The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of the Seven Gables

In his acclaimed oration on the bicentennial of the Pilgrims' landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts (1820), Daniel Webster declared one set of practices to be most crucial and correlative to social equality throughout American history: "A republican form of government rests not more on political constitutions, than on those laws which regulate the descent and transmission of property."¹ Theorists of national identity for generations after the Revolution argued that laws governing the transmission of property must not only represent democratic values in spirit but also function as a practical mechanism to maintain social equality. Inherited estates were excoriated as the basis of aristocratic social hierarchies, and laws of partible inheritance vaunted for their supreme political importance.² In his 1821 autobiography, Thomas Jefferson expressed his hope that inheritance reforms would create "a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican": "The repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families." He framed the abolition of entails and primogeniture as key measures against the perpetuation of "unnatural distinctions" in American society, that is, the privileges and disadvantages of birth under systems of nobility.³

Despite their political distrust of lineal descent, citizens of the early republic worried about the survival of the family in

House of the Seven Gables in 1865.

Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D4-11986.

the face of these reforms. By the mid-nineteenth century, a conception of hereditary property had emerged that heightened Americans' obsession with ancestral identity while allowing them to distance themselves from the "artificial" inherited distinctions of the old world. A product of this watershed historical moment in which the paradigm of kinship became the basis of scientific racism, Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (1851) charts the resignification of "blood" central to the transition from a system of social relations based on real property to a system of symbolic estate.⁴

In his influential Commentaries on American Law (1826-30), the first major work to deal exclusively with United States common law, James Kent writes, "Entailments are recommended in monarchical governments, as a protection to the power and influence of the landed aristocracy; but such a policy has no application to republican establishments, where wealth does not form a permanent distinction." He proudly asserts, "Every family, stripped of artificial supports, is obliged, in this country, to repose upon the virtue of its descendents for the perpetuity of its fame."⁵ Kent's description of the old-world system as an "artificial" means of buttressing family status typifies the early American conviction that the new nation must eschew the transmission of privilege through bloodlines.

The goal of weakening the power of inheritance in the United States was not only applied to material property. Article Three of the Constitution helped to free future generations from the wrongdoing as well as the prosperity of their forebears by declaring that culpability for treason against the United States would not carry forward to the next generation. It declares, "The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."⁶ Article Three represents another break from rules of inherited status, containing both guilt and wealth within the boundaries of the individual.

Because republicanism seemed to weaken at every turn the connection of ancestors to descendants, diminishing the link between successive generations through shared fortune as well as misfortune, many Americans wondered what would become of the institution of the family. Indeed, even those who lauded the political significance of inheritance reform often noted with at least some degree of anxiety its perceived social impact: while individuals may rise in America, families tend to fall.

As an interested observer, Alexis de Tocqueville forecast in 1835 that American inheritance laws would result in the demise of the institution of...