My Highlights from Ch. 5-13

The way my brain works, I grasp a book best when I make a Cliff's Notes version for myself.  So, I thought I might as well post it.

Ch. 5. Political Authority

Patronage was most evident in politics, and there its use was instinctive.

Such patronage politics was simply an extension into governmental affairs of the pervasive personal and kin influence that held the colonial social hierarchies together.

In a monarchical society the king was “the Head & Fountain” of all offices and honors. Subjects were expected to look upward for favors and rewards, if not to the king himself, then at least to those who were dependent on him. The experience of living in a monarchy, said Hume, tended “to beget in everyone an inclination to please his superiors.” Lines of influence radiated outward from the crown through the colonial governors into even the remotest localities of American society.

Certainly it provided much of the colonists’ antagonism to the imperial system; indeed, the power of appointment became the great political evil against which they struck out most vigorously in their new revolutionary state constitutions of 1776.8 It is almost impossible today to comprehend the ancient monarchy in its own terms or to understand the role that patronage played in sustaining its authority. We apply modern republican standards that were already emerging in the eighteenth century. “Corruption” is nearly all we see.

Eighteenth-century monarchical government still rested largely on inherited medieval notions that are lost to us today. The modern distinctions between state and society, public and private, were just emerging and were as yet only dimly appreciated. The king’s inherited rights to govern the realm—his prerogatives—were as much private as they were public, just as the people’s ancient rights or liberties were as much public as they were private. Public institutions had private rights and private persons had public obligations.

All government was regarded essentially as the enlisting and mobilizing of the power of private persons to carry out public ends.

Only in the context of these traditional assumptions about the nature and limitations of premodern government can we appreciate the role of royal patronage and the apparent “private” exploitation of “public” offices in the colonies; in fact, it was to be the other way ’round: the “public” exploitation of “private” power. Since everyone in the society had an obligation to help govern the realm commensurate with his social rank—the king’s being the greatest because he stood at the top of the social hierarchy—important offices were supposed to be held only by those who were already worthy and had already achieved economic and social superiority.

Since these colonial governments lacked most of the coercive powers of a modern state—a few constables and sheriffs scarcely constituted a police force—officeholders relied on their own social respectability and private influence to compel the obedience of ordinary people.

In an important sense the Revolution was fought over just this issue—over differing interpretations of who in America were the proper social leaders who ought naturally to accede to positions of public authority.23 The personal structure of eighteenth-century politics, the prevalence of numerous vertical lines of influence converging on particular people of wealth and power, was what made colonial politics essentially a contest among prominent families for the control of state authority. This personal structure of politics, and not simply the age’s abhorrence of division, explains the absence of organized political parties in the eighteenth century. Political factions existed, but these were little more than congeries of the leading gentry’s personal and family “interests.”

-By the way, this description of factions does sound to me like the unofficial nature of the Federalists and the Republicans.

ii   REPUBLICANISM

Ch. 6. The Republicanization of Monarchy

In the end the disintegration of the traditional eighteenth-century monarchical society of paternal and dependent relationships prepared the way for the emergence of the liberal, democratic, capitalistic world of the early nineteenth century.

But not at any one moment—neither in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, nor in 1789 with the calling of the French Estates General, nor even in 1793 with the execution of Louis XVI. Republicanism did not replace monarchy all at once; it ate away at it, corroded it, slowly, gradually, steadily, for much of the eighteenth century. Republicanism seeped everywhere in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, eroding monarchical society from within, wearing away all the traditional supports of kingship, ultimately desacralizing monarchy

Republicanism was not to be reduced to a mere form of government at all; instead it was what Franco Venturi has called “a form of life,” ideals and values entirely compatible with monarchical institutions.

