Reviews of Books

The premise of Joyce Appleby's new book is simple and arresting: Americans after 1789 possessed political independence and a constitutional blueprint for nationhood, but they possessed neither national political and social forms nor a national identity. It was the generation that matured after the Revolution that defined what the United States would become—not by relying on tradition but by living free and busy lives that became models for future Americans. Appleby's first generation constructed a democratic politics, a future-oriented, opportunity-driven liberal society, and a national ethos grounded in individual freedom, individual ingenuity, and individual aspiration. Her core source for all this is two hundred autobiographies written by members of the inheriting generation. These were not the anonymous Americans beloved of social history. They were innovators, both national and local, "who did something in public—started a business, invented a useful object, settled a town, organized a movement, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication, if only an autobiography" (pp. 7–9). It is through their life histories that Appleby maps the ways in which freedom created a national way of life.	1
Inheriting the Revolution begins, as does much of what Appleby writes, with Jeffersonian Democracy, construed as active, ambitious, and liberal. Jeffersonians rejected Federalist elitism, insisting on free speech, free association, and popular participation in political life. They also insisted, through the expanding medium of print, on publicity. Disputes that eighteenth-century gentlemen might have hashed out in their drawing rooms were now the stuff of newspapers, pamphlets, and barber-shop conversations. The result was a competitive, publicity-driven public sphere that was both modern and democratic.	2
The same held true for economic life. Neither government nor old elites had the power to channel opportunity in the new republic. American commercial society was constructed by ordinary men who made the right choices, weathered economic storms, and forged life histories that became the template of American myth. Boys fresh off the farm started businesses, invented new technologies, wrote books, founded schools, explored wildernesses, joined clubs and reform movements, and thought their way through new moral dilemmas. The money rolled in, and the expanding range of consumer goods encouraged further fantasies of self-definition. Many of the new careers were tied, like politics, to the world of print, and Appleby spends some of her most imaginative pages tracing the lives of engineers, lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, preachers, teachers, and journalists who rose through education and a knack for reading, writing, and speaking in public—old elite prerogatives that were becoming the common acquired skills of a new middle class.	3
Evangelical Protestantism also undermined old ways, helping, like the market and the republic, to hand decisions about intellectual authority, national identity, and eternal salvation over to the mass of aspiring individuals. Before long, self-made moralists formed societies and founded publications designed to impose a new ethos of individual freedom (self-government) not only on themselves and their families but on nonchurchgoers, Sabbath-breakers, drunkards, and slaveholders. The churches and reform societies were voluntary associations. They offered alternatives to inherited families and communities, and they provided another arena in which Americans rejected tradition and acted out lives of choice and self-definition. The reformers were a minority, but they were highly visible, and they were skilled deployers of publicity and print.	. . .