Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England 9780812203455

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Beyond the Farm

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES Daniel K. Richter and Kathleen M. Brown, Series Editors Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Beyond the Farm National Ambitions in Rural New England

J. M. Opal

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-free paper 10987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Opal,J.M. Beyond the farm : national ambitions in rural New England I J. M. Opal. p. em.- (Early American studies) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8122-2156-5 1. New England-History-1775-1865. 2. New England-Social conditions18th century. 3. New England-Rural conditions-18th century. 4· Rural populationNew England-18th century. 5. Ambition-Social aspects-New EnglandHistory-18th century. 6. Ambition-Social aspects-United States-History18th century. 7· National characteristics, American-18th century. I. Title. F8.063 2008 2007038308 974 1 .03-dc22

Contents

Prologue: In Search of Ambition

vu

Introduction: Ambition and the American Founding 1

Finding Independence

2

Creating Commerce

3

Opening Households

4

Exciting Emulation

96

5

Seeking Livelihoods

126

6

Pursuing Distinction

17 44

69

154

Epilogue: Worlds Gained and Lost List of Abbreviations Notes

195

Index

257

193

179

1

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Prologue: In Search ofAmbition

Ambition is central to the American self-concept. Besides "freedom" or possibly "equality;' no word so powerfully evokes what we want to have, or think that we embody. It is noteworthy, then, that we typically couch ambition in gentler words like "opportunity;' "individualism;' or, in the favored way of Abraham Lincoln, "the right to rise:' Historians also rely on ambition to make sense of the nation and its peoples. All would agree that the United States has undergone profound changes since the formation of the republic, and most would assert that those changes converged in the decades after 1800, when the basic dynamics of an individualistic society took root. Somehow, ambition arrived with the modern, and with the nation. "The installation of ambition as the one common good;' writes the historian Andrew Delbanco, "was the great transformation of nineteenth-century American life:' 1 The difficulty lies in identifying when, how, and why ambition acquired its particular salience in the United States, while bearing in mind that it has always existed in various forms and all societies. In many accounts, ambition's career roughly and implicitly follows that of liberalism: the public philosophy that openly approves of selfish and competing interests and that we properly associate with the growth of American capitalism and democracy. For scholars who stress the popular dimensions of market activity, and so portray capitalism and democracy as allies of a kind, ambition naturally took hold as free citizens cast off the colonial world of scarcity and ascription. The American Revolution, in this view, signifies the seminal event that "released" latent desires. If, on the other hand, we understand early Americans as primarily concerned with personal or household autonomy, and thus as wary of market entanglements and the political economy of capitalism, then ambition shades into a bourgeois imposition on "ordinary" people. Only as businessmen, lawyers, and like-minded statesmen contrived a commercial landscape did self-making corrode traditional relationships and slither into American life. Either way, in both narratives, ambition features more as an indication of grander processes than a subject in its own right. 2 This makes sense, because ambition is difficult to trace in anything but an impressionistic way. Especially if we search for it in the past as we know

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it today-as an ambient force that compels people to ceaselessly achieve more, more, more-then ambition becomes a historical phantom, at once everywhere (self-interest is ubiquitous) and nowhere (so is self-denial). Like salt in the ocean, it seems to defy observation. How can we identify one period or culture as more ambitious than any other, much less account for why it became so? How can we devise a meaningful yardstick for this or any other intangible? In studying ambition, in short, we run the risk of leaving history altogether and entering the domain of philosophy or psychology, the inner realm of human consciousness that does not align with any known chronology. In the hinterlands of eighteenth-century New England, for example, any number of people might qualify as ambitious in a general or ahistorical sense. Certainly the provincial merchants who fed goods to rural consumers while aping the lifestyles of the metropolitan elite were ambitious. In a superficially opposing way, the itinerant preachers who urged people to disdain the over-educated clergy and embrace the simple piety of lay exhorters (like themselves) reveal a similar tendency. Even farm parents who wanted their daughter to wed a future clergyman or their son to marry into a merchant's home betray ambition of a sort. Yet the mere presence of any attribute does not reveal its contemporary meanings, nor capture its cultural significance. The obvious fact that some people always qualify as ambitious does not address how that trait operated in different times, places, and cultures. Throughout the English-speaking world of the 1700s, for example, ambition seemed rare, exotic, and dangerous. Derived from a Latin term for "going around" rather than sitting still, it conveyed a keen yearning for visibility in space and time: "distinction" or "honor" or "fame." Ambition implied disdain for local need or modest gain and obsession with lasting recognition in the wide world. It also evoked sin, conspiracy, and evil itsel£.3 The eventual emergence of ambition into a national creed was of course a long and fitful process, full of continuities and adaptations, through which the prevailing values of a rural and household-based society gave way to those of an urban and individualized one. That much is clear. But the slow and uneven pace of cultural evolution can conceal rather sudden shifts in the cultural climate, after which certain ideas, conceits, and institutions gain traction while others give ground. The ensuing changes do not simply reveal and reflect the social and economic trajectories we now see; they also help to make those trends happen, and to frame how people remember and respond to them. To recognize this is not to impose simplicity on a kaleidoscopic world, nor to replace "material" explanations with purely ideological ones.

Prologue

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It is, instead, to appreciate the interplay of ideas and circumstances, of aspirations and situations, within particular stages of history. One of these cultural shifts began in the United States during the late 1780s, after the narrow victory of the Federal Constitution over more localized hopes for the new states. With the creation of the "extended republic" came a widespread effort to uproot households and communities from their provincial identities and align them with national judgments of self and success, value and virtue, public need and personal worth. While trying to turn a specific kind of ambition into an organizing principle of national life, this effort also took aim at alternate, more familiar, and typically more viable forms of aspiration for those living in a rural social order of laboring households and interdependent neighbors. More and less than a set of adaptations to market and commercial growth, "the installation of ambition" was a discernible project, a drawn-out campaign that entailed innovations in both the imaginative and discursive realm (how people thought and ideas operated) and the institutional and social terrain (how people were conditioned and resources deployed).It also occasioned a moral controversy that mostly ensued, not between social groups or political factions, but within communities, families, and individuals. This book offers a social history of that personal and cultural struggle-a story of restless sons and ambivalent fathers, resilient women and defeated men, bright-eyed reformers and hard-bitten neighbors.4 The restless sons were the focal points of the changes and conflicts at hand, because they, more than their sisters, stood to inherit both the local properties that brought independence and the national society that promised something more. For this reason, young men predominate in the pages that follow. But how to study them? Who to investigate and who to leave out? Any attempt to generalize about the young men of the early republic will tend to exaggerate the appeal and momentum of the project to promote ambition. It will also miss the inner struggles that ambitious striving brought (and still brings). A resort to biography, on the other hand, would lose the collective sway and texture of the larger effort in the details of a single life. By way of balance and compromise, then, I have crafted this history of ambition around six young men who found that passion to be compelling, inspiring, or necessary in their lives, and who therefore sought to transcend a social world and personal identity built on mere independence. A thumbnail sketch of the six figures is in order: Ephraim Abbot Born in 1779 to a "middling" farm family, or the kind that few people would have heard of outside its own township. He was the eldest son of Benjamin and Sarah Abbot, who raised nine children in Concord, New

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Hampshire. Apparently restless by nature, he acquired the ambitious message in adolescence and eagerly applied it once the usual options fell apart. Silas Felton: Born to a wealthy farm family in Marlborough, Massachusetts, thirty miles west of Boston, in 1776. Another firstborn son with many relatives nearby to remind him of who he was. Constitutionally opposed to the tedium of farming, he eagerly absorbed the idea that he was made for bigger things and waged a running battle with a moral, material, and political world that he never physically left. Charles Harding: Born in 1807 in the near-frontier town of Putney, Vermont, where his parents, Caleb and Elizabeth, found independence and little use for him. He was the baby of the family, and not a "real" man by local standards. A refugee to ambition, he embraced its most demanding and curiously self-denying lesson. Thomas Burnside: Parentage unknown, but born in 1779 in Northumberland, New Hampshire, a tiny hamlet on the Canadian-American-Abenaki frontier. Neither prideful nor aspiring by nature or early education, he made his peace with an ambition prompted by grim necessity. Edward Hitchcock: The youngest son of an unappreciated hatter and a well-born mother, he was born in 1793 in the Connecticut River Valley town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Very bright and ambitious, he consumed the exciting new formulas for his future until a terrifying episode reminded him of prior obligations. Daniel Mann: Also born in 1793, he grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, ten miles southwest of Boston. The first son of educated but struggling parents, he learned ambition early and well and gave it a particularly commercial and speculative turn. It is vital to see their passage beyond the farm as vexed and troubled (the way it was) rather than as natural and inevitable (the way it has come to seem). Leaving the status of the independent man, after all, meant departing from the gender and social roles set down by the household economy-even, or even especially, as markets developed-and from the religious and moral vernacular of local communities. It spun a tangle of tensions, fears, hopes, and resentments among family members, neighbors, siblings, and peers. It brought marginality of many kinds, and self-doubt, too. One of the primary tasks of the book is to recover the lived experience of ambition in a preindustrial past, to apprehend the practical and ethical difficulties of self-fashioning in a world of families and farms. In part, the efforts and intentions of such people account for the cultural shift around ambition that took place during their lifetimes. After all,

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cultures change when substantial numbers of people encounter similar problems and deal with them in corresponding ways. But cultures also change through public prescription, through conscious efforts to mobilize and endorse certain feelings, beliefs, and stories. Such initiatives can lend a coherent voice to endemic grievances, linking together the motives for and practices of change. After the ratification of the Constitution and the creation of a newly national state in 1789, a wide range of reformers-pastors, teachers, businessmen, printers, and professionals-used a common set of words and strategies to challenge provincial mentalites and to promote ambitious ways of thinking and doing as positively "public-spirited:' To reveal the roots, expressions, and outcomes of these reforms as well as their importance to the main characters is the other burden of Beyond the Farm. These efforts and themes were national, not regional, in scope and spirit. Indeed, the work of turning locals into citizens has preoccupied nation-states all over the globe during the past two centuries. But New England, of all places, offers a fruitful case study of the wider phenomenon because of two competing tendencies in its cultural anatomy: an unusual density of institutions and a history of social perfectionism, on the one hand, and a tradition of town autonomy and local self-rule, on the other. The first authorized the project to promote ambition, while the second qualified or opposed it. In centering this history on New England, then, I do not mean to revive one of the oldest (and most discredited) myths in American history, namely that the nation's past can be read as the troubled unfolding of a Puritan errand. Rather, I seek to observe the rural communities of New England as an instructive piece of a larger whole and to frame my analysis broadly even as I study people, places, and ideas intensively. In thinking about the young men at the core of this study, the obvious and pointed question is: How representative are they? I have two replies. First, although no person or group of people can fully represent a place and time, these little-known characters illustrate a wide range of ordinary backgrounds and important trends. Their households varied in size, wealth, political and religious belief, geographic isolation, and exposure to the ambitious message. They had different ranks and roles within their families and communities, all of which shared the rural setting that was home to at least nine out of ten Americans around 1800. And as the sketches above should suggest, they hardly conform to a single personality type, much less to a common sequence of life events. What they shared was their departure from local categories of self and success, their experience of moving beyond familiar roles to navigate the meanings and moralities of ambition.

xii

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Second, I have tried to consider their lives as comprehensive wholes, shaped not only by the cultural ferment under study but also by discrete situations, choices, and incidents. All historians rely on examples to make their points. When they employ people in this role, as is often and properly the case, those people too often become one-dimensional and out-of-context images that reflect what the author wants to see and hopes to show. On a given page, a certain person from the early national hinterlands might stand in for market-oriented profiteering or subsistence-oriented traditionalism, without leaving any further indication of who he was, what he believed, and how he lived. To some degree this is unavoidable. By studying a small cohort at successive life stages and in different social contexts, however, we might arrive at a more authentic portrait, one that draws several strands of analysis into a nuanced but synthetic story of personal and cultural change. Of course, stories can be misleading, especially when they converge into a single narrative of national destiny. Such is the case with the nearly four hundred autobiographies written by early national Americans, particularly those published during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Charles Harding, Edward Hitchcock, and Ephraim Abbot wrote autobiographies during that period. Sure enough, these stories register the triumph of ambition and self-making in national culture, relating how things turned out rather than how they happened. Yet each man wrote his story for different reasons and audiences. Their other paper trails-letters, diaries, poems, tax and deed records, and, in Hitchcock's case, the "Sort of Autobiography" of an ambitious father-belie the sense of destiny they had acquired. Moreover, Silas Felton and Thomas Burnside wrote their autobiographies during the early 18oos, when their futures and that of the United States were much more in doubt. These texts lack some of the confidence of their Victorian successors; they read more like progress reports than final audits. For his part, Daniel Mann relayed his story in a series ofletters, which are best read alongside the diaries, publications, and private reflections of his mother, father, and siblings. 5 While all of them loosely qualify as self-made, these characters left sources that offer a variety of analytical and temporal viewpoints. They also intended their stories to be truthful, and this, more than any other factor, separates autobiography from fiction. Therefore, I have tried to read what they wrote as roughly honest and profoundly incomplete accounts of what they were trying to be and do in the world, keeping in mind that their perspectives changed as they broke with the received life path. I seek to recover their lifeworlds by placing contemporary accounts and recoverable

Prologue

xiii

data in conversation with post-facto reflections and persistent caricatures, and to understand the stories they crafted by contextualizing decisions, decoding phrases, and comparing fortunes. 6 Above all, I want to show what ambition came to mean to them, to their contemporaries, and to the nation at large. To do so, I proceed through time, from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, but also through life spans, beginning with their parents' upbringing and working through their youth, early adulthood, and final reflections. The resulting balance between the social history of farm families, the cultural history of ambition, and the biographies of the main figures varies within each chapter as well as between them. In the early going, the protagonists are held back to lay the proper foundations and set the proverbial stage; at times, it may be difficult to recall who Silas Felton was, or where Thomas Burnside fits. I wish that thorough analysis would permit a cleaner storyline. But I also hope that the characters grow in color and authenticity as the pages turn, so that when they embark on lives full of soaring success and crushing failure, the wider career of ambition appears in a suitably personal light. However grateful they may be, autobiographers cannot help but privilege their own efforts in their own stories. Historians have no such excuse, and while writing this book I have amassed a long list of benefactors. My primary teacher has been and remains Jane Kamensky, whose extraordinary intellect makes her generosity, candor, and wit all the more admirable. Put simply, Jane has the most creative mind that I have ever come across; better still, she is always willing to share it. She never failed to lend me her ear or reiterate her faith. For that, and above all for her friendship, I am truly thankful. I also owe a great deal to David Hackett Fischer, who brought me to Brandeis and believed in my efforts from the outset. David's encyclopedic grasp of sources and methods, and the staggering scope of his knowledge of world history remains an inspiration for any scholar. Anthony Smith has been a close friend and a brilliant reviewer for many years. I could not have written Beyond the Farm without his counsel. Mary Beth Norton was my first mentor in history; she taught me to respect its complexity. Cathy Kelly, John L. Brooke, and James T. Kloppenberg went well out of their ways to train me as a scholar. Benjamin Irvin, Eben Miller, Hilary Moss, Molly McCarthy, and Jessica Lepler made research an enjoyable errand, while Michael Willrich and David Engerman oversaw my work at critical moments. Kathleen Brown, Steven C. Bullock, Benjamin Carp, Liam Riordan, Toby L. Ditz, Joyce Appleby, Bob Herbert, Sarah Doyle, Christopher Clark, Joseph Kett, Alan Taylor, Dan

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Richter, John Murrin, Gordon Wood, Mary Kelly, Anya Jabour, and Tamara Plakins Thornton all deserve much of the credit and none of the blame for this book. At Penn, Robert Lockhart and Kathleen Brown bestowed all the expertise and encouragement a first author could demand. Their enthusiasm and support carried the book to completion. At Amherst College, Daria D' Arienzo and the staff at Special Collections have helped me with two projects over six years, always with great knowledge and enthusiasm. I am also thankful that they enabled me to present part of the book at a crucial point in my revisions. At Memorial Libraries in Deerfield, Massachusetts, David Bosse and Martha Noblick have been generous with their expertise and wisdom since 2ooo. The American Antiquarian Society, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation funded my research. At Colby, the George C. and Harriet F. Wiswell research fund helped me finish the book, as did colleagues and friends Jason Long, Elizabeth Leonard, Pete Moss, Daniel Contreras, David Lewis-Colman, Margaret McFadden, Rob Weisbrot, Erik Jensen, Paul Josephson, Peter Ditmanson, Raffael Scheck, James Webb, and Larissa Taylor. My student collaborators, Charlie Hale, Alison McArdle, Jabez Dewey, Jeronimo Maradiaga, Daren Swisher, Lena Barouh, and Lee Emmons helped in more ways than I can remember; they also reminded me of why I wanted to write the book. Jeffrey and Vyjayanthi Selinger kindly helped me through the final revision process, not least by listening to me complain about it. It is to my family, though, that I owe my dearest thanks. My beautiful wife, Holly Buss, has shown me that benevolence is not just a fascinating concept but a viable one as well. She made the long journey through graduate school delightful as well as meaningful, and her gentle charm and dauntless spirit inspires me every day. My aunt, Mary Jane Weeks, and cousins Heather Pruskowski, Kelly Ryan, and Jessica Ryan embody all the virtues I admire. My big brother, Michael Oscar Opal, has been my hero since I was very young; my idolatry of him has changed in form but not in degree through time. I am lucky, then, that he is also a man of great wisdom, sympathy, and joy. Above all, my parents, Katherine Ann Opal and Steven Michael Opal, have shown me that love and care for others has no bounds except those we impose on ourselves. In their presence, cynicism seems like a foolish notion, a curious thing to be brushed aside and forgotten just as quickly. I think they already know how much I love them, but it bears repeating anyway.

Introduction: Ambition and the American Founding

In 1862, Edward Hitchcock finished a history of his long-time employer, Amherst College, and asked a friend to review the book. Had he made too much of his own department's importance, Hitchcock wanted to know. Had he been fair to the college's present leadership? Did the autobiographical portion, a brief"personal history'' that traced his life since his birth in 1793, reveal "more of egotism than is pardonable in an old man whose early experiences have been quite peculiar?" Certainly not, the reader assured him. The manuscript was a model of careful and impartial history. As for the personal history-it deserved a volume all its own. "It seems to me;' he told Hitchcock, "that, as there must be a Memoir of you after you are gone, (and may that time be far distant) it would be advisable for your biographer to interweave your narrative into his own work:' That way, the biographer could brag on Hitchcock's behalf. "Such a volume would be a charming autobiography:' 1 Hitchcock's life was "quite peculiar" indeed, as were his intellect, talents, and personality. But his passage from rural obscurity to a social role that called for autobiographical witness also spotlights wider and deeper trends in early national New England, as well as a particular set of ideas and institutions that impelled, reflected, and lent meaning to those trends. So, too, do the records and self-appraisals of other young men who tried to transcend their surnames in post-Revolution America. They were responding not only to social factors and personal motives but also to a cultural endeavor that made ambition both relevant and inspiring to them. The roots of that effort reach back more than a century before Hitchcock sought pardon for memorializing himself.

Enlightenment and Society When they considered ambition, eighteenth-century Americans drew from a wide range of classical, Christian, and monarchical traditions. But they also

2

Introduction

lived in an enlightened age that called all traditions into question. Their ideas of ambition and other "passions;' for example, often trace to the political economists of seventeenth-century England, who first identified that vast web of everyday behavior called "society." In the seaports, at least, people now seemed to live within a single network of supply and demand, desire and competition. "Private gaine," noted one with a fitting maritime metaphor, "is the compass men generally saile by." The relative fluidity of the English social order encouraged people to try to match those just above them. When the poor saw others grow rich, wrote one economist in 1691, they were "spurr'd up to imitate their Industry," to the benefit of all. Taken to its logical end, this train of thought turned customary morality on its head by converting personal vices like greed and envy into public blessings. As Bernard Mandeville summated in his 1723 essay, The Fable of the Bees, the great engines of prosperity were "Self-Love and Emulation;' not any feeling for "the Publick Good:' 2 Although Mandeville drew furious denunciation from conservative quarters, his analysis relied on a conventional view of humanity. People were egoistic, selfish, and vain, he assumed; both the Protestant theologian John Calvin and the monarchical theorist Thomas Hobbes agreed. Only the shock troops of the Enlightenment ventured to refute these grim and durable premises. Broadly speaking, enlightened thinkers shared a renewed faith in humanity that issued from Newton's discovery of natural laws, Locke's insistence on natural rights, and a gradual improvement in living standards for the patrician and commercial elite. According to a diverse array of Scottish, English, and French philosophers, people were neither selfish brutes (as Hobbes decided), ungrateful sinners (as Calvin believed), nor greedy consumers (as Mandeville insisted). Rather, each person had an innate capacity for reason and sympathy, a native power or "moral sense" that made him worthy of praise and capable of improvement. The Fable helped to galvanize these beliefs. By defending human frailties for their economic utility, Mandeville had actually contributed to a new enthusiasm for "the Excellencies of human nature:' 3 At the foundation of all enlightened thought was the gendered image of the human as an independent man within society. The Encyclopedistes, for example, defined Man as a "feeling, reflecting, thinking being, who freely walks the earth;' who "lives in society;' and who "has his particular goodness and badness." This defense of people as they were-not only for their reason, but also for their passions-set enlightened thinkers apart from Christian moralists or monarchists. "Passions;' reflected Helvetius, "are in the moral

Ambition and the American Founding

3

what motion is in the natural world." They were the prime movers of life, a notion made possible by the emergent image of God as a remote architect rather than an angry micro-manager. Rightly formed and balanced, the passions became "the germ productive of genius, and the powerful spring that carries men to great actions:' With his "natural desire of power, of esteem, and of knowledge;' man was made "not for the savage and solitary state, but for living in society:' Far from an amoral medium of commercial exchange, society signified all that was decent and improvable about people. It curbed the dark passions and fostered the noble ones. 4 No passion required more careful handling than ambition. Everyone, it appeared, wanted material comforts and the approval of peers. Anyone could be compelled to work hard, to reveal "honest industry" in hope of gain. The word "honest;' in fact, implied obscurity-the lack of"honor"-as well as truthfulness. (To this day, we praise "honest work" as the kind that has to be done, preferably by someone else.) But ambition meant the desire for the grand intangibles to be found in wide expanses of space and time: fame, glory, distinction. An ambitious person required what those nearby could never give or understand. The passion rested on a radically theatrical view of the self, an acute concern with what the eighteenth century called "the eyes of the world." Because most people were invisible beyond their locales, it followed that only the "great" could ever be ambitious; because women were supposed to shun the public eye, ambition carried a masculine as well as elite valence. "The love of fame;' David Hume mused in 1742, ruled with "uncontrolled authority in all generous minds:' Ambition for Thomas Reid could be "manly, ingenious and suited to the dignity of human nature;' while the lack of ambition could indicate low-bred greed or the effeminate wish for ease and comfort. Even as "ambition and avarice" became a common pairing in enlightened thought, then, the new emphasis on the passions arranged these motives into separate social and gender categories. 5 "Furious;' "uncontrolled;' "like thunder." In the eighteenth century, any words that evoked fear or wonder might describe ambition. Selfish in origin and toxic in effect, ambition drew far more condemnation than acclaim. One dictionary of theology called it "a desire of excellency" that was "generally used in a bad sense, for an immoderate or illegal pursuit of power or honor. See PRAISE:' Ambition also had a pronounced link to militarism. Throughout history, everyone knew, ambitious men like Caesar, Alexander, and Cromwell had begun wars in order to honor themselves. The collateral damage in blood and treasure never bothered them; indeed, the calamities of war satisfied their brutal compulsion to dominate others. If self-interest was, in

4

Introduction

Adam Smith's view, a "cool" and prudent motive, ambition "burned" in the heart rather than the head. Characteristic though it was of "noble minds;' James Beattie decreed in the 1790s, ambition was "almost impossible to restrain." Like a fire, it carried enormous power. Like a fire, it was a public hazard. By ignoring social duties and the decent opinion of others, ambition revealed the insatiable, ruthless self. Put simply: "the very word ambition conveys to us some idea of evil:'6 Predictably, then, ambition gained ground in eighteenth-century thought and culture less by overt endorsement and more through the gradual progress of allied concepts. "Emulation" and "enterprise" did much of the cultural labor. For while ambition set its bearer in search of greatness or fame in genera~ these words evoked the pursuit of particular goals or persons. They set firewalls around ambition. Early economists had used emulation to describe the simple pursuit of material comforts or fashions-what we would call "consumerism:' But enlightened thinkers imbued the concept with a moral and social dimension. The 1778 Encyclopedie, for example, called it "a noble and generous sentiment which fills us with admiration for the great actions of others, and strongly excites us to try to imitate and even to surpass them if we can win:' The same theological dictionary that considered ambition "immoderate or illegal" labeled emulation "a generous ardour" and constructive urge "kindled by the praiseworthy example of others." "Emulation has a manifest tendency to improvement;' Reid noted in 1788. Without it, "life would stagnate." Far from dissolving social bonds, emulation redrew them in harmony with the social passions. And enterprise, or the willingness to launch uncertain adventures, supposedly enriched the entire society as mere greed never could.? "The same being who formed the religious System, formed also the commercial;' declared Rev. Josiah Tucker (1713-1799), a British clergyman who spoke to and for a mercantile audience. The end goal of both was also the same: "That private Interest should coincide with public, self with social, and the present with future Happiness:' Tucker worried that self-love, "that ruling Principle of human Nature;' could threaten public good, and so warned of those who sought only "the Gratification of their Ambition." Yet he also argued that emulation and enterprise brought moral as well as material progress. Tucker praised the densely settled towns that drew farmers to market and "excited the[ir] Emulation." He wanted to arrange farm laborers side by side in the fields in hopes that each man would be "spurred on every Moment by the Examples of others, by Self-Interest, and by the Glory of Excelling:' In modern terms, Tucker wanted to light a fire under people. He

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also wanted them to "rub off local Prejudices;' to observe other places and customs until they attained an "enlarged and impartial View of Men and Things:' Enlarged, impartial, generous: these enlightened replies to "contracted" and "illiberal" ways opened room for the fuller expression of individual talents. 8 By the mid-eighteenth century, such principles had become commonplace in uncommon places-Masonic lodges, city coffeehouses, the social milieu of the educated and genteel. In metropolitan circles from London and Bristol to Boston and Philadelphia, the pleasures and promise of society were reflected in the daily experiences of exchange, refinement, and selfimprovement. And yet, as the philosopher James Beattie noted, "There are writers, who, viewing human nature in an unfavorable light, have thought fit to affirm, that emulation cannot be without envy, and that therefore it is dangerous to encourage it in schools or families:' An understatement, to be sure. Beattie's friends and colleagues aside, who didn't view human nature in a somewhat "unfavorable light" during the 1700s? In vain did he point out that emulation "wishes to raise itself without pulling down others," while envy, " [one of] the most malignant vices that stain human nature;' hated excellence itself. Such distinctions fell apart before the mutually supporting wisdom of monarchy and Christianity. The axiom of human weakness or depravity, and the corollary need for control by state and church, underlay prevailing mentalites and stymied hopes for a more enlightened society. 9 So did the numerical dominance and presumed prejudices of the rural masses. Yeomen, tenants, day laborers-all of the rankings that mattered dearly to country dwellers-collapsed in urbane minds into categories like "peasant;' "rustic;' or bouzon, an adaptation of a provincial term for cow feces. Rural peoples seemed quite alike because they all lived in a little orbit around their soil, out of range and touch with the wider world. "The situation of a great part of mankind;' Reid argued in 1788, "is such, that their thoughts and views must be confined within a very narrow sphere, and be very much engrossed by their private concerns." The rule applied across national boundaries. English tenants may have been industrious, but they were still "confined" in spirit. Voltaire called French provincials "two-footed animals;' whose ownership of the soil only tied them more pitifully to it. According to a Maryland planter, the "confined views and habits" of North American farmers were also "fixed on and handed down through many generations." Even as they participated in market transactions and imitated urban tastes, country dwellers like Edward Hitchcock's forebears were said to

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Figure 1. This depiction of eighteenth-century Philadelphia captures the cosmopolitan terrain and ambitions of the bustling, preindustrial seaport. Nicholas Scull and George Heap, An East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia. Engraving, 1756. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Ambition and the American Founding

7

follow family precedents, discourage those who wanted more, and envy those who got more. They were often greedy but rarely ambitious. 10

The Provincial Republic Republicanism has been called "the ideology of the Enlightenment;' the political persuasion that best captured the new ideas of self and society, reason and passion, history and progress. Only an ideology as expansive as this could mobilize a diverse lot of colonial leaders into rebellion against Great Britain. Rejecting monarchy as both repressive and archaic, North American republicans invited ordinary men (and men alone) into the public realm of statecraft. By insisting that such people were capable of "public spirit;' republicanism gave "honest" folk a new image of themselves: guardians of the public good rather than dependent and infantilized subjects. Indeed, the fate of this and other republics hung on the "virtue" of its citizens. Every republican knew that, or said that; virtue was a pliable concept. Ambition was less accommodating. By forcing them to define more carefully the nature and limits of private interest and to work out in greater detail its relationship to the public good, ambition revealed deep antagonisms between and among Americans over the meaning of their Revolution. 11 To the extent that he was typical of anything, Thomas Jefferson epitomized the widespread fear of ambition in republican thought and culture. He also personified the tensions inherent to this passion, its capacity to frighten even those, or especially those, who had plenty of it. Even as his many detractors accused him of the foulest ambition, Jefferson repeatedly warned of its manifold threats to the infant nation. General literacy and a basic knowledge of history, he argued in 1781, would enable citizens to "know ambition under every disguise it may assume:' Conversely, ignorance made people "fit tools for the designs of ambition:' Ambition and virtue were as oil and water, or perhaps as fire and forest. Virtue summoned a man to a sense of public duty; ambition enticed him with the desire for public honor. Virtue was humble, candid, and selfless; ambition was haughty, malicious, and selfish. Jefferson also turned to the more esoteric forms of the word, referring once to a "malignant neighbor" who had "ambitioned" to win George Washington's favor by telling lies. 12 This habitual fear of ambition in high places, and the emphasis on civic virtue from which it grew, characterized not only Jeffersonian thought but also the entire political culture of revolutionary America. Ambition was what

8

Introduction

made powerful men dangerous. It captured their disdain for the citizenry, their pathological need to promote themselves and injure anyone in the way. An ambitious man had no public conscience, no capacity to sit still and let others be. He was always plotting, always angling, always trying to command the eyes of the world. Revolutionary leaders from all regions and persuasions made this point throughout their careers. As a general presence in society, moreover, ambition reminded Americans of everything they hoped to leave behind in Europe. Ministers, moralists, and other commentators located ambition next to envy, malice, vanity, and other vices of the sinful and "abandoned:' Americans detected ambition in every extravagance they saw (or indulged) and hoped for a republican future of simple living and honest work. 13 As historians have long noted, however, these values seem to belie the subsequent history of the American republic. If Americans in the 1770s and 1780s cared so much about virtue and worried so much about ambition, then how did they forge the factious, competitive, and capitalistic social order that emerged by the early t8oos? Where did this world come from, and who, if anyone, wanted it? Or designed it? While social and economic historians answer with the trends toward and consequences of market growth, political and intellectual historians often point to the tensions in republican thought between its elitist roots and its democratic legacies. Virtue had lost much of its self-denying severity in the polite and commercial eighteenth century, blending with urbane gentility and work-ethic Protestantism to achieve a new moral hegemony. To be virtuous was to be diligent, pious, and prudent-and, as a matter of civic duty, wary of men in government, on whom the standards of virtue and the charge of ambition fell most readily. In the hands of new popular leaders, especially those who claimed Jefferson as one of their own, virtue continued to shed its inconvenient demands until it actually endorsed the everyday interests of ordinary citizens. 14 We call these attitudes "liberal" rather than "republican:' By emphasizing the producing abilities rather than the consuming habits of ordinary people, liberal values cast prosperity itself in a new light. Far from a threat to virtue, the wealth of the republic would reveal the moral starch of its citizens, the wisdom of its laws, and the favor of God. The success of the Revolution would depend on the degree to which ordinary men enjoyed "the fruits of their industry." Opinions about the state's rightful role in this effort were mixed, to say the least, but most early republicans agreed on what government should not do: sponsor hereditary elites through such devices as

Ambition and the American Founding

9

primogeniture, entail, and the exclusive monopoly. Ensure a relatively equal and open access to useful resources, Americans told themselves, and the social order would never become too steep or rigid. Keep a close eye on corruption in high places, and the society itself would remain virtuous. That these notions have survived to our own time, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, speaks to their appeal. 15 Essential as liberalism is to understanding cultural change in the early republic, it is also porous and imprecise. Especially when it strays from its home in political theory, liberalism too easily devolves into an omniscient abstraction that sprang from an indeterminable welter of social, economic, demographic, and legal sources. Moreover, the eventual triumph of liberal capitalism in American life can lead us to conflate together the different forms of self-seeking behavior that, in their historical moments and social contexts, served separate interests and competing convictions. That tendency not only leaves stodgy old republicanism with the impossible task of halting modernity but also obscures vital conflicts in early national life over the meanings, practices, and ethics of ambition-conflicts that stemmed from a self-conscious challenge to provincial milieus and mentalites. New Englanders, in particular, were well known as stingy, calculating, and grasping by the time of the Revolution. There is every indication that the general upsetting of the social order during the 1770s and 1780s and the fitful growth of market involvement thereafter fed these traits. But what often appears in historical renderings as inchoate "liberalism" was routinely assailed as "illiberal" during the revolutionary and early national years. The resulting confusion in historical literature is conceptual as well as semantic. To be liberal in the late eighteenth century, after all, was to claim what one scholar calls "an elevated moral position;' a social perspective built on generosity rather than greed, public spirit rather than private motive, cosmopolitan openness rather than local prejudice. Liberality implied freedom from narrow attachments and needs, the capacity to think and feel expansively and creatively. One of the great labors of the decades around 1800 was to promote liberality within national borders, and thus to uproot or amend the very traits we often see as the true legacy of the Revolution. 16 In the 1780s, that "critical period" for American law and government, the most common lament from genteel observers was not so much the presence of self-interest as its boorish expression in the general population. Instead of joining the wider public under creation, ordinary citizens were said to be withdrawing into "narrow" and "confined" interest groups. Instead of

10

Introduction

recognizing the "worthy'' few whose ambitions served the nation, they were electing no-names from "obscurity;' demagogues whose "dangerous ambition" led them to sow "narrow and illiberal distrust" of the rightful leaders. "Our citizens seem to be seized with a general emulation to surpass each other in every article of expense;' worried one southerner in 1786. Stripped of its ethical complexity, emulation became nothing more than the crude habit of buying as many things as one's neighbor. Seeking not to uplift or level the social order but to boost their own status within it, citizens were using bad credit and paper money to purchase the trappings of gentility. They induced a kind of cultural stagflation: the people of America were becoming greedier while the country itself fell into poverty and disrepute. Or so the leading lights of the infant nation reported. 17 The Federalist solution to the provincial republic was a national polity, run by "disinterested" elites, whose legal protections for creditors and businessmen laid scaffolds for capitalism-for a social and political order where "moneyed men" controlled the economy. But while the goal of elite and detached leadership quickly fell apart after the ratification debates of the late 1780s, the political frame for capitalism did not match the social conditions of the United States as of that decade, or the next, or even the next few after that. To be sure, moneyed men of the early republic found more ways to contrive greater profits than ever before. But they did not, and could not, rule a preindustrial economy built on self-employed men and their household subordinates. They did not, and could not, lord over a rural society in which labor was scarce and land plentiful. The more immediate consequence of ratification was instead the social imaginary it devised, where new forms of personal aspiration and public service gained cultural traction. 1B According to the Baron de Montesquieu, whose 1748 opus, The Spirit of the Laws, won universal praise and citation among American statesmen and thinkers, ambition was "pernicious in a republic:' Simple as that. The passion instead belonged to monarchies, which relied on distinctions of honor and often suffered from ''Ambition in idleness" and other moral travesties. But Montesquieu also described a "federal republic;' a political society that incorporated many smaller ones and joined "the internal advantages of republican government and the external force of monarchy." Here was a blueprint, not for a plain and independent republic, but for a powerful and distinguished nation. Here was the conceptual seedbed, not of a de facto acceptance of selfishness and social conflict, but of a concerted quarrel with "local prejudices" and the household priorities they reflected. 19

Ambition and the American Founding

11

The Extended Republic Supporters of the Constitution ultimately blamed the nation's problems on its people. But, in good republican fashion, they cast most of their stones at government. The sickness came from the "wicked" states and their despicable assemblies, where men "whose observation does not travel beyond the circle of his neighbors and acquaintances" had rendered the nation as a whole impotent. The cure would come from statesmen who revealed "extensive inquiry and information;' whose wisdom and learning enabled them to take a wider view of national problems and effect "the ENLARGEMENT of the ORBIT" of public life. While explaining their plan during 1787 and 1788, then, the Federalists prudently bypassed the state legislatures and called for special conventions of "the People" at large. The new government, they promised, would serve the citizens in general by recruiting a select few to represent them in spirit. Only the "worthy" minority, after all, nursed what Alexander Hamilton called, "the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds:' Only the broad-minded few could launch into "extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit:' For the more extreme Federalists, the hope was not so much for virtue in the people as ambition in the leaders. 20 The elitist core of the Federalist movement has led some scholars to consider the Constitution's triumph a sort of coup. The Anti-Federalists also saw it that way. With the most compelling alternatives to Federalist political economy left out of the debate, opponents of the Constitution offered discrete warnings and ad hominen attacks along with scattered suggestions as to how politics should really work. One warned "the substantial yeomanry of the country;' who were " [of] better morals and less ambitious than the great;' to beware the Federalists' wiles. A Maine delegate to the Massachusetts convention used ironic self-deprecation to expose the plot. ''Awed in the presence of this august assembly;' and "sensible how little I must appear in the eyes of those giants of rhetoric, who have exhibited such a pompous display of declamation;' he dismissed the proposed charter in favor of one "so simple and explicit, that the most illiterate may understand it:' Government had to reflect and defend the people in their smallest possible denominations, where people could pursue their various interests with minimal harm to others. "It is vain to tell us that we ought to overlook local interests:' declared a prominent Anti-Federalist. "It is only by protecting local concerns, that the interest of the whole is preserved:' Unaware of the narrow limits of human agency, the Federalists were using the rhetoric of the people to mask their contempt for the people. 21