But republicanism was no less revolutionary for all that. In fact, it was in every way a radical ideology—as radical for the eighteenth century as Marxism was to be for the nineteenth century. It challenged the primary assumptions and practices of monarchy—its hierarchy, its inequality, its devotion to kinship, its patriarchy, its patronage, and its dependency. It offered new conceptions of the individual, the family, the state, and the individual’s relationship to the family, the state, and other individuals. Indeed, republicanism offered nothing less than new ways of organizing society. It defied and dissolved the older monarchical connections and presented people with alternative kinds of attachments, new sorts of social relationships. It transformed monarchical culture and prepared the way for the revolutionary upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century.

From 1688 on, the need for the government to defend the whig settlement and attack Stuart pretensions meant that a quasi-republican, anti-royalist bias was necessarily built into the official center of English culture.

It was almost always classical standards—Catonic and Ciceronian standards—that British opposition writers invoked to judge the ragged world of eighteenth-century politics. They placed the character of republicanism—integrity, virtue, and disinterestedness—at the center of public life.

Good summary of republican political philosophy:

According to the classical republican tradition, man was by nature a political being, a citizen who achieved his greatest moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic. Public or political liberty—or what we now call positive liberty—meant participation in government. And this political liberty in turn provided the means by which the personal liberty and private rights of the individual—what we today call negative liberty—were protected. In this classical republican tradition our modern distinction between positive and negative liberties was not yet clearly perceived, and the two forms of liberty were still often seen as one.21 Liberty was realized when the citizens were virtuous—that is, willing to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community, including serving in public office without pecuniary rewards. This virtue could be found only in a republic of equal, active, and independent citizens. To be completely virtuous citizens, men—never women, because it was assumed they were never independent—had to be free from dependence and from the petty interests of the marketplace. Any loss of independence and virtue was corruption.

Precisely because republics required civic virtue and disinterestedness among their citizens, they were very fragile polities, extremely liable to corruption. Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force, by patronage or honor. In republics, however, each man must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires, his luxuries, for the sake of the public good… In their purest form they had no adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their citizens’ voluntary patriotism and willingness to obey public authority. Without virtue and self-sacrifice republics would fall apart.

For many this disinterested leadership could only be located among the landed gentry whose income from the rents of tenants came to them, as Adam Smith said, without their exertion or direct involvement in the interests of the marketplace.

Suspicion and jealousy…were in fact necessary evils to offset the soaring passions of ambition and desires for power expressed by rulers or great men. And therefore to the degree that the rulers became virtuous and republicanized, the people could relax their jealousy and suspicion and become open and trustful…Ultimately the most enlightened of that enlightened age believed that the secret of good government and the protection of popular liberty lay in ensuring that good men—men of character and disinterestedness—wielded power. In the end there was no substitute for classical republican virtue in the society’s rulers.

7. A Truncated Society

-Part 1: The top part of the English hierarchy was missing in America—Americans had “a strong bias to Republican Principles:”

First, many colonists had little reason to feel part of His Majesty’s realm or to respect royalty (eg, non-English immigrants and Puritans).

The harmonious compromise between central and local authorities that had developed in Britain since 1688 was not duplicated in America. The crown always seemed to the colonists to be an extraneous overlaid power antagonistic to their local institutions.

The colonists had little understanding of state authority, of a united autonomous political entity that was completely sovereign and reached deep into the localities. And thus they were not prepared to accept that authority when after 1763 it tried to intrude into their lives. Not only did royal authority have trouble making itself felt in the colonies, but it lacked the religious backbone that an established church offered royalty at home…. Control of religious life never flowed from the top down, and personal patronage within any of the numerous religious groups was never strong.

Although real and substantial distinctions existed in colonial America, the colonial aristocracy was never as well established, never as wealthy, never as dominant as it would have liked….As pervasive as personal and kinship influence was in the colonies, gentry use of this influence in the economy, in religion, or in politics was never as powerful as it was in England. Militia officers were often selected by their companies, ministers were hired by their parishioners, and a remarkably large proportion of political leaders were popularly elected, sometimes by an extremely broad electorate.

America could not sustain the stable pattern of tenantry that lay at the heart of a traditional landed society, and thus that dependency that lay at the heart of monarchical society was undermined. The tenants often lived on land far removed from their landlords and were very poorly supervised... mobility was high…In a society where land was so widely available, most men preferred to secure their own land.

