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10. Class, Discourse, and Industrialization in the New American Republic
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10 Class, Discourse, and Industrialization in the New American Republic Lawrence A. Peskin In the half century from the Revolutionary crisis to the 1820s, the conception of class by urban residents of the new nation underwent an important transformation. In the Revolutionary era, perhaps informed by philosophers such as David Hume, urban Americans frequently thought of class in terms of the three great economic orders—commerce, manufacturing , and agriculture.1 The parades marking ratification of the Constitution held in all of the new nation’s big cities in 1788 reflected this conception. Paraders celebrating the Constitution organized themselves by occupational orders—merchants, artisans, and even farmers from nearby rural areas. Each of these orders had its own hierarchies. Merchants stood at the head of the commercial order, with clerks and waterfront laborers beneath them. Artisans were further subdivided into trades, and some, such as silversmiths, were commonly understood to be higher in status than others, such as shoemakers . Furthermore, within each trade, masters stood at the top of the hierarchy , while journeymen, apprentices, and common laborers occupied subordinate positions. In agricultural America, this hierarchy took the form of masters of a different sort who stood above yeoman farmers, slaves, and other laborers. By thinking about their social order in this way, Americans were able to integrate seemingly contradictory notions of class relations marked by hierarchy and deference on the one hand, and, on the other, a conception of class distinguished by cooperation of the three roughly equivalent orders. Thus, while the actual urban society contained wide disparities in wealth and social status, particular members of the society were at least as likely to identify with one of the three great economic orders as with a class position that cut across the economic orders to unite workers or masters or middling sorts. In this way, the late colonial city markedly diverged from more modern, indus- trial notions of cross-cutting class distinctions constituting broad upper, middle, and lower strata. It was not until 1827 or so that urban Americans began to favor the more modern conception of class. In its broad outlines, the story of this transformation is an old one, dating back at least to Marx and rewritten in various forms by many subsequent generations of historians. Most of these scholars, although not all, have imposed modern definitions of class structure in their analysis of these events, providing teleological stories of one kind or another. The linguistic turn that was nascent in earlier sociocultural theorists such as Max Weber2 and his intellectual descendent, E. P. Thompson, and that later rose to prominence along with the rise of postmodern philosophy and literary criticism has prompted historians such as Sean Wilentz in the United States and Gareth Stedman Jones in the United Kingdom to re-create these historical actors’ languages of class rather than imposing historians’ own vocabulary (often derived from Marx). Examining what historical figures said about class creates an enigma; for by speaking and thinking about their world, these historical actors were also redefining the way in which they and their contemporaries thought about class relations and, therefore, in a real sense changing the nature of those relations. Therefore, in studying their language we are investigating both the vocabulary used to understand class transformation and one of the means by which class relations were actually constructed. Nonetheless, the changing economy drove both the modifications in class structure and the transformations in language used to express it. While the worldwide market revolution caused all three of the sectors of the American economy to grow—commerce, agriculture, and manufacturing—the emergence of the United States out of colonial dependency caused manufacturing to undergo the most radical transformation. While some areas, particularly New England, did develop small manufacturing sectors, and all of the urban areas contained good numbers of artisans who primarily served the local market, most colonial Americans had little interest in manufacturing, and imperial regulations often prohibited it. With the end of the Revolution and the end of imperial rule, the manufacturing sector would begin to grow very rapidly. During these years, the first short-lived American factories were constructed. But perhaps more important, artisanal and household manufacturing grew very rapidly as thousands of new craftsmen arrived in the cities and, in some areas, farm families produced twice as many domestic manufactures as in the prewar years.3 Language and ideas also played a part in this transformation. The postwar Industrialization 139 [54.160.244.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-19...