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Chapter3 Opening Households In the countryside of eighteenth-century New England, household and neighborhood duty underlay a cultural hierarchy that set old over young, custom over innovation, precedent over potential. Youthful inclinations were inherently suspect-youthful talents, vaguely threatening. "It is a common practice in the country for grave old age to speak of some youthful folly before an assembled family, in terms fit only to characterize a thief;' lamented Herman Mann of Dedham village. These small-scale jeremiads, the printer reported, could be heard "almost daily within the limits of every town." Behind the stern warnings and resigned faces of the old folks, Mann discerned, youthful hopes and virtuous ambitions went to die.1 Historians generally agree that the formation of the republic undermined patriarchal beliefs and routines, enabling new domestic ideals of romance , consent, and affection to manifest in everything from naming practices and wedding rituals to children's clothing and women's portraits. In contrast to their French counterparts, however, American revolutionaries barely tampered with the legal and social foundations of the patriarchal home. Indeed, political independence reinforced the status of propertied men in important if intangible ways. Especially for those families without the means to pose for a portrait, in which the enhanced sensitivity of the enlightened father could be displayed, the softening of patriarchal protocols had limited relevance. What did impinge on laboring households was a new rationale of family life that lifted the prospects of the nation over the needs of the household. This emergent perspective put a new value on the "genius;' "talents;' and even the ambition of youth while casting doubt on the assumption that they would "follow" their parents and seek independence.2 In the villages where Edward Hitchcock and Daniel Mann grew up, these new formulas made good sense. Parents and children in these new centers had to think more creatively about what sorts offutures awaited the next generation. Even in the village, however, the rhetoric and logic of youthful ambition ran counter to the daily needs of marginal parents, and often to the 70 Chapter] religious and social values that made their marginality bearable. The stories that liberal reformers and village boosters spun about youthful potential had even less traction in the farm households that raised Silas Felton and Ephraim Abbot. The tendency here was instead to saddle first sons, especially , with heavier duties for less certain rewards. Farther and further still from the village, young people like Thomas Burnside and Charles Harding discovered that independent parents, not national reformers, had first and even final say over youthful duties and destinies. Better than any theorist on family life, they understood the tangle of doubts, hopes, resentments, and opportunities that made early national self-making into the perilous journey that had to be retold. The Problem ofYouthful Ambition "How or in what manner are CHILDREN to be trained up?" asked Rev. Clark Brown ofhis rural listeners in 1795. With the knowledge that God loves them and wants them to be happy, he answered. For too long, young people had been made to forget or deny "that dignity in the scale of creation, for which we were created." Our benevolent parent would never want that, Brown dared to say. Due respect for human nature was the proper starting point for a good upbringing, which formed the "notions, ideas, and practices" of every person. To these liberal Christian and Lockean precepts, Brown added the cosmopolitan spirit of the Enlightenment: children were made not only for their families but also for "mankind in general:' With a newfound sense of their place in the nation or on the globe, the native talents and desires of young people would lead them to realize the self by serving the public. Parents should cultivate the "latent sparks of genius" within their children for "their own advantage, and for the benefit of society." Otherwise, young Americans would continue to turn out "contracted in their views and sentiments ." They would become as "illiberal and uncharitable" as the Brimfield, Massachusetts, leaders whom he would later denounce for ignoring public enterprises.3 Clark Brown's quarrel with the Brimfield patriarchs had many sources. He was young, Harvard-educated, and popular with the local youth. "The Aggrieved;' or the parishioners who fought for his ouster from 1798 to 1802, were older farmers of conservative mores. Brown always irritated and often enraged them, they explained in church records. He had all the "vanity" and "petulance" ofyouth; he was a"young Buonoparte" with dangerous...

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