12

Introduction

However justified these charges may be for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, we must remember that Federalism as a general persuasion appealed to many social groups-Continental Army veterans, established ministers, urban artisans, prosperous farmers-and that a stronger national whole tapped into personal and social aspirations that long predated and far outlived the "Great National Discussion" of 1787-89. Viewed in this light, the Federalist movement seems less like an audacious coup and more like a strategic alliance between certain political, religious, and economic sensibilities. All of these shared an enlightened enthusiasm for self and society and a corresponding disdain for local judgments of interest, ethics, and value. 22 The state delegates of the 1780s, Federalists charged, reduced representation to a matter of attorneyship. They delivered local demands without any reflection of their own, dwindling to the rank of "a servile agent, attempting to secure local and partial benefits by cabal and intrigue:' In his American Magazine, the equally ambitious and irascible Noah Webster assailed the "opinions of people in particular districts" as a deficient basis for policy. Immured in their "scattered districts" and "local interests;' he grumbled, the people made wrong-headed and mean-spirited decisions. The problem and remedy both concerned the visual range of the legislator, the "view" or vantage point from which he appraised the world. Instead of asking "what is my interest, or the interest of my town or constituents;' the "liberal" and "benevolent" representative considered the good of the whole society. He looked past the local and temporary and saw the wider world as it was and ought to be. That quality would restore the enlightened few to their rightful place atop society.23 These political contentions harmonized with certain forms of Christianity in the new nation, especially those that smiled on human nature. In 1784, with his state mired in debt and faction, the Rev. Samuel Macclintock of New Hampshire warned that citizens might fall prey to "the designs of the selfish and interested" if they were unable to "rise above that contracted spirit which centers all the views and pursuits of men in their own private separate interest, or that of [their] little circle:' In this sense, provincialism revealed the most basic of sins-the incapacity to look past the self. Citizens should not be provincials, Macclintock made clear. They "should learn to think on a large scale;' to consider themselves "member[s] of the great national body." Was this possible? Macclintock had his doubts, for like most New Englanders he was a Calvinist who subordinated human efforts to God's will. Benevolence, in the orthodox scheme, was more a divine power to be invoked than a human virtue to be cultivated. In New England, especially,

Ambition and the American Founding

13

this virtue had a vertical orientation, connecting a bounded community of seekers to God above and (more likely) Hell below. Yet moderate Calvinists as well as liberal theologians began to argue that people could develop and extend their benevolence, "diffusing" the divine seed across imagined horizontal space.24 The real "spirit" of Christianity, they declared, was "social" and "cheerful;' imbued with the idea that self-love was the origin of the Golden Rule, not its antithesis. Instead of the complete surrender of selfish desire, benevolence became the gentle wish to make other people-different and distant peoplehappy. It necessarily reached past family members and near relations, for what sort of man only did good to those he knew would reciprocate? Benevolence should be extensive and free, not tribal and instrumental. The creation of the federal republic underlined this quality by turning long-isolated subjects into fellow citizens. In The Love of Our Country Represented and Urged (1792), a Massachusetts cleric called benevolence "the strongest principle in the virtuous mind:' When it reached "to our friends and neighbors, it is worthy of praise;' he noted. But benevolence was "most of all excellent, when reaching out to all mankind:' Such" comprehensive benevolence" was the proper basis of morality in society at large. 25 In addition to its political and religious appeal, the Federalist plan drew from and promoted the century-old idea of "commercial society:' Now that each state had surrendered some of its "local advantage," noted the Rev. Enos Hitchcock (a relative of Edward Hitchcock) in 1788, the nation would spread through space and time as no republic had before. This liberal pastor could scarcely contain his enthusiasm for global trade and national progress. "Certain it is;' he told his July Fourth audience in Providence, Rhode Island, "that a most extensive field is now opened before every friend of his country, to display his utmost abilities in providing for its peace and safety:' He based his hopes on a simple, and rather modern, sociology: "Society is composed of individuals-they are parts of the whole-and when each one moves in his own orb, and fills his own station, the system will be complete:' With their state and local boundaries subordinated to the national whole, individuals would pursue their rightful places and realize their moral potential. Somehow, and suddenly, they would become more cosmopolitan. The "extensive commerce" of the nation would attach citizens to all the peoples of the world: a veritable "empire of humanity:' 26 With ratification, these cultural strands lost their unifying goal along with much of their global liberality. The nation, not the world, became the focus of reform and attention. (By 1789, Noah Webster was arguing for an

14

Introduction

exclusively national language.) Far from dissolving, however, these liberal sensibilities enabled a larger effort to make that nation a respectable figure in that world-and, accordingly, to expose every corner of the extended republic to the imagined and critical view of outsiders and posterity. Having reconceived independence as an ongoing project, the nation-building peoples and ideas of the 1780s set out to uproot the presumably local perspective of a household-centered economy and society. This endeavor spread the originally Federalist umbrella much wider still, to encompass ministers, teachers, printers, and village notables of many persuasions. It also bore powerfully on the experiences and imaginations of obscure and isolated people, not least because its exciting message supposedly applied to everyone who had gone to the trouble of being born white, free, and male. 27 Even in New England, with its legally established clerical elite and long tradition of social perfectionism, the ambitious project was a highly decentralized one. Its leaders tended to be commercial or professional in their employment, nationalistic in their politics, and relatively liberal in their religion; otherwise, they inveighed against local ways as semi-independent and often isolated voices. But this does not mean that their words and phrases merely operated as rhetorical rubber-stamps for elemental processes. Nor that the institutions and practices they forged predictably served economic trends or interests. The "spirit" they spread was instead an historical agent in its own right, and once set in motion it reshaped the cultural landscape in ways no one had planned. It advanced commerce in both moral and material terms, yet frustrated the fiscal priorities of many households. It offered new space for individual aspiration, yet condemned "selfish" behavior. It turned ambition into an organizing principle of the society and culture, yet wondered whether an ambitious person could ever be anything but a threat to himself, to others, and even to the nation he otherwise resembled. 28 For Federalist lawyer and judge Nathaniel Chipman, at least, the task at hand was really quite simple. In his 1793 opus, Sketches of the Principles of Government, he told readers to pick up where the Constitution had left off and ensure that "local prejudices" never returned to America. "Man;' in Chipman's mind, was "capable of improvement, in a progression, of which he knows not the limits." People carried an "appetite for society" that had to be cultivated and directed. In the newly United States, these social passions would serve and foster virtue, because they were no longer hemmed inside zero-sum localities and "ancient prejudices." Emulation would become "the strife of

Ambition and the American Founding

15

virtue;' leading each citizen to seek "superior excellence" in public estimation. Lands long dominated by native peoples who were only "honest" within "the circle of their several tribes" would now wear the marks of the "spirit of enterprize, without which nothing great is ever to be expected:' Demanding great things of his nation and himself, Chipman closed his book with this exhortation: "Let us endeavor to diffuse, extensively, the principles of useful knowledge, and to impress, indelibly, on the minds of the rising generation, the sentiments of liberal virtue, and genuine patriotism." Who could doubt the outcome?29 Chipman, for one. "Ambition, when in balance with other passions and appetites, is far from being opposed to society," he proclaimed. Through ambition, "many actions, the noblest and most beneficial to society, are produced:' The "spirit" of ambition-the ways of doing and thinking it implied-pointed to a future that was fundamentally better than the past he recalled and the present he disdained. It was nothing less than the motive force that would impel the national society to global visibility. But ambition could also be "hurtful" if taken to extremes or shorn of public spirit. Like anyone not born yesterday, Chipman knew of the violence and chaos it had brought, knew that the lust for power had "generally proved the scourge of the human race." He therefore found a certain appeal in the bygone ways of the Indians, who were not, in his professional opinion, "goaded by ambition." "They are content, or resigned to the present, and are little anxious about the future." They were untroubled by the motive forces that both thrilled and worried him. 30 In the early national hinterlands, however, the greater challenge to Chipman's "spirit" issued not from any half-hearted pining for the past but from a different and in many ways competing vision of the future. During the confederation period, he noted in his Sketches, the people had been "verging towards the situation of small, independent tribes in the same vicinity:' They had withdrawn from the social encounters that stirred the "strife of virtue;' lashing out at external influences and mistaking the republic for an expanded version of their own estates. This had "visibly contracted the views of the people;' much as the desire for personal independence could bind people to the most narrow interest of all-that of their own household. Suddenly, Chipman's message seems daring or even desperate. Who in postRevolution America could take issue with independence? Who could question a personal and political value that contained its own form of national pride, its own enthusiasm for the market, its own register of self and success?

16

Introduction

To appreciate the depth and nuance of the conflict, one that would bear so heavily on the life of Edward Hitchcock, among others, it is necessary to turn to the world of their parents. There and then, independence emerged as a personal and cultural goal just as ambition and "liberal virtue" began to challenge it. 31

Chapter1

Finding Independence

Charles Harding recalled a Sunday trip to church in rural Vermont, circa 18oo, as a single-file formation of people and animals. "Father rode the black [horse], with a boy behind him, and Mother rode the white one, with a girl behind her;' he relates. "In this way we went to church:' No doubt they also wore their best clothes and shoes, hoping to leave the dirt and sweat and stink of the farm at home. Other accounts of the post-Revolutionary period echo Charles's memoir. "The usual method of coming to church was on horseback, the women behind their husbands and brothers;' an 1838 writer recalls of his youth. "It was a pretty sight, on a sunny summer's morning, to see them emerging from the hills in twos or threes:' Appearances had mattered on Sunday mornings, and so country dwellers hadarrayed themselves by gender, age, and household status. Wealth also counted, of course, especially as churches began to sell their pews to the highest bidder rather than assign seats by community rank. A western Massachusetts native born in 1792 remembered his mother's efforts to dress him and his siblings decently, "that [we] might go to meeting on Sunday, and make a respectable appearance among the other boys:' For better or worse, the Sunday journey broadcast each household's fortunes to a live and local audience. 1 However inflected by nostalgia, condescension, or filial gratitude, the pictures that Charles Harding and others painted of the old countryside reveal some of the defining dimensions of rural life just before and after the Revolution. His family lived more than two miles from church, Harding notes-and, in fact, the hinterlands were lightly settled, with households spread out in remote neighborhoods. His parents favored male over female and old over young while riding to church, he points out. Indeed, most country dwellers of the time lived in patriarchal households, where adult men had legal and customary rights to the labor (if not the respect) of women, youth, and other dependents. Finally, Charles makes clear that his family did its best to look its best in front of other households. In this way they took part in a local economy of esteem, a small-town pecking order in

18

Chapter 1

which neighbors knew one another's business or thought that they should. "[My parents] were not only comfortable, but rather independent for the times, and place in which they lived:' he decided. 2 It is hard to miss a hint of disdain in Charles's account. From a remove of many decades, he gestured at these Sunday trips with something like bemused relief: What a sad little world I once had to live in! His parents, Caleb and Elizabeth, had gained enough usable property and local stature to drive to meeting in good order. They had found "independence:' and nothing more. But for Caleb and Elizabeth Harding, as for most country folk who came of age during the 1770s and 1780s, independence was anything but trite or petty. It was instead an idea whose time had come. The "Puritan" model of stable, regulated, and plain-living communities had long lost ground to "Yankee" contention and cupidity in New England, and after the violent chaos of the revolutionary period, its people found more reasons than ever to center their lives around their own households. 3 They used words like "industry" and "contentment" to comprehend a world of local necessities and limited options. It was a world where children and dependents "followed" their parents and neighbors in life-defining ways, where ambition was a disreputable passion or a subversive wish, but never a public good.

A Scattered Country In the 1750s, Edward Hitchcock's father, Justin, left Springfield, Massachusetts, with his land-hungry parents. Two generations of Hitchcocks had made their home in that large and long-settled town; Justin proudly notes that they included farmers, tradesmen, and town officials. But in 1756, when Justin was only four years old, his family resettled twenty miles west in Granville, one of several dozen towns established in western Massachusetts around mid-century. "[He] thought he might do better on a farm accordingly he moved to Granville:' Justin surmised of his father. Years later, Justin would also try to do better in another town, struggling in a way that his son Edward would rarely appreciate. Two hundred miles to the north, the Burnside family also sought new farmlands. Around 1720, immigrants from Northern Ireland had settled in the lower Merrimack valley of New Hampshire. They built the town of Londonderry, which by the 1760s had a population of 2,500, second only to Portsmouth in its colony. Here, too, relative crowding encouraged younger families to seek land on the fringes of white settlement. In 1769, three Burnside men, including the patriarch, Thomas,

Finding Independence

19

moved their wives and children up the Connecticut River to the remote hamlet of Northumberland. Local legend has it that Thomas met the royal governor around 1770 and told His Excellency that there was only "neighbor Spaulding and meself" living in the town. Years later, a second Thomas Burnside would grow up with similar isolation but much less respect. 4 Closer to the center of British America, in the Massachusetts town of Marlborough, Silas Felton's forebears also sought new lands. His grandfather was a farmer and shoemaker who had moved from an eastern town to Marlborough in the 1730s and then expanded his estate during the 1760s. By the 1770s, the Feltons owned over two hundred acres in Marlborough alone, distributed in five plots. Three of these properties shared a border, while the others sat in separate reaches of the town. The Felton patriarch carried the title "gentleman:' but his property differed more in scale than in kind from his poorer townsmen. All ranks of farmers owned their land, not in a single piece around their homes, but in several patches spread over the general vicinity: sixty acres around the homestead, perhaps, plus a ten-acre pasture a mile away and a five-acre meadow in a nearby town. Over the decades, farm families like these had turned the countryside into a confusing quilt of dispersed properties, each marked off by tree stumps, rock piles, and worm-rail fences. 5 The Hitchcocks, Burnsides, and Feltons all sought freehold land, which secured their livelihoods and bound the generations into something like harmony. A father with real estate could count on his son's willingness to work for him, since the younger man could expect a reward in land when he married, turned twenty-one, or (at the very least) outlived his father. When mothers and fathers grew "past labor" due to age, sickness, or accumulated injuries, they could retire on their children's farms rather than waste away in the dreaded poorhouse. The provisions they made in wills reveal an abiding concern to give each of their children some property, somewhere, rather than to preserve a single estate for a single son. The pursuit of propertied status, and all it enabled, was a complicated family business that required continual adaptation to the outside world and perpetual compromise within the household. What is most remarkable is how the fundamental goal endured. 6 Compared to the southern colonies, where slave-owning planters dominated a staple-crop export economy, or even to Pennsylvania and New York, where more and more families had to rent farms from wealthy landowners, rural New England remained a small freeholder's bastion at mid-century. The great majority of adult men owned some land in "fee simple:' without encumbrances or obligations. Between one-half and two-thirds of taxpayers

20

Chapter1

had enough property, in lands and livestock, to maintain viable households. Many of the rest were younger men who could expect to move up as inheritances came due. Of course, farm families in older towns had long struggled to provide all their sons and daughters with suitable property, and as they transitioned into supplemental trades like blacksmithing, carpentry, and tanning, wealthier families took an increasing share of the diversifying economy. 7 In these towns especially, the distinction between "gentlemen," who had the most property, and "yeomen" and "husbandmen;' who had progressively less, shaped the flow of cash, credit, and political power. A landstrapped Hitchcock counted less than a land-rich Felton, although both counted as propertied men. 8 The wide distribution of usable property also underlay the physical shape and "feel" of the countryside. In the fertile, grain-exporting town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, where Justin Hitchcock would eventually settle, wealthy farmers and merchants built fine homes along its main street-"The Street;' as locals knew it-and so maintained a centralized layout once designed for defense against Indians. Wealthier towns in Connecticut also developed small village centers as trade networks matured. Yet most of the older towns had lost their cohesive designs during the eighteenth century, and the newer settlements never had any. In the 1750S, Justin Hitchcock explains, Granville was "an upland Town thinly settled." Their nearest neighbors, who had moved with the Hitchcocks from Springfield, probably lived past shouting range or even beyond sight down the nearest road. "It was woods near the house all round it;' Justin recalled. This was a product, not only of Granville's backcountry status, but also of prevailing agricultural practices. Like most farmers, Justin's father devoted most of his acres to meadows and pastures rather than tillage. He used his land extensively, organizing his resources to care for his two dozen sheep, ten cattle, and assorted birds and pigs. He thus required a good deal of space between his home and barn and those of his neighbors, no matter what Puritan social theory had once prescribed. 9 Even in long-settled towns, farm houses were planted on long, thin lines, not in dense clusters. Livestock predominated: in 1771, Marlborough had about 170 houses and 400 oxen, 320 polls and 930 cows. Although its patriarch was a tradesman, the Felton family also farmed and kept a dozen cows, steers, and oxen, plus a handful of sheep. Such beasts of burden roamed through the wastes and woodlands with relative impunity; gentlemen-farmers routinely sighed that these animals were badly maintained and contained. Due to eighteenth-century farm technologies and the spotty

Finding Independence

21

quality of New England's soils, most towns reached something of a population threshold at around fifty persons per square mile, after which young families set out for newer towns and cheaper lands. By contrast, Boston had nearly 13,000 persons per square mile by 1770. Even as they responded to urban markets by growing more produce to sell in seaports, country dwellers like the Feltons lived in a radically different environment than the metropolitan minority. Hence the story of the country boy who, after returning from a market trip to Boston, reported that he could not find the city because there were too many houses in the way. 10 City dwellers were just as confused by the countryside. In an aphorism that apparently dates from the late eighteenth century, a visitor asks a local resident for directions to the town of Barkhamstead. "You are in Barkhamstead now:' the yokel replies. But, the traveler asks, where is the town center? "It hasn't got any center." Churches remained the meeting points of townships, but as farm families spread out, they broke away from old parishes to form new spiritual centers. This pre-modern form of sprawl led to the frequent complaint that the hinterlands were "scattered:' In 1788, a Frenchman declared that Andover, Massachusetts, was "not a town in the European sense:' but "merely an area of ten miles over which are scattered farms:' His countryman, the Marquis de Chastellux, agreed. "What is called in America, a town or township:' he noted after passing through Connecticut early in the 1780s, "is only a certain number of houses, dispersed over a great space." An English traveler labeled Massachusetts towns "nothing better than scattering villages:' while an Italian noted that beyond Boston "the houses are scattered about, each one surrounded by its property." In urbane eyes, the countryside was both chaotic and listless, both untamed and decrepit. No one seemed in charge. 11 But the Hitchcock, Felton, and Burnside children knew who was in charge-their parents, especially their fathers. Everyday authority in the hinterlands spread as widely as the farmsteads, concentrating in each "head" of family and inhibiting the clout of the provincial gentry. This geography of power was both a product of farmers' economic choices and an impediment to economic growth as gentlemen foresaw it. It was not that freeholders shunned aspirations for "commercial society'' out of hand, but rather that they decoupled its specific steps from the overall vision, seeking the benefits of trade and travel within the parameters of local needs and contingencies. Their localism, in other words, did not attach them to a given patch of ground or even to a single occupation but rather to the manifest interests of the households they meant to rule.

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Roads offer a good case in point. Enlightened gentlemen likened them to arteries of the body politic, the key vessels for the "animating" blood of commerce. New England townsfolk took a more sober view of roads, not least because they were required by law to work on them each year. To make the roads passable through Granville, Justin Hitchcock recalls, "The people had to do many a hard days work with their teams:' Their efforts notwithstanding, the roads were narrow, rough, and as likely to end in wooded thickets as connect to another road. Ten years after settling Northumberland, the Burnsides and their few neighbors told the General Court that a projected road through a nearby town was unlikely to appear, because the land around it was "unlikely soon to be Seteled:' As they could not wait that long, they begged for funding to complete the "Partly Cleared" roads and replace the "tedious Rout" they now took. Long after the birth of the younger Thomas Burnside in 1779, the people of Northumberland struggled to access markets by building and maintaining roads. 12 They drew clear distinctions between their roads and roads in general, however. In 1786, a Deerfield farmer complained that he derived "no Benefit or advantage" from the town's minister or school. Unless the selectmen could provide a "publick Road heding from his Farm to said Deerfield;' he wanted tax exemptions. Why should he pay for the local institutions from which he derived "no Profit or advantage"? Similar requests reveal a common sensibility at work in many households and across many decades. In 1757, a group of farmers from southern Deerfield asked to be excused from taxes earmarked for Deerfield center, for they were "Settled Remote from the Town." This alone suggests the mental boundaries that farmers drew around their homes. By the 1770s, "The Street" in Deerfield had many stores-distribution points for the consumer items that had proliferated since the 1730s-while fewer than half the towns in the inland parts of western Massachusetts had any stores at all. If farmers in south Deerfield felt removed from "the Town;' how did farmers in Granville or Northumberland feel? The petition also suggests the tension between the local identity of the rights-bearing freeholder and the political status of the monarchical subject. "Determined to abide by our Possessions if Possible;' they still made their demand as the "Dutifull Children" of their town fathers. 13 Spread out along poorly kept roads, farm folk met few passersby and fewer strangers. When four-wheeled carriages made their first appearances during the 1780s, townspeople were astonished enough to record the moment for posterity; the sight "made a greater wonderment than the appearance of a mammoth;' remembered one man. But those were special days. For

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Figure 2. Surely exaggerated to malign "rustic" apathy, this woodcut still reveals the isolation and material hardships of rural life. Reprinted from Samuel Goodrich, A Pictorial Geography of the World, 2nd edition (Boston, 1840). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

the most part, the homestead sat alone, a stubborn fact of great social consequence. Archaeological evidence reveals that farm inhabitants left refuse outside their homes and seldom painted their exterior walls, although wealthier families sometimes painted their trim. The wooden houses of rural towns acquired a mottled gray/brown hue that bothered visitors much more than residents. Indeed, farmsteads hardly "faced" anyone at all, for their doorways often pointed toward the fields or barn rather than the road. 14 Then as now, this apparent indifference to city tastes drew the scorn of city dwellers. Farm folk were "rustics;' "peasants;' or "potatoes." Then as now, these abuses signified all the ways rural people did not measure up to standards they did not entertain. "I Cant say I met with anything Instructive relating to Farming in your Parts;' reported one agricultural reformer to another after a three-month stay in New England. "I think the Contrary and that Slovenlyness too generally prevails." The problems were many and the causes simple, according to these critics. Why did farm folk neglect to drain their swamps, stall their cattle, or build better fences? Because they were lazy.

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In 1762, a Rhode Island gentleman confided that most farmers were also "Stupid:' Blind and deaf to progress, they persisted in their "Contracted way of thinking" and lived their days in a "miserable contracted State." They were contemptible, and, for most of the eighteenth century, not worth the bother to uplift. 15

Work, School, and Self Long before they rode proudly to church together, Caleb Harding and Elizabeth Richardson lived in poverty and obscurity. Both were born in rural Connecticut: Caleb in 1763, Elizabeth in 1770. Their nativity aside, they elude even the most impersonal and inclusive of public records, such as census data and tax returns. "They both lost thier father when quite young;' their son Charles explains, "and being left poor and under the necessity of being brought up, by strangers, thier early life was painful, and severe:' They had grown up with hardship, hunger, pain. Caleb's mother had remarried sometime in the 1760s, leaving the boy to work for a stepfather and two brothers, both of whom were bigger and stronger than he was. In some other part of rural Connecticut, Elizabeth also endured "hard treatment;' probably from an unlucky relative who had to tolerate a fatherless girl. "They were worked hard;' Charles emphasizes. 16 Benjamin Abbot, Jr., and Herman Mann were a bit more fortunate. Born in the mid-sized town of Concord, New Hampshire, in 1749, Benjamin was the second son of Benjamin, Sr., one of the town's first proprietors. The Abbot family owned over one hundred acres in the southern part of Concord, along with smaller patches spread around town. Their estate ranked in the top 10 percent of the town taxpayers and enabled them to remain through three generations, down to Ephraim Abbot's time and beyond. They were perfectly respectable in Concord and barely visible anywhere else. The Manns of Walpole, Massachusetts, a farm town south of Boston, operated a clothing mill. They had more disposable income and personal property than all but a few Walpole families. Herman Mann was the grandson of one of the most recognizable men in town and the nephew of a gentleman whose home features in town tours to this dayY No matter where they lived or what they stood to inherit, though, Harding, Abbot, and Mann all grew up doing what their parents did, as did the Hitchcock, Felton, and Burnside children. The great majority of early Americans carried on their parents' vocations as well. Indeed, work for one's parents

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(or master) and at their trade (usually farming) was the fundamental circumstance of the preindustrial West. The household, the center of a "scattered" landscape, issued the daily work orders through which people mapped out the familiar past and likely future. In New England, family labor also had a Puritan accent, a religious dimension that sacralized work in general along with each person's "calling:' But above all, the working household framed labor in terms of necessity. Family work was a matter of"duty;' and it decisively shaped the youthful self. The fact that the products of this training struck educated outsiders as lazy speaks to the cultural distances between them. 18 Families organized work by gender, and the sexual division of labor left its mark on domestic spaces as well as personal identities. In the Stow household of Marlborough, for example, Levina (b. 1755) would learn to help her mother with baking, knitting, and curing. She would feed chickens, milk cows, and process butter and cheese. Levina would also spend many hours at the family's spinning wheel in order to clothe herself, her parents, and her siblings. A young woman's labor varied more in kind than intensity with the seasons, and most of it placed her inside her parents' one-story, three-room home or in the narrow strips of land between home, garden, and barn. Across town, Stephen Felton (b. 1752) and his brothers would dress and work much like their sisters until age seven or eight, when, in a sartorial rite of high importance, they forsook their gowns in favor of pants. Thus "breeched;' they were ready to leave the home to work in their father's workshops or farm lands. As he returned each afternoon from the Felton farmlands, Stephen would recall his relative liberation from home, would learn and relearn who, as the saying lingers, "wore the pants" in the household. 19 Age and size also mattered in the household economy: smaller boys found themselves in subordinate roles. As an elder sibling, Stephen Felton probably took orders only from his father, or from the neighboring men for whom he would labor on occasion. (Perhaps he met Levina Stow in this capacity.) Benjamin Abbot and Justin Hitchcock were not so lucky. Benjamin's father and older brother both earned local repute in Concord for their labor powers. As the younger and smaller son, he had to obey them in the fields and defer to them during such pastimes as harvest races, wrestling matches, and house-raising contests. In remote Granville, Justin Hitchcock was two years older but a good deal weaker than his brother, who "showed more ambition as a good plough Boy than I:' In his self-story, at least, Justin accepted his lot: "I was willing to have him praised up as a teamster if I could then be freed from my turn of driving." (Even in unlettered memoirs of obscure workplaces, ambition meant notice and praise by others.) The regimes of

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field work shaped the flow of approval within rural families, deciding who would be "praised up" and who would be "freed." 20 Good boys or girls were diligent and patient in the work given to them, and these qualities drew together in the word "industry:' To be industrious was to be a reliable contributor to the working household, not a go-getter with discrete aspirations. This plain virtue recalled the Christian values of modesty and resignation-a point sometimes used by ministers or magistrates while urging social deference. "It is the same, as to say, they are industrious, they keep at home, and mind their own business:' one young college tutor and future minister noted of the ideal farmer. "If industrious;' farmers would be found "content within their fortress;' "fixed to one spot" and satisfied with the "narrow limits" of their lives. But industry applied more often and effectively inside the household, where it advised youth that their path in life, as in work, led from and then back to the household. "I was born and brought up in the farming way;' reflected one old man in 1810, "and I followed that business pritty much:' In this way, "follow" captured both the daily routines of farming and the social values tied to it. A son walked behind his father as the older man, following the ox, led the plow through the fields; the default expectation was that the son would take hold in years to come. He was "bred" or "brought up" to "the farming way;' conditioned to its endless tedium and eventual rewards.21 Of course, the transfer of land and social identity down the generations was a complicated matter. During the late colonial period, as families continued to bear four, five, or six children, more and more found it impossible to settle their two or three sons on suitable farms. So farmers became small-time land speculators. In 1746, one of Justin Hitchcock's relatives, a "yeoman" from Springfield, gave his "well beloved Son"-a mere "Husbandman"-a sizable estate. Nineteen years later, the younger man, now a yeoman himself, bought two plots in the new town of Hawley, forty miles northwest. The next year, 1766, he did for his son what his father had done for him. Once more, the terse formality of a deed record only hints at the family drama at hand. Pursuant to "love good will and affection;' not to mention many years of work, this father gave his son one of the plots in Hawley, or 100 acres. That, again, turned a young husbandman into a mature yeoman. Parents continued to prescribe their children's futures even as demographic pressures and occupational diversity undercut their ability to do so, perpetuating a cyclical worldview that could just as easily recover as unravel with the settlement of new farms. 22 But what to do with a farmer's son who had no hope of inheriting a farm? Or with any child who was simply unfit for the family trade? What to

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do, for example, with Justin Hitchcock? "[My father] was very carefull to get us as good an education as the circumstances in a new settlement would permit;' he proclaims in his autobiography. By rural standards, the Hitchcocks were indeed a bookish lot. Justin knew of at least two relatives who had received a "liberal education" at college, including the Rev. Enos Hitchcock, future Federalist from Providence. His own father was a "very Good writer" who copied the sermons he heard on Sundays for the benefit of his mother, who was deaf. His common or district school was about one mile from their Granville home. Most likely, this school was only about 16-by-20 feet, as small and unassuming as a common farmer's house. Yet it looms large in Justin's written memory. He paid special respects to one of his teachers, a nineteen-year-old who employed "a very different method" than other masters. 23 By and large, however, rural households regarded schools as supplements to the family economy, and often as taxes on it. A telling statistic: in the 176os, more than half of the Massachusetts towns required by law to hold Latin Grammar schools failed to do so. Townsfolk revealed declining interest in these institutions, and only sporadic and conditional concern with the much more numerous common schools. Although rates of attendance at common or town schools seem to have increased after mid-century, especially for girls, most children only went to school intermittently-for the one or two months per year that their parents did not need them-and with all the other dependents of the neighborhood. The result? Classrooms packed with both full-grown farm boys and young girls, with both pre-literate children and adolescents who had "learned their letters" long before. Classrooms in which, as one New Englander recalled, "such barefooted boys as were not wanted for hoeing corn" sat through their lessons without learning much, indeed without thinking that they were supposed to learn much. These were classrooms in which teachers kept order by busying their pupils with recitations and by hitting or humiliating them as needed. Justin Hitchcock's teacher in Springfield was probably closer to the norm than the younger one in Granville: "a proper Tyrant he kept a stick by him long enough to reach every boy in the school. ... We all feared him:' 24 The Felton household sat right next to one of the "moving school" locations in Marlborough, where teachers held lessons out of private homes for short terms. But Stephen's mother, Hezediah, could not sign her name in her old age, suggesting that she had never learned to write or had forgotten how during her adult life. (Between one-third and one-half of New England women during the 1760s were illiterate, and many more had only rudimentary

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reading skills.) His father, as well, had no more than a common school education, only attending school long enough to learn reading, writing, and ciphering. Precisely because of the assumption that children needed no more schooling than their parents had endured, descriptions of educational attitudes by and among farm folk are scarce. Popular attitudes can only be teased from critical retrospectives like this one, which describes a teacher's efforts to obtain small school fees in the Abbots' town of Concord, New Hampshire, around 1785: "[When the teacher] went to one of the families in his district, the man treated him politely, yet gave him no encouragement; but the good wife said, 'I have no notion of these schoolmasters; it is only to make money. I know as much as most people do, and when I was young a schoolmaster came 'round, and I was signed up for a quarter, and I went two or three days and I did not know one bit more than I did before, and I reckon I know as much as most people do who go to these schools, and our children can do as we did." Both the woman's insistence that she knew "as much as most people" and her belief that her children should "do as we did" speak to the here-and-now priorities of the farm family, its localized sense of what was important, right, fair, and likely. 25 The obvious goal of such stories was to indict rural parents and to make reform seem overdue. In the case from Concord, moreover, we should recall the peculiar dynamic of the house-to-house solicitation, which often reveals the residents at their most defensive. But when we relate what we hear about eighteenth-century schools to what we know about eighteenthcentury households, it is fair to say that schooling ranked quite low on rural priority lists. "The farmer with whom I lived [in the 1780s] thought I could read well enough;' reports one Victorian, "and as the district school-house was a mile or more distant, he considered it unnecessary to send me that distance in the winter, merely to read." While devising an educational plan for the "scattered" countryside he knew, a reformer in 1787 assumed that "few parents" would want their children to travel far for book learning. They were not "disposed" to lose work days to a school-master, not least because their children were "destined for a laborious country life." And even if they were so inclined, how many schools could they patronize in the first place? Latin grammar schools were few and obscure, private academies were all but unknown in the region, and no more than one New England male in one hundred went to one of British America's nine colleges. The exceptionally gifted and connected went past common school to gain a "liberal" or "public" education. For everyone else, the rough candor of a French peasant saying holds true: they mostly went to school behind a cow's arse. 26

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The overall effect on the life options and self-assessments of country youth cannot be exaggerated. "Neither of them ever [had] a months schooling:' Charles Harding wrote of his orphaned parents. "They could however read, but not write:' Their pasts and futures were tied up in the duties of industry, as Charles avowed when reporting that most Harding households "had large families and were obliged to work hard:' Bare literacy steered rural people toward familiar pursuits and places, where things made sense and experience mattered along with aptitude. It also fostered deep and complicated feelings of inadequacy in them, a persistent sense that they were being used or hoodwinked or laughed at. Justin Hitchcock wondered if he knew "any thing of what is proper in the stile of writing" and thanked his one capable teacher "for the little [I] know of writing and spelling:' He knew how difficult it was to escape a past built on family labor, indeed how hard it was to convey the desire to do so. In the opening pages of his self-narrative, Justin noted that people were "wholly passive" in inheriting their last names-and, by extension, their identities. He then cataloged his own relatives' fortunes. One uncle had joined the ministry, but after "some difficulty" closed this path he "went into trade and I believe failed:' Another uncle "followd purchasing Cattle I Suppose got to be much reduced he had only one Child:' One of his aunts married "an industrious honist Joiner" and had several children, "but only one handsome promising Daughter." Modest hopes for honest peopleP Hitchcock also summarized the "Sentiments of Calvanists" as he had learned them at home and church: "Original Sin. Election. Special Grace. And the absolute Divinity of Christ with the perserverence of the saints." No other inhabitants of British America listened to as many sermons as New Englanders, and no other region made the depravity of humanity such an enduring part of its cultural fabric. Not that all the pastors were hide-bound Calvinists. Liberal and "Arminian" theologies that stressed the moral agency of humanity had spread since mid-century from coastal areas and Harvard College to many communities-and, for that matter, to Justin Hitchcock's prosperous relative, Enos. During the 1780s they gave rise to the first Unitarian churches. All the same, the great majority of country folk took in various forms of broadly evangelical belief. These orthodox values were not only policed from above, by ecclesiastical councils, but also from below, by deacons and laypeople who did not want to hear about a gentle God and His noble children. According to an early Unitarian, many eighteenth-century ministers "were more liberal than the people to whom they ministered:' Fearing official censure or local rebellion, these humanists hid their ideas in "qualified language." 28

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In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5), Max Weber famously proposed that Calvinism induced both ascetic lifestyles and the ceaseless energy to work. But work for whom? And to what ends? Pride, not greed, was the sin that New England children learned first and best. From pride grew ambition, the "predominant vice" of adolescents and headstrong youth. From the 1750s to the 1770s, the pastor of the First Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, where Herman Mann would settle and raise Daniel along with nine other children, reminded listeners of the "furious Anlbition" that had led Adam to his "Horrid Ingratitude:' The best answer to ambition, of course, was industry, the "calm meek contented and patient Temper" that served practical no less than spiritual ends. His more liberal colleague in an outlying parish advised parents in 1777 to be "kind and indulgent" to their children. But both parents and children had to keep "constantly upon their Work;' he said, so as to curb "pride and ambition" and the "violence and Warmth of their passions:' As of 1777, this pastor found no reasons-or no language-to close the conceptual gap between ambition and industry, the breadth of which offers a crude measure of a society's traditionalism. 29

Marriage, Competence, and Envy During the winter of 1765-1766, Justin Hitchcock's father returned from a market trip with a clock. At the time, the fourteen-year-old was looking for an alternative to farming, and the marvelous commodity set his mind to an artisan's trade-another form of honest work. When a relative back in Springfield, a hatter named Moses Church, offered an apprenticeship to one of the Hitchcock boys, Justin jumped at the chance "to get free from so much driving team:' His father consented, probably because he knew how little his children stood to inherit. On May 5, 1766, Justin signed an indenture to Church, pledging not to waste his master's time or property. As a "good honest and Faithfull Servant and Apprentice;' moreover, he promised not to fornicate with or marry anyone until he turned twenty-one. Around 1770, Benjamin Abbot, Jr., entered a similar agreement with a house-joiner in Concord, New Hampshire. Like Hitchcock, Abbot was a mediocre plow-boy in search of another trade, and had to serve in another household before starting his own. 30 Stephen Felton had an easier time forming a family. After he turned twenty-one in 1773, he probably lived under his parent's roof while working one of his father's plots in Marlborough. When he courted Levina Stow, he

