Citizens More than Soldiers: The Kentucky Militia and Society in the Early Republic

6. A Refuge of Manhood

The men who came of age after the American Revolution could easily have identified withThomas Paine’s 1776observation that the times were trying for men’s souls. Although ratification of the Constitution settled the issue of an American system of government, the country struggled to preserve its independence, adjust to the volatile market economy, and shape a national identity. Social and political disorder threatened to overwhelm the nation as the post-Revolutionary generation appropriated the sacred ideal of liberty and seemingly perverted it to justify luxury, vice, and even corruption. The nation’s growing pains also created a crisis of confidence among white males as Americans’ definition of masculinity began to change. The eighteenth-century model of manhood , identified by historians as “republican” or “communal,” set forth that males, as heads of households, place the community good above individual desires, that they subordinate self-interest to the commonweal . In the early nineteenth century, this accepted gender construct came under assault from the market economy’s protagonist, the “liberal ” or “self-made man,” who unapologetically pursued wealth, power, and advancement. Before and during the Revolutionary era, virtue was the essential characteristic of the communal man. A sense of duty to one’s community and fulfilling that responsibility as a civically minded citizen established an individual’s claim to manhood. Classical republican ideology posits a similar notion in the ideal of civic virtue—that is, the subordination and sacrifice of self-interest and personal aspirations for the good of the community. Historian Ruth Bloch maintains that this was “an inherently masculine trait.” Communal manhood endured in the American psyche as the trials of the Revolution gave way to the challenges of nation building. But as the United States took the first steps toward legitimacy, another revolution [ 98 ] a refuge of manhood a refuge of manhood [ 99 ] of sorts was under way. In his study of Andrew Jackson, John William Ward describes the years of the early republic as a period of transition during which change was the byword. As the nation stretched westward , people traveled up the social scale, carried by economic prosperity and the transformation from a barter system to a market economy. This revolution swept through the United States as the market economy drew workers from farm to factory, replaced the independent artisan with wage laborers, and made competitiveness an admired quality. Selfinterest , the bane of eighteenth-century republicanism, began to take on a degree of legitimacy and acceptance. Success and prosperity were the rewards of ambition and assertiveness, characteristics no longer disparaged. Increasingly, the individual felt no obligation to surrender personal aspirations to a nebulous, ill-defined common good. What predominated, Anthony Rotundo suggests, “were the concerns of the self—self-improvement, self-control, self-interest, self-advancement.” Although family prominence survived the rise of the self-made man, this new American male saw economic security and challenges to arbitrary authority—not the old subordination of dreams to the common good or submission to men who had already realized the rewards of pursuing personal gain—as the best course to secure his family’s prosperity. These shifting components of manhood were not the only source of anxiety among American men in the early nineteenth century. Widespread land ownership, the fountainhead of republican independence and the key to capitalism for most Americans, also gave the common farmer the means and opportunity to question, if not directly challenge, his social and economic betters. Jefferson’s pronouncements of equality and liberty roused the common man’s determination and voice, and unquestioned submission to elite authority began to wane. According to Rotundo, by the early nineteenth century, society increasingly saw a man as “one who resisted arbitrary authority, who refused submission.” In sum, declining deference, waning civic virtue, and waxing self-interest all created a “culture shock of massive, inassimilable change that left men disoriented . . . and filled with both awe and fear.” The transition from communal to self-made man initiated a crisis of masculinity. Political leaders, clergy, and social critics bemoaned the decline in traditional values as men increasingly abandoned commitment to their communities for self-enrichment. Those who chose this course appeared to cast aside the qualities that for generations had iden- a refuge of manhood [ 100 ] tified American manhood. What it meant to be a man became lost in a whirlwind of confusing, contradictory, and contested values and...