Economics and Society in Early American Republic: Three Books

Introduction: Economic Growth After the American Revolution

After the American Revolution, production of staple products grew, economic risks decreased, transportation improved, and individual merchants and small companies experienced reduced costs through improved economies of scale (McCusker & Menard, 22). Contrary to the Colonial Period, with the increasing demand for U.S. agricultural products, American farmers and merchants were no longer in debt to British traders. Growing demand — driven in part by the Anglo-French wars — led to increased production of American goods. As a result, there was a powerful impetus across the country for settlers and recent arrivals to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by this newly established nation.

Depending on geographical location, this economic push had a different historical impact. The books The Whiskey Rebellion, The Long, Bitter Trail, and A Shopkeeper's Millennium provide an overview of three of the more important events of this era, each illustrating the ways in which market capitalism reshaped American society in the decades following independence.

Indian Removal and the Hunger for Land

The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians by Anthony F.C. Wallace provides a succinct yet detailed account of how hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from the eastern United States lost their lands and were removed to Oklahoma and Arkansas. Wallace focuses on both white and Native American societies and their contradictory goals. Many white settlers, according to Wallace, were land-hungry for both economic and personal reasons. He demonstrates how this desire for land was interrelated with state and federal governments' need to pay off debts, confirm control over U.S. borders, and allow individuals to improve their economic status.

The book also closely details the actions of Andrew Jackson, whom Wallace believes was influenced by personal economic interest in Indian removal. Jackson used his political office to obtain land for himself and his nephew John Coffee. Wallace describes the relationship among Jackson, Coffee, John Eaton, and Elbert Herring, who bribed officials and committed fraud to purchase tracts of Native American land near the Ohio River. Much of this land was then opened to white settlers — many of them officials like Jackson — who made significant personal gains through treaties.

As Wallace notes, "The appetite for Indian land in the American south in the 1820s and 1830s was whetted by economic events..." such as the industrial revolution, the development of steam engines for more advanced coal mining and urban factories, and increased reliance on iron and steel (6–7). With the end of the War of 1812, the nation entered a period of peace and economic development. The land taken at the time of the Removal Act was surveyed and sold to settlers and speculators to stake claims; the Native Americans received only a few cents per acre (71).

As noted by Gilje (159), this early republic "was a crucial, if not the crucial, period in the development of that trademark characteristic of American society and economy, modern capitalism." At this time it is possible to see the rise of capitalism where it "permeated and affected a large component of American society.... Capitalism crept into the consciousness of men and women, be they from merchant, farming, artisan, or laboring families."

The culture of the Native Americans differed considerably. These peoples resided in and were comfortable within the natural world rather than building an urban civilization of their own. They did not see land and labor as commodities to be purchased and sold in a market, nor did they place an emphasis on monetary accumulation. Rather, native societies were organized around communal kinship systems. Clans held common property and passed it down to coming generations. Accumulation of private property was not part of Native American culture as it was among white settlers.

In the eighteenth century, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur stressed the idealism with which Americans approached private property:

"The instant I enter my own land," he wrote, "the bright idea of property, of exclusive rights, of independence exalt my mind. Precious soil, I say to myself; by what singular custom of law is it that thou wast made to constitute the riches of the freeholder? What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil?" (Worster, 98).

The fervor of Crèvecoeur's belief developed from his recognition of the uniqueness of the American experiment. As he stated, "no wonder that so many Europeans who have never been able to say that such portion of land was theirs, cross the Atlantic to realize that happiness" (Worster, 98).

Capitalism, Class, and Religious Revival in Rochester

In the eastern United States, other economic transformations were producing their own distinct impact. Paul Johnson describes what took place in Rochester, New York, in what has since been called the Second Great Awakening. Economically, this period was defined by the separation of workplace and home and the changing nature of personal relations between workman and employer. Instead of working closely together as in the past, workers were expelled — physically and morally — from the masters' families. This severance put a strain on employees, employers, and society as a whole. By gaining their privacy, employers lost the social control they had exercised for so many years.

Johnson uses the role of liquor and drinking to demonstrate how communication changed so radically. In previous times, workmen and masters conversed about work and family over a shared drink. The new class of manufacturers, however, no longer followed this tradition. Workmen drank alone on the job in backrooms or stopped at neighborhood taverns, while "masters walked down quiet side streets" and retreated into the "icy sobriety" of houses "increasingly under the governance of pious housewives."

