Inheriting
the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans
Joyce Appleby
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
$16.00, 322 pages, ISBN 0-674-00663-1.
Bill Mohr
University of California, San Diego
In
The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, George
Kubler compares a historian’s technique with a painter’s
task: “to discover a patterned set of properties that will elicit
recognition all the while conveying a new perception of the subject.”
Joyce Appleby’s significant accomplishment in depicting the first
generation of a newly fledged nation is all the more remarkable because
she had no familiar image of her subject to work with; as she puts
it in her opening argument, this cohort of early citizens and their
subordinates and slaves is usually perceived as either “a coda
or a preface.” Appleby’s title frames the initial problem
she confronted in her choice of a period. Outside of numerical chronology,
what exactly is the name of this generation, and if they are the first
to inherit, how does their lack of anticipation of the inheritance
affect their reaction to its plenitude? An inheritance, after all,
is something one usually looks forward to, and in the uncertain glow
of its arrival time, one makes plans for how to spend it. The economy
of this primogeniture, however, is one which required those who received
the benefits to imagine themselves as the rightful owners of a nascent
state of things.
Appleby suggests that the generation she examines did not so much
inherit a revolution as generate the actual inheritance itself, for
it was this cohort that made the United States an “imagined enterprise.”
Her felicitous variation on Anderson’s well-known term provides
her analysis of the major transitions in this period with a context
for the emergence of America’s primary generic character: the
self-made man. As Appleby acknowledges, this phrase was coined by
Henry Clay, although she does not mention that it did not enter circulation
until the early 1840s, well after the period she is attempting to
illuminate. Nevertheless, “the autonomous individual,” as
Appleby points out, “came to personify the nation and the free
society it embodied.”
Appleby’s strategy is by now a familiar analytical shift: emphasize
that which has been overlooked before, and reduce the role of those
who previously dominated the narrative. William Cullen Bryant, for
instance, certainly fits within the temporal perimeter (1776-1800)
of birthdates for the characters who populate Appleby’s argument,
but Bryant’s presence as a literary figure is reduced to a reference
to a single poem. Instead of famous families, Appleby illuminates
her account of this period by drawing on memoirs of relatively ordinary
women and men, several of whom appeared in her earlier examination
of autobiographies from this period, Recollections of the Early
Republic. Inheriting the Revolution expands the argument
she proposes in Recollections of the Early Republic that only
in the America “did the decisions that individuals made about
their personal lives play so large a part in shaping the character
of public institutions.”
Appleby supplies varying degrees of irony within the notion of the
self-made man throughout her book, but the life of the New England
shoemaker Arial Bragg is an especially acute example of the ideology
of autonomy at work. As Appleby observes, “truly effective social
markers must be communicated subliminally, their identities conspicuous,
attitudes unthinking and behavior automatic.” If Bragg is a good
example of the individual who inherits the revolution, he occupies
this position because of how his life and occupation are related in
an unthinking manner to those whose disinheritance increased after
the Revolution. In contrast to African-American hopes prior to the
Revolution for manumission after their owner’s death, by 1820
slaves found themselves even more enmeshed in the South’s predatory
logic. A million more of them lived in states such as Alabama and
Mississippi which did not exist when the Constitution ratifying their
servitude was approved. Supplying footwear to these slaves, Bragg’s
prosperity as a shoe manufacturer grew in direct relation to the expansion
of a cotton market in the South. Bragg’s success demonstrates
how “self-made” must always be italicized by its direct
dependence on the exploitation of human beings stripped of any rudiment
of human dignity.
In addition, autonomy of the self, for white males at least, could
flourish only because the new nation did not perceive its legal boundaries
to be anything other than whatever settlement its citizens were willing
to establish in the territory that constituted the nations of Native
Americans. If Appleby’s book has a weakness, it is in the very
limited amount of space that she allows Native American voices during
this period. Very few Native Americans wrote autobiographies, which
constrains Appleby’s inclusion, but a few more maps would have
helped us understand the extent of the devastation. As she records
in a footnote, the paintings of the tribal representatives who went
to Washington, D.C. at the tail-end of this period were destroyed
in a fire, but that effacement should not be compounded by the absence
of maps. I am certain I am not the only person who must confess that
I have no precise idea of the actual area which constituted the Shawnee
nation led by Tecumseh, whom Appleby calls the “greatest American
Indian leader of the era [and] perhaps the one Native American capable
of negotiating some kind of an accommodation with the United States.”
