Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  15. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 6.

  16. Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784 (Philadelphia, 1911), 1: 238–39.

  17. Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago, 2006), 79.

  18. Lawrence W. Towner, “The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices: 1734–1805,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 43 (1956–1963), 427; Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, CT, 1976), 10.

  19. Charles William Janson, Stranger in America (London, 1807), ed. Carl S. Driver (New York, 1935), xxiii–iv.

  20. Janson, Stranger in America, 423–24, 311, 20, 86; William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801–1811 (Columbia, SC, 1999), 1.

  21. Samuel L. Mitchill, An Address to the Citizens of New York (New York, 1800), 23; Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York, 1977), 195.

  22. James A. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Selected Essays (Boston, 1991); Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, 1992); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, 1990). For analyses of the “transition to capitalism” debate, see Gordon S. Wood, “Inventing American Capitalism,” New York Review of Books (9 June 1994), 44–49; and Wood, “The Enemy Is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” in Paul A. Gilje, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early Republic (Madison, WI, 1997), 137–53.

  23. Rothenberg, whose book is based on empirical data drawn from account books, probate inventories, and tax valuations, argues that an authentic market economy exists wherever buyers and sellers are in such free exchange with one another over a region that the prices of the same goods tend to converge. In other words, a market economy, Rothenberg concludes, emerged in rural new england only when the prices of farm commodities, farm labor (or wages), and rural savings (or interest), came to be set, not by custom or by government, but by the impersonal exchanges of the market. Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992), 124, 220, 243, 101.

  24. J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, 2008), 53.

  25. BF to Benjamin Vaughn, 26 July 1784, in Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1905–1907), 9: 243–44; Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (London, 1974), 79–80.

  26. Opal, Beyond the Farm, 75.

  27. Elkanah Watson, Address of Elkanah Watson, Esq.. Delivered before the Berkshire Agricultural Societ y . . . 7th October, 1814 (Pittsfield, MA, 1814), 4, 7; Elkanah Watson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Existing State of Modern Agricultural Societies on the Berkshire System, from 1807 to Establishment of the Board of Agriculture in the State of New York, January 10, 1820 (Albany, 1820), 114, 126, 132, 142, 145, 160, 168 n, 169, 177–78, 182; Winslow C. Watson, ed., Men and Times of the Revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson . . . from the year 1777 to 1842 (New York, 1857), 425, 426–27, 428.

  28. Opal, Beyond the Farm, 96–125, esp. 118, 101, 111–13, 120; Rena L. Vassar, ed., “The Life or Biography of Silas Felton Written by Himself,” American Antiquarian Society, Proc., 69 (1959), 140.

  29. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982); Jack K. Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History (College Station, TX, 1980).

  30. Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, ed. Howard C. Rice Jr., (Chapel Hill, 1963), 2: 601; Elliot J. Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” AHR, 90 (1985), 18–43; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 98–104.

  31. Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky: A Series of Reminiscential Letters, in joyce Appleby, ed., Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies (Boston, 1997), 64; Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite,’” 23–25.

  32. Grady Mc Whiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, 1988); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989).

  33. Janson, Stranger in America, 307–8; Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite,’” 31–36.

  34. Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1960), 23–72.

  35. Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts, eds., Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey, 1793–1798 (Garden City, NY, 1947), 328–29, 333.

  36. The Journal of William D. Martin: A Journey from South Carolina to Connecticut in the Year 1809, ed. Anna D. Elmore (Charlotte, SC, 1959), 8–9; Ester B. Aresty, The Best Behavior: The Course of Good Manners—From Antiquity to the Present as Seen Through Courtesy and Etiquette Books (New York, 1970), 189–90, 229; North American Review, 1 (1815), 20.

  37. Samuel A. Otis to John Langdon, [16–22] Sept. 1789, in Maeva Marcus and James R. Perry et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 1985), 1: 661. Part 2 of this volume is full of the awkward letters of men who desired appointment to the Supreme Court but were culturally inhibited from expressing their desires too boldly.

  38. Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793–1821 (Columbus, OH, 1998), 79.

  39. Harvey Strum, “Property Qualifications and Voting Behavior in New York, 1807–1816,” JER, 1 (1981), 359.

  40. Strum, “Property Qualifications,” 367.

  41. Griffith J. Mcree, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell (New York, 1857–1858), 2: 160; Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1965), 57.