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could tell her parents that he had a substantial inheritance on the way. Two accounts of rural courtship suggest that he might have done just that. An 1806 parable lampooned the shallow materialism of New England's "peasantry" by describing Jonathan Jolthead's pursuit of Sally Snapper, the deacon's daughter. Jonathan's mother forces her son to try to "spark it" with Sally, reminding him that the young miss would receive £100 when she married. So Jolthead ambles over to the deacon's home, filling the awkward silence that ensues by talking to Sally's brother about livestock. (Sally was not impressed.) Another anecdote features a young suitor who nervously whittles a stick as he seeks permission to marry from his prospective fatherin-law, "a rich old farmer." After a long pause, the older man declares: "You have fine property, you have steady habits; good-looking enough; but you can't have my daughter. Had you made something, no matter what, of the stick you whittled away, you could have had her; as it is you cannot. Your property will go as the stick did, little by little, until all is gone, and your family reduced to want:' Jaded and apocryphal, these tales still point to the practical concern surrounding marriage: could a young couple start a viable household? 31 By the late colonial period, the power to decide when and whom to marry had passed decisively from parents to couples, and spread a bit more evenly between men and women. Like Jolthead's mother, parents could counsel their children about a given match, but little more. Young women, like Sally Snapper, could refuse a suitor's advances ("give him the bag"). Yet local boundaries arranged marriages more effectively than parents ever could. Stephen Felton married Levina Stow in 1775, and the new couple began a household in their native Marlborough. Herman Mann's parents both came from south Walpole. Thomas Burnside's eldest son married another Northumberland settler, then "settled on the farm next south of [his neighbor], where he passed his life:' Even in more densely settled and commercial towns, clear majorities of young people found their spouse within a day's ride ofhome.3 2 Having formed a household, a married couple joined the neighborhood, another focal institution in rural life. The physical distance between neighbors belied, or perhaps intensified, their investments in one another, especially when they had blood ties. In Marlborough, for example, about one-third of all polls shared all of three surnames. Stephen and Levina were related to one of these ubiquitous clans and lived within a short ride of two other Felton households. Thick concentrations of extended families obtained across the settled farm towns of New England. In the more transient backcountry, as well,

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settlers like the Burnsides and Hitchcocks planted new homes alongside old neighbors, enabling neighborhoods to reconstitute as their members moved. By the 1760s, Justin Hitchcock's family tree spread from central Connecticut to Springfield, Granville, and Hawley, Massachusetts, following the young man as he left his father's farm for his relative's shop. 33 Neighbors "changed work;' swapping tools, livestock, and labor as their needs and assets dictated. Early in their marriage, for example, Stephen and Levina Felton required help plowing the fields that Stephen's father let them use, for they had no children of their own to enlist. Thus, Stephen might build a fence for an older neighbor in exchange for help with spring planting. Women forged similar ties. The signature labor of preindustrial women, the production of "homespun" clothing, compelled several households to pool their sheep, spinning wheels, and looms. The birth of a child also called "the women:' and the women only, to the new mother's side; men worried about the gossip that germinated in their absence. Work exchanges were so common that rural households must have seemed porous, their doors open in spirit if not in fact. One young woman from Boston, whose well-heeled parents moved to the country in 1790, recalled that her new neighbors"kind and honest people, but [with no] education or refinement"-dropped by without notice, to the irritation of her mother. 34 Sometime after marrying, Stephen Felton began to keep an account book in which he assigned each work exchange a cash value. When two men agreed to settle their accounts in a "reckoning;' they rarely paid in coin or hard specie, always scarce in a region without a staple, profit-generating export. Rather, they used the cash amount of their "book debts" to measure how much work, maize, cider, butter, or good will would even the score. Stephen Felton did not worry if one of the How men did not pay up right away; he knew where the Hows lived. But even in communities in which neighbors "took" and "gave" from each other rather than "buying" or "selling" things, exchanges went sour, debts went unpaid, and prices fell into dispute. For out-of-town transactions, moreover, farmers often turned to "promissory notes:' which obligated debtors to repay by a certain date or risk legal sanction. Every spring and fall, Courts of Common Pleas heard cases brought by gentlemen, traders, and yeomen against husbandmen and laborers who had not paid as promised. 35 Beneath the formal divisions of parish, town, or colony, then, a social fabric known as "the People" or "the Neighborhood" supported a vital sense of local autonomy. Difficult to imagine in the current era of giant employers and global capitalism, this collective identity rested on the local control of

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basic resources. That control, of course, also brought interdependencerelationships framed by need and routine as well as choice and affinity. The cultural milieu of the rural neighborhood was at once empathetic and cruel, cooperative and testy, supportive and suffocating. 36 Joined at the hip in their pursuit of well-being, households had every reason to measure and judge one another. A New Hampshire man who grew up during the 1760s and 1770s recalled a "neighborhood talk" that convened after one household head gave his sons expensive clothes, silver buckles, and a watch. The folks decided that "the family were on the high road to insolvency;' which concerned them at least to the extent that it would no longer be able to change works. Neighbors kept close tabs on one another, as evidenced by their memory of local property: neighbor A was the first to own a carriage, in 1772; neighbors B and C wore fine shirts to meeting during the 176os; neighbor D lost his farm in 1786. Good farmers did not pay much attention to their homes' exteriors, but they kept their barns in good order and left their barn doors open in the fall to reveal the fruits of the harvest: conspicuous production, so to speak. As "boughten goods" from country stores proliferated after mid-century, of course, conspicuous consumption also took hold. Wealthier neighbors found new ways to embellish their homes with mirrors, ceramics, and furniture. They tried to impress each other even though, or precisely because, they needed each other. 37 "But what was especially characteristic of the people of [old times]:' recalled one antiquarian, "was a certain sheepish air." People were careful not to offend local mores, or even to dispute local decisions. The "dread of being laughed at:' noted one agricultural reformer from the 1810s, was "a peculiar trait in people residing in the country." More than anything else, including Sally Snapper's rejection, Jonathan Jolthead feared that "Folks will laugh at me so!" Again, these judgments came from contemptuous outsiders who measured their own virtue in the distance between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the charges also gesture at some of the fundamental tensions of provincial life. To be condemned or laughed at, to be derided for laziness or pretension or poverty-this was social death in the neighborhood. The pressure to work well with others and adapt to their needs also lent special meaning to those few distinctions that did set one household or person over another. Justin Hitchcock recalled that their nearest neighbor in Granville had turned "cold and unsociable, seldom visiting us" after Justin's father was named deacon. Perhaps he scowled as Justin trotted to school, or, more seriously, shortened the repayment demands on his book debts. 38

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The envious neighbor who resents prosperity and maligns talent is a common figure in rural recollections. At the same time, he (or, as often, she) was such an embarrassment that writers quickly passed over this reminder of the bad old days. Of a prosperous family in the fictitious town of Quabbin, Francis Underwood surmised that "No one envied them their good fortune-a rare experience, in Quabbin or elsewhere:' In A New England Tale (1822), Catharine Maria Sedgwick described the "side glances and prophetic whispers" that followed a wealthy merchant. His fine clothes and expensive furniture "attracted notice, and, we fear, sometimes envy:' An 1827 writer from Dedham recalled how rural folk had once presumed that those with higher educations only wanted to establish "a dangerous superiority over their neighbors:' (These sentiments, he thought, were now diminished, "or at least not publicly avowed:') During regular sermons throughout the eighteenth century, as well, ministers called envy the most despicable sin. It was "the First Native of Hell;' declared Dedham's first parish minister, a "low and base Passion" that epitomized our depravity and hated all the virtues, not just one of them. Others likened envy to a "hideous hag;' thereby blaming the cultural problem on gossiping women instead of a social context where one's gain seemed another's loss. 39 Rather than lament what they did not have or resent those who had it, country folk were told to look down at the wretched and then feel grateful with a "competence." Long a staple of agrarian folk culture, competence could refer to one hundred acres of work-ready farm land (for Stephen Felton), forty acres of virgin soil (for one of the Burnsides), or a well-stocked artisan's shop (for Justin Hitchcock). But it always meant local respectability, the right to be seen and approved by those who mattered. "Reason's whole pleasure, all the joys of sense;' according to one maxim, "lies in three words, health, peace, and competence:' A competent household was in good standing with its neighbors. It asked no favors it could not return, suggesting that it functioned reasonably well under the male head. Closely tied to this ideal was "contentment:' or a basic acceptance of one's role and lot in life. Like industry or competence, this term recurred in primers, sermons, and sayings so often that people had little choice but to use it, to internalize it, to fit themselves within its moral frames. "He's most rich, who's most content''; "with food and raiment, let us be therewith content"; "life's best blessing, is calm content:' Because it did not require ownership, contentment applied especially to women. "Contentment, rosy, dimpled fair;' ran a late-century article, "I ask but competence and thee." 40 The energy spent urging contentment and denouncing envy is evidence in its own right that rural peoples wanted more: more land, more things,

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more chances to promote themselves and their children. "Many a ditty have I heard sung sweet and smoothly, and many a laboured sermon preached on coNTENTMENT;' wrote one misogynist wit in the 1780s. "But they were done as the hypocrite prays:' He went on to picture contentment as a fat woman "in her greasy night-cap;' living in a filthy home. Such vulgar cynicism sounds crudely authentic in modern ears, knowing as we do that contentment and self-denial would face a hard future in American culture. But it is vital to see that these country dwellers saw contentment more as a goal than a consolation, and that the value itself could operate as an end point of personal striving. Moreover, the "sweet ditties" continued to circulate because they continued to serve important social functions, none of which were necessarily idealistic. Among laboring families and interdependent neighbors, after all, the pursuit of property by households neither implied nor encouraged the pursuit of self-realization by individuals. The meaning and relevance of contentment thus varied according to where one was situated in the family economy, and what he or she stood to gain or lose from the work everyone had to do. 4 1 A pastor might give a labored sermon about the need for contentment, after which a farmer who had listened could use the same language on his dependents while he worked them harder in order to gain more property. His cupidity required their contentment; his greed could double as the virtuous desire to care for his household. Then again, "virtuous" might overstate the positive rationales for work available to him. Just as the goal of competency oriented itself against the mortifying alternative, the obligation to provide for one's family carried with it the scriptural warning that those who did not do so "hath denied the Faith, and is worse than an infidel:' Where cultural prescriptions pointed down more than up, near more than far, ambition had no rightful place. "When ambition fires the mind;' decided one essayist in 1784, "a man may truly say, farewell content." Ambition was "an Ignis Fatuus, a blazing meteor;' a flame that consumed everything in its path. It was an "enraged" yet devious form of envy, a mortal threat to the vital beliefs that kept households from ruin. "Every exercise arising from the ambitious principle;' remarked an 1804 moralist in no uncertain terms, "is a selfish exercise:' 42

Revolution After finishing his apprenticeship in 1773, Justin Hitchcock promised himself that he would stay clear of "mean low tricks" in the pursuit of wealth "if

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I could avoid it:' He then used a debt he held against another man to open a hatter's shop in Deerfield center. But just as he neared competence, he received troubling letters from his father, whose efforts to do better on new lands ultimately failed. The old man died that summer, and Justin soon after endured an unpleasant call from one of the wealthy merchants of the area, who "very roughly" told Justin that his father's farm was mortgaged and no longer Hitchcock property. (The young hatter had suspected as much, but the patriarch had always kept the household finances "a profound secret:') While his younger brother remained in Granville to care for their deaf and widowed mother, Justin courted Mercy Hoyt, daughter of a local family of high repute. In a 1778 letter to his intended, he asked her to ignore "the Says of People" along The Street. He also sent a letter to her parents: That great Being who formed mankind rational Creatures, implanted in theirs natures a desire for Society. It is from such a desire being implanted in my nature and I think from honest and upright principles, that I have sought for a partner in this life. You very well know that I have for sometime past frequently visited at your house and had opportunities for private conversation with your Daughter Mercy ... I Suppose the usual way of asking consent is for the Father to do it for the Son. But you know it is impossible in this cas[e] ... I have dwelt So long in the neighbourhood with you that that you are acquainted with my Conduct, Character, and Circumstances in life. A dutiful request, garnished with enlightened language. You know my story, Justin seems to say, and I am going to marry your daughter one way or the other. He would not wait until he was "better provided." He only wished that he did not have to ask "whilst our public affairs are in so unhappy a Situation:' 43 By 1774, the idea that British authority posed a clear and present danger was widespread in the countryside. For those accustomed to the scorn of urbane power-holders, the frightening tale told by Whig radicals made perfect sense. Once again, their "honest Industry" and the property it brought were imperiled. As Justin Hitchcock would later reflect, the Crown meant to "load [the people] with shackles which their posterity would never be able to get rid of' Perpetual dependence: the nightmare had seemed all too near in the 1770s, when he was just emerging into independent manhood. In this way, the young man from Granville put his finger on the social meaning of revolution for his generation. Rebellion against monarchy became the political analog to their personal search for autonomy, which they would call "independence" more than "competence." Once a complaint of European visitors,

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the independence of New England freeholders became a centerpiece of personal identity-but not before a decade of chaos and violence revealed how precarious that identity was. 44 For competent adults, military service in the Revolution usually meant a short stint in the town militia. In Walpole, about 160 townsmen set out to assist their countrymen from Lexington and Concord on April19, 1775; Herman Mann's father served for less than two weeks before returning to his wife and young son. Stephen Felton and his brothers served similar terms in local contingents. Benjamin Abbot, Jr., recently finished with his apprenticeship in Concord, served for a bit longer. He followed the militia to the Battle of Bunker Hill, where, according to his first son, Ephraim Abbot, "a bullet cut a hole thro' one of his whiskers without drawing blood." Away from the neighborhood for the first time, perhaps enthralled by the freedoms of anonymity, the young man took to sea as a privateer. Poor, landless, and detached young men gravitated to the Continental Army rather than the militia. Among them was one of Justin Hitchcock's brothers, whom the hatter simply describes as "poor:' As for Justin, he joined the Deerfield militia as a fifer and later hired a substitute to fight in Washington's army. He considered the Revolution the central event of his life, not least because his service, such as it was, helped boost him to the office of town clerk in 1779. 45 For most people, of course, war brought far more misery than opportunity. Indeed, the Revolution was a prodigiously destructive event from which per capita income in the United States, an impersonal but telling indicator, would not recover for over twenty years. Just as Hitchcock gained public office in Deerfield, British and Hessian troops terrorized much of Connecticut, where Elizabeth Richardson and her future husband, Caleb Harding, clung to a grim subsistence. In the remote region of New Hampshire known as Upper Coos, where the Burnsides lived in the hamlet of Northumberland, an Indian raid in 1775 forced the family to flee sixty miles downriver. After the Patriot defeat in Canada the next summer, the white people of Upper Coos again petitioned their state government for some kind of assistance. By their own "industry;' they proclaimed, they had cleared "such a quantity of Land as by close application have Supported their families:' "Your petitioners whole property is in this part;' they reiterated, "and [they are] totally destitute of any subsistence for their families elsewhere:' 46 Fortunately for the Burnsides, the attack never came. By the time the men of the family joined the town's militia in 1782, three years after the birth of the younger Thomas Burnside, independence was all but won. But their petition spotlights the tension between the patriot cause and the pedestrian

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needs of family and locality. Farm families were willing to do without imported teas or linens, to contribute supplies to their militiamen, and to serve in local detachments. As war dragged on and moved south, however, their attention turned to the everyday concerns of the harvest and the book debt, the "surplus" and the "reckoning:' Pressed for labor by the departure of older sons and servants to military service, farmers also replied to wartime conditions by slaughtering more cattle and selling the meat to nearby armies. Sensibly, they began to refuse Continental money as payment and even to deal with the better-endowed British. 47 By 1780, the paper currency printed by the Continental Congress had inflated beyond absurdity; "No public or private men" expected it to be redeemed, recalled Justin Hitchcock. With the formal end of hostilities in 1783, British goods flooded American markets just as British ships blocked American shipping. To make matters much worse, state governments hiked taxes to three or four times their pre-war levels, mostly to pay interest on the war debt to wealthy speculators. Scarce money, high taxes, and unreliable markets pummeled the rural economy and sent repayment demands from seaports to market towns to scattered neighborhoods. Most households were both debtors and creditors, so the crisis not only estranged the rural interior from coastal areas but also played havoc with local relationships. The Peltons, for example, were apt to grant extensions on the debts they held on their Marlborough townsmen. But what were they to do with Abner Dunbar, a yeoman from a nearby town who asked for patience in 1785? "[It] is not my Nature or Inclination to falsify my word with any no not In the meanest concernments;' Dunbar appealed. Due to "unlook'd for Disappointments;' however, he was "ashamed to say that at Present I cannot answer your Desiers." What could he do? "I cannot sell the place;' he writes in an apparent reference to his farm, "But if you can and will you must for I cannot help it." 48 Without paper money or specie to pay for taxes or for lands just purchased, farmers and tradesmen faced insolvency and foreclosure on an astonishing scale. At certain points during the 178os, there were two outstanding court actions, mostly for debt, for every adult male in New Hampshire. Benjamin Abbot, Jr:s older brother accounts for two of those cases; after settling on a farm next to his father in Concord, this man sued for the recovery of debts in 1783 and 1785. Lawyers proliferated as never before, but otherwise the suffering was widespread and acute. "The people are at their witts end at the dismal prospect before them;' reported one gentleman in 1785 of some New Hampshire settlers. "Their case appears to be very pitiable." Petitions from the countryside, cobbled together by neighbors who relied on each other more

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than they cared to admit, reported the most pitiable circumstance of all: freeholders could not provide for their dependents.49 "Many industrious members of the community have been confined in gaol;' complained the freeholders of one town. Farmers "were never so industrious or prudent;' insisted another. Contrary to elite complaints, they had not gone mad over "luxuries:' They only wanted to redeem fair debts, pay lower taxes, and rest assured that "worthy, industrious men can go to market with a penny in their pockets." The Revolution had certified what they had long supposed-that property belonged to those who created it with their labor and that of their households. With this realization came a more assertive and public role for the prime virtue, industry. Rather than "discourage" freeholders with heavy and regressive taxation, country dwellers argued, government should reward and promote industriousness by expanding the money supply. Yet ambitious statesmen were restricting currency and transferring wealth from pinched taxpayers to rich bondholders! The anger spread through entire neighborhoods, because households swam or sank together. ("The women were, if possible, more clamorous than the men;' one country dweller recalled.) "No community;' a pastor proclaimed in 1786, "ought to leave her prudent and industrious members to struggle in vain under an unsupportable load:'so This same minister also decreed that industry implied forbearance, however. According to Isaiah 1:19-20, those who were "willing and obedient" would "eat the good of the land;' while those who refused and rebelled "shall be devoured with a sword." Industry rested on a cultural contradiction, empowering ordinary folk to the extent that they were quiescent and deferential. Indeed, eastern creditors promoted industry as the best way to avoid debt, not to excuse it. The fault lay with farmers' weakness for British goods, or with the "visionary" schemes of paper money that had scared off investors. With "Industry and economy;' maintained the Massachusetts Spy, "every man" could "live within his income, and thereby preserve his independence:' The prudent farmer and good citizen would therefore mind his business and avoid the "ambitious, idle, and troublesome men, who are fomenting a spirit of dissension amongst us:' In political discourse, no less than in family sayings and religious decrees, ambition implied laziness, trouble-making, the road to ruin. 5 1 Just as independence became culturally feasible, then, its economic foundations temporarily fell apart. The fear of working for others was especially vivid in revolution's wake. "We had got possessed of such truly republican sentiments;' Justin Hitchcock noted of the 1780s, "that evry man thought

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himself as good as his neighbor and som better:' Dozens of towns, despairing of an audience with state authorities, recalled their delegates from the legislatures. Indeed, the great majority of farm families suffered in silence, or rather in obscurity. Even in the most disaffected counties of central and western Massachusetts, most households ultimately deferred to government and hoped for better days. But some four thousand country dwellers openly defied the grossly regressive policies of the Massachusetts government during the summer of 1786. Riots also broke out in southern New Hampshire. These self-proclaimed "Regulators" generally followed the lead of well-known local families, to whom they were often indebted.52 The poorer communities around Concord, New Hampshire, where the Abbots lived, or the thinly settled communities of south-central Massachusetts, where the Hitchcocks had once settled, were Regulator territories. Yet the Abbots were respectable freeholders, not the marginal farmers who filled the insurgents' ranks. Justin Hitchcock now lived in Deerfield, a creditor's town where a local committee had decided that "Industry and frugality;' not extra-legal action, offered the best means of recovery. Moreover, his hat-making venture landed him in the middle of the debt chain, not on the hind end of it. He thus joined a town militia force raised in the late summer of 1786 to protect county courts-one of the few units from inland towns that the state government could rely on. In this sense, Justin Hitchcock took up arms against his former neighbors from the hill towns of western Massachusetts.53 ''A very sorrowful day;' wrote one observer of a crowd disturbance in September 1786. "Brother against Brother. Father against Son." On two occasions that winter, armed Regulators ran into the superior, privately-funded forces of the state government. On two occasions, they were swiftly defeated. "[The Insurgents] immediately retreated and scattered in every direction;' Justin Hitchcock wrote of the violence near the Springfield, Massachusetts armory. Because he had not been there, Justin must have consumed this narrative from any number of sources, all of which said that the rebels had sheepishly"scattered" at the first sight oflaw and order. Rarely have the winners written their history with such economy. Within months, "Shays's Rebellion" all but disappeared from public discourse, surviving only in local memories, tavern talk, and family legends. Rebel leaders were disqualified from voting, holding office, teaching in schools, and running taverns. Others fled to the northern or western frontiers. "Peace and quietness prevail here:' noted a smug New Hampshire Federalist. "The insurgents who threatened me at [the capitol] are now humble and fawning as spaniels."54

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Figure 3· The rural insurrections of 1786-1787 were led by local notables who tapped widespread anger over highly regressive taxation; state authorities were eager to declare that these figures had instead deluded ordinary citizens into "unnatural" rebellion. In this woodcut, rebel leaders Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck appear in military garb and domineering posture- the very picture of cruel, unprincipled ambition.

Convinced that the state had been too harsh with the Regulators, Massachusetts voters deposed their Governor in 1787, and this, along with a reduction in the overall tax burden, gave distressed farmers a victory of sorts. One thing is certain: the collapse of the Regulation and the economic recovery that began in the 1790s put an end to agrarian radicalism. As of 1780, the state of Massachusetts had considered limiting the size of individual estates and confiscating those larger than 1,ooo acres to ensure an equitable social order. By the time town delegates debated the Federal Constitution in early 1788, however, leading men had thoroughly discredited such ideas, insisting instead that the Revolution had gone far enough. Unified by this bedrock belief, the Federalists also argued that the United States, like other nations, required the elusive confidence of those with liquid capital. "Justice" as well as "prudence" called for a polity that could draw the gaze and secure the investments of the "moneyed men." 5 5

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As noted, though, the Federalist cause was complex and compelling, invoking as it did not only the need for "energy" in government but also the promise of"liberality" in society. To think broadly about the nation's future suggested a dilated moral sense, a sympathy for those who lived beyond the limits of daily experience. These qualities were very difficult to contest in the cultural world of the 178os. "I trust there is no man in his senses but what will own, that the whole country hath largely felt the want of energy in the general government:' declared one of Dedham's ministers during the ratification debates. Even when they found their way out of these rhetorical binds, critics of the Constitution struggled to make their message known, because Federalists dominated the available media. One suspects that many of the rural delegates who cast "yes" votes in ratifying conventions had simply succumbed to Federalist pressure. After listening to pro-ratification oratory in Boston for several weeks and realizing that the plan would pass anyway, the delegate from the Feltons' hometown reported that "many doubts which lay in his mind had been removed." At that point, the people of Marlborough had little choice but to make their peace with the Constitution. 56 Still, the Anti-Federalist emphasis on local autonomy made intuitive sense to common freeholders of limited education and horizons. Their hopes for decentralized government and their fears of an encroaching one followed a political logic that originated in the welfare of their homes, not the reputation of their nation-state. Their working assumption was that external powers sought to grow at their expense. Ambition, they had heard and seen, always wanted more and would take it from plain people like them. Late in life, Ephraim Abbot-first son of Benjamin Abbot, Jr.-recalled that his father "and other honest men, who fought on Bunker Hill" had carefully scrutinized the new plan of state "to see if it was sufficiently guarded to prevent the President from becoming King or Emperor." As Ephraim reflected, the fortunate thing was that the Founders themselves had shared these concerns. They had taken care to prevent any "ambitious Presidents" from seizing office. Ephraim could only hope that future citizens would know to keep power from those whose "ambition is not bounded by moral principle."57

The hero of Independence, an 1805 play performed in South Carolina, boasted that he could provide "every necessary comfort for me and mine." Like his parents, he relied on himself, his family, and his neighbors ("me and mine"). Unlike his parents, he defied any outside power. He obeyed the law, of course, but in his heart and soul he took orders from no one; "an honest farmer knows of no dependence, except on heaven:' Throughout post-Revolution

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America, independence became a means not only of joining personal and national aspirations but also of containing revolutionary impulses within the boundaries of gender, race, and age. A man was independent because he had the means of autonomous decision-making, which in practical terms meant that he had control over a farm or shop as well as dependent women, children, servants, or slaves. Independence implied particular relations of labor and property that empowered adult white men at the expense of all others and affirmed the tendency to judge the self by looking down rather than up. It offered a more aggressive form of competence, one that made greater room for interest-driven behavior among citizens and less space for social deference between them. 58 If you had asked an old Yankee farmer what was most important in life, Francis Underwood mused in the late 18oos, he would have told you that religion was "man's chief concern, and 'eddication' next:' But Underwood would not be fooled: "the truth was he believed in Work first of all, so that every human being should stand in his own shoes, indebted only to his own efforts for his living and his place in the world:' Independence was something "born in him;' "the eternal condition and basis of his character." Like Charles Harding's parents, this figure mainly survives in the reflections of those who found something more than independence, and who, from a safe remove of time and circumstance, looked back on a bygone world of family farms and working neighborhoods. Yet the passage of the independent freeholder began when the household economy and the social world around it were alive and well. Independence had its heyday in the decades after ratification; not until the 182os and 1830s would its social foundations permanently crumble. Only people like Charles Harding could fully appreciate what had happened in between. 59

Chapter2

Creating Commerce

How would Charles Harding, Ephraim Abbot, or other inheritors of the post-Revolutionary hinterlands answer the question, "Where are you from?" In what terms would they comprehend the newfound republic? During the 1790s, these questions preoccupied a wide array of influential people. The general concern was that the citizen-to-be would reply that he came from Town X, or, even worse, from Neighborhood Y, rather than from his state, or, better yet, his nation. Given the centrality of the town and parish in colonial politics and of the household and neighborhood in provincial life, this was a reasonable fear. Throughout the 1780s, the few maps that were made of each state often portrayed the population as scattered and thinly spread, just as visitors complained it was. The old countryside was not much of a "landscape" at all, in that no one bothered to appraise it from a critical distance. 1 The ratification of the federal Constitution did not create the legal and political mechanisms necessary to remake that countryside, but it did strengthen and authorize them. The new polity not only tied the capital resources of the nation's wealthy to the nation's growth but also underwrote efforts at the state and local level to build bridges, canals, and above all roads. (It also relieved rural taxpayers by assuming and funding the war debts of the several states.) Although these efforts were espoused by eighteenthcentury statesmen all over the Atlantic world, they arrived with unusual speed and intensity in the northeastern United States. More than a growing component of daily life, commerce-meaning social as well as material exchange-became a cultural goal, an avowed objective that required a new "spirit of enterprise:' During and after the 1790s, that esprit turned each town into a work-in-progress, a location to be judged by its external "aspect" and imagined "prospects."2 For families like the Hitchcocks and Manns, who settled in the commercial centers of the new landscape, "enterprise" became an important way to relate to their communities and secure their livelihoods. The Abbots and

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Hardings, by contrast, sought new homes and properties along the nation's receding frontiers, while the Feltons and Burnsides remained in their hometowns. These families encountered enterprise from a greater remove and wondered about its synergy with their own independence-and that of the republic. From their perspective, enterprise forgot or betrayed some of the fundamental victories and values of the Revolution, such as the freedom of ordinary men to possess and acquire property. The process of creating commerce and devising landscapes thus revealed important tensions within and between households and townships over their relationship to the nation and society. It also set the stage, physically and culturally, for personal ambitions that looked past the household altogether.

"A Sort of Breaking Up" Silas Felton's parents made it through the revolutionary age with their household prospects intact. He was born in 1776, the same year that his father, Stephen, briefly served in the militia. For his first thirteen years, through the grim times of war and depression, Silas must have been the primary source of labor for his parents: the one who fetched the water, milked the cows, tidied up the barn. His mother, Levina, had five more children during Silas's youth. Two died in infancy, however, and Stephen would not have hired any help. He, too, remained semi-dependent. Only in 1789, with the death of his own father, did Stephen gain full title to the Felton estate. Then, in a flash, he became one of the wealthiest men in Marlborough, the owner of several hundred acres. The constant duties and delayed gratifications of the farming way had paid off for Stephen-and it will for you, too, the eldest son was surely told. "Stephen (my father) settled down at home with his father, and followed farming and brought his Children up to it;' Silas reports of his early years. 3 Prosperous families had the option to "settle down" in their communities, while the very poorest had no choice but to stay and scratch out a living as field hands and domestic help. Yet the 1780s brought so much emigration by so many families that an early historian of the Feltons' hometown reported "a sort of breaking up" in the entire population. Among marginal families with diminishing estates, the eastern district of Maine became a common destination. Others preferred Vermont or upstate New York. In any case, the average distance that an average New Englander moved from his birthplace shot up during the 1780s, as tens of thousands of people made a

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considered gamble that life would be better somewhere else. Overwhelmingly, they made this investment in thinly settled towns rather than seaports, seeking independent estates within the independent republic. 4 Charles Harding's parents, Caleb and Elizabeth, likely spent the mid1780s doing odd jobs for meager pay in their native Connecticut. Sometime before 1790, Caleb arrived with two other Harding men (possibly his brothers) in the town of Putney, Vermont, fifteen miles north of the Massachusetts border. In August of that year, he married Elizabeth Richardson; that the town clerk considered them residents of Putney suggests that Caleb already owned some of the forty- five acres for which he would be taxed in 1794. They "worked hard;' Charles relates, "and were saveing and in the process of a few years, owned a very comfortable farm, and a goodly stock of cattle." Here was a genuine case of frontier opportunity. After many years of wage work and vagrancy, Caleb Harding could enjoy the simple dignities of independent farming: the right to work without taking orders; the right to give orders to his wife and children; the right to be counted among the resident freeholders rather than the passing poor. No wonder he took such pride in parading to church each Sunday. 5 Ephraim Abbot's parents also contributed to the "breaking up;' even though they ended up where they had started out. After his near-injury at Bunker Hill, Benjamin Abbot, Jr., took to the sea as a privateer, which probably explains how he met Sarah Brown of Brunswick, Maine. They married in 1778; shortly after the birth of their first child, Ephraim, in 1779, the young couple moved to another settlement in the vast "eastern district." Benjamin spent the next few years looking for work in Maine's coastal towns, only to decide to move back to Concord in 1784. After his wartime adventures brought a dramatic respite from home, Benjamin retreated to a farm adjoining his father and brother. His liberation from his roots had not lasted. Still, the return to Concord probably helped the family, for the town itself was flourishing. Its population jumped from 1,ooo in 1775 to over 1,700 in 1790. Concord's leading citizens began to imagine it as state capital, especially as a new sort of neighborhood began to take shape in what became known as the "Main Village:' 6 Many of the village emigrants to Concord and other towns were well-todo and refined, at least in their own estimations. "My busy imagination pictured the happy circle round the rustic supper, each partaking his homely fare;' remarked one seventeen-year-old as her urbane family, moving by carriage to Concord center, passed some lowly cottages. "Here, methought is contentment:' (We are left to wonder what the busy imaginations of the cottagers

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told them of the people inside the chaise.) After settling in Concord, this teenager slowly came to terms with provincial life. Friends as well as strangers were few, but her family members also found polite peers with whom to share tea, play the piano, and ride in carriages. New faces arrived in Concord village every month, and because they settled near one another, the pace of growth was more evident here than in farm country. In the late 1780s, at least three Boston merchants moved to Concord center and established dry goods stores; an early town history remembers them grandstanding into town in fourwheeled carriages. From 1790 to 1810, these men made over fifty real estate transactions in the Concord area, with most of their energy and capital spent in the central village. 7 "When, in 1772, I first saw the Main Village of Concord, the buildings composing it were scattered over a large area of ground;' recalled Levi Hutchins, a farmer's son from Massachusetts and a more typical migrant to the New Hampshire village. "I did not dream of the CHANGES that have since taken place in Concord:' His father had been ruined by wartime inflation; when Levi reached maturity, the older man regretfully handed him an old coat and said, "Levi, this is all I am able to do for you:' (Or so Levi reports to posterity.) In search of a living, Levi's father moved between several towns while Levi took apprenticeships in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Finally, in 1786, he and his brother converted a home into a dock-making shop in Concord center, just across the street from where their father eventually settled. Two years later, a blacksmith bought a quarter-acre plot near the Hutchins' new store from a landowner who lived eight miles away. Three years after that, a newspaper printer from Vermont bought a village plot owned by another absentee landowner. Piece by piece, in town after town, such tradesmen transformed the central places around which Ephraim Abbot, Charles Harding, and Silas Felton would grow up. 8 Neighborhoods and townships struggled to cope with all the newcomers. During just three years during the 1780s, for example, the town constable of Concord "warned out" at least eighty persons. About two hundred more warnings followed during the early and mid-1790s. In 1784, Connecticut toughened its anti-vagrancy laws, prescribing ten lashes on the back for offenders. (Perhaps these draconian measures hurried the Harding men to Vermont.) In Massachusetts, as well, authorities issued warnings on an unprecedented scale. But while popular fears of scarcity and poverty remained vivid, the laws that expressed them withered under the sheer volume of strangers. Local histories note that many people who received warnings in the 1780s later became leading citizens, and that most stayed in spite of public

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requests to go. Warning out typically served as notice that the town would not support an emigrant who became indigent-an official indemnity for the public coffers rather than a literal command to depart. During the 1790s, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut effectively abolished the practice.9 In other realms of personal choice and public oversight, as well, the great "breaking up" forced changes. If conservative laments are to be believed, the 1790s were lewd and impious years, rife with premarital sex and heavy drinking. Most of these jeremiads came from Federalists, whose victory in 1789 reinforced their identity as guardians of law, order, and even custom. One even grumbled that the surname, that most basic register of patriarchal authority, would not survive the rebellious climate. Reactionary melodrama aside, many protocols of order and morality crumbled. Whereas state courts before the Revolution had routinely prosecuted women (rarely men) for fornication, these cases all but disappeared during the 1780s and 1790s. To settle disputes involving slanderous speech, as well, New Englanders increasingly turned to private arbitrations. With the meanings and boundaries of community thrown into flux by war, emigration, and economic distress, young people found new liberty to escape parental controls and establish households when, where, and with whom they saw fit. 10 Consider the marriage of Daniel Mann's parents, Herman and Sally. A native of Walpole, Massachusetts, south of Boston, Herman had been orphaned in 1776. His widowed mother struggled to ward off her late husband's debts, and Herman fell under the care of his well-to-do uncle. Growing up in a relatively refined family that had produced many teachers in the Walpole area, Herman began to teach school himself during the late 1780s. The young man must have roamed north, towards the fishing town of Gloucester, and met Sally Haynes, daughter of a once-fine family ruined by war and desertion. (While getting by as a storekeeper in Gloucester, Sally's widowed mother kept a record of her struggle for contentment.) If nothing else, Herman and Sally shared a history of bleak family fortunes. They moved to Walpole and married in early 1793; Daniel was born nine months later. Herman's family evidently gave the young couple a sixty-acre estate to get started, a bequest that in previous decades would have tied the couple to the land for much of their adult lives. 11 But Herman Mann did not want the life of an independent freeholder. Instead of settling down, he continued to teach school and write anonymous attacks on stodgy farmers and hidebound locals. He disdained those who shunned reading or spoke ill of their free-thinking neighbors. This last

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tendency, which issued from "envy and jealousy;' was in Herman's view the signature vice of the countryside and the major obstacle to an "enlightened" future. In 1797, Herman took Sally and the four-year-old Daniel to Dedham, the next town north. There, he planned to become a newspaper editor and book printer-a person of considerable, if unofficial sway over public mores. To that end he did something dramatic: he sold half of his farmland and leased a home in the center of a town without any relatives in it. 12 Energy, daring, restlessness: these traits would lead Herman Mann into a tangle of debts and hopes and promises that made independence a quaint fiction. They would also reappear with a vengeance in his eldest son, Daniel. In the late 1790s, however, Dedham must have seemed a safe bet for the young family, much as Concord proved to be for the Abbots. In 1793, it had become the shire town of the new Norfolk County. The central district of its First Parish, once home to only a few houses and two churches, acquired a post office (in 1793), a county jail (in 1795), and a courthouse (in 1796). Thanks to this emerging center, the town itself began to escape its paltry reputation as a good place to grow squash, to claim a bolder spot on the numerous new maps made during the 1790s. "Be it known, to our friends at a distance, that the squash town is the capitol of Norfolk;' remarked Fisher Ames, a wealthy statesman who returned to Dedham in 1793. He hoped that the presence of the Court of Common Pleas would give "our folks" the proper "lessons and examples of good manners:' 13 Disappointed though he and other Federalists would be in their hopes for deferential order, Ames gestured at a new kind of public spirit and civic order that did take root. Rather than police the sexual probity of the local (female) population or defend the scarce resources of the local (male) freeholders, it endorsed the future prosperity of the general public. Rather than attach the "mind" of a given parish or town to the principle of republican sovereignty, it buried those opinions under the categories of"nation" or "society:' Like the extended republic that the Federalists had just devised, such civic pride not only had the potential to expand people's loyalties but also to transform them. Whereas neighbors and households had long defined the boundaries of their many and informal publics, this new ethos held that the boundaries of the nation marked out the one and only public. More than simple "nationalism;' this perspective rearranged the pieces and terms of the political community, emphasizing the prospects and repute of the whole over the demands and autonomy of the parts. 14 Of course, that perspective was an ideal type that never held undisputed sway over actual people. No one, not even Alexander Hamilton, was purely

