Cultural Orphans in America

CHAPTER 5: The Rise of the Republic

CHAPTER FIVE The Rise of the Republic For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. — MATTHEW 26:11 metaphorically speaking, the Revolution entailed a reconfiguration of the family in which sons replaced fathers, first through violent overthrow and then through generational succession. With the formation of the republic, the notion of citizenship became fundamental, and the Founding Fathers distinguished between natural children who belonged by birthright to the family of the republic and unadoptable orphans, Indians and Negroes,who circled like restless shadows outside its narrow embrace. But there gradually appeared a third category of children, adoptable orphans, or foreigners, who could become naturalized citizens. While naturalization laws appeared to signify a liberalization of earlier Puritan attitudes toward "strangers," they reinforced and even fomented an extraordinary wave of xenophobia during the 18405 and 18508 that recapitulated the exclusionary policies of the Puritans.In short, the Federalists adapted the Puritan notion of election to the political sphere, and as the recipients of God's grace asserted their right not only to serve as spiritual leaders but to regulate political and social conduct (Griffin, 425-426). During the first half of the nineteenth century, or the antebellum period, patterns of inclusion and exclusion became firmly established in the wake of the rapid social changes that were engulfing the fledgling nation. Industrialization , immigration, and innovations in transportation and technology were among the factors that created a second Revolution and destabilized the soM The Rise of the Republic cial order. The result was a republican ideology that was the product of the newly emergent middle class. It was an ideology that looked backward to the Puritans' organic view of society in which family, government, and religion intertwined; it also looked forward, insofar as its legacy persists today in the form of contemporary attitudes toward race, class, and gender that determine degrees and kinds of participation in Americansociety. The new social dynamic that shaped attitudes during the antebellum period was class conflict.As important as the Great Migration and the Revolution in shaping American national identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century gave birth to that many-headed hydra, the middle class. Class distinctions that had been amorphous and ill-defined emerged sharply, despite the effusion of democratic, egalitarian rhetoric intended to minimize them. The delineation of classes was, of course, the inevitable outgrowth of a market economy. Scholars such asJames A. Henretta trace the formativeperiod of American capitalism to the pre- and post-Revolutionary decades when the increased demand for commercial products at home and abroad created a new set of economic relations based on wage labor rather than the cooperation, barter, and self-sufficiency that characterized the earlier agricultural economy. For example, Henretta situates the formative period of American capitalism in the decades from 1770 to 1800. The Revolution itself can be viewed in economic terms. For example, the leaders of the Revolution belonged to the so-called "ruling classes"— merchants , major landowners, and professionals (Foner,xvii). Another factor was that economic and social changes in urban centers attended the rise of capitalism and undermined allegianceto the British mercantilistic system (Nash, 200-201). While the extent of the changing economy's influence on the Revolution is debatable, there is little question that the aftermath of the Revolution provided impetus to the growth of capitalism by disrupting the import trade and stimulating domestic production and enterprise, as well as speculative and acquisitive instincts. Specific changes wrought by the Revolution included confiscation and redistribution of Loyalist property, as well as the destruction and creation of working opportunities. These changes generated a surge in social mobility that, according to Bernard Bailyn,caused the apprehensive gentry to remark, "When the pot boils, the scum will rise" (302). Indirectly, the Revolution sharpened class distinctions and circumscribed the nature and range of social intercourse. Stuart M. Blumin,in The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900, explains, 119 The Rise of the Republic "the experience of class in the nineteenth-century city can be understood in no small degree as the process by which people werebrought together and kept apart, attracted to one another and repelled, and asthe effect that resulting social networks had on the way people lived and perceived themselves as living in society" (231).After 1840, class distinctions seemed to become more ambiguous , as...