Examining Our Revolutionary Baggage

Joyce Appleby. Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. viii + 322 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $26.00.

Joyce Appleby's provocative and wide-ranging new book joins a growing group of works interested in the construction of our myths and how we remember our past. ¹ Appleby, long a scholar and admirer of Jefferson, has looked at how the generation of Americans, beginning to exert their power at the time of his election in 1800, gave meaning to the Revolution. She isolates America's proverbial defining moment, crystallizes the ideas it produced, and indicates some it left behind. She consulted over 200 published autobiographies and memoirs in addition to myriad other accounts of this generation. Appleby's group of Americans "did something in public," and she acknowledges that failures did not get voices in her story (pp. 24, 7). As a result, the tone often bears a strong resemblance to Tocqueville's enthusiastic report of a country, brash and strong, expanding in every direction, a people serious, untutored, egalitarian, and pleased with themselves. Both writers find much to celebrate in tracing the effects of a democratic revolution on the character and practices of Americans. But Appleby's primary story is not only about how these Americans construed their experience but also how that related to historical reality.

For Appleby, the Revolution, culminating in Jefferson's election and the "uncoupling of social and political power," opened the doors to ordinary white people to imagine and enact plans to improve their economic condition and to participate in politics designed to promote and sustain these opportunities (p. 6). She believes the Revolution triggered unparalleled energy, creativity, and a willingness to risk among ordinary people. Successful (white and generally male) representatives of this generation glorified the realization of personal ambition as a national contribution. However, this selective codification of experience became a constricting prescription "that left the next generation with far fewer intellectual alternatives. A kind of closure of meaning had taken place. . . . Universality was claimed for the qualities displayed by successful white men, throwing other people into the shadow of national consciousness" (p. 5).

Inheriting the Revolution is a complex and strongly ambivalent tale. There are two kinds of tensions in this book. Appleby deliberately sets up one between the admiration she feels for aspects of the Revolution and the caution she expresses about its limits. The other is inadvertent, and happens in the shifting area between the triumphal stories of her cohort and the degree to which she supports their views. Sometimes it is not always perfectly clear where her participants' enthusiasm ends and Appleby's begins. Other times, particularly in the latter half, her enthusiasm strikes me as unwarranted.

Appleby is hardly alone in her enthusiasm for the period, in terms of its widening opportunities, its hectic mobility, and the seizure of democratic forms and symbols by ordinary white men who previously supplied the deference that kept colonial status in place. Gordon Wood is only the best-known historian to write on the radical nature of the Revolution in his The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991). But Appleby's particular appreciation of the Revolution's legacy is perhaps closest to T.H. Breen's. ² Both turn away from decades of emphasis on republicanism and return us to the social contract, Locke, and liberal thought and its universalist assumptions about natural rights as the most enduring and useful tradition deriving from the Revolution.

Appleby's concern with the Revolution's bequests leads her to focus on change, not continuity. Jon Butler's most recent book, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (2000), locates many of the changes Appleby assigns to the Revolution to the later colonial period: 1680 through 1770. Appleby acknowledges the continuity of pre- and post-colonial culture, saying that post-revolutionary Americans were acting on desires and ideas that had "long lain close to the surface" of colonial life" (p. 5). But her interest is less...