Book Review

Joyce Appleby admires "pathbreakers" who break with traditional ways. Her arresting book is pathbreaking in two ways: it offers a major new synthesis of the period from 1790 to 1830, which "normally serves as a coda to the Revolutionary era or a preface to Jacksonian America," arguing successfully that, as a time of major transformations, it is important in and of itself. Second, it is based on a reading of some two hundred published autobiographies of individuals born between 1776 and 1800, a "cohort" of the "children of the Revolution," demonstrating that autobiographies are indeed "an unparalleled source of clues about sensibilities . . . as well as of values and interpretations that constructed reality for a given generation."	1
She has organized her findings in seven thematic chapters: "Responding to a Revolutionary Tradition," "Enterprise," "Careers," "Distinctions," "Intimate Relations," "Reform," and finally "A New National Identity." The result is a provocative synthesis textured with evocative life stories from a scholar with an enviable command of the era. "Far more than Andrew Jackson," Appleby argues, "Jefferson and his supporters democratized American politics," and politics percolated through the society, eroding elitist values. Here is a portrait of a country where "a popular entrepreneurial culture . . . permeated all aspects of American society"; where "widely accessible new careers probably engaged as many as ten percent of white adult men"; where an efflorescence of evangelical religions stimulated a host of reform movements attacking "the darker side of American freedom"; and "where two distinct social orders" had emerged by 1830, prefiguring the North and South of the antebellum era. In short, she offers Alexis de Tocqueville's liberal America moved back a full quarter of a century.	2
"My research strategy," Appleby writes, "resembled a vacuum cleaner." She identified 400 autobiographies from which she read some 200, how chosen is not clear. They are for the most part "modest achievers," those who "did something in public," men and women who "were not typical but influential." While she offers no breakdown of her "cohort" (she is frank that "the preponderance came from white Northern clergymen"), she is quite aware of the inherent bias in the genre: "few failures wrote autobiographies." "To correct this imbalance," she hopes that the "information that I gathered on the thousands of other active members of the first generation who had not written autobiographies provided some ballast." (An appendix defining her sources and explaining the principles of selection would have been clarifying, and a listing of the texts would have been valuable to scholars who willbe inspired by her example to work with the genre.)	3
As sources, the autobiographies work exceptionally well for those themes where they were generated to fill a cultural need: the stories of entrepreneurs to celebrate their success, or the confessions of reformed drunkards to further the temperance crusade. Here Appleby's conclusions flow from an analysis of the "self-fashioning" in the genre as well as from the texts. Where the conventions of the later era in which the memoirs were composed impose reticence, as in the discussion of "intimacies," they are less effective. And by the time we reach the creation of a bifurcated national identity, the memoirs come across as illustrations of generalizations arrived at from other scholarship. But one listens carefully to the conclusions of a scholar of Joyce Appleby's breadth, however derived.	. . .