  42. Strum, “Property Qualifications,” 350, 369.

  43. Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence, KS, 2004), 199, 153; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 123.

  44. Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago, 2003).

  45. Benjamin Latrobe to Philip Mazzei, 19 Dec. 1806, in Margherita Marchione et al., eds., Philip Mazzei: Select Writings and Correspondence (Prato, Italy, 1983), 439.

  46. Richard Beale Davis, ed., Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America Collected in the Years 1805–6–7 and 11–12 by Sir Augustus John Foster, Bart. (San Marino, CA, 1954), 56.

  47. Latrobe to Mazzei, 19 Dec. 1806, in Marchione et al., eds., Mazzei: Writings, 439.

  48. David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: the Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965), 183; Charles Warren, Jacobin and Junto; or, Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, 1758–1822 (New York, 1931), 223.

  49. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic, 82; Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton, 1960), 161.

  50. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 43.

  51. Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995), 367–68.

  52. Warren, Jacobin and Junto, 183–214; Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (New York, 2006), 113–17.

  53. G. S. Rowe and Jack D. Marietta, “Personal Violence in a ‘Peaceable Kingdom’: Pennsylvania, 1682–1801,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America (New York, 1999), 24–27; Eric H. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (Berkeley, 2001); Historical Violence Database, http://cjrc.ose.edu/hvd; Alan David Aberbach, In Search of A
n American Identity: Samuel Latham Mitchill, Jeffersonian Nationalist (New York, 1988), 187.

  54. Neil K. Fitzgerald, “Towards an American Abraham: Multiple Parricide and the Rejection of Revelation in the Early National Period . . .” (M.A. thesis, Brown University, 1971), 8–9.

  55. Doron Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown, “Darkness in New Light New England: Punishing Bestial Acts in the 1790’s,” unpublished paper presented at the American Historical Association Convention, 5 Jan. 2008, and cited with permission of the authors.

  56. Roger Lane, Murder in America (Columbus, OH, 1997), 82–84; Irene Q. Brown and Richard D. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 260.

  57. Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), 123–288; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979), 59.

  58. Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 268, 274, 279.

  59. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009).

  60. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana, IL, 1989), 59.

  61. Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, in, 1996), 60–63.

  62. James Monroe to JM, 4 Aug. 1812, Papers of Madison: Presidential Ser., 5: 114.

  63. Gilje, Rioting in America, 60–63; Charles G. Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763–1812 (Urbana, IL, 1984), 243–50; Hickey, War of 1812, 52–71; Frank A. Cassell, “The Great Baltimore Riot of 1812,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 70 (1975), 241–59; Donald R. Hickey, “The Darker Side of Democracy: The Baltimore Riots of 1812,” Maryland Historian, 7 (1976), 1–19; Paul A. Gilje, “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the Anglo-American Mob Tradition,” Journal of Social History, 13 (1979), 547–64.

  64. Janson, Stranger in America, 304.

  65. Samuel L. Mitchill, Emporium, 1 (1812), 74; Aberbach, American Identity: Samuel Latham Mitchill, 189.

  66. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York, 1979) 89, 17.

  67. Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 3–21, 87; Ian R. Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, CT, 1979), 3–32; Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (Cambridge, UK, 1987), 48; Elizabeth Cometti, ed., Seeing America and Its Great Men: The Journals and Letters of Count Francesco dal Verme, 1783–1784 (Charlottesville, 1969), 15; BR, “The Effects of Ardent Spirits upon Man,” in Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush (New York, 1947), 340.

  68. Page Smith, John Adams (Garden City, NY, 1962), 2: 1016–17.

  69. Alan Taylor, “‘The Unhappy Stephen Arnold’: An Episode of Murder and Penitence in the Early Republic,” in Ronald Hoffman, Mechel Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1997), 105.

  70. Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill, 2006), 188–353.

  71. Karen A. Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa City, 2004), 24.

  72. Ellen K. Rothman, “Sex and Self-Control: Middle-Class Courtship in America, 1770–1870,” in Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York, 1983), 394–95; Daniel Scott Smith, “Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35 (1973), 419–28; Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640–1971,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1975), 561; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1822 (New York, 1990), 155–56.

