| This study explores the transformation from a traditional to a “liberal” culture in early national America. Previous studies of this topic stress the expansion of markets and the spread of democratic sentiments as the key agents of cultural as well as social change in the countryside. Yet scholars struggle with the concept of liberalism, not least because few Americans employed that term in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some historians have even suggested that the United States grew into a liberal society without crafting a liberal ideology.; This project reveals that there was, in fact, a grammar of liberalizing change that emerged after—and, in many respects, because of—the American Revolution. Far from a simple apology for acquisitiveness or egalitarian sentiments, this grammar leveled a complex moral, economic, and social challenge to localism writ large. It promised to “excite” country peoples, to lift them from parental precedents and neighborhood concerns. Both its detractors and supporters captured its message and appeal with the term, “Ambition,” or the desire to gain “distinction” within a grand public. To study this movement, I have focused on seven rural New Englanders, all born after the Revolution, who each devised a distinctive “career” within a still-agrarian economy and social order. Each chapter follows these figures through a stage in the life course, interlacing their experiences with the spread of new formulas for personal and social potential.; By asking how and why these figures escaped the farm, I reveal the contested creation of a new cultural landscape in the American hinterlands, one that exploded local bounds and underwrote the self-definition of obscure young men. I also cast light on the rise of the autobiographical persona in American culture. And I contend that this process unfolded before the demise of the household economy, anticipating and helping to shape the ultimate decline of a pre-industrial social order in the United States. |