Masters blamed themselves for the resulting confusion and crime in working-class neighborhoods. The revivals, Johnson argues, were the product of anxiety among those who felt responsible for dismantling customary social conditions.

The shift Johnson describes is from the household economy to something that began to look like market capitalism. Society began to fracture because the old social controls were gone — alcohol being only one symptom of the larger breakdown. Johnson stated: "The laborer who stabbed a friend in 1828, the boat carpenter who beat a workmate to death with a caulking mallet in 1829, and the man who killed his wife in the middle of North St. Paul Street were all drunk (60)." However, "in 1833 a constable entered a grocery to quiet a disturbance and was kicked to death (60)." The new working class was creating its own independence and identity.

As Johnson notes, "By 1830, the household economy had all but passed out of existence, and so had the social order that it sustained. Work, family life, the makeup of neighborhoods — the whole patterns of society — separated class from class: master and wage earner inhabited distinct social worlds" (55). This separation also brought about other changes: "Workmen experienced new kinds of harassment on the job... Masters increased the pace, scale, and regularity of production, and they hired young strangers with whom they shared no more than contractual obligations... [liquor] pitted a culturally independent working class against entrepreneurs who had dissolved the social relationships..." (61).

At this same time, Rochester underwent a major religious revival whose causes remain controversial. Was it because masters felt guilty about the separation, or was it driven by changes in domestic life? Johnson argues that the revival did not arise from a lack of moral concern among Rochester's entrepreneurs. He points to a strengthening of moral connection and shared purpose resulting from the religious awakening, and stresses that the primary impetus was the growth of class tension. In his view, such revivals produced societal order and self-restraint — qualities that were urgently needed when other aspects of society were in turmoil. The revival offered a way to cope with the upheaval in employee-employer relationships. Although earning wages and economic advancement were driving forces behind conversion, some participated willingly, while others sought primarily economic improvement.

The revivalist Charles Finney stepped into a situation ripe for his influence. His theology appeared to relieve shopkeepers of their traditional social responsibilities and to legitimize the new economy that had arisen in Rochester. Johnson concludes his book by writing: "In the few years preceding the revivals of 1831, Charles Finney's converts [the shopkeepers] dissolved those arrangements [the household economy]... and that dissolution posed immense problems of work discipline and social order. When a master broke with home-centered relations of production he gave up his authority as head of a household and as moral governor of society. The revival of 1831 healed the divisions within the middle class and turned businessmen and masters into an active and united missionary army. Behind their actions in the 1830s was the new and encouraging knowledge that authoritarian controls were not necessary. As Finney stated, man is not innately corrupt but only corruptible" (140). A newly born industrial capitalism became attached to visions of a perfect moral order founded on individual freedom and self-government. Old relations of dependence, servility, and mutuality were seen as sinful and left behind. "The revival was not a capitalistic plot. But it certainly was a crucial step in the legitimation of free labor" (141).

Religion in general, and revivals especially, eased the pains of capitalist expansion in the early nineteenth-century United States. After Finney's departure, converted reformers evangelized the working class, supporting poor churches and building new ones in working-class neighborhoods. Finney's revival was effective because it cut across class boundaries and united middle- and working-class individuals within churches. The middle class attended out of moral obligation; the working classes went because they feared the consequences of staying away. Workers who did not join churches found it more difficult to keep their jobs. To succeed in Rochester, it was prudent for employees to become active churchgoers.

Conclusion: Economics as the Root of Early American Conflict

The individuals who came to the New World and participated in the American Revolution did not do so without their own personal agendas alongside their commitment to the nation as a whole. Many came to escape the inequalities of Europe, but also because they saw America as a place where they could better themselves socially and, especially, economically. In all three of these historical events — the displacement of Native Americans, the transition of merchants in Rochester, and the Whiskey Rebellion — economics was at the root of the conflict.

Yet the move toward capitalism in a country such as antebellum America, which was land-rich and labor-poor, depended on the combined organization of groups. On the frontier, settlers joined together to push out the original native landholders and to resist federal taxation. In Rochester, New York, merchants and their employees joined together in a religious movement to reestablish social cohesion. Each of these situations had secondary motivators — the aspiration for a new homestead, concern about inequality between large distillers and small farmers, and the breakdown of a traditional class structure. Yet uniting around shared interests proved the most effective way to overcome major challenges and to exert greater control over the future.

References

Gilje, Paul A., ed. The Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997.

Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

McCusker, J.J., and Menard, R.R. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Slaughter, Thomas R. Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Long, Bitter Trail. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Worster, Donald. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.