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"continental" in thinking. Yet ideal types shape the cultural registers people draw from while describing and defending their aspirations. They enable new forms of personal expression, imprinting certain postures and actions on the collective intelligence of a given place or audience. "He does not expect to become rich by publishing a Newspaper-he does not even wish to be independent, without exertions:' Herman Mann insisted of himself in 1799. He hoped instead for a "more extensive use and respectability" for his paper, which he hoped would "promote the general prosperity of the country:' The relevant question is not whether or to what degree Herman actually meant what he published about himself, but how the cultural climate authorized and received his claims. What did the promotion of prosperity entail in the new republic? What did "the country" encompass? And what sorts of ambition, if any, revealed the proper public spirit for the mobile people of the reinvented nation, if not for young sons like Daniel Mann, Ephraim Abbot, and Silas Felton? 15

Public Enterprise Born in 1793, Edward Hitchcock recalled that he had grown up in "comparative poverty" in the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. His father, Justin, was all too aware of this. In 1789, more than a decade after arriving in Deerfield and marrying Mercy Hoyt, an out-of-town woman hired out land to Justin. When he was late in paying rent, she sued for damages, obliging the village hatter to sell a cow. He had also incurred debts while building a somewhat oversized home just off "the Street:' The wealth of Deerfield village was all around Justin, but his own household barely stayed afloat. ''And sometimes I found it very difficult to get grain and wood;' he admits. The Hitchcocks probably endured spare meals and cold nights. In his self-narrative, written in the late 1790s, Justin used the future of the nation to brighten his "dark prospects:' "1790 Nothing remarkable happened this year, except it was the effect of our National Government had upon all classes of people:' With public confidence restored, "a new Spring to all kinds of business" induced people to "cultivate their lands under a sure prospect of a ready market and [a] good price:' 16 This Federalist narrative, which Justin passed to his son Edward, exaggerated the universal benefits of the "Spring" but accurately conveyed its sudden appearance. During the early nineteenth century, American courts and jurists chipped away at traditional protections for estates and monopolies to

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embrace a more fluid definition of property rights. Yet the fundamentals of a capitalist regime in which private parties could build, invest, and compete with relative impunity did not prevail until the 1820s and 1830s, at the earliest. Until that time, corporations existed in what one scholar calls a legal "twilight zone:' in which the rules and legitimacy of market competition were unclear. The earlier and more much obvious change came in the organization and ideology of economic initiative. 17 In Ephraim Abbot's hometown of Concord, the new spirit arrived with an effort to forge the Merrimack River. Since the first white settlement of the area in the 1720s, townsfolk had relied on a chartered ferry to cross the river. Seventy years later, and for more than a decade after Benjamin Abbot, Jr. returned from his revolutionary adventures, this family had to depend on the same ferry whenever they set out for the properties they owned in the northeast corner of town. Ephraim Abbot makes no reference to the river or the ferry in his autobiography; his childhood memories from the 1780s and 1790s replayed within the contiguous farmlands of his father, grandfather, and uncle. While family and natural barriers marked out Ephraim's world, common law gave the ferries an exclusive right of service. But in 1795, sixteen men set out to replace the ferry by incorporating as the Proprietors of the Concord Bridge, one of several hundred corporations chartered by state legislatures during the 1790s. "The rapid encrease of the Country;' explained the bridge proprietors, "renders it necessary that traveling be facilitated:' 18 All sixteen were villagers, and six of them had not lived in Concord as of 1790. At least three of the newcomers were merchants, and another was the newspaper editor-Concord's answer to Herman Mann-who had arrived from Vermont in 1791. The other ten included the merchants who had pulled into town on carriages during the 1780s, a lawyer once accused of Toryism, and the son of Concord's first minister. Once they obtained their charter in early 1795, they divided their venture into one hundred shares worth $5 each, and then sought out subscribers in the local population. Again, the bridge proved most popular in Concord center, where the benefits of greater traffic were most obvious and the proprietor's influence most evident. Levi Hutchins, the itinerant dock-maker who had arrived in the late 1780s, lived within easy sight of one of the proprietor's stately homes. Like most shareholders, he and his brother bought only one share: a $5 investment in the growth of their adopted town. 19 Like the leaders of this enterprise, the rank-and-file supporters of the Concord Bridge barely qualify as home-grown. Besides the villagers, the shareholders were mostly middle-aged, well-off landowners from the nearby

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towns. In fact, fifty-four of the seventy-six investors (71 percent) were not Concord residents in 1790. One of these men hailed from an old family in Canterbury, ten miles from Concord center. After inheriting 250 acres during the war, he bought almost 450 more after the depression of the 1780s. Surely, this large landowner must have reasoned, $5 was a small price to pay next to the $90, the £52, and the 40 Spanish milled dollars he had spent buying the lands nearby. The bridge would tie these properties into the market region anchored by Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They might then be sold to a young family in search of a working farm, or held as security for (or leverage over) a footloose son. For such freeholders, buying a bridge share marked no dramatic turn in economic priorities. What had changed in Concord in 1795 was the endorsement the bridge had from state authorities, the scale of commerce it opened, and the cultural significance of commerce itself. 20 After ten months of construction, the proprietors opened the bridge and announced the dawn of a new age. They had planned the spectacle three days earlier, and it would linger in local memory as a definitive moment. With townspeople watching, the sixteen proprietors walked across first, followed by Concord's minister, who was also the largest shareholder. Next in line were the other shareholders, followed by the laborers "with the master workmen at their head"-a shadowy group of workers who otherwise elude historical detection. At last, "the spectators in regular order" crossed from both sides of the river, completing the enterprise and initiating the celebratory feast. The sequence of the event made clear who had done what for an enterprise that so easily passed as a public blessing. No one could object to a bridge that would collect no tolls while promoting trade and travel; even the ferry owner received handsome compensation for lost business. All the more reason, then, for those who had built the bridge-or, rather, those who had paid for it-to exhibit themselves as the virtuous few who had involved "their" town in the larger work of enterprise. 21 "Topographical descriptions" spread and upheld a similar logic of civic duty. Published by organizations like the Massachusetts Historical Society (founded in 1791), they situated a given town within national geographies and then offered a critical review of its physical resources and cultural "prospects:' Among the authors was the Rev. Clark Brown, a young and liberal pastor who preached in Brimfield, Massachusetts, from 1797 to 1802 before being ousted by its more orthodox elders. He took his revenge in 1804 by describing the sorry look of the whole damn place. Despite its fertility, Brimfield was a shambles: "The inhabitants have never been distinguished for industry: the farms are poorly fenced; and few only are under proper

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improvement." The primary fault rested with "the most wealthy part of the inhabitants;' who seemed to think that monies spent on "publick institutions" were "in effect thrown away." Their stinginess immured the entire town in apathy and greed. "Were the inhabitants more ambitious to excel in agriculture, and to encourage tradesmen to settle among them;' Brown sighed, "the town would assume a very different aspect." 22 Brown found happy foils to this dead-end town in two upstate New York communities, which he reviewed alongside Brimfield. These were "handsome" and "flourishing" towns with fast-growing villages. Their citizens revealed a "publick and enterprising spirit;' as by building or planning roads and wharves. "The former state of cultivation was bad, but is now much altered for the better;' wrote a physician in a 1795 review of another Massachusetts town. "A spirit of emulation prevails among the farmers. Their enclosures, which used to be fenced with hedge and log fences, are now generally fenced with good stone wall." As in Brown's laments, the fence served here as a crucial indicator of cultural health. Sturdy stone walls belonged to those who used their lands intensively, while hedges and worm-rail fences betrayed the customary sloppiness. As the boundary between home and public, moreover, the fence gave physical form to the invisible struggle between healthy emulation and mean-spirited envy. Reformers wished for solid fences around "open" farmsteads. They sought to erase the zero-sum terms of the farm neighborhood from the moral issue of innovation, and thus to announce the arrival of a wide world where envy was as illogical as it was immoral. 23 In its most benign form, enterprise did not imply competition, where one gained and another lost, but a generous ethic of collective betterment. For long-settled families like the Feltons of Marlborough, however, the newly positive charge around the word must have been as surprising as the arrival of so many unfamiliar faces. Long taken as the selfish and devious passion of powerful men, enterprise had profited during the mid-1700s from the separation in enlightened thought between society and government. If confined to the merchant's counting house, enterprise could be a salutary means of enriching the general public. In "commercial society," at least, one person's daring ventures did not necessarily threaten others. Yet the Revolution revived the older wisdom by warning citizens about "enterprising" officials who wanted to prey on their industry. As late as 1803, Silas Felton, fortunate son of the Marlborough family, would note the historical pattern whereby"some enterprising person, under the pretense of protecting the people has entirely rob'd them of their liberties:' In its heart and soul, enterprise was akin to selfish, plotting ambition. 24

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Figure 4· Seal of the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Connecticut River, 1792. Enterprising men were eager to announce the civic conscience behind their ambitious ventures.

Ratification, however, not only brought commercial praises back to public discourse but also imbued exchange and enterprise with a positively civic dimension. After the successful struggle against "local prejudices;' the formation of a national society-not a merely commercial one--cleared the way for "bold" and "grand" efforts made on behalf of the People, newly and broadly conceived. Thus did one pastor describe an expensive canal project not as an extravagant scheme but as a public "enterprise" that revealed "laudable ambition." Ambitious striving on behalf of a town's prospects and reputation now qualified as a civic responsibility. When another topographer faulted "a want of enterprise in the people" of one town for failing to build a new wharf, he registered the shift in official morality: without enterprise, the locals were actually guilty of selfishness. Enterprise became a self-perpetuating campaign to insert one's town into the national work at hand. Just weeks after the completion of the Concord Bridge, another company sold shares for another bridge in town; the "Federal Bridge" opened in 1798. A visiting dignitary to the town praised a "spirit of enterprise, before unknown in the annals of our country" that promised a general "increase of property:'

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Concord's printer also applauded the "laudable spirit of enterprise" that merchants and others (like him) had shown while funding the bridges. 25 Country dwellers had little choice but to fit that "spirit;' and the changes made in its name, into their living spaces and public values. But to what degree did they welcome it? In what numbers or proportions did they embrace civic ambition? How, for that matter, did Ephraim Abbot, sixteen years old when the Concord Bridge took form in 1795, understand enterprise? Neither his father, his uncle, nor his grandfather had invested time or money in the venture. Along with at least So percent of Concord households, the Abbots were neither shareholders in nor proprietors of the bridge projects. Even in this prosperous town, most people and households encountered enterprise as the bridge proprietors scripted them-as "spectators;' not participants. Moreover, the very rhetoric of enterprise partially belied the claim on which it rested, namely the uniform interest of an abstract public. The spirit had to be "excited" and "displayed"; it did not grow on its own in farm country. 26 The experience of the Burnside family along the northern fringes of New Hampshire offers a quiet corrective to the noisy fanfare of enterprise. After recovering from war, their town, Northumberland, amounted to about twenty families, all settled in a remote patch of land between the Connecticut River and the White Mountains. In 1785, six years after the birth of the younger Thomas Burnside, the residents petitioned the state government to deputize the elder Thomas as a ferry captain. Nearby townsfolk supported the effort, but only after considering its effects on specific people and neighborhoods. "We know the inhabitants of Said Towns:' they remarked of the settlers downriver, "and every one travelling that way will be greatly reliev'd by a ferry:' They clarified their position:" [We] further Certify that We are of Opinian No person in either of those Towns or in the State would Object thereto as no one would be injured thereby but every person in that quarter and all travellers there greatly benefited:' Every person and all travelers would benefit; No person and no one would be injured. Behind these words lay a standard of public good that called every ambitious undertaking into question, especially those that levied new tolls on "free and public" thoroughfares. 27

Turnpike Rage "Roads are the public channels of intelligence and business;' a Connecticut newspaper declared in 1797. A better system of roads "increases social happiness, adds beauty and consequence to the State, and aids our national

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prosperity." No mundane task, the work of road construction meant "awakening a spirit of enterprise-and taking actual possession of our natural and local advantage." Agricultural reformers and land speculators had made the point for decades; to this day the presence and quality of roads signify "developed" areas over "remote" ones. Roads are the basic sinews of society. During the 1790s, state legislatures authorized new post roads to carry U.S. mail across town lines, while townsfolk built more roads inside their borders to accommodate new setders and gain access to emerging villages and trade networks. Since these efforts still enabled towns to allocate resources of time and work, no one seriously challenged them. Freeholders were more than willing to take "actual possession" of "natural and local advantage" as long as they decided when and how to do so. They were more than happy to note the larger benefits of their local efforts. 28 For supporters of enterprise, however, the usual pace of road construction was as torturous as the surface of the roads themselves. In Putney, Vermont, for example, the Hardings and their new neighbors began work on a post road in 1797; it was still unfinished after four years of intermittent labor. (Charles Harding later recalled the local roads as potholed, crude, and miserable to travel.) Town roads were especially unpleasant for those brave, haughty, or careless enough to ride over them in carriages. In 1790, one traveler not far from Silas Felton's hometown found the country "Rough and very Rocky;' and the roads "horrid." Even after he forsook his carriage and ventured on by horseback, the constant bumping "jolted me Mountain high sufficient to Murder any Honest Man." Roads were painful, nauseating, and often impassable. As a remedy, American boosters followed British precedents and began chartering "turnpike" companies in 1792. Armed with the powers of eminent domain and toll collection, these projects became the favored means of creating commerce in the early republic. 29 ''After the new [federal] Constitution;' declared the fifty-nine founders of the Norfolk & Bristol Turnpike in 1802, "the attention of many persons was turned towards its improvement:' Turnpikes were wide (twenty to sixty feet) and long (several miles at least). They cleared away large swaths of countryside, enabled much better access to urban centers, and divided memories into before and after the turnpikes came. The Norfolk & Bristol was especially grand in design. It would form a single artery through forty miles of southeastern Massachusetts, linking Providence and Boston as never before. Most turnpikes used dirt surfaces in convex shape to create a smoother surface than town roads, but this one would be paved in gravel and drained by trenches and sluice-ways. In its organization, as well, the Norfolk & Bristol

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was unusually ambitious. The proprietors' homes stretched from North Providence (where the industrialist Samuel Slater bought six shares) to the Massachusetts seaport of Salem (where one founder asked for the support of "public spirited men of property"). Almost half of the subscribers I sampled owned real estate along the projected route. Public enterprise made perfect sense to them. 30 The turnpike would also slice through Dedham, home of the Mann family. Among the four proprietors who lived in its village were Fisher Ames and Nathaniel Ames, brothers and neighbors who had several reasons to detest one another. During the late 1790s, partisan tensions between Federalists like Fisher and Jeffersonians like Nathaniel gave them new ways to convey their feelings. In addition to the officious prig whose cattle were always straying onto his brother's lands, Fisher became, in Nathaniel's view, an Anglophile traitor to the Revolution. And Nathaniel, according to Fisher, would have everyone singing ra ira and toasting the murder of kings. (Most town residents sided with the Jeffersonian Nathaniel, which Fisher explained thus: "two classes exist here, the lower envying the higher:') But two years after they yelled at each other in the village streets during the heated election night of 18oo, Fisher and Nathaniel lined up behind the Norfolk & Bristol enterprise. Leading men of many towns and both parties, in fact, promoted turnpikes with startling unanimity. In its early phases, at least, enterprise was not a partisan issue. 3 I The Norfolk & Bristol also had the endorsement of the nominally nonpartisan paper in Dedham, Herman Mann's Columbian Minerva. Since settling in the village in 1797, Herman and Sally had struggled to provide for their young son, Daniel, and other children. Herman published essays on domestic life and education, but booksellers "devoured" his rightful earnings. Subscriptions for the Minerva leveled out at a disappointing five hundred, which Herman blamed on the thick-headed locals. "Do you wish [the paper] different in any respect?" he asked them in one exasperated edition, "or do you wish for [none] at all? Speak!" The turnpike was a new cause for hope. It would pass through the village, directly in front of the Mann home, and so increase the delivery range of the paper. It was another expression of the "spirit of enterprize, whose tone oflate has greatly increased:' In March 1802, in the same edition in which the Norfolk & Bristol proprietors introduced themselves to his readers, Herman reprinted an article that denounced shabby roads as impediments to "moral and intellectual improvement:' He staked the turnpike boosters to the civic high ground: "Public benefit is the grand principle which operates in their measures:' 32

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The public thought otherwise, however. Several weeks before Mann sang its praises, word of the Norfolk & Bristol had spread through Norfolk County, probably by way of a Dedham tavern owned by one of the proprietors. In January 1802, voters in Walpole, Herman Mann's hometown, ordered their selectmen to draft a "Remonstrance" against the Norfolk & Bristol. Protests also came from the town just north of Dedham. The turnpike, residents feared, would divert trade from existing inns and taverns, "injuring the property of a numerous and industrious portion of the community:' In Dedham itself, voters from the outer parishes elected a new representative in early 1802-a well-off farmer from an old family-and told him to block the company's charter; the legislature obliged that February. Sounding a bit like his brother, who disdained common folk as a matter of principle, Nathaniel Ames used the private refuge of his diary to assail the "stupid apathy" of nearby townsfolk. He was certain that their "ancient prejudice" against Dedham's first parish underlay the commotion, and marveled that they seemed to want a harder life, to favor a hard trudge along the beaten path. When the "Great commotion" failed to quiet down that spring, Ames could only shake his head at the "astonishing blindness in the herd:' "[It] was not Republicanism nor Federalism that governed the choice [of representative] ;• he discerned, "but the rage against Turnpike:' 33 Although Dr. Ames exaggerated when he wrote that "the other parishes;' en masse, wanted to "turn back the great roads" and halt travel entirely, his diagnosis had its merits. Resistance to turnpikes was widespread and intense, if also disjointed and conditional, across the New England countryside. From 1800 to 1804, for example, the state assembly of Vermont received at least twelve anti-turnpike petitions signed by hundreds of obscure people; such efforts seem all the more significant given the indifference or hostility of both organized political parties. By contrast, many of the nearly fifty pro-turnpike petitions or requests sent to that assembly during the same period bore the signatures of only a handful of boosters. In May 1803, the Brattleboro Reporter announced that two gentlemen from the town of Rockingham sought to replace the post road that residents had gradually built with a "Rockingham Turnpike:' From August to September of that year, more than 250 residents of Windham County, including the former vagrant, Caleb Harding of Putney, signed anti-turnpike petitions. Probably written by a deacon, selectman, or another prominent neighbor, these texts offer rare insight into local perceptions of the most important enterprise of the early republic-and thus of their opinions about ambitious doings more generally. 34

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Feeling "deeply concerned for ourselves and Posterity in opposing Speculations and wanton projects;' nearly one hundred residents of Guilford condemned the Rockingham turnpike first and most furiously. The rhetorical customs of the colonial era, which obliged freeholders to hold their noses and address officials as "fathers;' left no trace on this document. Because the post road already enabled them to reach market, the turnpike company would serve no public end. Indeed, by giving "to Indeviduals" powers that rightly belonged to "the Publick;' the proposed franchise was "totally repugnant to the Genius of a free County [and] an Inlightened People;' a "most violent Impeachment on the Sovereignty Wisdom and Economy of our Government:' It mocked local autonomy by presuming that private corporations, not people like them, had leave to decide and direct public needs. The hardships they had endured while "Peopling this once disolate wilderness" enhanced their outrage. After "many weeks and months of painfull Labour and Toil gratuitously done for the Publick;' they had prevailed in making town roads "passable and Good:' How could the state now side with the "Insolent Toll-gatherer" and ask them to pay for something they had built for free? They closed their remonstrance with a colorful challenge to "any gentleman of the Coach or the Chariot" who supported this enterprise: "we Invite them to assist us in making and repairing our highways freely; but not in borrowing Gates from Tunis or Algiers to Incumber them:' They were independent citizens of a free republic, not slaves to a piratical satrap. 35 In Putney, fifty-six men signed another remonstrance against the same turnpike. While repeating that the road was "entirely unnecessary and burdensome to the People;' they made a telling statement about who the People were. They called themselves "freeholders, citizens, and Inhabitants of Putney;' and claimed to speak for the entire town. They were middling farmers, owning sixty to eighty acres, and had lived in town for at least a few years-long enough to have "changed works" with their new neighbors and labored with them on the county road that the turnpike would duplicate. The "great majority" of residents wanted to maintain the current roads, they declared. The town was "almost unanimously" opposed to the turnpike, with "very few" exceptions. Like the petitions for a new ferry service in the Burnsides' home of Upper Coos, this remonstrance tried to quantify local opinion, to define the public as the precise sum of fungible parts. Only in their conclusion did they widen their rhetorical stance: "We further conceive that such a grant would produce no beneficial effect to the public but only contribute to fill the Pockets of Individuals

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without any adequate public utility-that it would tend to promote a Scheme of an evident antirepublican tendency and only calculated to oppress the farmers mechanics and the middling and lower Classes of the Community merely to advance a plan of speculation dangerous to the freedom of the People and destructive of that Liberty and equality which are the fairest features in the Constitution of the State of Vermont." Caleb Harding's signature at the bottom of this petition marks one of his only entries into the public records of Vermont. 36 Caleb's youngest son, Charles, offers some insight into anti-turnpike thinking in his recollections of the market trip of the average Putney farmer. Each fall, farmers like Caleb had packed their carts with their surplus and set out for Boston with half a dozen of their neighbors. After the week-long journey, "they would sell their load and purchase thier years stock of groceries, molasses, sugar, tea, coffee, spices, salt, codfish etc always takeing good care to fill their keg with new rum, and then turn toward home, in the same manner they came." They were a "jolly set of fellows" who wanted property and status as much as the next neighbor. Caleb had fared well enough to buy his own chaise sometime around 1810. "A wonder it was for the times:' his son recalls, of which the family was all too proud. But family farming was always a tenuous business, and Caleb had spent much of his life as a burden or vagrant. Accordingly, the very thought of debt "caused him to shiver:' After once borrowing a small sum to repair his home, Caleb was "so troubled ... that he could not sleep nights untill it was paid." In the hilly neighborhoods of eastern Putney, the road from independence to ruin was easy to fear. 37 Similar concerns animate the petitions of other rural dwellers, whose understanding of the republican promise fortified their concern for household well-being. Among the "many great advantages of a Republican Government:' declared one group of Vermont farmers, was "the Equal Right of acquiring and possessing property under good and holsom Laws." They were clear on this point: they wanted better access to markets, so that they could reap the just rewards of their industry. But they would build the physical and economic ties to village centers and seaport markets in good time, meaning their time. They claimed an "Equal Right" with other tow!ls and neighborhoods and laboring peoples to profit from the "Spirit of Industry" that "pretty Generally'' prevailed across the state. The dense network of favors and obligations that defined their neighborhoods, like their households, traced out a near and palpable community that the Revolution had been fought to protect. This territory did not exist to impress anyone who lived outside its practical limits but to ensure that those inside got their fair share. The public

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was nothing more or less than the collection of household interests, each aligning on the common denominator of need to beat back overbearing agents of change. 38 All of these protests pivot around the term "necessity." Doing what had to be done for one's own armed country folk with a civic identity built on work and utility, not status or distinction; hence their ability to boast, in a sense, of belonging to the "middling and lower Classes:' Once shared needs were met, of course, heads of families readily pursued goods, property, and distinctions, as when Caleb Harding bought a chaise. Instead of promoting enterprise for the sake of town, state, or nation, and then waiting for the household returns, however, they sought public protections for their household needs. Republican equality demanded nothing less, or more. Turnpikes and other enterprises, on the other hand, issued from a curious concern with how a town should appear to unnamed spectators or how a village might benefit from more traffic. Two promoters in the town of Rockingham did nothing to fill everyday needs in East Putney. By imposing a new toll in order to embellish a road that already existed, they sacrificed public needs to selfish imaginations. Turnpike revenues would end up in "the Pockets of Individuals" or "the purses of a few individuals"-in hidden, secret, private places. 39 Due in part to such opposition, many turnpikes (including the Rockingham) never received a charter to begin work. Others had to be scratched because private funding dwindled or state requirements mounted. Ultimately, though, the economic culture of farm neighborhoods formed more of a filter than a barrier against enterprise. For wealthier farmers, especially, the distinction between town roads that led to market and turnpike roads that led more quickly to market fell apart. Poorer citizens also accepted or welcomed turnpikes on a case-by-case basis. We are "not totally averse to Turnpike roads;' offered one group. If the usual methods of road-building fell through, as they often did in newly settled townships, then a turnpike corporation might fill a public need. "Tho opposed to the Granting of Turnpikes unless in Cases of real Necessity and where Sufficient roads cannot be made and supported by the Inhabitants;' declared another group, they saw no alternative "in this particular case;' and so asked for a charter. Broadly speaking, support for a given turnpike rose when there were no other nearby roads and when few persons stood to suffer from diverted traffic. When a company sought to build an entirely new path rather than to pave over or duplicate an existing roadway, rural folk were more likely to see the project as necessary, and thus as public. 40

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In 1797, a pro-turnpike article in the Connecticut Courant summarized a common complaint against the roads (they cost too much) in three sentences, and then spent sixty-three refuting it. The author, ''A Philanthropist;' sadly reported that the selfish interests of "individuals" had curbed the progress of "great roads;' and that many towns wore "a very deformed and unsocial appearance" as a result. He assured everyone, however, that the state and public would press on in their efforts to clear countryside and lay roads "till the face of the country exhibits a delightful appearance:' No longer so isolated as to ignore one another, but still distinct enough to seek supremacy, towns and states were now part of what one promoter called, a "race of competition:' "Most fortunately, we are awake: the spirit of turnpikes has generally diffused itself:' Because the race involved towns rather than people, enterprise did not threaten to unleash the demons of pride, envy, and malice that were widely presumed to attend personal rivalry. Twelve years after the quarrel over the Rockingham turnpike, about thirty petitioners from Putney noted that "the usual way" of repairing roads had failed in eastern Putney, where Charles Harding grew up. The only remedy, then, was "the enterprise or liberality of the Public or Individuals;' in the form of a turnpike. (Alas, this road was another non-starter.) Who could argue against such generosity? Who would rely on the "uncertain" works of local residents when it came to "the attainment of a great national object" like transportation?41 Besides these rhetorical advantages, turnpike promoters had a decisive edge in political capital. Responding to the fierce opposition that greeted the Norfolk & Bristol in early 1802, the proprietors used their personal connections in the state legislature to bypass the initial vote against their charter. By March, they had the authorization they needed. Dedham's farmers did not give up: in April and again in October, they posted warrants for town meetings "to see if the town will take any further measures to prevent the establishment of a turnpike:' Both times they sent their representative back to the General Court with anti-turnpike instructions. The road's supporters, however, like well-connected and amply funded people to the present day, outlasted local protest. They also used Herman Mann's paper to forecast the benefits that the innovation would bring to "all succeeding Citizens of Dedham." In a town meeting held late in 1802, Dedham's delegate switched sides and voted with forty-two others in favor of the turnpike (forty-one opposed). By March 1803, Nathaniel Ames happily reported the turnpike "fast making" through town. Not even the deaths of two laborers during construction that summer could curb his enthusiasm for the imminent greatness of his village, his town, his nation. 42

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Village Centers Whatever their public benefits, turnpikes disappointed all hopes of private gain. "Shunpiking;' or the evasion of tolls by way of local detours, cost the companies untold thousands. In 1801, at the age of twenty-five, Silas Felton helped survey the roads of Marlborough and noted that one was "Now called Turnpike, or Shunpike," presumably because savvy travelers used it to avoid the toll roads. For many, turnpikes were illegitimate contrivances upon free and public ways; the real crime lay in demanding the tolls, not evading them. This "spirit of settled hostility;' complained a New York company, led them to shunpike with appalling frequency. Even when turnpikes collected their due, only a handful of the companies drew enough traffic to cover their costs. As was often the case in early national America, faith in the nation's economic future outran the pace of the nation's economic growth. Moreover, state governments prescribed what tolls they could charge, on what vehicles, and for how long. (One historian laments these profit-mellowing measures as "pretty severe.") Although they laid out about $25 million of the $30 million spent on turnpikes during the early national period, turnpike promoters did not directly profit from the ventures. 43 Boosters continued to form turnpike companies, however, because they knew that better transportation paid in the long run. Also, they considered enterprise a public duty. Also, they wanted to ride their carriages through the countryside. From 1792 to 1810, about 170 of these roads were built in New England alone. They spread like spider webs from market centers, doubling the distance that farmers could travel to market profitably. They reduced travel times between urban centers, enabling carriages to drive past remote communities and bringing business to village tradesmen along the way. In a favored metaphor of both boosters and historians, they "opened" the countryside, physically and conceptually clearing the way for outside influences. Before railroads and the Erie Canal completed a "Transportation Revolution" in the United States, turnpike roads built the framework for a more commercial economy. 44 The impact of turnpikes and other enterprises, however, cannot be measured in miles covered or bushels sold-the volume of commerce-because they also helped to reshape the context for buying, selling, and seeking goods-the experience of commerce. Turnpikes intersected in villages, where people mixed in new and self-congratulatory ways. As much as the business they did with each other, the social bonds that held villagers together made the village a center-indeed, a society-in a way that farm neighborhoods never

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were. "This is the age in which little compact villages begin to arise in all parts of the country;' a Dedham villager wrote in 1827 of the turn of the century. Although farmers had long dominated the town, "a different state of things is about to arise;' in which "the influence of the villagers will be felt:' Villagers like the Mann family had formed a "new population;' and because of them "a wider field is opened to the various talents of men:' Even as the metaphor for work remained agricultural (the "field" of toil), the village emerged as a standing challenge to the farming way. 45 In market towns like Dedham and Concord, village growth began when artisans and shopkeepers settled there during the late 1780s. Mostly arriving after 1795, turnpikes and other enterprises simply catalyzed the process. Other, smaller villages only sprouted after turnpikes paved over old roads and drew travelers through town centers. Either way, villages and enterprises grew together, each supporting the other, all at a pace that amazed travelers. In 1797, Yale President Timothy Dwight passed through Brimfield, Massachusetts, and like Rev. Clark Brown found nothing but "a scattered village consisting of some decent and more indifferent homes:' Only ten years later, he saw a neat cluster of homes and shops around its meetinghouse. Such visitors counted village homes to make sense of a town's progress, because the village was "the principle and most noted place" in their lines of sight. 46 Of the several hundred villages that took form in rural New England and New York after 1790, few had more than 10-20 percent of their towns' total population. Because many towns had no village at all, their overall share of the rural population was even smaller. In some respects, the village minority qualified as elite, and not only because everyone who was anyone beyond town borders lived there. The village homes I sampled from the 1798 Federal Direct Tax were worth far more than country homes, and contemporaries reported astonishing increases in the price of village plots. Yet struggling hatters (like Justin Hitchcock) and desperate printers (like Herman Mann) lived among the village gentry, their humble homes and dirty workplaces mingling with Federal-style mansions and neoclassical courthouses. Artisans kept pigs and other livestock near their house lots; the sights, sounds, and smells of the farm invaded the village whenever country folk came to shop, trade, or visit. Neither urban nor rustic, the village became a distinctive milieu-a place with its own ways of doing things, its own power to shape the very people who created it. 47 Mobile and diverse, the village population organized itself differently than the farm neighborhoods around it. Around 18oo, for example, fifteen families from Connecticut settled in Dedham center, just a block from the

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Figure 5. Village center, early nineteenth century. Reprinted from John Warner Barber, Historical Collections (Worcester, Mass., 1841). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Mann family. Although their new homes stood much closer together than they would have in their old neighborhoods, the families of "Connecticut Corner" plied a variety of trades, including tin-making, blacksmithing, tanning. Only one of them farmed. Each had different labor and capital needs, and so could not rely on one another as more dispersed farm neighbors did. The social dynamic of neighborhood life was decisively changed. Households now sat within close range of each other, yet they also lived further apart, their fortunes tied more to the volume of passing customers than the competence of fellow townsmen. 48 Consider Justin Hitchcock's hatter shop in Deerfield village. The account book he kept from 1783 to 1800 shows that he worked at a preindustrial pace, but for a large and diverse clientele. Justin fit his designs for each customer, the great majority of whom bought one hat at a time. He made fine beaver hats for the more discerning head and lower-quality castor hats, made from a variety of furs, for others. He filled orders for specific people, not an impersonal market. Yet this was no small-time operation, inasmuch as he dealt with at least as many strangers as locals. Of the 133 customers I can

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locate, sixty-five lived in Deerfield. The other sixty-eight came from almost three dozen other towns, mostly in western Massachusetts but also in Connecticut and Vermont-travelers moving by turnpike, perhaps. Even when Justin filled orders for town residents, moreover, he no longer "changed works" with his townsmen, as his parents once had in the hills of Granville. His closest neighbors included a physician, a tavern-keeper, and a carpenter, plus a gentleman-scientist who would teach his son Edward to expect more from life than a hatter's shop. 49 With their homes and shops on display, exposed to the example of nearby mansions and the opinions of potential customers, villagers acquired new standards of competence and well-being. When village gentlemen began to paint their houses white-a refined yet republican color, they thoughttheir poorer neighbors quickly followed suit. Through the 1780s, Dedham had very few painted buildings, and perhaps none at all in the outlying parishes. Soon after the new turnpikes made their way past the Mann home, however, one traveler found in Dedham "a handsome little village [where] the houses are mostly built of wood, and painted white:' (We may assume that the Manns did their part.) Suddenly, houses that had long seemed "indifferent" appeared to care what passersby would think; they "faced" the street and looked "handsome." If Herman Mann had chosen an alternative to the farming world, his son Daniel would have no option but to grow up in a radically new environment. 5° In travelers' accounts and personal memoirs as well as topographical reviews, the village became shorthand for everything prosperous and promising, civil and civic, connected and enlightened. The people were "few and scattered, and some of them extremely poor;' noted one traveler of an upstate New York hamlet. Days later, he found a pleasing contrast in "the finest, most flourishing, and most commercial village of the West [with] a number of turnpikes:' Twenty years after settling in Concord center in the 1780s, the dock-maker Levi Hutchins moved to the west part of town, where another village had begun to grow. The two-mile trip from one village to the other was not short enough. "The principal objects that cheered or depressed the spirits of a traveler along the route between the two villages;' he recalled, "were a few scattered houses, fertile fields, and gloomy woods:' There were even traces of the olden times, when settlers feared Indian attacks! After two decades in a village, this former farm boy had no patience for the countryside where families like the Abbots continued to live. 5 1 Rural towns "compactly built" were the ideal communities, according to the New York booster, William Cooper. They preserved the simple virtues of

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farm communities while stimulating "more civility and civilization" and "more emulation" than was feasible in remote neighborhoods. Rather than a candid apology for self-interest, this enthusiasm for village enterprise and emulation relied on a distinctive logic of public good that praised "commercial" society as more than the sum of its parts. "Scattered" communities, on the other hand, had as many centers as households, enabling a selfish and short-sighted indifference to the wider fortunes of the nation. The commercial aesthetic of the new republic thus turned a social phenomenon-the growth of trade and population in town centers-into a measure of moral progress. No wonder, then, that visitors and boosters began to assume that all of the northeastern countryside was just like the villages they passed through and heard about. By 1816, a new map of New Hampshire gave the distinct impression that everyone now lived in villages. 52 But, of course, they did not. The overall proportion of farmers and agriculturallaborers in the United States actually increased in the early national period, up to nearly So percent of the workforce by 1820. The bulk of emigration was not to the new centers but to the new frontiers, where families found virgin soil at the expense of native peoples. They also found new conceptual and rhetorical tools with which to demand a say in whatever public they chose to recognize. And yet, in New England, the glittering alternative to their lifeworld no longer came from the distant seaport, as it had in the old countryside, but rather from villages in their midst. They now lived "between the villages:' A satirical verse from 1816 suggests how that might have felt: In every country village where ten chimnies' smoke perfumes the air, Contiguous to a steeple, Great gentlefolks are found a score, who can't associate any more, with common country people Jack Fallow, born among the woods, from rolling logs now rolls in goods ... Tim Oxgourd, lately from the plough, a polished gentleman is now ... Miss Foddle, lately from the wheel, begins quite lady like to feel.

It is difficult to tell if this poetic effort came from a smug city dweller looking down on the village, or from a peevish country dweller looking up at it. Regardless, "Village Greatness" captured the threat to the farming waysymbolized here by a plough, a wheel, and the clumsy surnames-that the village posed. 53 Ultimately, the spirit of enterprise that came out of the village was an effort to make the landscape itself ambitious, to initiate among towns what a Victorian-era history called "that spirit of emulation and business enterprise that sprung into life with the Nation:' Village boosters enjoyed a clear

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advantage over cautious farmers in this endeavor. But to stir the ambition of the people who lived within that landscape-that was another matter. Late in life, Samuel Burnside of Upper Coos (b. 1783) noted that he had "hardly mingled" with the world in his youth. Growing up on a remote farm in Northumberland, alongside his kinsman, Thomas (b. 1779), he had missed "seeing anything of [the world], beyond what a scattered population of families in a new Country would permit to view." 54 The new landscape had removed the Burnside household from his line of sight, alerting him to all that he was missing on a little-seen patch of countryside. Just how much of his life and that of Thomas would unfold in such obscure places would turn on the decisions made, the assumptions employed, and the duties enforced within their household.