The War of 1812 receives scant attention in this book, which is not
necessarily a flaw, but if Tecumseh was honored in defeat through
“the ritual cleansing of print,” a page or two addressing
those texts and how they circulated would permit us to understand
how the onslaught of American individualism used the social organization
of Native American life to justify its own accumulating power. Both
Julia L. Dumont and Benjamin Drake, for instance, wrote about Tecumseh,
and both (both in 1794) easily fit within Appleby’s definition
of first generation.
Inheriting the Revolution demonstrates how difficult it can be
even for an astute and accomplished scholar to resist the youthful
romantic myths of an imperialist nation, a myth so alluring that it
seduces Appleby into indulging in a brief fantasy of what the immigrant
insurgency must have been like as the population west of the Appalachian
Mountains soared from a third of a million to more than two million
between 1800 and 1820. “There must have been something wondrous,”
Appleby fantasizes, “about growing up when the pinebreaks and
forests, teeming with game, yielded to the plough, the ax and the
managed fires of frontier farms. Stands of hardwood trees, covering
the land, opened up farther west to prairies ablaze in spring flowers.”
The actual wonder of this time was much more pragmatic, as Appleby
herself notes. After the War of 1812, for instance, veterans received
a bounty of 160 acres of land, which most of them promptly sold to
land speculators. As a historian, Appleby appears to be fair to everyone,
especially those who have previously been marginalized, but one wonders
if she betrays a secret sympathy when she repeats a sentence that
follows the above snatch of lyrical effusion. As an example of the
kind of people who moved through this undiluted wilderness, she presents
the Trimble family, who “passed though the Cumberland Gap with
a party of five hundred moving west in military formation under the
tight discipline of a former Continental army officer,” and over
a hundred pages later again recites almost the same exact sentence,
though the second time she omits any mention of the several slaves
who helped clear the Trimble family property.
The restless prosperity of the first generation did not extend to
all free white males. The contemporary disparity in the distribution
of wealth in the United States is a well-known fact, but Appleby’s
statistics indicate that this gulf has been a persistent fact of American
social life, with the “top 10 percent (of free white men) controlling
almost half of all wealth” during this period. Significant material
possessions did not translate into enduring political power, however,
for the Federalist party which represented old money yielded to the
ascendancy of Jefferson’s followers. This factionalism was not
simply about political ideals, but represented a social challenge
that “had thoroughly politicized the very notion of social superiority.”
Appleby emphasizes the role that commodities played in leveling the
lingering images of hierarchical notions of social subordination.
Political independence did not instantaneously translate into cultural
autonomy, and Appleby succumbs too quickly to the cultural division
between Great Britain and the United States. “Each set of heirs
necessarily re-works its cultural inheritance,” she argues, but
neglects to account for the continuities in literary rules employed
by American critics. When Appleby cites criticisms of biographies
of contemporary Americans of that period, she fails to mention that
the notion of the power of private life to illuminate the character
of a public figure derives from Samuel Johnson’s contentions
about this genre. What Appleby calls the “contrapuntal action
of past and present” is indeed the flux that vivifies our understanding
of the genealogy of “individual aspiration,” but the point
of view of her argument too often isolates this generation within
its own contours. She does, for instance, incorporate the successful
slave revolt that resulted in the establishment of the Republic of
Haiti into her argument, but these events in Haiti are also an inherited
revolution with more consequences than she presents.
All of these reservations are minor, however, for her book permits
us to juxtapose many of the social contradictions that American capitalism
inherently generates. Appleby builds on the assumptions that culture
is primarily “the traditions and attitudes passed though speech
and actions from parents to children.” The first generation however,
developed a tradition that shaped the entire concept of an individual’s
relationship to the community. Whatever aspects of gemeinshaft
that might have existed in American society after the Revolution vanished
quickly as what came to be known as a “career” refocused
one’s sense of responsibility to one’s fellow citizens.
Appleby cites Joseph Schumpeter’s term, “creative destruction”,
to mark the arrival of a new virtue: one’s reputation for self-reliance.
Inheriting the Revolution will provide scholars with a framework
for further investigations of this period in American history for
many years to come, and may prove to be the most frequently cited
of all of her books in bibliographies of future scholars.