More than anything else, it was this weakness of the colonial aristocracy—its relative lack of gentility, its openness to entry, its inability to live up to the classical image of political leadership, and its susceptibility to challenge—that accounts for the instability and competitive factiousness of colonial politics. Wherever the ruling families of a colony were entrenched—readily identifiable and beyond the resentment and rivalry of others—as in eighteenth-century Virginia and New Hampshire, then the politics were stable and factionalism was at a minimum.

-Part 2: “Egalitarian exceptionalism”—the bottom part of the English hierarchy was missing in America: the great mass of destitute people that still burdened most European societies was also lacking.

Most American farmers owned their own land (“We are Lords of our own little but sufficient Estates”). The radical importance of this landownership in an English-speaking world dominated by rent-paying tenants and leaseholders cannot be exaggerated: even before the Revolution it gave Americans a sense of their egalitarian exceptionalism.

Freehold tenure in America was especially widespread, and freehold tenure, said William Knox bluntly, “excluded all ideas of subordination and dependence.”

-Conclusion of Ch. 7:

America, it seemed, was primed for republicanism. It had no oppressive established church, no titled nobility, no great distinctions of wealth, and no generality of people sunk in indolence and poverty…Yet paradoxically this latently republican society was at the same time manifestly monarchical…Not only were the legal dependencies of white servitude and black slavery harsher and more conspicuous in the colonies than in England, but the relative backwardness of the colonists’ society and economy meant that Americans had fewer opportunities than Englishmen to substitute impersonal market exchanges and a cash nexus for older personal and patriarchal connections; and thus they were more apt than Englishmen to continue to think of social relationships in familial and personal terms—as expressions of the household rather than of a market society. Colonial society was therefore a society in tension, torn between contradictory monarchical and republican tendencies…Consequently, the connectedness of colonial society—its capacity to bind one person to another—was exceedingly fragile and vulnerable to challenge.

Ch. 8. Loosening the Bands of Society

Just at the moment when some parts of American society seemed to be becoming more like England’s, powerful forces were accelerating and changing everything. These basic forces were the most important sources of the late-eighteenth-century democratic revolution. Of course, they were not unique to America; they were Western-wide. But because society in the New World was already more republican, more shallow, and more fragile, there the effects of these forces seemed magnified and overdrawn.

In the subsequent decades, they, like the Europeans, struggled to comprehend what was happening to them, and they sought through a variety of ways to resolve the problems and anxieties created by their newly detached and independent situations. The history of America in the decades between the 1740s and the 1820s is the story of these various resolutions. The imperial crisis with Great Britain and the American Revolution itself were simply clarifying incidents in this larger story of America’s democratic revolution.

The basic fact of early American history was the growth and movement of people

With such movement of people and such buying and selling of land, any traditional sense of community became increasingly difficult to maintain….The effects of this increase and movement of people were momentous. The population outran the society’s political institutions, and most of the small and exclusive colonial governments remained unresponsive to the powerful forces at work. In many of the colonies, in the middle colonies especially, representation in the legislatures did not come close to keeping up with the expansion of population

Continued immigration…kept the backcountry society from matching the stability of the older Tidewater counties. Thus its social distinctions remained tenuous, its politics turbulent, and its structures of authority continually susceptible to challenge.

Coupled with this demographic expansion—and nearly equal a force in unsettling the society—were the spectacular changes taking place in the American economy.

Exports and imports began rapidly rising in the 1740s and 1750s. Higher prices and increased demand for foodstuffs to feed the expanding populations of the Atlantic world began enticing more and more American farmers into producing for distant markets.

But it was not just increased purchasing power among ordinary people that caused this consumer revolution; it was the weakness of the social hierarchy and the social emulation this encouraged.