Chapter3

Opening Households

In the countryside of eighteenth-century New England, household and neighborhood duty underlay a cultural hierarchy that set old over young, custom over innovation, precedent over potential. Youthful inclinations were inherently suspect-youthful talents, vaguely threatening. "It is a common practice in the country for grave old age to speak of some youthful folly before an assembled family, in terms fit only to characterize a thief;' lamented Herman Mann of Dedham village. These small-scale jeremiads, the printer reported, could be heard "almost daily within the limits of every town." Behind the stern warnings and resigned faces of the old folks, Mann discerned, youthful hopes and virtuous ambitions went to die. 1 Historians generally agree that the formation of the republic undermined patriarchal beliefs and routines, enabling new domestic ideals of romance, consent, and affection to manifest in everything from naming practices and wedding rituals to children's clothing and women's portraits. In contrast to their French counterparts, however, American revolutionaries barely tampered with the legal and social foundations of the patriarchal home. Indeed, political independence reinforced the status of propertied men in important if intangible ways. Especially for those families without the means to pose for a portrait, in which the enhanced sensitivity of the enlightened father could be displayed, the softening of patriarchal protocols had limited relevance. What did impinge on laboring households was a new rationale of family life that lifted the prospects of the nation over the needs of the household. This emergent perspective put a new value on the "genius;' "talents;' and even the ambition of youth while casting doubt on the assumption that they would "follow" their parents and seek independence. 2 In the villages where Edward Hitchcock and Daniel Mann grew up, these new formulas made good sense. Parents and children in these new centers had to think more creatively about what sorts of futures awaited the next generation. Even in the village, however, the rhetoric and logic of youthful ambition ran counter to the daily needs of marginal parents, and often to the

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religious and social values that made their marginality bearable. The stories that liberal reformers and village boosters spun about youthful potential had even less traction in the farm households that raised Silas Felton and Ephraim Abbot. The tendency here was instead to saddle first sons, especially, with heavier duties for less certain rewards. Farther and further still from the village, young people like Thomas Burnside and Charles Harding discovered that independent parents, not national reformers, had first and even final say over youthful duties and destinies. Better than any theorist on family life, they understood the tangle of doubts, hopes, resentments, and opportunities that made early national self-making into the perilous journey that had to be retold.

The Problem of Youthful Ambition "How or in what manner are CHILDREN to be trained up?" asked Rev. Clark Brown of his rural listeners in 1795. With the knowledge that God loves them and wants them to be happy, he answered. For too long, young people had been made to forget or deny "that dignity in the scale of creation, for which we were created." Our benevolent parent would never want that, Brown dared to say. Due respect for human nature was the proper starting point for a good upbringing, which formed the "notions, ideas, and practices" of every person. To these liberal Christian and Lockean precepts, Brown added the cosmopolitan spirit of the Enlightenment: children were made not only for their families but also for "mankind in general:' With a newfound sense of their place in the nation or on the globe, the native talents and desires of young people would lead them to realize the self by serving the public. Parents should cultivate the "latent sparks of genius" within their children for "their own advantage, and for the benefit of society." Otherwise, young Americans would continue to turn out "contracted in their views and sentiments." They would become as "illiberal and uncharitable" as the Brimfield, Massachusetts, leaders whom he would later denounce for ignoring public enterprises. 3 Clark Brown's quarrel with the Brimfield patriarchs had many sources. He was young, Harvard-educated, and popular with the local youth. "The Aggrieved;' or the parishioners who fought for his ouster from 1798 to 1802, were older farmers of conservative mores. Brown always irritated and often enraged them, they explained in church records. He had all the "vanity" and "petulance" of youth; he was a "young Buonoparte" with dangerous ideas and

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insufferable manners. He was an "abortion" from Harvard who had never even graduated from the school. Not to be outdone, Brown noted that Brimfield had "an uncommon proportion" of elderly people to go along with its unkempt homes and scattered terrain. In this way he put distance between the town (old and shabby) and the nation (young and improving). Perhaps he privately inveighed against "old fogeys," a label coined around 18oo. 4 Brown's youth may not explain the deadly pride that vexed the Brimfield locals, but it does obscure the larger controversy over youthful ambition in which he was embroiled. The work of the Rev. Enos Hitchcock throws more light on the subject. Born in 1744 to the same family group as Justin and Edward Hitchcock, this liberal pastor and Federalist had more skill and experience in confronting the durable mentalites of the countryside. His two books, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family (1790) and The Farmer's Friend (1793), offered an agreeable pastiche of enlightened and Christian ideas to well-educated readers; these books sold well enough and raised few eyebrows. Even admiring eulogists from his own church noted that Hitchcock was "seldom original" and "not profound." The significance of his writing lies instead in its nationalist hostility to local culture, its liberal effort to teach new sorts of ambition to "worthy" young men. By revealing "the progressive steps" that led out of obscurity, this pastor tried to align rural households with "the Present State of Society, Government, and Manners in the USA." 5 Published the year that Edward Hitchcock and Daniel Mann were born, The Farmer's Friend centers on Charles Worthy, the well-named son of a poor farmer who "never repined at his situation" and a pious woman who was always "contented with her condition." Both of the hero's parents died in prison after their neighbor, an "overgrown farmer;' sued them for unavoidable debts (echoes of the 1780s, to be sure). Young Mr. Worthy then falls under the roof of Mr. Gruff, another wealthy farmer whose provincial aspirations hindered the good of society. Gruff's defining trait was "covetousness, that detestable vice which degrades men below the animals." The old man only cared about the bottom lines of his account book. He thus regarded Charles Worthy as a farmhand, plain and simple-a possible asset and a certain expense for the Gruff household. Thick of head and hard of heart, Gruff disdains learning and keeps Worthy from school; when he discovers the boy studying in secret, the "old churl" turns violent and sends the boy scurrying to more useful toil. Piety itself found little room in the busy home. The patriarch always went to church on Sundays, but only to be seen and to palaver with the other freeholders. 6

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Figure 6. William Hamlin, Rev. Enos Hitchcock, D. D. Etching, n.d. RHi X17 123. Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Charles works dutifully for his unreasonable master and studies on his own time, eventually winning the tutelage of a kindly patron and ministerEnos Hitchcock's alter-egos, perhaps. Helpfully, Farmer Gruff dies around Worthy's sixteenth birthday, enabling the young man with a "spirit so enterprizing" to chase "new prospects" in other towns. After joining a military campaign against America's "savages;' he saves the life of one Lt. Smith and

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follows the man back to a wealthy and esteemed household, where Worthy finds his life partner. The Smiths help the young couple move to the frontier; Charles and his bride settle on a farm with ready access to market. After escaping the grip of one independent farmer, Charles Worthy became one himself. Answering to "no other landlord than the Lord of all land;' he was much like Mr. Gruff in terms of wealth and social rank. The crucial difference hinged on Worthy's attitudes towards those around him. Rather than focus their efforts and priorities on their own estate, he and his wife encouraged their children to go to school, gave alms to the poor, and led "every project for public good:' Their moral compass reached far beyond the properties on which they labored, so that the talents and ambitions of their children seemed promising instead of threatening.? The goal of The Farmer's Friend, Hitchcock made clear, was to "provoke the emulation" of"noble spirits;' even at the risk that Charles Worthy would "excite the envy of little minds." Both a means and an end, emulation enabled Hitchcock to celebrate self-improvement without excusing ambition. By fixing a worthy but approachable ideal in the minds of his readers, Hitchcock would "provoke" or "excite" emulation, encouraging them to close the gap between self and object through sustained effort. "Nothing has a better tendency to elevate the mind;' Hitchcock counseled, "than to place those images before it, which, tho above our reach at present, yet appear not too far distant to encourage our hope of soon attaining the same excellence:' Emulation was an exquisite tool for personal and national progress because it "elevated" natural inclinations while securing the social order, attaching youthful energies to due embodiments of authority and prestige. Once "fired" with the desire to equal or excel "those images;' the reliable virtue of industry would take over-with fresh purpose and confidence. "The truth is;' Hitchcock revealed, "industry is not only a handmaid of virtue, but the high road to every kind of eminence:' Hard work offered a way out of obscurity, not just a mark of respect within it. 8 Hitchcock knew that emulation upset the cultural economy of the farm family by authorizing a form of personal growth that neither immediately nor ultimately served household needs. The path of emulation led up, out, beyond: anywhere but back home. So he took pains to remind parents that they could contain the combustible passion. The key was to match the source of emulation with each child's "natural abilities;' "particular inclinations;' and, of course, with the child's gender. The model Bloomsgrove parents, for example, gave their son a plot of garden to tend, so that he learned to value private property and to " [vie] with the gardener" for the best piece of soil. Like most

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liberal reformers, Hitchcock argued for interpersonal rivalry with care and specificity. Accordingly, the Bloomsgroves' daughter looked after a doll and a bed of flowers "with her own hand, which vied with the lily in whiteness:' As she grew accustomed to keeping a fine home, she would take part in a more private and less competitive form of emulation. Still, women and girls played a central role in the work at hand, because their ability to relate to and sympathize with strangers created "society" itself. Hence the need to honor what Hitchcock called, "the dignity and importance of the female character." 9 Like any cultural innovation, emulation relied not only on positive rationales but also on contemptible foils, figurative straw-men and -women to burn on the altar of progress. Of course there was Mr. Gruff, the "cruel persecutor" of Charles Worthy. He wanted to stifle genius and horde wealth, to stow resources where only he and his favored dependents could find them. Shot through with the "mean spirit" of low-bred people, Gruff coveted what his neighbors had, assuming a fixed supply of desirable things and of happiness itself. He incarnated narrow, cynical adaptation to social and economic opportunity. There was Farmer Slack as well, who put his mind to doing as litde as possible. Unfastened, by means of Hitchcock's pen, from their many duties and quiet virtues, local farmers made easy targets. Yet the worst enemy "to our social state" in Hitchcock's view, was not covetousness or laziness, but envy. He used "old Mrs. Grudges:' a character who hated Mrs. Charles Worthy, to convey its poisonous effects: "'For my part: [Mrs. Grudges] would say, 'I don't know as how [Mrs. Worthy] is any better than some other folks. Some people loves to go galloping about from one place to another, so they can get a litde praise, but others are obliged to stay to home, and keep to work. For my part I an't agoing to say nothing about any nabors. She may be well enough and good enough-but then-I know what I know:" With her dingy standards (good as some other folks), narrow duties (stay to home, keep to work), and smug decrees (I know what I know), Mrs. Grudges suffocated virtue and ambition. "There are some to be found in most places:' Hitchcock sighed, "who have envious dispositions." 10 The emotional process of emulation required a measure of pride within each person; without such self-regard, the gap between person and example would fail to agitate and inspire. Everyone had pride, Hitchcock noted, and everyone could moderate and harness that pride to virtuous ends. Yet rural parents continued to stifle nature's energy by judging their children in terms oflabor rather than talent, output rather than potential. "What solecisms are not parents guilty of in the education of their children?" he demanded. "How few consult their natural abilities, or particular inclinations, as much

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as they ought?" The results could be seen in the sullen faces of those who accepted their fate and heard in the envious mutterings of those who did not. "There is a meanness which sometimes appears in children, that does not belong to nature;' Hitchcock stated. This unnatural bigotry "damps that noble ardor of mind which is a spring to worthy actions, and should be cherished with great care:' He then spelled out the spring as plainly as he knew how: "EMULATION."ll Liberal reformers assumed that individual ambitions, rightly cultivated, served national ends. "Whatever you pursue be emulous to excel;' Hitchcock told young readers. "Generous ambition and sensibility to praise, are among the marks of virtue, especially at your age." Both the emulating individual and the newly United States vied for distinction and notice, for fundamentally external, abstract, and relative forms of reward and value ("a little praise;' as Mrs. Grudges put it). They reflected and required one another until ambition, nationally conceived, became a patriotic signifier. "In some of the vast empires of Asia," wrote Noah Webster in 1790, "children are always instructed in the occupation of their parents; thus the same arts are always continued in the same families:' This was a travesty, because the self and the nation rose or fell together. The custom of the Chinese families that Webster imagined "cramps genius, and limits the progress of national improvement." The United States, on the other hand, had nothing to fear from the "ambition and fire of youth." These motives were "often innocent and laudable; the ambition therefore should be governed, rather than repressed:' 12 Just a semi-colon after decrying Oriental despotism, however, Webster noted that such customs stayed the grim sentence of history. Once the republic departed from agrarian simplicity, this narrative ran, it would soon descend into decadence and strife. Already in the 1790s, Webster and other Federalists bewailed the decline of social deference within the political society they had just contrived. Americans, they said, were addicted to "innovation;' intoxicated by the curious belief that anything newer was better. Especially in response to the French and Haitian Revolutions and the emergence of a Jeffersonian opposition, many Federalists (though not Clark Brown or Enos Hitchcock) retrenched inside a Calvinist emphasis on human depravity and patriarchal rule. They also recoiled from the humanistic virtue of "universal benevolence;' which sounded dangerously seditious and vaguely effeminate. In the heated public life of the early republic, the enlightened ideas of 1789 often became the seditious notions of 1798. 13 By recruiting pride, moreover, emulation betrayed the fundamentals of orthodox belief, which were alive and very well in the new republic. Indeed,

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the number of "New Divinity" ministers-ostensible followers of Jonathan Edwards, for whom pride was "the worst viper" in the heart---doubled in the quarter-century after the Revolution. By 18oo, about a hundred of these pastors dominated pulpits in western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut. When a group of Unitarians in central Massachusetts dedicated a new church to "a rational, progressive and exalting religion:' the ministers and congregations nearby reiterated their orthodox emphasis on the conversion of sinners like themselves. Throughout the hinterlands, evangelical axioms of depravity and Original Sin made up the moral assumptions of everyday life, reinforcing the conventional fears of youthful pride and ambition. The first thing to consider when raising a child, decreed one of the most popular domestic tracts, was the "circumstances and estate of the parent:' Every step in the child-rearing process had to reflect "the station and rank of life in which children are born, and placed by the Providence of God:' 14 But it is not enough to note that various conservatives worried about the excesses of youthful ambition in the new nation, because no common understanding of that passion and its implications held sway. For liberal reformers like Enos Hitchcock, after all, ambition was not a regrettable offspring of the social process but a positive ethic that called for careful-and deliberatecultivation. The problem was that the preferred medium for that passion, society, was more ideology than reality. The countryside they meant to "excite;' in other words, was a collection of households rather than individuals. Now more than ever, Hitchcock realized in 1790, the freeholders and parents who ran those households placed "too great restraint" on their children. Instead of forming "benevolent citizens of the world;' they confined their progeny within "the narrow circle of kindred and family connexions:' They used up the talents and abilities under their own roofs in order to pursue property and achieve independence from other citizens, especially elite ones. Because the structure of the economy and society required family labor, the only way to promote a more "laudable" sort of ambition within households that had other priorities was to counsel youthful rebellion. Few authorities, and no Federalist, wanted that. 15 The problem of youthful ambition in the early republic then, was more than another episode of the struggle between progress and custom in eighteenth-century thought. It was a prolonged collision of social priorities and moral viewpoints, both of which drew from the ideology of the Revolution and the opportunities of independence. Faced with the governing facts and emerging convictions of rural life in the 1790s, reformers repeatedly fell back to safer cultural ground, where children "followed" their parents instead of

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"pursuing" ambitions. Besides acquiring the skills of "common utility'' in a farming country, Webster delicately suggested, "lads should be directed to pursue those branches which are connected more immediately with the business for which they are destined:' Not that he could say what those destinies might be. In The Farmer's Friend, as well, Charles Worthy wants and deserves more ... but stays "faithful" to Mr. Gruff. Indeed, Worthy "never betrayed the least disposition to quit the business he had been so far brought up in, that of farming;' and "never felt so happy as when conscious of industriously following his occupation:' 16 Even Clark Brown, Unitarian radical though he was, could not bring himself to mount a full-blown argument for youthful ambition. Instead he appealed to "mankind in general" while asking parents to give their children "a proper education for the calling, in which it is probable they will follow:' Unappeased, his critics from Brimfield traced all his "Disorganizing conduct' to his denial of Original Sin. Addressing themselves to their "influential neighbors:' not to mankind generally, they argued that Brown's ministry "tends to subvert family discipline and to derange the established order of society relative to the Subordination of minors to their parents and masters:' For once they imagined themselves within the wider field of action that the nation offered, what would keep children close to home? Once they acquired a high opinion of their motives, what would stop them from chasing their ambitions at the expense of their duties? 17

In the Village Edward Hitchcock's father, the hatter Justin, wrote his "Sort of Autobiography'' around 18oo, when he was pushing fifty. Perhaps the realization that his best prospects were behind hinl led him to reflect. Or perhaps the death of his hero, George Washington, set off the requisite soul-searching. In any event, Justin had to conclude that he had not, in fact, ended up much further from where he had started out. As Edward would note, the hatter's trade was "not very lucrative:' and the family lived in "comparative poverty" in Deerfield village. Justin had a brief stint in the town government and once delivered an anti-French screed to his fellow Federalists. His only lasting post, though, was as deacon in the local church-the same distinction for which his own father had once drawn envy in the hills of Granville. "It would be folly for me to undertake to describe [Washington's] worth;' Justin wrote. "I feel myself unfit for of all the great Men I have heard or read of he far exceeds

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them all." He could never emulate Washington; he was but a sinner, a hatter, and an honest citizen. All the same, Justin promised himself that he would not follow in his own father's footsteps when it came to preparing the children for adult life. He would at least give them a fighting chance. 18 "I am an unworthy reptile;' Justin noted in his self-story. Evidently, he broadcast a similarly Calvinist message each day in his household, during family prayers. His piety and his politics became more severe and reactionary with age. An artifact from Justin's papers also suggests his exposure to timeworn lessons about the evils and hazards of ambition. "The Jolly Miller;' a folk song that the hatter copied into a book of music, tells of a prideful lord who meets a contented miller, free of "ambition's fire:' The key to his happiness was his obscurity, his ability to live an entirely self-contained existence: "I care for nobody, and nobody cares for me." Yet Justin and Mercy knew that their five children would never inherit enough property for even the most modest form of independence. Moreover, their village surroundings made the desire for new careers and public identities relevant and laudable. The more germane story for Edward Hitchcock was not the tale of the jolly miller but that of Charles Worthy, which his father knew about and may have read. 19 In 1806, when Edward was thirteen, his older brother wrote to their maternal uncle, Elihu Hoyt, then serving as town representative in Boston. The elder son tried to speak for the entire Hitchcock family: "We'll not envy your lofty station, But hope you'll better this our nation .... You're now our law and mediator, So now good night great Legislator:' For Edward, as well, the social prominence of his mother's family alerted him to the doings of "this our nation" and to the burdens of his humdrum life in Deerfield. "Farming was the only resort;' he recalled decades later, "and I worked on the farmnot on my father's, for he had none-but on land hired by my brother! know not how many years." Justin had to supplement his modest trade with field work done for landowners, including the Hoyts, and this left holes in Edward's daily schedules. Along with time spent with village youth, which he would later regret, Edward filled those holes with lessons from his other uncle, Epaphras Hoyt. A college graduate and gentleman scientist, Hoyt lived just down The Street from the Hitchcocks. Informally at first, and then as a mentor and patron, he trained Edward in everything from chemistry and astronomy to politics and history. 20 "Uncle Ep" also taught Edward about Unitarianism. With most of the village quality, Hoyt had rejected orthodox Calvinism as "bigoted" and "illiberal"; in 1807 he and other prominent citizens settled a Harvard liberal in the town church. Outlying residents furiously noted that this pastor denied such

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Figure 7. Edward Hitchcock's childhood home. Photograph by Allen sisters, c. 1900. Courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts.

"essential doctrines" as "the total depravity of the human heart," and soon after formed their own church. Edward's father was furious, too, although he held his ground in the Deerfield church rather than secede with the orthodox farmers. Justin Hitchcock knew that the leading families would never send him to Boston; that was a job for a Hoyt, not a Hitchcock. This made his position as deacon all the more meaningful. At stake was not only the spiritual health of his adopted village but also his control over his own family. Far from a domineering patriarch in the Farmer Gruff mold, the hatter nonetheless presumed that he, not his brother-in-law or any other village gentleman, reserved the right to guide his children to their futures. Justin's dissent from the prevailing tone of his own church-he kept a journal of his running struggle against its liberal heresies-thus signified a more general defense of his own value as a fatlter, a citizen, and a man. 21 Justin's elder sons held fast to evangelical doctrine and revealed no great wish to escape their village or social niche. They sought to improve on

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the family fortunes by owning farms, not to transcend those fortunes altogether. But Edward had spent too many hours with Uncle Ep. "I am bound to state;' the youngest son confessed late in life, "that in my religious views in early life I did not sympathize with those of my father, but rather with the Unitarian notions prevalent in Deerfield." He had also developed "a great aversion to being apprenticed to a tradesman." Here was a terse audit of a long and emotionally complicated process, whereby the talented and promising son drifted from the pious and unremarkable father. Throughout his life and in texts that did not require him to use the first person, Edward would describe the prodigal son who ignored the patient entreaties of home. Rather than open rebellion, the drama he evoked was implicit and incremental-a series of encounters between buoyant Unitarianism and youthful ambition, on the one hand, and humble Calvinism and wizened contentment, on the other.22 By the time he was a teenager, Edward believed that God had designed people for an "exalted sphere." He hoped to find some exaltation of his own by going to college and becoming a lawyer. A lawyer? his relatives back in Granville might have asked. Everything about this "order" of gentlementheir mastery of arcane words, their command of state powers emanating from cities, their ability to gain wealth without "honest" work-seemed at odds with the farming way, and the traumatic events of the 178os reinforced these conventional prejudices. By announcing his intentions, then, Edward told his parents everything that filial decorum kept unsaid: that he could not bear their lot in life, that he deserved better, that he would attain much more than they ever would. "I was treated very leniently by my father and elder brother;' Edward surmised, "who probably did not know what to do with me, but saw plainly that I should not become distinguished as a farmer:' Justin, in particular, "did not even attempt to teach me his own trade:' 23 There is no evidence that Justin or Mercy persistently discouraged their bright-eyed son. Mercy may have welcomed the prospect of at least one of her own returning to the genteel status in which she had been born. Given his lifelong struggle with limited education, as well, Justin must have faced his son's ambition with as much pride as regret, although the departure from Calvinism upset the hatter in a way that Edward could not help but recall nor bear to specify. In any case, the village surroundings undercut the parental say in the matter by exposing youth to new role models bearing new conceptions of civic and family duty. Whether he had read The Farmer's Friend or not, Epaphras Hoyt understood himself in a way that its author would have approved. As a liberal gentleman in the new nation, no less than

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as an uncle and neighbor, he saw every reason to help a talented youth like Edward Hitchcock escape obscurity. Born the same year as Hitchcock in Dedham village, one hundred miles to the east, Daniel Mann found such advice and patronage from his parents, Herman and Sally. Recall, though, that they had left the security of the family farm when relocating to the new village. Sally's diary from 1795, before the move, offers a glimpse into the most private moments of this often struggling family. In sentimental prose that suggests a high level of education, she portrays a warm and loving home with only three inhabitants: Herman, herself, and Daniel, "my little Charge, my Babe:' But one summer day, Sally decorated the house with goldenrod flowers, inciting her husband to an odd and ugly tantrum. Herman pulled the flowers down "in contempt, as he said, of their its being placed there, either for ornament, use, or a sign of domestic economy:' Sally objected with sarcasm: "do make as much worke for me, as you can!" Herman then fed his pigs inside, intentionally spilling the slop all over the floor and the flowers. Perhaps he was ashamed that he could not provide a home where such refinements would make sense. 24 Herman's editorship of the Minerva deepened their problems. He tried to play the role of impartial reporter and friend of "enterprise" in Dedham village, which was possible for much of the 1790s. But the partisan fissures that opened up around 1800 drew him into the intensifying clashes between Jeffersonians (predominant in most of the town) and Federalists (prominent in the village). Herman took fire from both sides. In 1798, he also happened upon some explosive news about his neighbors, which the young printer shared with the village doctor, Nathaniel Ames. The "almost incredible" gossip, Ames recorded, concerned "a scene of debauchery, infidelity, adultery, and villainy, among several reputable families here:' The news had "destroyed [Herman's] peace of mind;' Ames wrote, "and if it gets vent [it] will break up his, if not several other families!" One likely source of this scandal was Gay's Tavern, where villagers-including a rebellious young woman in Dr. Ames's household-enjoyed a range of indiscretions. Did Herman know this by rumor alone, or through personal experience? Had he cheated on his obviously loving spouse, or simply discovered "debauchery" among other couples? Regardless, he was so terrified at what his new neighbors would do to keep the secret that he asked Dr. Ames for antidotes to common poisons. All of which is to say that the Manns offer a dramatic case of village isolation. Like city dwellers in a modern high-rise, they were both surrounded and alone. 25 Instead of tightening his hold on his children's labor, though, Herman espoused the new ideologies about youthful potential and ambition. He

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advertised "a variety of Children's Books" at his print shop, including The Farmer's Friend and the enlightened canon of Locke, Kames, and, more daringly, Wollstonecraft. Significantly, he did not carry, or did not list, devotional standbys like The New England Primer or The Pilgrim's Progress. More telling is the advice he gave while writing as "Reformer" or "Moralist" in his paper. In a 1799 expose of his own politics, he made clear that people were not damned, but improvable. Family life should reflect that dignity. The task of"enlightening the Youthful Mind;' he later surmised, required sympathetic engagement with children's needs and feelings. They learned best when happy, interested, and liberated from the dull recitation of "our primer, psalter, and creed:' While arguing for "universal emulation" of Revolutionary heroes and defending "the ambition of every friend of humanity;' he staked out the cultural posture of the public-spirited reformer, trying despite many "discouragements" to stir the rural masses out of their boorish pragmatism. 26 Ambition and discouragement, hope and pain: the story of Daniel Mann, too, navigates between these poles. By the time he was eleven, Daniel worked in his father's print shop. The work was drudgery, of course, but it also familiarized him with exciting accounts of world-historical events. However deficient and uncertain it was as a source of income, the family's print shop served as the nerve center of Dedham. Stories and copies and reports from the state, nation, and world filtered in, then came out in weekly editions of the Minerva, so that he was among the first in his town to know about the Louisiana Purchase, Napoleon's warmongering, or the sale of a nearby farm. For Daniel, the overall effect of this unique position was twofold: first, a close and complicated identification with the United States, and second, a propensity to take risks in the course of business. The fact that things rarely paid off for him or any of his family members had no demonstrable effect on their willingness to try again.27 When Daniel was seven, one of his younger brothers died after a prolonged illness. "[Four] nights the week before he died;' recorded Sally Mann, "I rock'd him all night in the chair not feeling the want of sleep, so great was my anxiety." Like many preindustrial women, she spent most of her childbearing years pregnant or nursing; she raised ten children in all. Unlike most of those women, though, she had no nearby relatives and searched in vain for what she called "the help of womankind:' And while she routinely denigrated her own intellect, Sally described her children as "promising" and "remarkable." Perhaps she looked to Daniel, her firstborn, for a kind of solace that her hard-luck husband would not provide. Where else could she turn? Daniel, in particular, seems to have shared her religious beliefs, or at least

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her churchgoing habits. He later recalled the "many pleasant hours" he spent in church, probably with his mother and sisters. (They eventually became church members, while Herman never did; at least one other son was an avowed deist.) Over the years, Daniel and his mother developed a pattern of communication in which she affirmed her complete devotion to him and others while he assured her that he would soon be rich, famous, and happy, or at least independent. 28 During her visits from Gloucester, Daniel's maternal grandmother brought a more conventional view of ambition into the Mann home. After a quarter century of widowhood, Sarah Haynes had kept faith in a God who was angry with prideful humanity. (Tom Paine's work was "Prophain;' she noted, and should be shunned.) She stayed in Dedham village for weeks on end, helping Sally and noting that her daughter took "Industrious Panes" to please Herman. When she grew weary of her "lonly pilgrimage" through life, the old woman rebuked herself: "Oh Stop thy murmuring my Soul and forgive me Oh my God." In her journal, Sarah copied a poem to "Reason;' which told her to seek contentment: When we see capricious fortune Shining, all the rich to bless, Reason tells us envy not them, Riches are not happiness ... When in pomp and power parading, Presidents and kings we see, Reason tells us they are fading, They must die as well as we .. . When our passion drags us ... thro' lust [and] and ambition .. . in search of happiness and pleasure.... Reason tells us, tis not there ... All our life in trouble spent, Reason has a balm to send us, and that balm is called Content.

Young villagers like Daniel Mann may well have dismissed such wisdom as old-fashioned nonsense. They had talents and ambitions that the old folks could never understand, much less appreciate. But the Mann family remained traditional in at least one crucial respect: its size. They had ten mouths to feed, ten bodies to clothe, ten futures to prepare. By paying heed to the words and values that enabled people to cope with hard times, Sarah Haynes articulated a better formula for her grandson than he cared to foresee. 29

On the Farm By trying to sell as many printed goods to as many country folk as possible, the Manns contributed to what the historian David Jaffee has called "the Village

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Enlightenment" in New England. Severed from its foundation in the collegeeducated elite, information became a commodity that citizens could access on their own terms. This further undermined the social basis of elitism among those citizens, upon which the Federalist Party, in particular, had staked its future. Of course, stuffy Federalists were not the only ones with reservations about youthful reading and the ambitions it could stir. Nor, for that matter, were they the most relevant ones in the early lives of country youth like Silas Felton of Marlborough and Ephraim Abbot of Concord. For them, the personal implications of village enlightenment were hashed out in the small-scale politics oflaboring homes and neighborhoods. As the presumed heirs of an independent living they knew they should want, these first sons struggled with a form of mortification called "obscurity;' or isolation from the wide world they began to read and hear about. 30 "My father having considerable business to transact;' Silas Felton recorded around the age of twenty-five, "I was kept at work, so that I had only a common chance like the other boys in the neighborhood:' This was a jaded way to describe a successful farming venture. After inheriting or purchasing several hundred acres in Marlborough and other towns in 1789, Silas's father, Stephen, became an employer and businessman as well as a head of household. He hired day- or month-laborers to work alongside Silas and the other four children. Stephen and his wife, Levina, also began to embellish their home, already among the largest in town, with the consumer items to be had in nearby villages: cherry-wood drawers, a dining table, a Windsor chair. Early national Americans called such an estate "an elegant competency." As far as anyone in western Marlborough knew, Silas Felton was a lucky member of a prominent family, who stood to inherit a substantial estate and a respectable name. Stephen Felton had every reason to consider his life a success and to expect his eldest son to do his part in preserving and enhancing what God and industry had brought to the entire family. 31 Stephen's account book records the schedules he made for his eldest son: a day of haying for one farmer; one morning dragging stones for another; the better part of a week plowing for still another. Silas became a means to settle his father's debts, a source of useful labor as defined by the grown men around him. Worse, Silas had no viable language or set of ideas to contest this situation until the year 1794. Through his eighteenth birthday, he lived in a moral world that counseled patience and saw youthful ambition as not only wrong but also as useless. Among the phrases that apparently constituted the micro-culture of the Felton home and its environs: ''After a plenty comes a scarcity"; "We are poor worms in the dust"; "The Lord gave,

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the Lord taketh away:' In 1791, his widowed grandmother moved into the homestead, bringing with her the family Bible once read by her husband. Now it was Stephen Felton's turn to reiterate time-honored truths to his dependent listeners, even though he owned few books and disliked reading. 32 In the self-history he wrote in 1801 and 1802, Silas divided his life between the meaningless years before he read Ben Franklin's autobiography and the more purposeful ones that followed. Certainly his dislike of farming preceded the seminal event. He was awkward and clumsy in the fields, he tells us. Prone to injury, he also had a way of going absent when the most difficult farm work beckoned. He was fond instead of reading "entertaining stories" and "boy books" and of enjoying the social routines of visiting and merry-making. In previous generations, such a boy may have dreamt of the faraway city. By 1790, however, a small village grew just a few miles away, in Marlborough center. With it came new opportunities to read, imagine, and consider alternatives. In 1792, the young man already known as "Lazy" pressured his father to join the village circulating library, just opened by eager self-improvers in the town center. For whatever reason, Stephen agreed or relented, enabling the fateful meeting of Silas Felton's eyes and Ben Franklin's words. 33 The autobiography of the "first American" casts such a shadow over the cultural history of the new republic that it is easy to rush or exaggerate its presence in actual communities. An edited edition of Parts I-III of Franklin's four-part story did not appear in English until1818. Before that, and besides excerpts printed here and there, the only available copy was an anonymous translation of a French printing of Part I, published in 1793: a novella-length review of Franklin's first twenty-five years. What Felton read, then, was rather cutting-edge at the time, and its narrative arc should qualify the general assumption that Franklin told a receptive audience how to seize the main chance in the wide world, as if everyone agreed that they should do so. Part I begins with Franklin's hope that his escape from "the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred" would inspire imitation and ends with an account of his "first Project of a public Nature, that for a Subscription Library:' In its historical moment, Franklin's text was as much a moral argument for a certain kind of self-making as a practical guide to that process. 34 What did the story mean to Silas Felton? How did he make the tale of a colonial city-dweller relevant to his own prospects in western Marlborough? The phrases and themes that recur in both autobiographies suggest the major points of conceptual interface. Franklin repeatedly describes people as "bred to" a given trade by their parents, then implicitly condemns the

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practice; Felton remarks how he and others were "brought up to" or "put to" futures they did not ask for. Franklin reports an omnivorous appetite for books, which "fell" his way and convinced him that anyone who was absolutely certain of anything was a boor or bigot; Felton read this and pledged to "consider all sides" of a given question, as by reading everything that dropped into his hands. He would "adhere strictly to Reason, Industry, and good Economy." Better to embrace "Reason and Conscience;' Felton told himself and others, than to trudge along behind "some headstrong fanatic" who assumed that all truth was already known. Above all, Franklin conveys the agony of invisibility, of not being "taken notice of" by important people. From this suffering followed the exquisitely satisfying moments, described in vivid detail, when the artisan-made-good showed up his doubters. 35 In Franklin's story, Silas Felton found a virtual patron who approved the fact that he was "ambitious to excel" in learning and in life. Ambitious to excel: this made Silas different from the locals, and better. It also harmonized with what he called "true genuine Republicanism:' Instead of assuming that all truth resided in the Bible, as he assumed the local Calvinists did, Felton's republicanism welcomed dissent and inquiry. Instead of denouncing children as wicked and the times as degenerate, as he claimed a typical (and unnamed) father did, Felton's principles sought the happiness of individuals and of the world in general. He condemned "the superstitious sour-hearted people" and praised "the innocent, honest, industrious and contented" sorts who kept "a chearful, contented mind." Felton's strain of republicanism traced an ascending line from the individual to something called the "land of liberty;' a social medium where duties were not very burdensome or concrete. Alas, he reflected around 1802, "people do not pay attention enough to the Inclinations of their children;' but "commonly put them to the same kind of business which they themselves follow:'3 6 Felton used Franklin's text along with the unimpeachable values of the working home-industry and contentment-to argue for a more open family, indeed a more progressive and tolerant world. This soured his local reputation, Felton would have us know: "When at home I was call'd rather lazy." His literary tastes also led "the people often to bestow the name of Lazy upon me, which I acknowledge was not altogether misplaced." Even if he exaggerated this stigma to enhance his later victories, Franklin-style, Silas recognized the cultural breach that had opened between him and his neighbors, relatives, and younger siblings, none of whom figure into his story. Although he had dedicated himself to industry, no one saw that virtue when they saw him, because they did not recognize the value he ascribed to his reading. They saw Lazy. 37

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Ephraim Abbot also struggled with social invisibility, and not only because he, too, grew up in the blank spaces between villages. As of 1798, one resident of Concord, New Hampshire recalled, "the settlements were thinly scattered;' and so the town as a whole "did not exhibit that outward show of prosperity which it does [in 1824) :·Even though "several enterprising and active citizens" had opened village stores and built the new bridges in 1795-1796, the real take-off did not begin until1815, when a new canal route to Boston gave the village an "outward show" of well-being. Still, the spread of public enterprises and the growth of villages quickened the pace of labor in the farm neighborhoods of Ephraim's youth. Rapid emigration and new trading patterns also tested neighborly mores of debt collection. In April 1796, for example, Ephraim's father did $30 of work on the home of one Richard Wood. This man lived in the town of Pembroke, which was newly accessible due to the completion of the Concord Bridge the winter before. Wood used a half-bushel of wheat to pay half of the debt in September 1796; Benjamin Abbot, Jr., waited three years before suing for the rest. 38 Suspicious of the great men who had made the Constitution, this veteran of Bunker Hill also fit the maturing stereotype of the multi-skilled, restive Yankee, who peddled several trades while still keeping a farm. Benjamin did odd jobs in the Concord area and spent long stretches of time in Maine, leaving his wife and eldest son to look after farm and home. Ephraim salted his narrative with implied rebukes of his here-today, gone-tomorrow father. While describing the labors he did for his uncle and grandfather, whose farms abutted his father's land, he also forsook the stable use of male pronouns. When he (his father) did not need Ephraim in the fields, he (his uncle) put the young man to work alongside hired hands, unless he (his grandfather) wanted help with innumerable "family concerns:' "Tho' I weighed only 93 pounds;' Ephraim recalled of his sixteen-year-old self, "I hoed, reaped, mowed and raked about as much as a man.... I cultivated a large garden for my Father and raised an abundance of Carrots, Beets [etc.] .... I also made for our neighbors 200 barrels of Cider." All of which again confirms what the historian Christopher Clark calls the "involution" of the rural economy around 1800, the intensifying demands on women and dependents within an increasingly commercial landscape. 39 During the summer of 1797, Ephraim worked as a kind of informal apprentice to his father. Presumably, he would follow the house-joining or cabinet-making trade, or the farming way, when he turned twenty-one in 1799. What else could he do? "Drive from the confines of my heart, impertinence and pride;' a 1793 offering in the Concord Herald asked of God.

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Figure 8. Silas Felton and Ephraim Abbot spent their childhood years working on properties like this one, alongside family members as well as hired hands. Francis Alexander, Ralph Wheelock's Farm. Oil on canvas, 251/4 x 481/8 inches, c. 1822. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch.