  73. American Museum, 7 (1790), 306; David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1977), 77–112; Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy.

  74. Steven J. Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798–1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 12–13, 14; Charles Nisbet (1787), quoted in Samuel Miller, Memoir of the Rev. Charles Nisbet, D.D., Late President of Dickinson College, Carlisle (New York, 1840), 167.

  75. Novak, The Rights of Youth, 14.

  76. Novak, The Rights of Youth, 17–18.

  77. Novak, The Rights of Youth, 20–21; Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 139.

  78. Novak, The Rights of Youth, 28.

  79. Novak, The Rights of Youth, 45, 57.

  80. Novak, Rights of Youth, 76.

  81. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 225.

  82. William Miller, “The Effects of the American Revolution on Indentured Servitude,” Pennsylvania History, 7 (1940), 136; Sharon V. Salinger, “Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” WMQ, 40 (1983), 64–66; Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and “Lower Sort” During the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 16.

  83. C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York, 1999), 83.

  84. American Museum, 11 (1792), 84; Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge, 1981), 125–26; Richard S. Pressman, “Class Positioning and Shays’ Rebellion: Resolving the Contradictions of The Contrast,” Early American Literature, 21 (1986), 95; Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 132.

  85. Janson, Stranger in America, 88; M. J. Heale, “From City Fathers to Social Critics: Humanitarianism and Government in New York, 1790–1860,” JAH, 63 (1976), 26–27; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977), 28–30, 49; Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, 379; Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765–1848: The Urbane Federalist (Boston, 1969), 533; Strum, “Property Qualifications,” 371.

  86. David John Jeremy, ed., Henry Wansey and His American Journal, 1794 (Philadelphia, 1970) 99; Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830–1860 (New York, 1967), 5–7; Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of Etiquette Books (New York, 1946), 82; Doris Elizabeth King, “The First-Class Hotel and the Age of the Common Man,” Journal of Southern History, 23 (1957), 173–88; Sharon V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore, 2002), 244–46; A. K. Sandoval-Strauss, Hotel: An American History (New Haven, 2007).

  87. Sharon V. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge, 1987), 154, 156–57; Charles F. Montgomery, American Furniture: The Federal Period (New York, 1966), 14.

  88. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), 39; Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 167–68; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 58.

  89. Montgomery, American Furniture, 22–23; Ian M. G. Quimby, “The Cordwainers Protest: A Crisis in Labor Relations,” Winterthur Portfolio, 3 (1967), 83–101.

  90. Lisa B. Lubow, “From Carpenter to Capitalist: The Business of Building in Postrevolutionary Boston,” in Conrad Edrick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens, eds., Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850 (Boston, 1997), 195.

  91. James P. Walsh, “‘Mechanics and Citizens’: The Connecticut Artisan Protest of 1792,” WMQ, 62 (1985), 66–89.

  92. Lubow, “From Carpenter to Capitalist,” in Wright and Viens, eds., Entrepreneurs, 206, 207.

  93. Walsh, “‘Mechanics and Citizens,’” 66–89.

  94. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge, UK, 1989), 33–34; Lubow, “From Carpenter to Capit
alist,” in Wright and Viens, eds., Entrepreneurs, 185.

  95. George Warner, Means for the Preservation of Political Liberty: an Oration Delivered in the New Dutch Church, on the Fourth of July, 1797 (New York, 1797), 13–14; Alfred Young, “The Mechanics and the Jeffersonians: New York, 1789–1801,” Labor History, 5 (1964), 274; Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, 1969), 389; Richard E. Ellis, Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York, 1971), 173.

  96. TJ to David Williams, 14 Nov. 1803, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 10: 431.

  97. Ruth Bogin, Abraham Clark and the Quest for Equality in the Revolutionary Era, 1774–1794 (East Brunswick, NJ, 1982), 32; Abraham Bishop, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against Christianity and the Government of the United States (Hartford, 1802), 20; Jerome J. Nadelhaft, “‘The Snarls of Invidious Animals’: The Democratization of Revolutionary South Carolina,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (Charlottesville, 1981), 77; Aleine Austin, Matthew Lyon: “New Man” of the Democratic Revolution, 1749–1822 (University Park, PA, 1981), 274, 67; Stewart, Opposition Press of the Federalist Period, 390.