These written contracts represented very different obligations from those of the older book accounts: they suggested a degree of mistrust and were particularly and often exclusively economic rather than being part of some ongoing social relationship based on personal familiarity. For many rural colonists these written credit obligations constituted a major intrusion of impersonal market relations into lives that hitherto had been governed by custom and communal norms.34

Without specie or paper money,…trade had to be carried on “by credit or barter,” which in turn required the close and more personal patron-client relationships of a small-scale society. But in a society where increasingly “the Inhabitants [were] Strangers to each other,” reliance on such personal relationships would mean that the society “could carry on no Trade.” …Thus paper money opened up possibilities for increasing numbers of people to participate more independently and more impersonally in the economy. For farmers to borrow from a land bank meant that they were no longer dependent on city merchants or great moneyed men of the community for their credit. Paper money thus had a corrosive effect on traditional patronage dependencies.38

A series of religious upheavals throughout all the colonies, later called the Great Awakening [also had a big impact]…In general they grew out of people’s attempts to adjust to the disturbing changes in their social relationships caused by demographic and commercial developments. It is not surprising, for example, that New Light religious awakenings in Connecticut centered precisely in those eastern counties most unsettled by population growth, trade, and paper-money emissions. Although the Great Awakening commonly represented an effort by people to bring some order to their disrupted lives, its implications were radical, especially since supernatural religion remained for most ordinary people, if not for enlightened gentry, the major means of explaining the world. By challenging clerical unity, shattering the communal churches, and cutting people loose from ancient religious bonds, the religious revivals became in one way or another a massive defiance of traditional authority. The individualistic logic of Protestantism was drawn out further than ever before. Revivalist clergymen urged the people to trust only in “self-examination” and their own private judgments, even though “your Neighbours growl against you, and reproach you.” …The burden of people’s new religious attachments now rested clearly on themselves and their individual decisions.45 Such conditional loyalties could contribute little to the deferential faith and obedience on which monarchy ultimately rested.

Ch. 9. Enlightened Paternalism

Duties and obligations hitherto taken for granted by masters and subordinates were now open to doubt. Traditional social bonds were coming apart, and authority lost confidence in its ability to hold them together.

The problem began naturally enough with the family—that model of all superior-subordinate relationships in a traditional society.,, These changing ideas about parent-child relationships constituted what has been called a “revolution against patriarchy.”… Parental power was not absolute after all, and children had rights as well as obligations. Parents, it seemed, had to earn the respect and trust of their children, and in some sense the children as they grew actually came to consent to their parents’ rule. In just this way did the Lockean image of a trusting relationship between caring parents and respectful children come to explain the new consensual relationship between rulers and subjects in the English-speaking world.

This liberalization of paternal authority spilled out to affect all economic and social relations. And precisely because American society was so economically primitive and so personally organized compared with England, the effects of this liberalization on relationships were greater in the colonies than in the mother country… Increasingly in the commercialized eighteenth century contracts became much more voluntary, explicit, and consensual, much less declaratory of previously existing rights and duties and much more the consequence of conscious acts of will. Instead of defining social relationships, they now focused on individual transactions...Contracts came to be thought of as positive bargains deliberately and freely entered into between two parties who were presumed to be equal and not entirely trustful of one another.

Not only did this contractual imagery explain the people’s obedience to the prerogative powers of the king (which their consent expressed in their representative legislatures could never do), but eventually the notion of an original contract between crown and people also made sense of the colonists’ developing view in 1774 that they were connected to Great Britain exclusively through the king, “Parliament” being “no party to the transaction.” Their several charters (or where these were lacking “their commissions to their governors have ever been considered as equivalent securities”) were now seen as “evidence of a private bargain made and executed between the King of England and our predecessors, to which the [British] nation were total strangers, and are so still, however they have in some instances strangely intermeddled.”

As feelings between the antagonists hardened, the modern contractual image tended to swallow up the traditional patriarchal idea of authority. It was as if paternalism became so liberal, so republicanized, as to surrender itself willingly to modern legal contractualism.