"Whate'er thy all-discerning eye, sees for thy creatures fit, I bless the good, and to the ill contentedly submit." Another piece from the local paper warned readers to rest "content in reason's circle" and to turn their backs on "mad ambition's shrine." Still another praised he whose "views are bounded with his state, nor envies he the rich nor great." In the absence of a patron with the means and motives to sponsor youthful ambition, these sayings gave better day-to-day advice for rural youth than the stories of Charles Worthy or Ben Franklin. Contentment and obedience to family made good sense even to those of favored gender, race, and household stature. 40 Yet new advice also fermented in the village, just a few miles from the cluster of Abbot farms. The Blazing Star Masons of Concord, for example, urged people to look past "that narrow benevolence confined to our kindred, our circle" and to promote a general "emulation to excel" in life. Speakers and pastors praised the "spirit of enterprise" as a sign and source of prosperityindeed, as a public duty imposed by the nation on the community. Moreover, the nearby village brought new kinds of people and commodities to Abbot's world. Among these villagers was the future pastor of the First

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Church, Asa MacFarland. Arriving in 1793, he showed a keen interest in the town schools, where Abbot had already distinguished himself. True to script, MacFarland noted Abbot's abilities and began offering lessons in composition and Latin to the young man, while a kindly deacon (and distant relative) lent Ephraim a devotional standby, Philip Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion. Much as Franklin's autobiography did for Silas Felton, this book gave Ephraim Abbot a concrete source with which to explain, and defend, his ambitions. 41 During 1798 and 1799, Abbot recalls that he "consecrate[ d) myself to God by a solemn and written Covenant:' Conversion had long been part of the New England life-course, the point at which a young adult forsook adolescent egotism, struggled with spiritual anxiety, and emerged a pious adult. Ephraim added a new and daring dimension to the customary passage by pledging to serve God as a minister. That meant going to college, which no Abbot from Concord had ever done. Looking back, Abbot could only explain his hopes with the very passions that made conversion necessary: pride, arrogance, vanity. "Like many other young men, I thought I should preach the Gospel more earnestly, and more successfully, than some aged minister, that I then heard preach." About the only person Abbot certainly did not mean by "some aged minister" was his own pastor and patron, Rev. McFarland. 42 Upon turning twenty-one, Abbot faced three stunning events in rapid order. First, his Uncle Isaac told him "that if I would marry a person whom he named, and live with him he would give me his estate." Although unusual, this proposal followed from Isaac's position as an independent farmer, master of a small world, who sought to underwrite his future with his estate. Then Isaac died, just three days after making his offer. Isaac's wife told town officials that, "so far as she knows:' her husband had prepared no will. (The farmer must have kept his wife in the dark about his finances.) So the large estate-some three hundred acres-passed not to Ephraim but to Ephraim's aunt and father. Finally, Ephraim's mother developed tuberculosis and nearly died. She never fully recovered, and for the rest of her days she was "feeble;' unable to offer much besides advice. Ephraim's father thus had the local distinction of full independence thrust upon him just as he lost the ability to maintain a viable household. 43 With nine children to provide for, and without a helpmeet to rely upon, Benjamin made a tactical decision that he might have rationalized in a number of ways. Ephraim explains with equal parts candor and restraint: "My Father told me that, as he was then circumstanced, all he could provide me, was my time and one hundred dollars:' Ephraim was to take $100 and make his

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way away from the Abbot farms. His "time" no longer belonged to the household, but neither could he draw on its resources. It is possible, of course, that Benjamin wanted or told his son to use this money to go to college; in that case, the grim imperatives of the independent home would have aligned with youthful ambitions. But Ephraim insists that he had chosen something more than independence even when it had been offered to him, that events had unfolded around his ambition and not the other way around. This is how he recalls his reply to Uncle Isaac's offer: "I told him, that if he would give me the whole town of Concord, and require me to relinquish the idea of obtaining a public education, I could not accept it:' The whole town of Concord was precisely what he wanted to transcend. 44

On the Fringes While Silas Felton and Ephraim Abbot spurned the farm and the personal goals tied to it, more and more New Englanders sought their independence along the new republic's receding frontiers. The lands they stole from native peoples enabled them to match or surpass the living standards they might have expected in their native towns. Frontier settlement perpetuated the household economy and the farming way through much of the nineteenth century, sustaining one of several national dreams: escaping history by finding new promised lands on which to live in noble autonomy. Of course, that dream also hindered the ambitious projects of the new republic, for it sought freedom from society rather than distinction within it. And as Thomas Burnside and Caleb Harding could attest, the frontier household was harsh and unforgiving to those who did not pull their weight in the fields. In social environments with few institutions besides households and few patrons besides fathers, ambition for and in the nation was not so much a controversial idea as a practical impossibility. 45 Born in 1779, Thomas Burnside offers virtually nothing about his first twenty-one years in his autobiography. The isolation of his hometown makes it even more difficult to recover his childhood. The first state survey of Northumberland, New Hampshire, completed the year Thomas was born, notes that "The greatest Part of the inhabitants of said town are unknown to us." Over 150 miles from the state capitol at Exeter, its settlers also found sixty miles of"Exceeding bad" roads between them and "the neerest Shier Town" of Haverhill, to which his family had fled during the Indian raids of 1775. In 1791, five years after the elder Thomas Burnside gained the right to run a ferry

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down the Connecticut River, thirteen men from Northumberland-about half of its male population-petitioned for a new county seat closer to their town (ignored, of course). The town had no voice in the state government and little access to any turnpikes. Besides the first white settlers of Kentucky or Maine, it would be difficult to find someone in early national America who grew up in more remote circumstances than Thomas Burnside. 46 Even his lineage is a mystery. Most likely, he was the son of James or Samuel Burnside, both of whom had settled the town with the elder Thomas Burnside around 1770. They had either died or moved away by the time of the first national census in 1790. That year, the elder Thomas had eight dependents in his household, including three boys under the age of sixteen. One of these must have been the younger Thomas-an orphan in his uncle's home, or a forgotten son nobody was eager to claim. Like the Abbots in Concord, the various Burnside households formed their own corner of town, and in the remote reaches of Upper Coos, at least, they were well-known as selectmen, land speculators, and tavern-keepers. Their homes also doubled as meeting houses. Thomas and his many relatives probably listened on Sundays to the itinerant mystics who scratched out a living on the frontier by reminding its hardscrabble people of their insignificance before God. 47 Thomas spent much of his youth, indeed much of his life, in the shadows cast by Samuel M. Burnside (b. 1783), the youngest son of the elder Thomas Burnside and the focal point of the family's hopes. These two lives would intertwine at many points, but always they frayed apart again, and always it was Samuel who led the way, Samuel who found the open doors, Samuel who left a path for history to follow. The differences between them were rooted in their physical constitutions, which shaped how their families viewed them and in turn how they pictured themselves. Samuel was a healthy young man, favored from early on by his locally prominent parents; Thomas was weak, undersized, and easily forgotten. The need to labor was especially acute in the remote reaches of New Hampshire, and while Samuel did his duty and took his praise, Thomas recalls "many embarrassments" suffered because of his frailty. If he could not work, what good was he? A painful sense of inadequacy bore its way deep into Thomas's mind, later manifesting in a self-narrative that is remarkably thin in detail and passive in tone. 48 In 1790, the elder Thomas Burnside fell sick, and the whole family staggered. The burden on Samuel and the younger Thomas must have grown heavier; while Samuel was fit to labor on, Thomas fell into a deflating cycle of sickness and despair. He became so ill that he could not attend to "any kind

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of business" for days on end. He simply took up space. In 1799, the elder Thomas died, and the heads of the Burnside farms must have gathered to decide what would become of his property and their sons. Importantly, they decided that Samuel was entitled to something different and better, and so sent him off to Haverhill Academy. Samuel would later recall his sadness at leaving "the family" and his "dear, Angelic Mother:' The twentyone-year-old Thomas heard a very different sentence. Early in 1800, several months before his younger relative set off for school, Thomas decidedor was told-to hit the road and care for himself. He became a wanderer, a detached individual looking to sell whatever muscle power he could offer to whatever bidder he could find. He does not mention any tearful goodbyes. 49 As Thomas journeyed (by boat and then stage, most likely) well over one hundred miles to Portland, Maine, he surely met other transients who were bound for the Vermont towns of the Connecticut River Valley, where the soil was said to be cheap and fertile. Among these towns was Putney, Vermont, which became something of a halfway house for the frontier equivalent of the "strolling poor." Almost half of the newcomers who arrived in Putney between 18oo and 1820 had no property at all, and most of them moved on within a few years. They rented rooms or built shacks along Putney's hills while collecting the modest wages paid out by independent households. By the time Charles Harding was born to Caleb and Elizabeth in 1807, the town wore the ugly marks of rapid population turnover: hills stripped bare of timber, hastily built homes, and abandoned cottages. The Harding farm was located in the hilly eastern portion of Putney, among several scratch farms that frequently changed hands. 50 "My first recolections of home were being in a family of one brother and three sisters, with my parents, I being the youngest and the pet:' Charles explains in his autobiography. Seven years younger than his youngest sibling, Charles was "the babe and a welcome guest:' and he wondered if he had been "indulged too much" by his parents and "peted too much" by his sisters. His brother was ten years older and "hence never a companion:' By the time Charles could work, the Harding farm had moved past the frontier stage of tree-cutting and field-clearing, so his labor tasks were lighter than those of his elder brother. The more severe moments of his childhood came at night, when his parents recounted their childhoods in Connecticut. "I have, when a child, sat out for the hour together, and listened to the recital, of their early trials, their rough, and hard treatment-their want of food, and clothingNo sympathy, no tenderness, manifested toward them." These stories served

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to remind the Harding children of the privileges they enjoyed and the duties they owed. 51 In Putney, as through much of the new republic, a wave of revivals after 1800 gave rise to a popular new evangelicalism and a more pluralistic religious landscape. Although she could barely write, Elizabeth Harding was outspoken in her Calvinist beliefs, which invested her early "trials" with higher meaning. Charles recalls that she often confronted passersby on the state of their souls. One traveler stood out in his memory. After stopping by to warm up on a cold day, he found himself at Elizabeth's mercy: "[I] can see, after so many years, just how he appeared-The picture is distinct today-He wept tears of penitence, how they ran down his cheeks, while she held up the cross, and invited him to her Savior:' With somewhat less ardor, Caleb shared his wife's piety. This obliged him to drive the family carriage through the small village of Putney each Sunday, reminding anyone who wondered that the Hardings were doing fine. 52 In his self-story, Charles credits his mother for teaching him to have a meek and Christian spirit. She was the pillar of strength and mercy he cared to recall, the woman who made a farmer's abode into "the bosome of a pleasant home:' The pious and angelic mother had become a stock figure by the time Harding wrote his memoirs, and his autobiography made room for Victorian sentimentality as well as unlettered candor. All in all, his early youth had been "as pleasant as most children's are, or need to be." Yet he had inherited his father's poor health, or acquired it due to vitamin deficiencies. Small and weak, he also suffered from anemia and coughing spells. Unable to labor as family duty required, he fell into the role of the family baby, whose time with his sisters and mother probably drew raised eyebrows and disapproving glances. He was a "babe" and a "guest" rather than a full, contributing member of the household. 53 In 1821, Caleb Harding "settled his property;' dividing the family properties among the five children. At the age of fifty-eight, the former vagrant devised a plan to secure his welfare in old age and to bestow his earnings upon the next generation. Each daughter was to receive the respectable sum of $6o after Caleb died, which would help them begin households with their husbands. All of the real estate passed to the elder son, John. And Charles? Like his sisters, he would receive $6o after Caleb passed. Until then, "I was to have my time, take care of myself, and my brother was to take care of the old people:' In other words, Charles was cut out of the family, "freed" in a rather callous sense from any responsibility to it. The painful and confusing sentence left Charles stumbling for the right words nearly a lifetime later: ''As for

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me they thought they had done great things for me. But I have failed to see the richness of the boon. For a boy to be turned loos upon the world without a home-without a dollar-without a parents care, or a friend to protect, and guide, is in my estimation no great legacy." Ultimately, Charles decided that "no parent is justified" to do what his had done, especially when they had property to give. 54 Assuming that Charles's account is accurate, it is worth speculating as to how Caleb might have justified the settlement. Even if the economic "Panic" of 1819-1822 had pushed the farmer to desperate measures, why did he give the entire estate to his elder son, rather than divide it between the two boys? That practice had been common in New England since the mid-17oos, and yet Caleb gave everything to John. One argument for this course was sheer reciprocity. John had earned his right to the land by working it during the early 18oos, before Charles could contribute. The younger boy simply came along too late to lay claim to the patrimony: a literal, rather unfair application of the "labor theory of value:' Moreover, Caleb must have known that if he split the farm, both of his sons would barely qualify as competent. Better to bequeath independence to at least one young Harding, to perpetuate the rank he had earned rather than watch both heirs fall to the misery he had escaped. Then again, Caleb might have been forced to mortgage his property sometime during Charles's youth, agreeing to a third party not to divide the estate. 55 We might also see darker motives behind the settlement. After enduring "hard usage" as an orphan, did Caleb harbor hidden resentments for the adored "plaything" of his household? Was he frightened by something vaguely girlish about Charles? Did he, at some level, want to see his youngest son travel the same hard road he had been forced to take? His actions toward Charles from the moment of settlement on leave an ugly silhouette, a shadow of bitterness or trepidation that is hard to decipher. It is certainly possible that Caleb feared his son had sexual affinities for other men, which the early nineteenth century categorized as unpardonable, sinful, and seditious behavior rather than a coherent identity. No less than the relentlessly intrusive social milieu of the small farming community, the violent hatred of "the crime not fit to be named" embedded in both law and custom may have induced Caleb to expel his young son. In any event, Charles invites his readers-his children or grandchildren, he assumed-to ponder his hardship even as he insists that he had quickly accepted it. "But so it was, such was my fate:' he writes. 56 Like Thomas Burnside, then, Charles Harding found himself alone in the wide world, written off by a family that had no need for him. So he departed

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for Putney's Great Meadows, just a short walk from his parents' home, and hired himself out to a farmer. "In those times there was little business, but farming;' he explains, "and having always been on a farm, I supposed it must be my life's work:' Small for his age "but very ambitious:' Charles would have to create a reputation-a picture of himself in other people's minds. Burnside came to an equally grim conclusion. His narrative scolds himself for "loitering" for a time in Portland, Maine; the need to labor, to be useful, endured even after the institution that bred it had deserted him. "Destitute as I then was:' he relates, "I could no longer continue in idleness and as I had always been a farmer I could do nothing else:' Even before the society and economy around them began to produce new options and occupations, however, both young men found a fresh start at an old institution that became new in the early republic: the school.s7

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For several weeks in 1800, the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Burnside labored as a farm hand in Maine. Predictably, this work led nowhere. The labor he managed to wring from his frail body went to enhance other men's property, and once the seasons turned his value evaporated. So he made his way back to Upper Coos, New Hampshire, where at least people knew who he was. Once more, he tried to labor for his family members, but his poor health "would not allow me to procure a living in this honorable way." Feeble and useless as always, he gave up on the farm and "kept a petty school in my own native Town and District." Of course, he had no qualifications for this teaching job. He had always been a "dull scholar," he tells us, and his education in Northumberland was "miserable indeed, only such as had been acquired at a few private schools:' In this context, "private" referred to a school held at a household, perhaps by a widow who earned a little extra firewood by occupying neighborhood youth during lulls in family labor. 1 Among the remote farms of Upper Coos, Thomas had little chance to move past that paltry education and the small horizons it offered. He was effectively stuck in his "own native Town and District." But just a month after his return, Thomas watched as his younger cousin or brother, Samuel, left for a very different kind of school: Haverhill Academy, sixty miles to the south. Here was another chance to escape his grim past and bleak future. Ironically, Thomas's poor health might have worked in his favor at this point; the Burnsides would not object if he left town, because he was not much help anyway. In March 1801, then, he set out for Haverhill, walking half of the way in a secular pilgrimage that left his feet "monstrously blistered:' He recalls that he arrived in the village "among entire strangers"-perhaps Samuel, newly established at the school, tried to ignore his awkward relative. "This scene will ever appear fresh in my memory, 'till my dying day;' Thomas wrote of his first day at Haverhill. "Howsoever, I mustered up what little fortitude I had left, and the next day, being the last of March 1801 I entered my

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name a student of the Academy." That was the day his life, as he preferred to remember it, began. 2 Thomas Burnside had arrived at one of the several hundred privately funded institutions for higher learning that sprouted across the republic after the 1780s, the most important of which were called academies. These schools drew young people from households that were variously situated in the economies and landscapes around them, widening the social distance between village and countryside and spreading the liberal knowledge and refined manners that signified gentility. As important, they converted the new ideologies of emulation and ambition into everyday policies. In the hands of teachers and precepts who saw themselves as members of a nation or society first and a town or community second, school became a crucial vehicle of cultural and personal change, an institutional base for new ways of thinking and aspiring. In The Mother of a Family, a play performed at one such school in 1799, a rustic character named Nelly remarked that "everybody is going to school" in "these times:' Beneath the sweeping generalization, Nelly touched on a vital truth: for the first time, many of her peers and neighbors had to depart from home, physically and cosmologically, in order to go to schooP

Customs and Reforms Many post-Revolutionary leaders valued schools as pillars of republican society, and some tried to tie them into regional or national systems. At least in theory, they wanted every citizen to have a common educational experience and to learn "that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property." They meant, more specifically, national property. To accomplish this, reformers like Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson called for three-tiered state systems, with free elementary schools at the base, regional academies for more advanced pupils in the middle, and, at the pinnacle, state colleges for the best and brightest. (Some luminaries also hoped for a "Federal University'' that would train students to "think and feel as genuine sons of America:' thus lifting them "Infinitely above the local prejudices of vulgar bosoms:') They also wanted change at the classroom and instructional level. Much like the advocates of a more open family, they rejected corporal punishment in favor of moral suasion, implied authority, and the cautious embrace of individual abilities. Few intellectuals questioned these ideas. The importance of role models and discipline-by-example was so widely accepted in educated circles

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that the President of the College of New Jersey called it "the most beaten of all topics:' 4 Most of their designs quickly ran aground, however. In New York, a 1795 plan to improve common schools withered five years later when the legislature refused to fund it. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire, as well, de jure educational reform was modest in both intent and effect. Massachusetts's Education Act of 1789 required towns with two hundred or more families to support a Latin grammar school, relieving the smaller communities of a much-ignored obligation. Within a decade, the number of grammar schools had fallen from some sixty-five before the Revolution to only thirty. This means that about three-fourths of the larger towns failed to provide Latin instruction as the 1789 law stipulated. A new education law in New Hampshire, also passed in 1789, similarly required all shire towns (and no others) to hold grammar schools, with similar results. Only in urban centers did educational reform gain traction, primarily as a device for keeping poor children in line.5 Throughout the New England countryside, townsfolk continued to decide the day-to-day questions of schooling. Who would teach in the summer? Should girls as well as boys learn to write? Above all: When should children go to school, and when should they remain at home? The "Encouragement of literature is Good;' noted one group of Massachusetts freeholders in 1780. But they objected to the state's support of Harvard-"We have litle knowledge of said University"-and argued that "no town has any busness with another Town about Schooles." Plainly, "the inhabitants of Each Town have the Sole Right and are the Properest Judges" of what schools best served town needs, just as each head of family had that prerogative with his dependents. In response to the 1789 law, the selectmen of Marlborough prescribed seven-week common school terms, to be held as a kind of instructional circuit at six different locations. They marked the schoolhouse "near Mr. Stephen Felton" as one of these sites, as it had been before the Revolution. Silas Felton credits this measure with "doubling our schooling:' But family duties weighed heavier even as school terms grew longer. Because Silas's father had "considerable business to transact;' the Franklinian protege was still "kept at work;' just like "the other boys in the neighborhood:' 6 As Ephraim Abbot could attest, reforms in discipline and pedagogy also came slowly, if at all. Although the state of New Hampshire had devised new teacher requirements in 1789, the local taxpayers effectively decided who would keep the schools. Classrooms in Concord were more crowded than ever, not least because town residents rejected an effort to build new schoolhouses in 1794. Abbot first attended in 1783, when he was four. Like most

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children, he probably brought his parents' own copies of the New England Primer with him to class. Along with Noah Webster's spellers, Jedidiah Morse's American Geography, and the Scriptures, these texts formed the backbone of a curriculum aimed at rote memorization and moral inculcation. Sitting on high wooden benches, which one veteran likened to a "rack of torture;' Abbot and his classmates waited silently until the master summoned them to recite-or marked them for punishment. He tells us that his first mistress, "a very aged woman;' once applied her cowhide to his skin with "great violence;' then chased him around the schoolhouse in order to complete "one of the most severe whippings I ever suffered:' Another of his teachers was a drunkard who also abused Abbot "unreasonably and cruelly:' The big boys in this class made the smaller ones fight each other, and the master winked at the brutality. 7 Contemporary descriptions and nineteenth-century memoirs both insist that country schools in the new republic were "despicable, wretched, and contemptible" and that the teachers who ran them were boors, clowns, or bullies. "I remember the first day with perfect distinctness;' wrote a Connecticut native of district school in the 1790s. Along with seventeen girls and boys "mostly of my own age;' he trembled before his "short and bent" mistress, an old maid who cared not at all about his talents, fears, or abilities. When called to the front of class to recite part of the alphabet, he forgot to "make manners;' or bow, to the teacher, who promptly grabbed his hair and pulled his head downward. Petrified, he forgot his ABCs. "I didn't come here to learn you your letters!" the schoolmarm yelled. In most accounts, the district school remained a creature of the countryside it served: run-down, isolated, and filled with barefoot children with the same last names. 8 Yet the harsh complaints and grim recollections both trace to a wider tide of educational ferment in the early republic, a set of heightened expectations for the new nation's schools and students. Against the local mores that treated schools as helpmeets of the household and neighborhood, nationalist arguments for broader and more systematic instruction forged ahead. "Unshackle your minds and act like independent beings;' Noah Webster challenged citizens in 1790. To build a sturdy republican society beneath the shaky edifice of republican government, Americans had to "frame a liberal plan of policy and build it on a broad system of education." They had to think of independence as a national endeavor, requiting a "broad" and "liberal" view of the world, and not simply as a household goal. As products of this pervasive tension in early national life, country schools underwent changes that elude official record and inhere between the lines of even the most damning reviews. 9

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Take, for example, the Connecticut man who recalled his first day at school with "perfect distinctness:' He refers to seventeen boys and girls in his classroom. Other classrooms might have had double that number, leading to frequent complaints of overcrowding. Yet this very charge points out the spike in school attendance during the early years of the republic. District school enrollments for boys and especially for girls surged around 18oo, fifty years before compulsory attendance laws. (This helps explain how illiteracy all but disappeared among white New Englanders, women as well as men, born after 1780.) Moreover, the Connecticut man not only knew the exact number of his classmates but also described them as "mostly of my own age." Late in life, he found some of them "respectably established" in different cities across the nation. ''And the rest-where are they?" he wondered. Here, too, the winds of change had already come. For in recalling his peers as classmates rather than neighbors, he quietly recognized a new way to organize schools that had taken shape in his youth and transformed the meanings and experiences of school in country life. 10 The basic idea of an academic "class" dates back to the fifteenth century. Grouped together with their peers, the theory ran, young people became attuned to and desirous of each other's accomplishments. They put a new value on academic achievement, because they could no longer rely on the differences of age or size they brought to school to form a pecking order. Competition among relative equals allowed teachers to use the desire for praise and the fear of failure as disciplinary tools. The question for John Locke as of 1693 was where to cultivate those fears and desires: at home, under private tutelage, or at school, among other students? "Being abroad [at school] 'tis true, will make him bolder;' Locke noted of his ideal pupil, "and the emulation of Schoolfellows, often puts Life and Industry into young Lads:' Locke eventually endorsed private tutoring for the patrician few, but his eighteenth-century followers embraced classroom rivalry as a training ground for a competitive society. In 1751, for instance, Benjamin Franklin designed the Philadelphia Academy to place students on a level playing field, and then to lift some in clear sight of others. By studying in pairs, alongside the classmate who was most similar in age and ability, each pupil would pursue the spoils of relative praise. "Let Emulation be excited among the Boys by giving, Weekly, little prizes, or other small Encouragements;' Franklin exhorted. 11 Peer rivalry became common at the eighteenth-century college, where new enthusiasms for rhetoric and theatricality gave rise to the end-of-term exhibition. During these events, the performing students not only revealed

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their social distance from the mute onlookers but also negotiated status among their peers; the most public roles went to the most accomplished scholars. Naturally, some cared about their class rank and exhibition role more than others. But the time on stage clearly stayed with them, for it anticipated the vita activa they hoped to lead after graduation. One man who had been "kept industriously at work" just like "other farmers' boys" escaped to Yale during the 1780s, then went on to win a top spot at commencement. "I was flattered and much gratified by being told that my performance was the best of the day;' he reminisced. "I recollect no occasion when I have experienced such elevation of feelings:' James Morris, another Yale graduate who had chafed at his duties on the farm, took from college the "ambitious view of being the best scholar in my class." This drive had not stopped him from also becoming "beloved of his classmates;' at least as he recalled things. "He had a powerful rival in his friend Bailey, and this probably added zest to his ambition;' remarked the son of another graduate from 1807. "[When] hereceived the highest appointment in the commencement exercises, his delight knew no bounds:' Among the elite cadre of college men, a new sociology of ambition took hold, in which rivals became friends and talents brought distinctions. 12 This new pedagogy took hold more broadly after the Revolution, astraditional forms of discipline came to seem like crude vestiges of the colonial past. Emulation offered a rational, non-physical alternative to the old ways. More practically, classing enabled teachers to handle the larger classes they faced. "The method of teaching, and perhaps I may say governing schools in New England, is essentially altered within so, and even within 20 years" reported Herman Mann in an 1801 edition of his Dedham newspaper. "This alteration is chiefly in the classing of schools:' Writing as "A Reformer;' Mann used his own experience as a teacher during the 1780s and 1790s, before he and Sally married and moved to Dedham village, to celebrate the sweeping change. Faced with no fewer than 150 students in Walpole, Mann claims to have divided them into four classes and then selected two "ushers" to lead them through recitations. The choice of these ushers was not "hereditary;' Mann made clear. Instead his selections marked "a free offering to any one who, by his talents and exertions, should become [the] superiors" of his classmates. 13 Throughout the early national period, college graduates took temporary work as district-schools teachers, thereby spreading the new techniques one classroom at a time. The youthful master who swept through town on his way to bigger things became an agent and icon of cultural innovation. In

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his recollections of country life, for instance, Francis Underwood wrote fondly of the "bright young schoolmaster" who "enlivened" sleepy farm towns. He also noted that the village girls (not the farm girls?), "made much of these ambitious youths, for there were often appealing possibilities in their eager faces:' The most famous incarnation of the Yankee teacher, Ichabod Crane, could be found each Sunday surrounded by the "country damsels" of Sleepy Hollow, while the bashful bumpkins looked on, "envying his superior elegance and address:' He even threatened the social supremacy of the toughest farm boy in town; Ichabod might have prevailed in their contest for the town's most desirable spinster had the Headless Horseman not intervened. Ichabod's erudition set him apart from the local farmers, all of whom were somehow "old" and none of whom "sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm." 14 Ichabod Crane combined Puritan severity and enlightened justice in his classrooms, and in this, more than in his sex appeal, he typified the early national schoolmaster. The old customs and the new reforms fused and competed differently in each town, each year, each parish. Without state standards, the key determining factor in the quality and approach of a school was its teacher, the quality and approach of whom imperfectly reflected the disparities between village and country, seaboard and backcountry, center and periphery. As noted, Ephraim Abbot suffered through his first four district schools in rural Concord. But his fifth teacher, a Dartmouth graduate named Eastman, brought exhibitions to the town in 1793, when Ephraim was fourteen. Country teachers in Dedham, outside the village where Daniel Mann grew up, probably employed the rod as thoroughly as ever. According to undisclosed residents, however, the "famous teachers" of the village school ran classes with "less severity than many of that day:' They were Harvard graduates who brought along the techniques in which Daniel's father had so much faith. A good teacher had to make schooling "a pleasure, rather than a task;' the printer remarked. That meant "exciting the attention and ambition" of every student, his own son among them. 15 Just up the road from his father's farm in Putney, Vermont, where he was a suspect "plaything;' Charles Harding found a refuge of sorts. "I was quick to learn, and always led those of my age in the school:' It is unclear whether he had actually sat next to children of his age in class or whether he simply recalled school through the prism of his peers. But it is significant that Harding did not recall "ever of being punished in school;' and obvious that he found much-needed respect and praise there. "I think I was a favorite with my teachers:' Encouraged by his success, or perhaps at the urging of his

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pious parents, Harding also attended Sunday School as a teenager. There he met Joshua Leavitt, the instructor and a newspaper editor from a nearby village. ''A noble man was he;' Charles recalls. "Tall-muscular, looked as though he was born to rule and yet as gentle as a child, a man, and a christian, every inch of him." He was the role model that Harding never knew at his parent's grim home. 16 Yes, "the People" called him lazy, and yes, his family members did too, Silas Felton relates. "But at School, I was almost Always at the head of the Class of which I belonged." (Just like Ben Franklin.) Although Marlborough's schools did not hold exhibitions during the 1780s and early 1790s, when Felton attended, they evidently put students in classes and announced who was the best one way or another. School and home diverged in his memory: "Being more fond of School than of work, I generally had more praises bestowed upon me at school rather than at home:' And his classroom successes bore fruit. In 1795, Marlborough's selectmen offered the nineteen-year-old his own teaching post across town. "On the 31st of March 1795 I sat out from my fathers;' he records of this welcome day, "and arrived at the schoolhouse about 9 o'clock (it being only 4 miles):' Of course, he was nervous. When he walked into the school, he admitted seven years later, "my heart almost leap't into my mouth for fear that I was not sufficient for the undertaking." Of course, he faced local disapproval. Many persons, Felton reports, "silently hoped I should [fail], and would sneeringly say they didn't know I was better qualified than many others." Their periodic grumbling disclosed their persistent envy, Silas thought. 17

The Academy Movement In 1787, village parents in Deerfield tried to establish a "New School" with a college-educated master and a limit of thirty students per class. Nothing came of it. Ten years later, Deerfield Academy helped to fill the gap that had emerged between the supply of Latin grammar schools and the demand for better education. Its nineteen trustees typified the booster elite that gained prominence during the federal period, whether by funding turnpikes, celebrating "enterprise;' or tidying up their fences. Thirteen of them lived in Deerfield center, while the other six hailed from nearby towns. At least five were ministers; nine had been to college. After buying land in Deerfield village-just a few hundred yards from Edward Hitchcock's home-they collected funds from about forty donors and secured a state charter. The

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pattern recurred in towns and villages across the countryside, mostly after 1790: ten to twenty notables collected funds, built an academy, secured a charter, and began classes (not always in that order). Massachusetts alone had forty-four chartered academies by 1810; the total across New England reached at least 168 by 1830. Still others came and went without leaving a mark in public records. 18 Like enterprises, these schools arrived with a good deal of public acclaim for their public spirit. Like villages, they drew loud and hyperbolic praise. "To name the Academies incorporated in New-England, exceeds our limits," one speaker boasted. The schools multiplied "almost without number:· beamed the Rev. Samuel Miller in his 1803 opus, A Brief Retrospective of the Eighteenth Century. Miller tied this promising trend to the Federal Constitution, which not only gave citizens "a sense of national dignity and independence" but also "excite[ d) an ambition for enriching our own country with the treasures of knowledge." Although academies generally formed in mid- or large-sized towns with village centers, their notoriety thus spread to even the most remote places. In 1793, the founders of Haverhill Academy in northwestern New Hampshire assured the General Court that their school would be of"great Utility to the Publick and especially to the rising Generation:' A state charter would "enable them with more propriety and Efficacy to pursue their Object, and render Service to the Publick:' Even in tiny Northumberland, sixty miles north from Haverhill over bad roads, the Burnside family knew about this school and considered it for their children. 19 Always located in village centers, academies were stately, self-important institutions. Atkinson Academy in New Hampshire, for example, used a twostory, 6o-by-34-foot building on a small hill. Leicester's founders called their building, which had pillars, a cupola, and the air of importance, "exceedingly well calculated for an academy:' Two-story Deerfield Academy was the first brick building in its county. Compared to the 16-by-20-foot common schools that spread thinly over the countryside, these buildings belonged with the other public sites of the new, village-dominated landscape: churches, post offices, courthouses, and, for that matter, colleges, which were said to grant a "public education" by fitting students for the professions or politics. In this sense, as well, academies claimed public status. A few-like the Phillips academies at Andover, Massachusetts, and Exeter, New Hampshire-were designed as college preparatory schools for young men. Others admitted only women and offered lessons in French, embroidery, and dancing. But most northern academies were coeducational schools that served up a mixed curriculum of geography, English composition, mathematics, and oratory. They offered

Figure 9. Wiscasset Academy, Maine. This brick structure is one of many early academies still extant in New England; by contrast, very few examples of common schools remain. Photograph by Holly S. Buss.

