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211 7 American Commerce “What are the mutual influences of beings on beings: how far is the wellbeing of each, consistent with that of every other,” asked Elihu Hubbard Smith, a young man living in New York City in the mid-1790s. Like many admirers of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Smith hoped that Americans would ponder exactly how they could exercise their newfound liberty without infringing on the liberty of others.The dilemma was acute in thevast, diverse, and looselyorganized Republic because so many American men saw the pursuit of self-interest as their birthright.They wanted to make their fortunes, not discuss limits on their independence. Instead of love for one another, the “love of gain peculiarly characterizes the inhabitants of the United States,” lamented theologian Samuel Miller. Education was “superficial ,” and wealth “the principal test of influence.” Was it folly to speculate about the role of sociability in shaping the future of such a nation?1 A small but influential number of Americans did not think so. Men and women of letters were eager participants in a cosmopolitan discourse that promoted conversation among friends as a major source of authority and 1. Elihu Hubbard Smith, “Notes from Recollections of My Life from My Birth till the Age of Eleven,” in James E. Cronin, ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771–1798) (Philadelphia, 1973), 27, Smith to Idea Strong, July 22, 1796, 188; Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century . . . , 2 vols. (NewYork, 1803), II, 407. See Gilbert Chinard, “A Landmark in American Intellectual History, Samuel Miller’s A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, XIV, no. 2 (Winter 1953), 55–71. More generally, see Linda K. Kerber , Federalists in Dissent: Imageryand Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970); and Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (New York, 2009). 212 / AMERICAN COMMERCE the most effective engine of progress. Reading books published in Great Britain, they discussed their contents and then wrote their own books, some of which were read on both sides of the Atlantic.Their preferred genre consisted of novels that meditated on the power of conjugal love to transform selfish individuals and create affectionate marriages that institutionalized mutuality. If imagining the perils of romantic entanglements was to confront power at the very core of human existence, imagining its possibilities was to sustain the radical conviction that human beings in commerce with one another could improve as well as govern themselves.2 American writers operated within an American context. Literary radicals in London called for free-floating communities as a revolutionary alternative to a well-entrenched patriarchal social order unexpectedly reinforced by the exigencies of a global war against France. Their American counterparts focused on affectionate marriages as a means of redirecting a democratic social order that seemed to put a premium on personal independence at the expense of mutuality. But men and women on both sides of the Atlantic were concerned about a world in which too many people were suddenly imagining themselves as completely independent historical actors. An enthusiasm for liberty as the right to pursue self-interest without regard for the interests of others amounted to enslaving one’s self to the tyranny of desire. Well aware of the power of that impulse, American writers rejected institutional restraint in favor of persuasion through romantic love as the most effective means of managing it. No matter how hard the struggle, they preferred to consider what human beings might become rather than to accept that they would always remain the same. 2. This chapter reflects the influence of Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), and Leonard Tennenhouse ’s provocative The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Disapora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, N.J., 2007). See also Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 1998); Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (New York, 2000); Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections : British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia, 2001); Michael Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (London, 2007); Elizabeth Barnes, “Novels,” in Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, vol. II of David D. Hall, ed., A History of the Book in America...

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