Ch. 10. Revolution

[Revolution] meant as well an opportunity to abolish what remained of monarchy and to create once and for all new, enlightened republican relationships among people.1 Such a change marked a real and radical revolution, a change of society, not just of government. People were to be “changed,” said the South Carolina physician and historian David Ramsay, “from subjects to citizens,”

By the late 1760s and early 1770s a potentially revolutionary situation existed in many of the colonies. There was little evidence of those social conditions we often associate with revolution (and some historians have desperately sought to find): no mass poverty, no seething social discontent, no grinding oppression.

Yet because such equality and prosperity were so unusual in the Western world, they could not be taken for granted. The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists’ hard-earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the poverty of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.

This extraordinary touchiness…flowed from the precariousness of American society, from its incomplete and relatively flattened character, and from the often “rapid ascendency” of its aristocracy,

They may have seemed…to be “silly people” by their resisting a simple extension of the services required of them out of “fear [of] drawing their Posterity into Bondage,” but they knew the reality of the eighteenth-century world. They knew the lot of ordinary people elsewhere, and they knew especially the lot of white and black dependents in their own society, and thus they could readily respond to images of being driven “like draft oxen,” of being “made to serve as bond servants,” or of foolishly sitting “quietly in expectation of a m[aste]r’s promise for the recovery of [their] liberty.” The immense changes occurring everywhere in their personal and social relationships—the loosening and severing of the hierarchical ties of kinship and patronage that were carrying them into modernity—only increased their suspicions and apprehensions. For they could not know then what direction the future was taking.

The revolutionaries’ assault necessarily was as much social as it was political. But this social assault was not the sort we are used to today in describing revolutions. The great social antagonists of the American Revolution were not poor vs. rich, workers vs. employers, or even democrats vs. aristocrats. They were patriots vs. courtiers—categories appropriate to the monarchical world in which the colonists had been reared. Courtiers were persons whose position or rank came artificially from above… Patriots, on the other hand, were those who not only loved their country but were free of dependent connections and influence; their position or rank came naturally from their talent and from below, from recognition by the people.

It was not how many loyalists who were displaced that was important; it was who they were… Because they commanded important chains of influence, their removal disrupted colonial society to a degree far in excess of their numbers.

Neither the returning loyalists nor the patriots who took many of their places were able to re-create precisely the old prewar chains of family and patronage. Post-revolutionary society was inevitably put together on new republican terms. Social and business links formed during the war and after were thinner and more precarious, less emotional and more calculating than they had been. The lines of interest and influence created by the Revolution were looser and less personal, based less on kin and more on devotion to the patriot cause or on wealth alone… To eliminate those clusters of personal and familial influence and transform the society became the idealistic goal of the revolutionaries. Any position that came from any source but talent and the will of the people now seemed undeserved and dependent.

It is in this context that we can best understand the revolutionaries’ appeal to independence, not just the independence of the country from Great Britain, but, more important, the independence of individuals from personal influence and “warm and private friendship.”…[Thus,] All dependents without property, such as women and young men, could be denied the vote because, as a convention of Essex County, Massachusetts, declared in 1778, they were “so situated as to have no wills of their own.”

Once the revolutionaries collapsed all the different distinctions and dependencies of a monarchical society into either freemen or slaves, white males found it increasingly impossible to accept any dependent status whatsoever. Servitude of any sort suddenly became anomalous and anachronistic…Before long indentured servitude virtually disappeared… By the early nineteenth century what remained of patriarchy was in disarray.

Limiting popular government and protecting private property and minority rights without at the same time denying the sovereign public power of the people became the great dilemma of political leaders in the new republic; indeed, it remains the great dilemma of America’s constitutional democracy.

Ch. 11. Enlightenment

Destroying the ligaments of patronage and kinship that had held the old monarchical society together was only half the radicalism of the republican revolution. Something else would have to be put in place of these ancient social ties, or American society would simply fall apart. The first steps in constructing a new republican society were to enlighten the people and to change the nature of authority.