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what one observer called "a middle education between that of the parochial school and that of college:' 20 European visitors and American commentators alike labeled academiesbut not common schools-"public" buildings. Yet common schools relied on tax money and served every taxpayer's child, while academies leaned on private donations and paying students. Much like turnpikes and other enterprises, academies were located in towns but were not entirely oftowns. By complicating the link between town and school, they also upset the relationship between school and home. For all the changes in enrollment and pedagogy since the 1780s, district schools still served the household economy by occupying youth during lulls in family work and transmitting the skills necessary to run a farm or shop. Academies, on the other hand, took money and work-hours away from the household, then made children more learned than their parents. They undercut both the productivity and the desirability of the working household, forcing parents to reconsider the futures awaiting their children. 21 Even before Edward Hitchcock made his distaste for his father's trade plain, Justin and Mercy Hitchcock had decided to give their gifted child the best schooling they could find in Deerfield village. "It cannot be doubted that such a father would do all he could for the education of his children;' Edward recalled. That may be, given Justin's professed wish to escape the ignorance he had inherited in Granville. But intention is one thing, capacity quite another. How could a struggling hatter spend almost $3 per term and child to send two sons and one daughter (Edward and two of his siblings) to the academy? The tuition at Deerfield was typical of most academies: about the price of two weeks' labor, a handful of books, or a half-acre of unimproved land. From 1804 to 1809, when Edward attended, the family would have had to spend at least $20 on academy schooling, or about as much as their entire assessed real estate. Did Mercy's family, especially Epaphras Hoyt, help Justin pay these bills? "We were first carried thoroughly through the primary school;' relates Edward, no help in this matter, "and then had the advantages of a good academy, as much as we could find time and means to improve it." 22 The school that eleven-year-old Edward first enrolled in during 1804 drew boys and girls from forty towns across Massachusetts, with a large plurality from Deerfield itself. Local academy families averaged $250 in total wealth, against $70 for their townsmen. They also owned proportionately more personal property than non-academy families, suggesting a higher level of material refinement among academy households. The Hitchcock children were a threadbare few amidst a well-heeled many; among their twenty-four classmates from Deerfield, only the sons of Deerfield's minister

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had less household wealth. Their out-of-town classmates were probably just as wealthy as the local village youth, because the cost of boarding surpassed that of tuition by a factor of two or more. According to one observer, Deerfield students were "the children of gentlemen" from wealthy towns, the republican version of an aristocracy.23 Yet most academies drew from a wider range of social backgrounds. When a Federalist in 1806 noted that "the middling class of society" found it "fashionable" to send their sons and daughters to academies, he might have referred to the student body at Amherst Academy, fifteen miles south of Deerfield. In 1815, it enrolled some seventy girls and fifty boys, about half of whom were from Amherst. Local families who sent children averaged $8o in taxable estate, along with sixty-five acres of land, while their townsmen had $50 and forty-five acres, respectively. The children of Amherst's most prosperous farmers were well represented, while villagers of all social ranks were over-represented. From a sample of twenty local pupils, fifteen lived in Amherst center, where their parents were petty craftsmen as well as merchants and professionals. A similar pattern emerges in Dedham, where Daniel Mann's father called for "exciting" pedagogy. In 1801, almost three dozen residents of the First Parish complained that the district schools were too crowded for their children to receive adequate "attention;' and so requested a new parish school. They owned less property, on average, than their townsmen, and included three house-wrights, two blacksmiths, and a wheelwright, coach-maker, watchmaker, hatter, baker, painter, and merchant. Of the twenty-two petitioners for whom I found reliable information, fifteen lived in the village. Stymied by the town meeting, the villagers then built a two-story brick schoolhouse with subscription money. It is likely that Daniel Mann and his many siblings went to this school before proceeding to Dedham Academy, an unchartered academy that opened around 1795 and began exhibitions shortly after. 24 For Daniel Mann and Edward Hitchcock, an academy education followed logically from their village upbringing. Silas Felton's last name carried different privileges and burdens. Despite his own nerves and the "silent" disapproval of his local "enemies:' Silas did well enough in his first teaching job in 1795 to land another offer from a school in the north part of Marlborough. (Disappointing his critics gave him "inexpressible Satisfaction;' he recalls.) He was now earning his own pay in a trade that did not involve haying, plowing, or taking orders from his father. Yet the nineteenyear-old still bore the weight of family needs and neighborly expectations. "Ending the school about the first of July, my father wanted me at home;' he

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writes with a near-audible sigh. ''Accordingly I went home and followed farming untill the middle of October." So long as Silas taught in his hometown, the Felton patriarch could summon him back to the plow at a moment's notice. The answer, both Silas and his father knew, was a term at nearby Leicester Academy, where the young man could qualify himself to teach anywhere. "Intending to take another School as soon as convenient, and knowing that my knowledge of Grammar was very small;' he explained, "I solicited my father, and at length gained his consent to attend an Academy a few months." 2 5 What did Silas hide under the words "at length"? Shouting matches at meals? Testy exchanges in the barn? Tense silences during field work? This much is clear: he pressed to go to school against his father's wishes, and he was hardly alone. Take John Ball, born in 1794. His parents had moved to the rugged borderland between Vermont and New Hampshire at the end of the Revolutionary War, there establishing themselves "in comparative indigence but entire and absolute independence:' They were "honest and honorable;' "industrious;' and "quite as well off as their townsmen and neighbors:' With little education and much work, John's father "did not seem to think any further education than an ability to read, write, and cipher ... to be needful;' and so denied the young man's wish for more schooling. This farmer "adhered strictly to the opinion that work and implicit obedience were the things most useful and needful in the education of boys." The words evoke the moral signposts of the family economy: strictly work, needful labor, useful persons. After "much importunity;' however, this man "consented" to let his son go for a few weeks. "I remained with my father till I was 22 years old;' reflected an Amherst native, "when ... my father consented to let me go to Amherst AcademY:' Another rustic who spent his life "sometime Farming sometime going to school, sometime teaching school, sometimes shoe making;' finished his autobiography with this gloomy thought: "I think If my Father had encouraged my education I should have pursued a different course." 26 As the last example suggests, youth was not always served in these family disputes. The need to work for busy parents, or to care for widowed, sick, or disabled ones set the terms for the tacit agreements, mostly lost to history, that kept people with their families and away from their aspirations. Of course, parental wishes only mattered insofar as children remained in the family economy. For Ephraim Abbot, that time had passed in 1799, when his uncle died, his mother fell ill, and his father gave him his "time;' or walking papers. A year before, Ephraim had begun lessons in composition and Latin with the town minister, Rev. McFarland. He then taught classes in several

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Concord schools, an experience that, if nothing else, enabled him to give orders instead of taking them. Determined to go to college and become a pastor, Abbot sought admission to Phillips Exeter Academy in 1800. Rev. McFarland and two other village notables wrote letters to Exeter on Abbot's behalf; the twenty-one-year-old was then accepted and offered a scholarship from the school's charity fund. He left his home in a stagecoach owned by one of his patrons, traveling by turnpike to a fresh start in life. 27 For Thomas Burnside and Charles Harding, virtual abandonment by parents left them free to attend an academy-if only they could find a way to pay for it. Burnside does not explain how he managed Haverhill Academy's bills, although he does mention the debts he began to accrue. For his part, Harding worked as a farm laborer in his hometown of Putney, Vermont after his father exiled him at age fourteen. He earned $5 per month bailing hay for a rich farmer who had "no care for me, only to get all the work he could:' He recalled this farmer's estate as "one of the hottest and most fatiguing places that ever a mortal labored in" (Hell, to the layperson). That summer, Harding began to suffer nose bleeds and fainting spells. The next summer he collapsed and nearly died. He recovered, no thanks to his nearby parents, and found work as a store clerk in another town. But after his employer found that he could not handle the arithmetic, Harding took another teaching post and pledged his next term's pay to the tuition and boarding costs of Brattleboro Academy. His willingness to do so speaks equally to the appeal of higher learning and the miseries of wage work in the new republic. 28

The Academy Experience Early academies had only one building, which was devoted to both teaching and performing. Out-of-town students therefore boarded in nearby homes. In Brattleboro, Charles Harding stayed with one of his parents' former neighbors, who, like any decent neighbor, let him pay less than her other visitors. Silas Felton probably boarded with one of his father's friends (or debtors) in Leicester. Thomas Burnside paid out of pocket for room and board at Haverhill, while Ephraim Abbot lived for free with eight other charity scholars in Exeter. Daniel Mann and Edward Hitchcock lived at home while attending their nearby and respective schools. Academy trustees celebrated the moral benefits of home boarding-as if they could offer any alternative-and paid due homage to the household as the cradle of piety, industry, and morality in the new republic. If not in the parsonage, students

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would be "placed in orderly and religious families:' promised the Rev. Joseph Lathrop at an academy opening in 18oo. 29 But these schools also undercut the household's role in shaping youthful destinies, and avowedly so. "The education of youth must be begun in the families in which they are placed;' Lathrop argued. "But it cannot be completed here:' The stated goal of their curriculum was to move students past their "native walls" and to fit them for "a larger society;' a national society. Academies lifted young people who would otherwise "be content with the narrow privileges of the common school" into "an education considerably enlarged." In a similar vein, Deerfield founder Joseph Lyman dedicated the school to wisdom, because wisdom "renders men useful:' Everyone knew that they had to be useful to others; about this, there was no dispute in the world of 18oo. Yet Rev. Lyman shifted the social meanings of duty and utility. The more wisdom people acquired, he explained, "the more extensive are those effects, which benefit human society:' The vital work of the academy was to initiate the expansionary process, to broaden self-assessments beyond home and locality: outward, toward peers, and upward, toward public figures. 30 Much like district schools, academies coped with a wide array of ages and abilities, and from a much greater geographic range. More thoroughly than any district school, however, they systematized their classes in at least three ways. First, they kept strict attendance laws and charged tuition per term to reduce daily turnover. Once enrolled at an academy, a student was not likely to leave until the six- or twelve-week semester was finished. Second, academy instructors classed pupils by age or ability level, consciously using the same techniques they had learned at college. (Most schools stipulated that they would hire only college graduates or students.) Some academies also organized classes by gender, although many seem to have divided the sexes within a single building. Finally, and most obviously, they collected only those willing and able to pay. By both self-selection and design, then, academy pupils moved among peers, just as reformers had long suggested. They entered a social world where status followed from relative achievement among relative strangers, from the mastery of skills that had potential value in society rather than immediate use in homes. 31 Their new school days began with early morning prayers and lasted until mid-afternoon, with short breaks for lunch, recreation, and more prayers. In addition to the usual doses of geography, English, and mathematics, some students opted to take further coursework at extra charge. "I was in every class but one in the school;' writes Charles Harding. He enrolled in

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Latin and Grammar classes at Brattleboro, while many of his classmatesmostly "rich men's sons"-"took but half the studies, and mastered them but half as well [as I]." Like Harding, Thomas Burnside had nowhere to go in the event of failure, and so he threw himself into his studies of grammar, geography, and Latin "with all the ardour and energy of body and mind, that ambition, prompted by necessity, could excite:' Outmatched by most of his classmates at Exeter, Ephraim Abbot also recalls a heavy workload and a busy schedule. If not in class, he claims, he was studying in his room, seldom taking the time to ice skate or sled with his classmates or even to sleep more than five hours per night. 32 Punishing as their schedules were, academies disavowed corporal punishment. A typical charter called for "genteel conduct" on the part of pupils while also pledging to make disciplinary action "seldom, very seldom:' Teachers would reluctantly punish "the disorderly and the vile:' but also promised to "ever lend a parental ear" to students' grievances. Students' bodies were more or less off-limits; they were to be treated as gentlemen and ladies. Rather than respond to misdeeds with intermittent force, teachers would grant pupils "such marks of distinction and Honor as may best conduce to promote emulation and encourage literary merit:' They found "a more effectual control" than physical threat in "the spirit of emulation:' Surviving evidence indicates that they kept their word. One former student, who says he endured three beatings per week in his district school, recalled his academy as "an institution in which several hundred children of both sexes were in the same building successfully taught and governed for years, without the use of the rod:' The only incident of bodily punishment at an academy that I have found, at Marblehead Academy in Massachusetts, caused a stir-the more so, perhaps, because its constitution called for "laudable emulation" to replace corporal punishment and "the servile principles of fear:' 33 Removing fear from young hearts opened room for the real work of emulation: realigning personal goals from precedent to example, from household need to public honor. "Let me especially direct your admiring and emulating eyes to the MAN who presides over the political affairs of our nation:' proclaimed David Tappan to his young listeners at Phillips Academy, Andover. In Tappan's creative sketch, George Washington became a boy of ordinary means who rose to fame through classroom excellence. "Go you, my young friends:' Tappan concluded, "and do likewise:' Appropriately, Tappan celebrated Washington's MAN-hood at an all-male campus, for his ambitious message came with gendered terms and conditions. Only young men could become citizens, thus only they could truly emulate great citizens. In

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general, academy supporters were sufficiently confident of this to leave it unsaid; their priority was to stir ambition, not to parcel and delimit the passion. "You have not, duly considered, to what lofty heights you may arise;' insisted Rev. Lyman at (coed) Deerfield. "Prodigies of learning and wisdom have come from small and unpromising beginnings:' Edward Hitchcock certainly hoped so. 34 Excellence and distinction meant nothing without their foils, mediocrity and obscurity. In order to impel students to do better than one another or to excel in general, academies had to devise an atmosphere of contest, to make plain who had won and who had lost. Marblehead's constitution, written in 1789, required its Harvard-educated preceptor to seat both male and female pupils according to "merit and literary improvement;' thus inscribing achieved hierarchies on the very layout of the classroom. Weekly performance reports would allow "the urbane and the brilliant Scholar [to] have the satisfaction ... of bearing to his parents and friends a written testimonial of his decent deportment and improvement:' On the other hand, the "negligent and unruly" would go home without such plaudits. The quarterly exhibition, which was open to the entire town, offered another chance for proficient or favored pupils to "display their Talents:' "Such an opportunity to unfold to view the Splendid dawnings of youthful Genius;' the school decreed, "must enkindle the sparks of Ambition to an ardent blaze." Mediocre students would sit "in silent envy and in mortifying obscurity" while watching "their successful Schoolfellows adorned with the unfading Garlands of praise which applauding auditors shall bestow." Along with a buoyant faith in the power of public exposure, the whole design rested on the harsh conviction that those who were "so lost to a Sense of honour and so insensible to the Charms of honest praise as to be uninfluenced by the noble incentives of ambition" should be "banished from the Academy in ignominy and disgrace:' To warm "the sparks of Ambition;' Marblehead lifted a few students and denigrated most others. 35 This academy was unusual in its cutthroat tone and exceptional in its admitted use of "silent envy:' Perhaps we expect to find it in a seaport like Marblehead, where the cooperative values associated with farm life had long since given way to commercial bustle. But similar methods and rhetoric prevailed at academies all over the countryside, superimposing a network of "exciting" institutions over a thickening grid of household duties and local exchanges. Academy students, male and female, could ascend to higher classes by outdoing their peers. Proficient students earned certificates of

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merit or "premiums," little objects whose value reflected their contrived scarcity. Other schools gave out book prizes-iconic reminders of life away from the plow. The shy, slow, or ill-prepared were left behind, their failure announced not in episodic punishments but through a subtler and longerlasting blow to the psyche: "mortifying obscurity:' "Many a youth, who, with the benefits of a good society, and free access to useful books, would, at home, have been a mere idler;' noted Rev. John Woodbridge in 1818, "is roused, by the competitions of rivalship, and the judicious praises bestowed on merit in the school room, to vigorous exertions of intellect, and acquires habits, never to be lost." Nothing "roused" a young scholar quite like classroom emulation, Woodbridge thought. 36 The signature event of the academy experience was the exhibition, which capped the spring or fall term and drew students, teachers, parents, and townsfolk to the local meetinghouse, or to the upper floors of academy buildings. "Went to exhibition," recorded a female schoolteacher in 1794. "Was very much pleas'd with the performances-Beautiful Musick. A very large number of people:' Looking back on the early days of Leicester Academy, one townsman "distinctly" recalled how locals had crowded the meetinghouse "to its full capacity" to watch the likes of Silas Felton perform. Ministers, selectmen, and local notables from nearby towns also attended these affairs, which lasted an entire day or longer. Like the academy classes they came to see, such onlookers were quietly controlled by sequential formalities. Elaborate processions to and from the exhibition stage established who would do the talking, and when, where, and how they would do it. The one- or two-page exhibition schedules also made clear that the audience's role was to participate in some ways and not others. 37 Exhibitions were spectacles of excellence: they not only broadcast student feats but also announced that the resulting hierarchies were fair, rational, and reflective of both talent and virtue. They targeted envy by crafting scenes in which comparisons had an inspiring and encouraging effect. Teachers assigned pupils to exhibition "spots" that fit their classroom proficiency as well as their gender. Individual orations were the most coveted spots; two- to four-person dialogues came next; plays with many performers rounded out the schedules. The most honored roles went to the few students, invariably men, who studied the classics in preparation for college. At one school, for example, the top scholar gave a Latin declamation and later played George Washington in the play Glory of Columbia. What better way to endorse personal attainment among peers-and the ambition for it-than

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by equating the best pupil with the first President, the very embodiment of the nation? What better way to tap the desire for visibility than by turning a select few into celebrities for a day? 38 Typically consigned to supporting roles, young women still gained a rare moment of public attention during exhibition. ''April 1st the day has really come for examination:' recorded academy student Jemina Brewer in 18oo. Afterwards, "we ware applauded by every one that I heard speak of it;' yet she felt dejected, "knowing it was the last time that ever I expected so good an opportunity as I had had at that place." Leicester student Ruth Henshaw Bascom copied the exhibition schedules of her academy into her diary. While noting that the events drew "a great concourse of people from all Neighboring Towns:' she also dismissed some of the locals who lingered around the schools as '"speckled potatoes: or Spectators." Academies did not create such genteel prejudices, of course. But by enabling the display of female talents, they put further distance between their students and supporters and the backward folks who allegedly treated women as beasts of burden. In the play The Mother of a Family, unlettered Nelly worries that "the fellors" of the neighborhood would be "mad as vengeance" if they learned that she had been improving herself at school. Not to worry, "my dear:' replies her more educated counterpart, Latitia. You will soon forget about such ruffians. 39 Together, the peer classing, liberal learning, and "exciting" pedagogy of the academies forged a new school experience that openly avowed the ambition for excellence and visibility. Beyond these fundamentals, of course, we may find a great variety of individual academy experiences, some of which belie the schools' promises. "I look back upon the three months passed there, with mingled emotions;' writes Charles Harding of Brattleboro. He bore bitter memories of the "mortifications:' "neglect;' and "sneers" he had endured at the hands of the wealthier students, who easily deduced that he was a refugee from farm country. Academies brought new occasions for casual cruelty. Their village setting put farm youth, especially, on unfamiliar turf where colloquial speech or rough manners brought disdain and neglect. When we hear of students holding balls and delivering invitations, or of forming "Social Fraternities" and speaking societies, we suspect that people like Charles Harding and Thomas Burnside found themselves on the outside looking in, much as they had back home. 40 Yet the reputation of academies among the students was very positive. Its smug clientele notwithstanding, Charles Harding thanked Brattleboro for teaching him "that the memory is capable of great improvement [and that] I could remember whatever I was determined to:' More than any place or

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Figure n. Academies enabled well-born village youth to reinforce their genteel status and rustics to depart from the provincial mores and manners of their parents and neighbors. Both of these young women attended Deerfield Academy, where Edward Hitchcock studied. Portrait of Rhoda Wright Smith (attributed to Charles Lyman); Portrait of Pamelia (Burt) Field, c. 1808. Courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts.

person he had known before, this school had appreciated his talents. Edward Hitchcock spent six terms at nearby Deerfield Academy from 1804 to 1809, farming for his father, brothers, or uncles in between. He excelled in class and helped to form a student society known as the "Literary Adelphi." In the company of other young scholars, he sharpened a soaring vision of his own future. Ephraim Abbot praised his teachers as "all worthy men" who "never received any but respectful treatment from the students": a stunning change from the callous apathy he had known back in Concord. In his memoirs of the early republic, a minister contrasted the "long, long, tedious hours" of common school, in which he "did scarcely a thing;' to the creative rivalry he found at his academy and collegeY "I have not felt those dreadful effects from emulation, that many fearthat many think inseparable from its vigorous exercise;' this man reflected. "Experience" had shown that this motivational tool could work wonders.

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Here we should pause and resist the temptation to align early national supporters of emulation with the amoral exponents of "survival of the fittest" who gained power later in the nineteenth century. In the new republic, after all, emulation did not imagine or anticipate, much less encourage, a grim struggle between social groups. Nor did it abide what one man called "an unhallowed and envious ambition:' Rather, it promised to alert individuals to the discerning gaze of others, and in that way to inspire everyone to a new sort of social awareness: a desire to merit the applause of strangers. "I do acknowledge my indebtedness to emulation:' the minister continued. "If any mental principle has ever done me good, it is assuredly this:' Alas, he reflected, the desire to win praises and become visible had also left "some alloy of evil" behind, in the world if not in him. 42

The Ethics of Emulation Academies based their hopes on emulation and thus struggled to define it. Everyone knew that emulation "excited:' "roused:' and "awakened" people. Everyone knew that emulation happened when people compared themselves to certain models or goals, and then tried to match or surpass the target. But when did benign imitation give way to harmful rivalry? When did "generous" emulation collapse into muttering envy? When did the worthy goal of excellence ramify into insatiable ambition? At the 1807 opening of an academy in Wiscasset, Maine, one gentleman-orator conceded that home tutoring was "generally more favorable to morals" than classroom instruction. Yet "publick institutions" were "the most propitious means of promoting emulation, which is the very soul of literary improvements:' Thus, students should go to school rather than stay at home. (In this way he posed the same pedagogical question as John Locke, whose educational treatise he surely knew, and then gave the opposite answer.) What was emulation? A "laudable spirit:' he offered, whereby those "who are eminent for their improvement will be models of imitation for others:' and "a generous ardor to excel will animate every bosom:' For this speaker, the virtues of these new values ultimately relied on the adjectives that held them in check: "laudable:' "generous:' "judicious."43 Even though girls often outnumbered boys at academies, it is difficult to find a female analog to Silas Felton, who "importuned" for schooling against father's wishes. The cultural problem seems to have centered more on the restless son than the eager daughter. Without a reasonable chance to

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strike out on her own, the well-educated young woman posed less of a threat to family stability. Academies left a young woman "polished"; she would adorn the households she served, not abandon them. Young women had different "employments and pursuits" in their futures, one orator noted, and with a better education they would become "more agreeable and judicious" as wives and mothers. All the same, the traditional fear of the learned lady and the gender confusion she would bring still stigmatized academy women. In The Mother of a Family, Nelly notes that her uncle disliked well-schooled women for their supposed unwillingness to labor, and that her brother called such girls "smooth-chin'd phosophers" ("philosophers;' Latitia amends). Yale graduate and Continental Army veteran James Morris found similar prejudices when he returned to his home parish of South Farms, Connecticut, in 1783. Revolted by the rustic manners he found, Morris began to tutor parish youth, girls included. Sure enough, "it was often said that girls need not learn to write, if they knew enough about it to write their names it was sufficient." 44 Soon after, Morris opened his own academy and began holding end-ofterm prize contests in front of the South Farms meetinghouse. The prospect of winning a book during a public ceremony, he reports, "excited a spirit of emulation" among his mostly wealthy students. At first the townsfolk must have accepted or appreciated Morris's efforts, for in 1787 they made him a deacon "by a great majority:' Things went south soon after his re-election in January 1793. Church records reveal that in June of that year Morris accused one woman of "scandalous" behavior with a man who was not her husband. The following July, he brought charges against another man for spreading "diverse scandalous reports" of the Morris name. Whatever the origins of the quarrel, it clearly dovetailed with a debate over Morris Academy. During one month in the summer of 1794, the local church held seven separate meetings to sort out the "many reports" circulating against Morris's "moral character"; one of these assemblies lasted well into the night and led to a "warm altercation:' Again, Morris explained the sound and fury by lumping his critics into a passive-voiced Other: "It was said [that] I was making an innovation on the manners and customs of the youth. I was blowing up their pride. They would feel themselves above their mates and they would feel above labor. There must be a stop put to all this:' Some added the lurid charge that Morris was "too familiar" with his female pupils. In a way they could not articulate, perhaps, South Farms residents found Morris a threat to their homes, livelihoods, and futures. Eventually they called a tribunal of nearby pastors to hear their case against him.45

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The founding of Atkinson Academy in New Hampshire also drew local protest. With just 500 residents and a tiny village, this farming hamlet may seem an unlikely place for cultural "innovation." But its minister, Stephen Peabody, tirelessly promoted the new school. He mobilized local labor to build the edifice in 1786-1787, went door-to-door every year thereafter to secure patrons, and boarded pupils in the parsonage. Peabody had great success in drawing out-of-town pupils, but he also ran into persistent opposition from the townsfolk. One woman was "very warm about our making scholars pay for their schooling;' and most everyone had mixed or muted feelings on the enterprise. In June 1789, resident Caleb Noyes told Rev. Peabody that "some of ye people [were] disturbed" by the school. "I went down to Jona Sawyers to get a pair of bits put in;' the minister recorded in the fall of that year. "[He] is against exhibitions-and talks as he always does, like a fool!" And, in December: "I had a talk with Lt. Poor about [the] exhibition he is very zealous against it and talks totally without reason. D[eacon] Knight is almost as unreasonable." 46 Who were these opponents? The density of surnames in a town like Atkinson makes it difficult to identify the particular Sawyer, Poor, or Knight whom Peabody encountered. Then again, that difficulty speaks to the family ties that enmeshed country folk in a moral and social world at odds with advanced schooling and "exciting" pedagogy. One critic, Caleb Noyes, was a native-born yeoman who had inherited substantial real estate and his family's church pew. Jesse and Jonathan Sawyer were blacksmiths and farmers who owned several plots in town, bordered by men who shared their surname. Jonathan was also one of the founding members of the town church, the charter of which reaffirmed that people were "sinful and unworthy Creatures:' Jonathan Knight, the "unreasonable" deacon, came from a family of yeoman and house-wrights. They were, in sum, local leaders, in that their influence rested on their positions inside Atkinson's borders andreflected the opinions expressed there. At a 1789 town meeting held at and about the academy, Rev. Peabody (who served as moderator) found that "a number came and would not come in to the house they pretended there was a wicked plan laid to get money from them." By refusing to set foot in the new school, these residents conveyed their disapproval of the new enterprise in their midst. 47 To protest the costs of a new school did not imply hostility to schooling in general; indeed, the woman who was "very warm" about the school's fee might have been angry because she planned to enroll more of her children

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than ever before. The quarrel with this and other academies rather turned on what they taught and how they taught it. Long after the initial fight over the school, the Rev. Peabody still did the rounds to garner students and support for the academy. Late in 1802, he visited one John Dow, whom he found "killing his hogs, with Caleb Richard's help." They all had dinner at Peabody's home and "talked about academy matters:' while Dow "talked like himself." Peabody does not reveal what transpired, but surely he had some convincing to do, with other locals if not with these. They were busy storing meat for the winter. They had to work harder than ever to keep up with the market and their neighbors as well as the pace of business that turnpikes enabled. Academies were asking them not only to give up labor power and school fees but also to expose their children to an environment that marginalized the accomplishments-and the ambitions-of honest farmers and obscure parents. 4 8 Some of Peabody's townsmen may have opposed exhibitions because the pride-provoking events were sometimes held inside the town church. Although he generally blamed the troubles on the "envy" of the South Farms locals, James Morris also reports that "Religion was made the 'shouting horn'" against his "mode of instruction:' Morris considered religion crucial to social order and scorned the impiety of South Farms. Yet the "true spirit" of Christianity for this liberal gentleman could be found in a "benevolent temper of mind;' in "cheerful and social" morality rather than the "sour and gloomy" ranting of unlettered evangelicals. From his perspective, emulation posed no moral threat as it fueled personal and national progress. For many seekers, however, Morris's methods violated any number of Biblical teachings, including Psalm 75: "God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another:' No one took this Old Testament lesson literally; inequities of status and property were obvious and widely accepted in the hinterlands. But to foster distinctions based on learning, and to thereby create a desire among youths to stand out and over their "mates:' not to mention their parents and neighbors-that was something more, indeed something else. "A degree of emulation, among literary institutions, is proper:' decided one Calvinist pastor in 1818. "But when it goes to pull down one, in order to build another up, it is wrong:' 49 Perhaps the most thorough attack on competitive classrooms came in the 1818 article "On Ambition as a Motive in Education;' published in the Boston-based Christian Observer. Mankind differed "not a little" in its views of ambition, the author deadpanned. The passion came in three varieties: the drive for a better moral character; the thirst for glory and public acclaim;

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and the compulsion for success "at the expense of a competitor." The first was nothing less than "benevolence expanding itself;' the motive for "rendering the sphere of usefulness more extensive:' But even though the other strains of ambition prompted "deeds of vast enterprise;' which did much public good, they ultimately relied on the selfish love of praise. Thus they were "directly repugnant to the real spirit of Christianity;' which cultivated fellowship and humility. Academies and schools like them thus paid lip service to Christian piety while betraying its essence. By ranking students and distributing praise so that "the excellence in view is comparative;' in fact, they spread the most vicious strains of the dangerous passion. 50 Even worse than ambition, the author noted, was that "one passion, so mean and despicable in its nature ... that its advocate cannot be found:' The author continued: "this passion-! need not say that I mean envy-is the offspring and the almost constant attendant of emulation." The evils of pride, slander, and above all envy were the "usual" and "inevitable" results of "that emulous and ambitious spirit which is encouraged in the education of youth:' They followed rivalry as night followed day. Of course, no one (besides the Marblehead founders) argued for envy. But while academies insisted that its elements could be isolated, refined, and then redeployed as emulation, orthodox wisdom saw envy as an irreducible sin to which everyone was prone. Who could honestly say that they had never felt a twinge of envy at the success or prowess of another? If nothing else, such mortification was damningly authentic: no one could feign envy or jealousy as they could happiness or inspiration. Envy was as human as sin, and academies were foolish to suppose that their students would admire those who excelled them. Such admiration was beyond the reach of most people-especially young, unregenerate ones. The whole plan of emulation therefore rested on a fallacy born of the very pride it encouraged. 5 1 After his term at Leicester and a short stint back on the farm in 1795-1796, Silas Felton brought these controversial techniques to his home parish of Marlborough. Breaking with the usual curriculum, the self-assured young teacher taught "the art of oratory" by giving his pupils parts of a speech to memorize. He called this an "undertaking entirely new;' and for local farm youth, it certainly was. "When they began to speak;' he recalled, "it was very awkwardly:' They were "entirely unacquainted" with the meaning of the script they were supposed to perform, and so felt "discouraged." To inspirit them, Felton evidently drew from the mores and methods he had learned at Leicester. And "as soon as I began to dress them to suit their respective parts;' he recorded in an apparent reference to class rankings, "it

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raised their ambition to such a pitch that their greatest thought was, who would perform the best:' Felton was broadening the motivational revolution of the late eighteenth century. As hundreds and then thousands of recent academy students like him taught district schools, more and more country youth encountered the signature forms and underlying spirit of emulation, no matter if they went to academies or not. 52 By deliberately "raising" ambitions, Felton both fascinated and infuriated his townsmen. At first he invited a few residents to watch the students speak, "and [we] had more or less spectators every evening:' After testing the waters of town opinion and building a suitable stage, he held the town's first exhibition in February 1797. According to Felton, the good people of Marlborough flocked to the event. But, as he also admitted (or bragged), "a few superstitious bigots" protested. They "pretended they thought it was the works of the Devil." Felton pressed on, irreverent and cocksure as ever. After convincing the local minister to visit the district schools, he organized other exhibitions from 1798 to 18oo. "These Exhibitions pleased the greater part of the people:' Silas claims, "and many, who were strong opposers in the beginning ... afterwards informed me that they had their information from the enemies of it, and that their information was false:' In other words, his reforms met substantial resistance before making gratifying progress. Of course, "a few superstitious and bigoted persons" continued to defame the performances. He never mentions his parents' view. 53 Emulation at academies also raised the perennial question of post-Revolutionary America: did a given person, policy, or institution benefit the public, or not? By the time he held his first exhibition in his hometown, Silas Felton had developed a vivid sense of public good, which he linked to the "land of liberty" known as the American republic rather than "the Neighborhood" of western Marlborough. But William Manning, a middle-age farmer from a nearby town, also believed in the public good. Instead of incorporating academies, Manning argued, the state should establish common schools in every town and make certain that every child attended, "for the public is as much interested in the learning of one child as another:' Drawing from a provincial morality that valued each household for the work it did, Manning devised a democratic philosophy for the entire republic. He wanted the state to mitigate inequalities of power and prestige, empowering the laboring "many" against the privileged "few." In a similar spirit, the enlightened radical Robert Coram contrasted academies with truly "public:' or tax-supported, schools. In the former, a paying minority learned dead languages and aristocratic manners. In the latter, all children gained the useful skills that underlay

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personal and national independence. Coram also found classroom competition counter-productive and un-republican, a wrong-headed innovation that always generated "jealousy and envy, under the specious semblance of emulation:' Republican virtue, he foresaw, could neither coexist nor compete with the desire for preeminence. 54 If so many country parents were leery of academy schooling for so many reasons, why did they (by all accounts) flock to exhibitions? Why did they (grudgingly, at times) allow their children to enroll? How did the academy movement overcome such opposition? Part of the answer stems from the social clout of educational reformers and the powerful logic of national progress they employed. Among these reformers, an authentic idealism about the public good reinforced their equally authentic disdain for the rustics in the way. At his 1794 tribunal, for example, James Morris was disgusted to find his neighbors testify "to what they knew was not true" in order to discredit him. After escaping with a slap on the wrist, he went on to expand his school until it enrolled students from almost every state-a fitting end to his struggle against provincialism. Within a few years of the tribunal, his disappointed enemies either moved or were "taken away by the immediate hand of God:' Moreover, the youthful demography and resulting land shortages of the early republic made it difficult for farm parents to enforce their preferences on their children. Even if they had enough property to grant or withhold, like Silas Felton's parents, they often fought an uphill battle to keep their children at home and from school. 55 Then again, "exciting" pedagogy held its own appeal, even for those most likely to consider it immoral. In his 1823 novel, The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper satirized the "prodigious exultation" that the bumpkin relatives of one pupil disclosed at seeing one of their own on the exhibition stage, butchering a translation ofVirgil. Catharine Maria Sedgwick similarly described a mother who watched her daughter give a speech. "My daughter, sir ... my daughter, ma'am:' whispers the "swollen" woman to the unlucky folk nearby. "'You see, by the bill, the prize composition is to be spoken by the writer of it."' A sharp-witted editorialist in 1794 also mocked the misplaced hubris of academy parents. Although their twenty-year-old graduate had become "too proud and indolent to labor" for the "honest" father, the mother "says that [he] beat all the boys to nothing in the academy." His ambition was their pride as well as their problem. 56 The upshot of such commentary was that only the locals could miss the real spirit of emulation and brag of its surface effects, trivializing the important work at hand with their petty ambition for small distinctions. Yet, for

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actual rural families, the thought of "beating all the boys to nothing;' or of watching their children do so, may have carried special appeal. Exhibitions, public exams, and advanced learning tapped emotional currents that country life normally held in check: pride in self, desire for praise, the urge to stand out and be noticed. Indeed, such distinctions may have grown ever more precious in the democratic culture of nineteenth-century America, boasting as it did of the fundamental sameness of citizens. No wonder that even an academy founder like James Morris had to confess that advanced schooling could sow "selfish ambition" and disregard for parents, while even a critic of the schools had to concede that emulation was "an engine of wondrous potency." 57 How to gauge the value of an academy education? How, indeed, to measure the significance of anyone's education, relative to the life he or she would have otherwise led? There is, of course, the simple matter of earning potential. Charles Harding had been paid $6 per month teaching school in southern Vermont; after his term at Brattleboro, he made $9. More important, his preceptor gave him a letter or certificate authorizing him to teach "any district school;' not just those where people already knew him. This man "saw my diligence;' Harding relates, "and regardless of my thread bare coat he cheered me on:' Silas Felton's preceptor also favored the young man known as "Lazy" for his "Industry and progress in learning;' and encouraged him to find a better teaching post than those in western Marlborough. Academies thus expanded the potential range and scope of employment for their students. By equipping young men with letters or certificates and inserting them into village networks, the schools undermined the customary correlation between household "credit" and personal prospects, not to mention the social relevance of local gossip and reputation. 58 Ultimately, the significance of these schools and the many smaller ones they influenced lay in their power to approve. Students arrived at their doors with many competing ideas of who they were and should later become, of what was possible and important in life. Did they belong to the relatives and neighbors who needed them to be more industrious than ever? Or did the relevant world actually stretch much farther from home and church and town? Above all, how were they to understand their own ambitions and to conceive of ambition itself, which everyone knew was explosive and powerful and newly applicable to the "rising generation" and the nation they would inherit? Whatever else ambition had come to mean for someone like Silas Felton, it surely signified personal departure from a world governed by

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household interests in favor of one built on national prospects. Academies approved of this kind of ambition every day: in their policies and discourses, in their curriculum and social life, and in the examples set by teachers, preceptors, and other students. The dilemma for Silas Felton, Charles Harding, Ephraim Abbot, Daniel Mann, Thomas Burnside, and Edward Hitchcock was to turn that ambition into a living.

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In his thirties, Edward Hitchcock glanced back at his teenaged years-and did not like what he saw. His younger self had been haughty, restless, and "well nigh spoiled through with philosophy and vain conceit." He had forsaken his Calvinist heritage because orthodox pieties ran against "my prejudices, the preaching I had always heard-the opinions of most of my friends, and my temporal interest." These self-indictments were true enough. Hitchcock's minister since he was fourteen was a Unitarian, like most Deerfield villagers, while his uncle, neighbor, and mentor, Epaphras Hoyt, was an "extremely skeptical" man who made "frequent lectures against orthodox religion:' At the nearby academy, moreover, the young villager had learned to take pride in his academic feats, measure himself alongside well-heeled classmates, and seek public recognition for his talents. Upon finishing school at the age of sixteen, in 1809, Edward was something more (and less) than a simple hatter's son: a "puffed up" young man who spent the first six days of the week thinking of himself and the last one listening to how God loved him all the same. He had "high hopes of distinction" in the world and a strong "ambition" for its notice and praise. 1 While explaining this checkered past, Hitchcock cited both his own failings and the social context in which they had grown. He was wrong, he seems to suggest, but not entirely at fault. He might well have indicted the entire cultural project and process of which Deerfield's village, church, and academy were only local examples. Derived from enlightened premises about self and society, and sanctioned by the originally Federalist design for an extended and cohesive nation, this endeavor interacted with an array of social changes and played out in the various fields of economic thought and public works, family strategy and religious belief, school life and peer sociability. By elevating the strivings of the nation and society over those of the household and locality, this campaign and "spirit" endorsed the very ambition that Edward Hitchcock first embodied and then regretted.

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If the ambitious project mapped out new possibilities for Hitchcock and others, however, the future it promised was remarkably imprecise. What, after all, did "distinction" or "excellence" mean the day after exhibition? How were individuals to obtain their elevated goals once they left the shelter of school and dependence? One set of answers appeared in Ben Franklin's autobiography, which Silas Felton idolized and which historians often mark as the first installment of a new American genre-the how-to manual for self-making men. But most of that literature did not appear until the 1830s and 1840s, when the conditions of American life were fundamentally different from those of the early republic. Even the constant invocation of "emulation" as the soul of progress often failed to specify who or what to emulate, as if the only sure thing was that young people could not rely on received wisdom or conventional role-models. There was no reliable guide to self-fashioning in the early national hinterlands, only the vague imperative to escape "obscurity" and serve society. Indeed, ambitious men like the six figures studied here ran into the deflating fact that the nation they sought to embody had small use for their aspirations. Their difficulties as they turned twenty-one and searched for livelihoods shaped their political and religious beliefs, their relationships with friends and love interests, and their perceptions of failure. 2

Friends and Patrons Academy students were notoriously unwilling to return to household labor. "Proud of [their] accomplishments;' wrote an elitist wag in 1806, "our young gentlemen are apt to suppose themselves to be personages of too much consequence to return to their former laborious occupations:' Thus they tried "to crowd themselves into the learned professions;' with predictably poor results. It was not only that school life could make honest labor unbearable, although it often did. (Three days after writing that "the day has really come" for her academy exhibition, Jemina Brewer was back at home: "I went to spinning and the time past very slowly away.") It was also that academies encouraged young men, especially, to reach higher up the social scale than their minds and breeding authorized. ''All, in all ranks, are discontented in a state of pupilage, and anxious to be quit of parental control;' lamented the American Monthly Magazine in 1817. This "impatience at remaining in obscurity" could be found everywhere, and even though it fostered a laudable "spirit of enterprise;' it also undermined social order. More to the point, the nation

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had been "overrun" by academies, which annually produced "multitudes of half-educated candidates for public confidence and honor" to "crowd the professions." To amend these problems, the author advised young men to bear patiently until "the time appointed by nature and good taste for assuming the toga virilis." 3 Such high-brow counsel seems to pine for a rigid, European-style social hierarchy, in which common folk know their place and stick to it. There is no question that many upper-class Americans in the new republic entertained such hopes, in safe company at least. By imagining those aristocratic longings as the primary obstacles to the democratic and capitalistic world to come, however, we not only oversimplify but also misread the trials of ambition and ambitious people in early national America. Consider, again, the social ills described in the American Monthly Magazine. Although the author devolved into a general attack on his "impatient" countrymen, he still made a vital distinction between those who wanted to speed the arrival of adult status (as by leaving an apprenticeship or heading west) and those who sought to redefine that status (as by "crowding" the professional ranks). Both persuasions grew readily in the economic, political, and social mediums of the early national era, although the first approach was far more feasible for most people. The most relevant resistance to those in the second and more daring category did not come from the stuffy pretensions of dead-end elites but from the ambivalence of family members and neighbors who wondered what ambitious men wanted, if not independence. 4 Self-making was a group effort, especially at the onset of a new career and especially for those who had already left home before going to school. These people absolutely required friends in high(er) places. To review, Ephraim Abbot had departed the Concord farm and arrived at Phillips Exeter Academy in 18oo, convinced that he could become a better pastor than "some aged minister" he did not specify. His years at Exeter gave him the "public education" he wanted and made possible an even more prestigious sort of schooling. Already by 18oo, the Phillips schools annually sent a small contingent of students to Harvard. In 1802, Abbot's preceptor, whom he had come to love "as a father;' recommended him for entry. Abbot was now at the threshold of a public life, and although he stayed in touch with one of his younger sisters back in Concord, he did not hesitate to escape obscurity once and for all. 5 College students were very scarce and proverbially ambitious in early national America. Harvard students primarily arrived from gentry households in New England, although they also came from the southern states and

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Figure 12. Harvard College, early nineteenth century. The Houdin-Dorgemont View, Plate XX. Reprinted from Hamilton Vaughan Bail, Views of Harvard: A Pictorial Record to 1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1949).

