the years after independence and that there was a marked change between the generations. Each chapter follows a different strain of popular culture, whether it is post-revolutionary careers or religious reform. Ms. Appleby brings up an interesting notion that women's lives simultaneously changed and stayed the same, both reinforcing and reforming, and that is merely one strand of her premise. I found this book very fascinating, although the prose can, at times, become dry or heavy, and I found myself really having to focus on each sentence. This is not a book for light reading, but does make for excellent bedtime reading!
January 26, 2009
I read this for my senior AP US History class. We got to pick the book and this just sounded interesting to me. This is a really great book to learn what is not always written in the textbooks. Of particular interest to me was her discussion of religion in early America and branching off of so many sects of Christianity and how this relates to the America we live in today. Highly recommended!
March 3, 2013
The author never loses sight of the damaging failure to deal with slavery, the blindness inherent in Westward "progress" in regard to Native Americans or the legacy of alcoholism as these things shaped The First Generation. If you want an idea of how American Exceptionalism came to be our defining myth, this is the book to explain it.
March 8, 2016
Not sure how I didn't know about this book until nearly done with all my coursework...I would put it down as a must-read for anyone interested in early America, especially the generation that was born during and immediately following the Revolution. The endnotes are also particularly helpful for those looking for a wealth of primary sources to mine.
March 27, 2007
Another must read for the American People. Ever wonder how Colonial Englishmen became Americans? How the "American Spirit" can into being? The "American Dream"?
Read this and find out.
Another former class assignment- and one that the students actually loved.
Read this and find out.
Another former class assignment- and one that the students actually loved.
Read
September 23, 2010Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans by Joyce Appleby (2001)
October 17, 2012
Loved it!!
April 18, 2016
Another textbook for my current class.
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