But enlightenment was not simply a matter of material prosperity, of having Wedgwood dishes and finely pruned gardens. It was above all a matter of personal and social morality, of the ways in which men and women treated each other, their children, their dependents, even their animals. Such enlightened morality lay at the heart of republicanism. Americans thought themselves more civilized and humane than the British precisely because they had adopted republican governments, which, as Benjamin Rush said, were “peaceful and benevolent forms of government” requiring “mild and benevolent principles.”

We shall never understand the unique character of the revolutionary leaders until we appreciate the seriousness with which they took these new republican ideas of what it was to be a gentleman. No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership. Washington’s behavior, for example, is incomprehensible except in terms of these new, enlightened standards of gentility. Few were more eager to participate in the rolling back of parochialism, fanaticism, and barbarism… Jefferson was probably the revolutionary leader most taken with the new enlightened and liberal prescriptions for gentility…

The power of classical republican imperatives among all the revolutionary leaders was impressive…They believed the Revolution represented a recovery of antique virtue… In ancient Rome, said James Wilson, magistrates and army officers were always gentlemen farmers, always willing to step down “from the elevation of office” and reassume “with contentment and with pleasure, the peaceful labours of a rural and independent life.”  [Washington’s] retirement had a profound effect everywhere in the Western world. It was extraordinary, it was unprecedented in modern times—a victorious general surrendering his arms and returning to his farm.

Ch. 12. Benevolence

At the height of the patriot frenzy in 1774–76 many of the revolutionaries wanted nothing less than a reconstruction of American society. But they had no desire to overturn one class and replace it with another. They could as yet scarcely conceive of society in these modern terms. What the whig radicals desired was to destroy all the remaining traditional ties of a monarchical society—those “secret bonds of society,” as Jeremy Belknap called them: bonds of blood, family, and personal influence—and replace them with new republican adhesives.1 Somehow American society would have to be tied together in new ways.

Since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century reformers had sought to republicize monarchy by replacing its social cements with other, more affective, more emotional, more natural ties. The Enlightenment came to believe that there was “a natural principle of attraction in man towards man,” and that these natural affinities were by themselves capable of holding the society together.8 These natural affinities, the love and benevolence that men felt toward each other, were akin to traditional classical republican virtue but not identical to it.

Promoting social affection was in fact the object of the civilizing process… The importance of this domestication of virtue for American culture can scarcely be exaggerated. It was not nostalgic or backward-looking, but progressive. It not only helped reconcile classical republicanism with modernity and commerce; it laid the basis for all reform movements of the nineteenth century, and indeed for all subsequent modern liberal thinking. We still yearn for a world in which everyone will love one another.

Men like Adams were optimistic and confident of social harmony and progress because the new modern virtue was no Utopian fantasy but an enlightened conclusion of the modern science of society… But educated and enlightened people wanted something more: to secularize Christian love and find in human nature itself a scientific imperative for loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Ultimately the Enlightenment aimed at nothing less than discovering the hidden forces in the moral world that moved and held people together, forces that could match the great eighteenth-century scientific discoveries of the hidden forces—gravity, magnetism, electricity, and energy—that operated in the physical world.

Masonry transformed the social landscape of the early Republic… It offered ritual, mystery, and congregativeness without the enthusiasm and sectarian bigotry of organized religion…It was designed to maintain the familiarity of personal relationships in a society that was coming apart. It created an “artificial consanguinity,”

Even the submissiveness of the servant toward his master was occasionally sugarcoated with the term “friendship.” It was as if every patron-client and dependent relationship had to be smothered in benevolence.

Yet these efforts to assert the obligations of gratitude and to reconcile republicanism with hierarchy were doomed almost from the outset. For the Revolution had set loose forces in American society that few realized existed, and before long republicanism itself was struggling to survive.

iii   DEMOCRACY

Ch. 13. Equality

But the ink on the Declaration of Independence was scarcely dry before many of the revolutionary leaders began expressing doubts about the possibility of realizing these high hopes. The American people seemed incapable of the degree of virtue needed for republicanism. Too many were unwilling to respect the authority of their new elected leaders and were too deeply involved in trade and moneymaking to think beyond their narrow interests or their neighborhoods and to concern themselves with the welfare of their states or their country. In many of the greatly enlarged and annually elected state legislatures a new breed of popular leader was emerging who was far less educated, less liberal, and less cosmopolitan than the revolutionary gentry had expected.

