Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, and: The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Both of these books feature published autobiographical writings as their central source of historical evidence, but they do so to rather different ends. Joyce Appleby employs autobiographies of successful white men as a starting point to fashion a synthetic narrative of the Early American Republic. Ann Fabian, on the other hand, uses autobiographies of marginalized men (white and black) to investigate standards of credibility in nineteenth-century American print culture. Fabian contributes more directly to the recent burgeoning of scholarship on the autobiography form in America and Europe, ¹ whereas Appleby’s ambition reaches beyond the monographic to highlight the “human touch” that autobiographical evidence can bring to the writing of grand historical narrative.

Joyce Appleby focuses on what she identifies as the “first generation” (p. 5) of Americans born in the fateful years between 1776 and 1800, the generation which inherited the many opportunities and many burdens created by the American Revolution. The cultural flexibility already apparent in the colonial period would magnify so dramatically in this post-revolutionary world that the colonial past rapidly became obsolete as a point of cultural reference for a rising generation faced with the open-ended task of building a new nation. If the Revolution witnessed a wrenching disruption of society and a radical transformation of governance in America, it was the Early Republic which would see the abstract political principles of the Revolution turned into concrete social realities and enduring cultural myths. The Early Republic, according to Appleby, resulted in the ascendancy of versions of individualism and nationalism whose positive and negative legacies still confront Americans in the present day.

The introductory chapter seeks to contextualize a fundamental bias in Appleby’s primary source base, so that she can pinpoint which social groups generated these myths of individualism and nationalism, and which did not. The core of her evidence comes from a sample of over 200 published autobiographies, but the preponderance of these were written by “white Northern clergymen” (p. 23). Hence, Appleby also gathered data on “thousands of other active members of the first generation” (p. 24) who did not happen to publish autobiographies. Conceding that such a cohort still did not directly cover “those who declined to become pathbreakers or in fact were categorically excluded” (p. 24), Appleby rounds out a complete image of American social diversity via secondary literature that highlights the experiences of women, enslaved and free blacks, Native Americans, and other marginalized social groups. Even so, these groups remain positioned somewhere outside the “first generation” of Americans; they serve largely as surrounding context for the “successful white men” (p. 5) who provide the ideological thrust of Appleby’s narrative. Appleby scrupulously includes both history’s winners and losers in that narrative, yet her source base does not afford equal access to the countervailing subjectivities and alternative ideologies of the losers—those who likely viewed the triumph of individualism and nationalism rather differently.

After the introduction, the bulk of Appleby’s book pulls the reader away from questions of subjectivity, and into the brisk flow of narrative. It is here that her use of autobiographies pays immense dividends, because in strikingly kinetic prose Appleby weaves a grand historical narrative not through abstract social aggregates, but through a succession of concrete individual stories. The effect is to render a decisive sweep of American history both vivid and dramatic, and to populate that history not with ordinary men (they are somewhat too successful to be ordinary), but with many unexceptional men who acted as “agents of change” (p. 3) in an extraordinary interval of American history. Chapters Two and Three set the scene by outlining how the vast energies of these middling white men unleashed a democratic new political culture and an entrepreneurial new economic culture between the 1790s and the 1820s.

Appleby then devotes the next several chapters...