Since at the outset most revolutionary leaders had conceded primacy to society over government, to modern social virtue over classical public virtue, they found it difficult to resist people’s absorption in their private lives and interests. The Revolution was the source of its own contradictions. The federal Constitution of 1787 was in part a response to these popular social developments, an attempt to mitigate their effects by new institutional arrangements. The Constitution, the new federal government, and the development of independent judiciaries and judicial review were certainly meant to temper popular majoritarianism, but no constitution, no institutional arrangements, no judicial prohibitions could have restrained the popular social forces unleashed by the Revolution. They swept over even the extended and elevated structure of the new federal government and transformed the society and culture in ways that no one in 1776 could have predicted. By the early nineteenth century, America had already emerged as the most egalitarian, most materialistic, most individualistic—and

Democracy actually represented a new social order with new kinds of linkages holding people together.

Summary of the big change: In the decades following the Revolution, American society was transformed. By every measure there was a sudden bursting forth, an explosion—not only of geographical movement but of entrepreneurial energy, of religious passion, and of pecuniary desires. Perhaps no country in the Western world has ever undergone such massive changes in such a short period of time. The Revolution resembled the breaking of a dam, releasing thousands upon thousands of pent-up pressures. There had been seepage and flows before the Revolution, but suddenly it was as if the whole traditional structure, enfeebled and brittle to begin with, broke apart, and people and their energies were set loose in an unprecedented outburst.

Nothing contributed more to this explosion of energy than did the idea of equality… Within decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world, and it remains so today, regardless of its great disparities of wealth… By equality they meant most obviously equality of opportunity… Ordinary Americans came to believe that no one in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner was really better than anyone else… Good republicans had to believe in the common sense of the common people.

In the course of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, enlightened and republicanized gentry undermined this aristocratic contempt in a variety of ways. By assuming their inferiors had realities equal to their own, they in effect secularized the Christian belief in the equality of all souls before God, and in the process gave birth to what perhaps is best described as humanitarian sensibility—a powerful force that we of the twentieth century have inherited and further expanded.

In the end what remains extraordinary about the views of late-eighteenth-century Americans is the extent to which most educated men shared the liberal premises of Lockean sensationalism: that all men were born equal and that only the environment working on their senses made them different… Despite all their acceptance of differences among people—differences created through the environment operating on people’s senses—most revolutionaries concluded that all men were basically alike, that they were “all partakers of the same common nature.” It was this commonality that linked people together in natural affection and made it possible for them to share each other’s feelings… Americans, like others in these years, modified their stark Lockean environmentalism by positing this natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being. Such a moral gyroscope—identified with Scottish moral or commonsense thinking and resembling Kant’s categories—was needed to counteract the worst and most frightening implications of Lockean sensationalism and to keep individuals level and sociable in a confused and chaotic world… this balancer or arbiter was not reason, which was too unequally distributed in people, but a common moral sense… From this assumption flowed not only the confidence of the revolutionaries in the natural affability of people, but the view of many that educated gentlemen had no greater sense of right and wrong than plain unlettered people… Here was the real source of democratic equality, an equality that was far more potent than the mere Lockean belief that everyone started at birth with the same blank sheet.

Equality became the rallying cry for those seeking to challenge every form of authority and superiority, including the rank of gentlemen… As early as the 1780s the principal antagonists in the society were no longer patriots vs. courtiers but had become democrats vs. aristocrats.

Equality in America meant not just that a man was as good as his neighbor and possessed equal rights, but that he was “weighed by his purse, not by his mind, and according to the preponderance of that, he rises or sinks in the scale of individual opinion.” That was a kind of equality no revolutionary had anticipated.