West Indies. Their privileged upbringing made their subordinate roles in college particularly vexing, while the prevailing language of revolution and natural rights enhanced these perennial tensions during Abbot's time on campus. In his junior year, for instance, the "Bread and Butter Rebellion" nearly brought the expulsion of an entire class. In this case and several others, a rather petty flashpoint revealed deeper conflicts over the moral and intellectual status of the students. Faculty members, especially the older and more Calvinistic ones like Eliphalet Pearson ("the Elephant;' to students), saw the pupils as unusually wicked children who required in loco parentis discipline. Students disagreed. They celebrated "genius;' their own and others. By this they meant not sheer cognitive ability but the unique qualities of select minds, the native talents and sensibilities that lay dormant in even the most remote habitations. Genius was what made someone original and creative-and, for that matter, ambitious. 6

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Although he shared and absorbed these beliefs, Ephraim Abbot's upbringing had impressed in him the implicit duty to obey and defer. Also, he needed Harvard more than most of his classmates. He seems to have become a leader of the loyal minority on campus, or of what he called the "conservative" students who deferred to the faculty. In 1802, his classmates appointed him to deliver an oration; he spoke about "our improvement and happiness, as individuals, and our harmony and respectability, as a class:' He urged them to avoid the "turbulent spirit" of rebellion, a position that led some students-out of grudging respect, or outright derision, or both-to call him "Father:' His ambition to become a pastor further separated him from the genteel majority of students, who anticipated careers in law, medicine, or commerce. Abbot rejected extreme Calvinism, yet scorned those who replaced God with Nature or "philosophy." He later remarked that Jesus Christ "would be a Puritan:' a defender of evangelical truths in a profane world. 7 All of this landed him on the losing side of a long-brewing struggle between liberals and Calvinists at Harvard, one that culminated during his tenure in the resignation of Eliphalet Pearson and other orthodox professors. Amid these quarrels, Abbot helped to form the "Saturday Evening Religious Society;' a gathering of pious students from all academic classes. Abbot may have dwelled on this group and these achievements in his autobiography because he intended his story for Harvard's bookshelves. Still, his kinship with like-minded peers and classmates had clearly begun to surpass his prior and customary ties to parents and townsfolk by the early 18oos. An incident during his sophomore year made this painfully obvious. Struck by a "severe bilious attack" and carried to a nearby town in search of help, Abbot found many locals unwilling to help him and his friends, "because we were scholars, and they were afraid to trust us:•s We were scholars. The words stand out because they signify a group consciousness, while this and other autobiographies generally reveal and develop an individual one. Abbot makes clear that these students, more than his siblings or peers from home, had become his primary allies or "friends;' the people with whom he shared hopes, fears, and aspirations. In the early republic, friendship could refer to a blood link or patron-client relationship as well as to an elective, egalitarian camaraderie. For ambitious men, friends were those who shared their struggles or "cheered on" and "encouraged" them within a world that, on the whole, did not. Abbot's friends included the Concord minister and deacon who had begun his theological training, the Concord villagers who had helped pay for his schooling, and the preceptor of Phillips Exeter. (In an 18o8letter, but not in his self-story, Abbot also refers to

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the "assistance" his father gave while he was in school-another example of the invisible economy of family patronage that no one likes to recall.) These sponsors were identifiable, and their "encouragement" noteworthy, because the ambient voices advised him to be useful and practical and primarily attentive to household needs. 9 While Ephraim Abbot found enough friends and sponsors to keep his ambitions both viable and inchoate, Thomas Burnside learned their importance from their absence. Having departed the Northumberland farm, where he counted for very little, the only relevant kin he had was his younger relative, Samuel. Late in life, this more fortunate son recalled that he entered Dartmouth in 1801 and left in 1805 "with the usual honors and distinctions" as well as "all the ardor, and buoyant hopes, and ambitious aspirations, common to a young man of 22 years." After graduating, Samuel found a "liberal friend" who helped train him as a lawyer. In this case-or at least in this narrative-support from family evolved into patronage from friends. Thomas had neither form of help. Long "embarrassed" in Northumberland due to poor health, he enrolled at Haverhill in 1801 "with all the ardour and energy of body and mind, that ambition, prompted by necessity, could excite:' In both autobiographies, then, ambition follows from "ardor" or intense feeling. But while Samuel's owed to the carrot of encouragement, Thomas's followed the stick of necessity. 10 At Haverhill, Thomas studied desperately and taught school in between terms, trying to defray his expenses and find some occupation that did not require physical vigor. His fragile health relentlessly "discouraged" him. Moving past the perceptual divide between the sickly and the healthy, Thomas's preceptor suggested that the young man begin to study with the local physician; this physician, in turn, recommended that Thomas take a convalescing trip in the early fall of 1802. Thomas thus set out on horseback for the British province of Lower Canada, anxious as always "to recover my health, on which my all depended:' In his autobiography, this trip features as a transformative moment on par with his pilgrimage to Haverhill the year before. He describes his journey to a remote tavern in vivid detail, perhaps because he regained his appetite there or because he mastered his fear of the dark forest on every side of "nature's turnpike:' Having survived his trip into the northern woods, he writes that he was "highly disposed to be, 'therewith contented:" If he stopped along the way to see family in Northumberland, he never mentions it. Instead he makes two other comments about the journey that qualify as either mysterious or pathetic, depending on one's interpretive mood. The trip was "the greatest exploit of my life"; his horse was "at that time, my best friend:' 11

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For those who remained at home while going to school, such as Daniel Mann and Silas Felton, the search for a living hinged less on friends and patrons and more on their parents' assets and inclinations. In Dedham village, Daniel had received all the encouragement one could ask for from Herman and Sally Mann, both of whom embraced schooling, enlightenment, and even youthful ambition. The problem was that they also had ten children to care for, and no reliable means to do so. When Daniel was eighteen, in 1811, his father finally gave up on the newspaper business and devoted the household to a wide array of printing and peddling jobs. From his stationery store in the village, Herman Mann turned out musical sheets, playing cards, school diplomas, and Fourth of July orations. He also pioneered the production of"marbled" paper in the United States. This colorfully decorative style had developed over several decades in western Europe; Herman and Daniel probably learned it from a visitor to their village, then sought out high-paying customers around Boston. Along with his five younger brothers, Daniel helped his father fill printing orders and produce marbled paper. He also accompanied his father on peddling trips to southern New England. 12 During the early 1810s, Daniel traveled to Rhode Island and Connecticut over the turnpikes his family had helped to promote, making contacts with different printers and honing his writing and conversation skills. Evidently and incrementally, he also decided that Dedham had little to offer him, and that he would have to depart to realize himself. He never tried to explain why Dedham was such a dead end for ambitious youth, but in 1827, one of his village peers did. The majority of the locals, this man ruminated, disliked those with "the high gifts of writing and speaking." They wanted people who thought just like them to represent their narrow interests in state or national politics. Because of this twisted excuse for democracy, the brighteyed youth, "fresh from the groves of the academy;' found his hopes "trampled down:' No one in Dedham trusted the talented youth, much less appreciated him. Meanwhile, "the blustering, the mercenary, and the cunning man in small things" easily stole the loyalty of the farmers by making hollow professions of egalitarian zeal. Thus did the "illiberal prejudices or selfish views" of small-town life sink the promise of"every elegant genius" and "every generous spirit:' 13 Because of his parents' stature in his hometown, Silas Felton had more liberty to plan his life and indulge his ego. Ever since the fall of 1794, when he was eighteen, Silas had courted Lucretia Fay, daughter of a small farmer and

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tenant who lived near the Felton homestead. When he set out for Leicester Academy the following autumn, he claims to have broken off the relationship. As he was "not in any condition to marry;' he decided to focus on his schooling. After all, Lucretia was just another member of the old neighborhood. He could do better. But no sooner did Silas return home for a visit than he went carousing with friends to the Fay household. "I thought I would chat with Miss L. a little while, tarried behind;' he notes of that important evening, " [and] in the Morning, I found myself where a few days [ago] I could almost have sworn I should not have been:' Here and elsewhere, Silas codes his sexual experiences in furtive tones and double entendres, much like his hero, Ben Franklin. 14 For several years the pattern held: Silas taught school, boarded in homes along his teaching circuit, and spent many nights at the Fay household. Despite the obvious fact that the "Lazy" son of the family would never get by as a farmer, Silas' father still summoned him back to the farm as needed, perhaps with a desultory promise to help out when the time came. As a teacher, Silas once bumped heads with one of the many How households in Marlborough, because he slapped little George How on the wrist for misbehaving. The ensuing ruckus must have been especially uncomfortable for Silas, because it cast him in the role of old-fashioned and authoritarian schoolmaster, and he hated old-fashioned and authoritarian schoolmasters. Generally, though, Silas relied on emulation to govern the nearly Boo students he had in class from 1795 to 18oo. His exhibitions won acclaim from all but the "superstitious bigots" who opposed their underlying message, "and the parents frequently told me their children never learnt so much in one school before." 15 It seems that Silas became a small-time celebrity-the young man everyone knew and the old folks distrusted-and that he used this popularity along with his family stature to keep Lucretia waiting. He visited friends and women after teaching each day, apparently enjoying a favorable sex ratio as well as a decline in social controls over youthful carnality. "In the meantime a number of Misses were striving to excite my attention," he snickers crudely, "but they succeeded no farther than the pleasure of my Company a night or so." He read, reveled, and saved some money. He also took a fourweek trip to upstate New York and returned "in good health and spirits" along one of the new turnpikes. Silas was biding his time for bigger things, and everyone else would have to wait until he figured out what those things mightbe. 16

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Radicals and Reactionaries Only when Lucretia's father bought land in Vermont in 1798 did Silas Felton have to grow up. (Naturally, her father expected her to move with the family.) Lucretia's impending absence made Silas appreciate her a bit more, and he began to "seriously" consider "what I could do with a family." Had they not spent years together "without ever having the least difference"? Did her gentle virtues not outweigh the fact that her family would only be able to give her "a decent setting out"? In the fall of 1798, after much reflection and soul-searching, he proposed to Lucretia in a letter he copied into his selfnarrative. Rejecting marriages made in haste or for profit, Silas still framed his offer around economic concerns, much as his parents would have. Unlike his father, though, he could not promise a competency. "I have ransacked and ransacked the different occupations, which are followed in the world untill I have almost distracted my brain:' he told his sweetheart. "Yet, I know not what to do:' Farming was no option, either because he refused to sentence himself to obscurity or because his father had flatly declined to give him farmlands. When they were married in January 1799, then, the young couple had little more than family insurance against outright destitution. For the first months of their marriage, they lived with Silas's parents, an awkward arrangement he barely mentions. 17 Determined "to follow some other occupation" than teaching, Silas tried to free his mind from his boorish surroundings. By the time he married, he claims to have read more than one hundred titles, which he organized into ten categories. "Religion and Morality" was the largest, followed by lists of novels, travel narratives, and historical accounts. The most startling entries include the Koran, along with the more radical products of the Enlightenment, such as Tom Paine's Age of Reason. He read the Constitutions of the United States and of the sixteen different states, "Besides a great many laws:' He made it through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, "Lock on Education:' and various histories of antiquity. Alongside a topographical and historical review of central Massachusetts published in 1793, which lamented that the houses in many towns remained "scattered over the place without much order:' he read about the far reaches of Africa. Consuming all sorts of ideas had become an ethic to him, a moral imperative built on the liberal principle of inquiry over dogma. 18 In a manuscript titled "Chronicles of Liberty:' and in letters to friends written in the late 1790s, Silas drew his readings and experiences into a political ideology that both reflected and endorsed his ambitions. The story that

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he relayed went like this: a group of"priests;' once in league with George III, had recently closed ranks with "the other Aristocrats;' also known as Federalists, to keep everyday citizens out of power. They meant to rebuild the oppressive social order that had prevailed before 1776, the year of the Revolution and his birth. In that world, Silas believed, people had lived in fear of God and taken what their leaders "assert to be true" as gospel, for the elites were always "discouraging Learning, among the lower Class of people." Because he considered power broadly, conflating together anyone who told other people what to do or think, Silas saw everyday patriarchs and Federalist statesmen as two of a kind. Co-conspirators, in fact. He also defined "the lower Class of people," not in the modern sense of a waged proletariat, but as the dependent majority who lived under the rule of fathers, real or fictive. His political principles thus enabled him to situate his personal battles with obscurity and local doubters within a historical struggle against tyranny. 19 Throughout the late 1790s, Federalists dominated Marlborough (and New England). Silas saw "bigoted" and "sour-hearted" pietists all around him, and he clenched his fists at their low regard for human nature, their myopic reading of scripture, and their apparent distaste for happiness itself. Each day, and especially every Sunday, Silas raged, they crushed youthful spirits with embittered lessons about duty and depravity and sin. They were greedy and selfish, and yet assailed young people for any hint of self-awareness. Late in 1797, Silas wrote one of his friends to decry a recent sermon in Marlborough by another one of these hidebound Puritans, who "tell us ... 'I know better than you:" This one had scolded the local youth for "growing more vile;' simply because they had studied religion and politics and "opened their eyes, so much, that they have ventured to read all sides of a question, or at least two sides:' (Perhaps they had done so as his students.) His repeated emphasis on "reading two sides" and listening to others' opinions suggests the deep-seeded frustrations Silas had developed while taking orders and following farming. 20 In addition to obstinacy and tyranny, Silas charged Federalists with serial dishonesty. However much they praised liberty, he believed, they were actually "conspiring against reason and republicanism:' This belief in the systematic malignity of shadowy antagonists was a staple of both eighteenth-century politics and the Jeffersonian dissent that arose in the 1790s. In part, the opposition movement of the new republic drew strength from a "Country" tradition in Anglo-American radicalism, a nostalgic perspective that idealized rural simplicity and yeoman independence over modern corruptions. Yet Jeffersonian culture also upheld a progressive vision of freethinking, enlightened

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citizens who knew that the earth belonged to the living. This is what stands out in Felton's writings. Beyond the usual platitudes to agriculture as "the nurse of the human race;' he celebrated a more dynamic society of artisans, merchants, and scholars. The Revolution had made that society possible, forming "probably the happiest people upon the globe:' The Federalists had betrayed this, the real promise of 1776. They stood against the tide of history and the progress of America. 21 The town of Marlborough elected Silas to the post of Assessor in 1799, and over the next several years it turned against the Federalists. Most of the nation did, too. Meanwhile, the young man finally found a suitable alternative to teaching, which he could no longer abide. (The last straw came when a "Calvinistical" teacher spread rumors of Silas's ignorance.) During the summer of 1799, he and Joel Cranston, a farmer-turned-innkeeper from Marlborough, pooled money to purchase a shop in the north part of town. By 1801, Silas had committed to his commercial profession and moved Lucretia into a new home of their own. These gains mellowed his anti-authority posture and confirmed his faith in the pursuit of happiness. In an 1802letter, Silas likened himself to "the honest, industrious" type who was "contented with the common lot of Providence, yet pursuing those steps in public life, which tend most to promote peace and prosperity:' The word yet here marked the social distance, and the personal tension, between those who stayed at home (like Silas) and those who wanted more (like Silas). 22 To express his persistent ambitions, Silas Felton helped to launch the Society of Social Enquirers during 1802. Again, the most likely inspiration for this fellowship came out of his favorite book. In his autobiography, Ben Franklin described "the Junto" that he had formed for artisans-on-the-make in colonial Philadelphia. The Junto had eleven original members; Felton found twelve others to join the Enquirers. The Junto's constitution, which Franklin wrote, prescribed decorum and civility among members; the Enquirers' charter, which Felton wrote, required every meeting to begin "in the name of Order and Harmony" and to conclude "In the name of Love and Benevolence:' All but one of the Enquirers were Marlborough natives, either established men in their late thirties or recently married or engaged ones in their twenties. Yet their fundamental premise was their membership, not in their town, but in "society:' The purpose of the fellowship was "to increase the happiness of Society" while making themselves "more useful to Ourselves and Society."23 At their monthly meetings, the Enquirers posed mostly metaphysical questions, and gave mostly mixed answers. Question: How much wealth does

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a man need? Answer: Enough to satisfy "the necessaries of Life." Question: What is the duty of man? Answer: To practice "the moral and social duties:' Question: Do fashions add or diminish to the happiness of society? Answer: They add. Yet the Enquirers were hands-on reformers as well as armchair philosophers. They thought socially and acted locally. In 1803, for example, they helped devise a plan to improve Marlborough's schools by extending class terms and establishing visits by interested adults. The town approved a similar plan that year, with Felton and other Enquirers serving on the school committee. The final report of this committee subtly disputed the inheritance strategies of farm families by declaring that "no legacy we can bequeath to posterity is so valuable as a good education:'24 Felton's comrades also took issue with the customary status of women, agreeing that the "fair" should at least listen to political discussions and social theories. Accordingly, they invited their wives and fiancees to one of their meetings in January 1803. (An underwhelming gesture, those women might have thought, since the meetings were always held at their homes.) "While we esteem it our duty, to provide clothing and food for our several families:' Silas lectured to his small audience, probably gathered in the parlor of the host Enquirer, "we consider it yours, to be mistress to domestic affairsThus we view each, equal in our several spheres:' Coming from a young man who sometimes described women as sexual objects, these words might sound downright cynical. Taken that way, they reduce marriage to a onesided bargain that authorized him to do whatever he wanted, except let his wife and children go naked and hungry. More likely, though, his words signified an effort to situate manly status within the social imaginary he had embraced. Once he had fulfilled his basic duties to Lucretia and their infant girl, born in early 1802, his larger duties to society began. In other words, his "sphere" no longer enclosed the lands, home, and credit of an independent household. 25 When he finished schooling at Deerfield Academy in 1809, Edward Hitchcock sought a similar entry into society at large. While his older brothers settled on farms in Deerfield, not far from their father's shop, Edward literally gazed at the stars. In 1811, at the age of eighteen, he and his mentor, Epaphras Hoyt, used the astronomical instruments of the nearby academy to measure the exact coordinates of their home town-an especially dramatic way to put their little village in unflattering perspective. Edward Hitchcock was locating himself within the widest medium of all: not the nation, or the world, but the galaxy. The young prodigy also began to critically review the work of older and .more established astronomers, and to refer to this branch

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of science as the only one that was not "confined to this contracted earth:' He was certain that he would "pass through Harvard University" on his way to distinction, either as a lawyer or scientist. 26 In the meantime, the Society of Literary Adelphi, founded at the academy in 1807, offered an idealized version of the society beyond. In speeches given to the Adelphi in 1813 and 1814, Hitchcock devised a master narrative of the world that began, not with the American Revolution, but in a state of nature. In Man's primitive phases, he declared, people lived in isolation of each other and ignorance of their abilities. Born and bred within a "contracted sphere:' they came and went and were quickly forgotten. This sort of life was "so disgusting, so mortifying" to Edward that he could only rejoice at the recent arrival of a more "civilized society:' in which "the faculties of the mind expand" and people found "a thousand incitements to action." Chief among these incitements was ambition, or the "desire of immortalizing the name." Embracing the arguments and sensibilities of his uncle, his village, and his school, he advanced this daring claim: "In the breast of every man we perceive a spirit of ambition inciting him to deeds which will lift him high among his fellows." This spirit was "implanted in the soul of perhaps every person on earth:' presumably by God or Nature, and so deserved more notice and support than it typically received. 27 Edward refined these ideas in an 1813 speech entitled "Genius and Application." By identifying two popular fallacies that continued to hem and vex ambition, this oration implicitly collapsed the local surroundings he knew with the savage past he imagined. It built a cultural enemy for him to malign and discard and define himself against. The first fallacy: people misunderstood genius as an inborn gift to a select few. "It is high time that this error should be exploded:' Edward decreed, for it only offered an excuse for the lazy, the timid, and the narrow minded. The second fallacy: the "greater part of mankind:' so far as he knew, "almost continually" protested that they had no time to cultivate genius in themselves or others, as by reading or attending school. This gloomy conviction immured people in "the present moment:' in which gossip and stories of "some defect in their neighbors" somehow mattered. Indifferent to the "great and noble" affairs of nations and empires, ordinary folk (read: non-Adelphi) trudged along the beaten path, greedy for property and advantage but afraid of innovation and distinction. They chose to confine themselves within "some little concern of a local nature:' 28 Like Silas Felton, who railed against those who "cast their eyes no farther than the present moment:' Hitchcock thus carried an anti-local ideology no

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less than an extra-local identity. That antipathy gave ambition much of its personal and moral meaning in early national America. In an 1803 debate among the Enquirers, Felton dutifully noted the ill effects of the fiery passion when it took root in the wrong people, such as Federalist politicians or envious teachers. In fact, he argued, "a vicious absolute ruler' was the worst evil imaginable, because under such dominion "Laudable ambition would cease, and all the ambition would join on the side of vice." Both men thus turned to the concept of "laudable ambition;' which they effectively defined as the desire to reveal their personal talents and public spirit to people they did not know-to people, that is, who would never ask anything of them. Ambition sought the elusive esteem of strangers more than the grounded respect of kin; it referred to the motives and trials that lifted the self to a visible perch within society, the Promised Land where possibilities outweighed duties. By its very nature, such ambition deprived personal striving of a concrete goal, dooming its carrier to a life of ceaseless efforts for immaterial rewards. It gave voice to the most intense and daring-and unreachable-needs. 29 If polled on their twenty-first birthdays, both Felton and Hitchcock might have blamed "the envious locals;' especially the Calvinist ones, for inhibiting their noble passions. Beyond that stereotyped enemy, though, they made different judgments about how the provincial status quo frustrated genius and ambition. For Silas Felton, the prevailing arrangements of power and custom-"the system;' so to speak-did not work. He spread the blame widely, if not fairly, among everyday heads of household as well as to "priests;' "aristocrats;' and Federalists. Combined with his buoyant hopes for youthful enlightenment, Felton's quarrel with the known world gave rise to a brash, anti-clerical Republicanism. By contrast, the authority figures Hitchcock knew, including his minister, uncle, and to some extent his father, had promoted more than hindered his ambitions. Whether liberal or Calvinist, they idolized George Washington and demonized France. Their principles held sway in the Federalist stronghold of Deerfield, especially from 1807 to 1815, when Jeffersonian and Madisonian policies brought severe hardships to New England. However else he ignored his father's lessons and convictions, Edward Hitchcock upheld the stern Federalism of the hatter's home. 30 Beginning at the tender age of sixteen, in 1809, the young villager from Deerfield published brutal indictments of Jacobins, libertines, and other species of Jeffersonian excess. His earliest effort lampoons every Republican leader in Hampshire County and describes one as "so slender" as to be of "doubtful gender." In his political writings, especially, Hitchcock reveals a reactionary swagger, a quasi-macho identification with the brave forefathers.

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Writing in local newspapers as "The Voice of New England" during the War of 1812, Hitchcock argued that the nation had been founded by sober patriots, many of whom were now dead. Their virtue, not the people's vigilance, had made the United States into "the only asylum of persecuted freedom on earth." The great work was finished. There was no clerical plot to enslave Americans; the threat came from Jefferson and Madison, whose "visionary theories" and subversive ambitions might undo the achievements of Washington and Adams. Now their wicked war had decimated overseas commerce, to which "every civilized state on earth" owed its life. Citizens had to reject Southern and Jacobin rule and restore unspecified "Fathers of New England" to the helm of state. 31 It would be misleading to locate Hitchcock and Felton on "opposite" ends of the early republic's political spectrum. Then as now, the most important spectrum separated the engaged and committed from the disillusioned and disfranchised. Both of these men belong on the far end of the former; their partisan differences stemmed from a variety of factors that mattered less than their white skin, free status, and male gender. More than the opposing sides in the ratification debates of 1787-1789, the rival parties of the 1790s and early 18oos could both support the personal desire for public distinction, just as they both sponsored civic enterprise. Still, as an arch-Federalist, Hitchcock had less conceptual room to rail against the powers that be, much as archCalvinists had to swallow hard before celebrating emulation. Foreigners with vile ambitions made better enemies. In 1814, Hitchcock published The Emancipation of Europe, a seventy-page play that hailed the collapse of Napoleon's "unhallowed" and "mad" ambition. (The Adelphi and their female counterparts from Deerfield Academy delivered the play.) By locating the wrong sorts of ambition in a Gallic other and then denouncing that passion in all the ways a New Englander could, he absolved the rightful inheritors of the American Revolution of any blame for their own, presumably laudable, ambitions. 32 But if the system worked for Edward Hitchcock, then why did he remain in obscurity? To what could he attribute the "shafts of envy" that followed the talented few? Why, indeed, was the Society of Literary Adelphi necessary? In contrast to Felton, who moved rather easily from a general quarrel with the standing order to an exuberant spirit of reform, Hitchcock ran into the inherent contradictions of a dutiful ambition. His conservative politics authorized his ambitions to the extent that Federalists hoped to locate and "filter" talent, to recruit the worthy few to national notice. But his Federalism also obliged him to defend a social process that had lifted him to the brink of distinction but not over it, trapping him in his own deference to

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"the Fathers:' Every ideology has its tensions, but this one rested on a paradox, and the resulting frustrations inhere most vividly in the following passage, from Hitchcock's 1813 commonplace book: Far from the tumult of cities and the world, in the retreats of solitude often dwell men of preeminent talents and exalted virtue. There unknown to the world they pass their time in obscurity.... There virtues lie dormant which might have adorned the highest stations of society. The traveler as he passes the humble habitation of such a man, casts upon it a scornful look and pities the contracted soul of its possessor. Ah, ye great men of the earth! Ye kings and rulers of the people! Regard not thus contemptibly as you pass the humble cottage.... Perhaps there dwells a man who will one day be the saviour of his country ... another Washington [or] another Newton.

Patronized but obscure, encouraged but frustrated, Hitchcock had a tendency to lash out at "incompetent" persons in the spotlight. Surely they were to blame, even if they were not, strictly speaking, kings or rulers. "I scarcely know what to think when I perceive so many errors in your edition;' he wrote in 1814 to a famous astronomer. People like this were taking up the notice that rightly belonged to him. 33

Suitors and Strangers Just as he turned twenty-one in 1814, Edward Hitchcock lost his health. A severe case of the mumps nearly killed him, and a secondary immune response almost blinded him. The aspiring scholar could no longer read without feeling intense pain in his eyes, which meant that he could not prepare for Harvard's entry exams. No college, no professional future. The sequential disaster turned his "high hopes for distinction" to idle fancy, and he fell into a paralyzing anxiety about what would become of his life. His friends from the academy and the Adelphi were moving away or marrying, and the upcoming wedding of one such peer reduced him to mournful poetry. Laid up at his parents' home-"down the old lane"-he asked if his friend could spare "one sigh of pure pity" for him before leaving, "with her by your side, Your will be fair bride:' The failure of his health and plans underlined his modest origins, which his mentor, Epaphras Hoyt, inadvertently captured in an 1815 recommendation letter. Edward was "a pretty good astronomer for the Country;' Epaphras noted. Yet Hoyt identified the young man not as his student, his nephew, or as a playwright and orator from the Adelphi and academy, but simply as "a son of Deacon Hitchcock of this Town:' 34

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While doing odd jobs around town, Edward had little choice but to reconsider the honest living of his father and older brothers. (One of them had left town for a time and then returned; he would later confide to Edward that he had not enjoyed "the feelings of a stranger in a strange place.") The unpretending quality of the family business-its basis in productivity rather than reputation, autonomous labors rather than approving looks--carried a wellestablished claim to manly virtue in rural New England. It also mirrored and reinforced the demanding nature of the family faith. Now that pride had led Edward to ambition, and ambition to disappointment, Calvinism began to make more sense to him. Perhaps he was a sinner, just as his father had always said everyone was. Perhaps Unitarianism was but an "opiate to the conscience:' a device by which the prideful forgot their depravity. The death of another close friend in 1815 deepened Edward's spiritual and personal crisis. 35 He shared his traumatic passage with Orra White, a preceptress at the academy whom he had earlier cast in The Emancipation of Europe. (She had played the Empress of France, opposite Edward, the noble Emperor of Russia.) The daughter of a wealthy farmer from nearby Amherst, Orra had studied at two academies, including one near Boston. Even her early writings reveal her polish and erudition, her brilliance and creativity. She was also pious. Edward recalls her as the "Christian friend" with whom he shared his feelings of guilt and experience of rebirth. In contrast to the occasionally hedonistic Silas Felton, Edward never wrote (that is, never preserved) an irreverent word about women, least of all about Orra White. She was his soulmate. She had saved him from himself. 36 The simple fact that Hitchcock met Orra White speaks to the social changes and innovations their families had lived through. Edward's father, Justin, had emigrated to find work and independence during the Revolutionary years. This process had accelerated since the 1780s, funneling strangers not only to the fringes of white settlement but also to new village milieus, where schools like Deerfield Academy made possible the courtship between Edward Hitchcock and Orra White. Recall that Ephraim Abbot's parents, as well, had met due to the social upheavals and "breaking up" of the 1770s and 1780s. Since leaving the Concord farm in 1800, Ephraim himself had moved even further from his roots by studying at Phillips Exeter and Harvard. Upon graduating in 1806, he taught at an academy in nearby Charleston, saving money and turning down offers from schools as far away as Georgia. Still hoping to become a pastor, he enrolled in the fall of 1808 in the first class of Andover Theological Seminary, just formed by disgruntled Calvinists from Harvard and Boston. Among the founders was "the Elephant:' Eliphalet

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Pearson. By the spring of 1808, Abbot and Mary Holyoke Pearson, the professor's daughter, were exchanging love letters. Needless to say, she was not the sort of person he would have met had he taken his uncle's offer a decade earlier and remained in Concord. 37 "I would love my Creator supremely;' Ephraim wrote Mary in May 1808, "for without his love I know nothing can make me happy." The idea of "romantic love;' on the other hand, retained childish and flighty connotations around 18oo; a proper suitor based his proposal on moral and material commitment, not unbounded adoration. So Ephraim promised Mary that his love for her, as for God, was the real thing. He "truly and deeply" felt "the most ardent yet the most honorable passion" for her. She was his "dear friend," his "sweet girl;' his "better self." His letters range widely, touching at times on his dislike of city balls (too extravagant) and his quarrel with extreme Calvinism (too dour). Generally, though, they reiterate two basic points. First, she was in every way perfect. Her body was "delicately graceful [and] infinitely more interesting, lovely, and enrapturing, than any other I have ever seen;' while her mind was "pure and sweet, as the morning." Second, he wanted her to be "my companion, my consort," though not to marry him at the moment. 3 8 Unlike couples in farm towns, Ephraim and Mary did not know each other as members of working communities or allied families. The chance qualities of the match highlighted its romantic meaning, even as the social distance between them posed chronic problems. At first, they courted in something like secrecy, probably because Mary's father had his doubts about the suitor or because Ephraim did not want to complicate his relationship to a patron. In June 1808, Mary wondered if she and Ephraim had been "too hasty;' and asked him to return her letters. Sadly, she did not believe that she deserved the pedestal on which Ephraim had placed her. Even after they spent more time together and courted openly in Andover, she worried that Ephraim overestimated her, that there was something false or fleeting in his affection. "You have seen my very soul, do not I interest you?" he flared in October 1808. "You have searched my heart. You know it yours:' 39 Abbot realized that marriage would mean the onset of adult obligations. As everyone knew, it required foresight and prudence from both parties-and sufficient property from the groom. In A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774), an English tract read by many early republicans, including Silas Felton, an enlightened father declares that he "could never pretend" to tell his daughter whom to marry. Nor does he counsel her to avoid ambitious men, if only because they usually had better things to do than ruin a woman's heart. But

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he also commands her to avoid the congenitally insane and irretrievably foolish, along with likely carriers of "the worst diseases:' Somewhat more delicately, this tract reminded women that every couple required a "competency:' and that no besotted swain had the right to endanger his spouse and in-laws "in point of fortune:' Play it safe with a man of solid property and skills: this was the dominant message, .and it colonized Ephraim's mind even as it undercut his chances. He told Mary that he had "only the will and not the ability" to make her happy. Without the means to make "honorable and liberal provision for your temporal felicity:' he could only ask God for "competence, and contentment" and conclude that he was "so little worthy'' of her. 40 Given the basic assumptions and governing realities of the preindustrial world, the question marks that followed ambitious suitors should occasion no surprise. The more interesting line of inquiry is not whether and to what degree Mary or Mary's parents approved of Ephraim Abbot, but whether and to what degree he and others like him wanted to get married in the first place. It bears reminding that the decision to propose belonged to them, and that white American men had more liberty to form households, regardless of parental opinions, than their counterparts in Europe or Spanish America. Moreover, the tendency among young men of their time was to marry slightly earlier in life than their colonial predecessors. Increasingly, men in the early republic married in their early to mid-twenties, as Silas Felton did. Why, then, did Edward Hitchcock, aged twenty-three in 1816, not propose to Orra White after Deerfield Academy offered him the post of preceptor that year? Why wait-for years and years, as it turned out? The duration of their courtship, not the average national age of marriage, was the relevant reference point for this or any couple, and it reflects on Hitchcock's hopes for something more than a simple life in his native village. 41 Ephraim Abbot also waited so long that we wonder where his professed inability to marry shaded into an unspoken preference not to marry. Consider an 1813 letter he wrote to Mary in which he decided, against her advice, to arrange an academy education for one of his little sisters. He noted that this sibling had learned "to spin and weave, knit and sow, do house work make clothes and shoes:' If she stayed in Concord, "exposed to so much company:' she would next learn "to get her a husband:' He meant a local and average husband, who would tie her to a local and average life. In reply, Mary conceded that time away at an academy would enable the young woman to "learn a little more of the world than were she to remain at Concord:' But she also worried that Abbot's sister "may not be contented" among the refined company of strangers. By then, Mary knew that Ephraim wanted more

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than contentment, both for his sister and for himself. She also knew that Ephraim's ambitions could complicate their lives even after they had their competence.42 The difficulties of courtship for the rootless and ambitious become more evident lower down the scales of property, status, and luck. To review, Daniel Mann's parents, Herman and Sally, had married in 1793: a fatherless teacher from the farm town of Walpole, Massachusetts and a fatherless young woman from the fishing port of Gloucester. Four years later, they had left the security of real estate for Dedham village. As a printer, Herman had promoted turnpikes and other "enterprises;' encouraged a less patriarchal and restrictive family, and spread enthusiasm for the schools and teachers who "excited" youth. In some respects, then, the Manns epitomized the proper spirit of the extended republic. But they never found a reliable way to support their ten children, and in 1813, Herman sold off most of his village property. The failure of the family enterprise meant that Daniel and his siblings had to fall or dive into what one scholar calls the "whirlpool" of the market economy, the maelstrom of uncertain wages and credit that pulled individuals into urban areas, then spit them back out again. 43 It is vital to see that the best move frequently involved a return to home, family, and friends. Those who stayed behind or came back in the early republic were by no means the "losers" of their day. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that the wealthier and more fortunate preferred to remain in those places where they could expect a large inheritance in land and status. For their poorer peers, as well, remaining near home enabled all sorts of adaptations and arrangements. Two of Daniel's brothers, for example, joined together in 1816 and purchased their father's printing materials. They began a new newspaper near their old home. Two others would start a marbling business in Boston before returning home when business soured. As the eldest son, Daniel had a customary first claim to the family resources; in 1815, he and his father co-purchased a plot ofland next to the Norfolk & Bristol turnpike along with rights to a mill. Neither father nor son lacked daring, which the society and economy of the early republic enabled just enough to repeatedly disappoint. 44 As Herman's luck failed once again, however, Daniel drifted away. In January 1817, the older man sold off over $100 worth of land to cover damages owed to a local farmer. One week later, Daniel sold his own portion of the mill rights they had purchased together two years before-his first move as a (legally) independent man. Apparently tiring of his father's unreliable coattails, he departed for New Haven or Boston, using whatever capital he had

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accumulated to buy hand-sized cards. On these cards, he decided to print anything people might pay to look at: conversation pieces, musical notes, words, games. He would also use the latest technologies from European or American printers to mass produce these cards. He would make it big, he told his family; one of his siblings remarked that Daniel would soon produce cards that were "superior to any ever made in this Country:' Daniel also stayed in touch with his mother, who had learned what happened to people who aimed too high. I am sick and weak, the forty-four-year-old Sally told Daniel in an 1818 letter. Soon she would pass on. Before she arrived at "another and better life;' however, she hoped to offer "usefulness to my family and friends:' Daniel urged her not to worry about him. Once he made just one more deal, turned out just one more shipment, "my independence is sure:' 45 To his parents and siblings, Daniel existed mainly as a set of narratives, grounded in their memories and revised from time to time by a letter. He does not figure into the lengthy diary of one of his brothers, who lived and worked in Dedham, and left few and faint footprints while chasing customers across southern New England. He was a traveling salesman with no employer. Even more than the ebullient Daniel Mann, Thomas Burnside seems to disappear from the places in which he sought refuge and competence. After his convalescing trip to Lower Canada in 1802, Thomas returned to Haverhill and began studying with the local physician-again, at the recommendation of his academy trustees. His only other friend, besides his horse, was Samuel M. Burnside, who was four years younger but much more fortunate. Thomas was a stranger among strangers, shuffling from one halfhearted patron to another. 46 While at the academy, Thomas had taken dance lessons to shed some of his rusticity. Their only effect was to worsen his health and enlarge his debts. With nothing to his name except a small sum in Haverhill village, and with his "tedious and incessant" cough, it is safe to suppose that he was a nonstarter as a suitor. His poor health gave him a sound reason to become a physician, but it probably made him an object of pity or disdain, too. Without his health, who would trust or patronize him, much less love him? As of 1802, Burnside claims he had been "so discouraged" in life that his "highest ambition" was "to become a petty practitioner in medicine, get into some obscure corner of the Earth, and by labor and practice endeavor to gain a living." His only hope, in other words, was to attain the lowest denominator of usefulness, here described in terms of public selfhood rather than independent manhood. 47

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"Dreadful Blanks" "What would be the effect upon Society if no credit should be given in trade?" This was one of the eight questions that Silas Felton posed to the Social Enquirers during their brief existence, 1802-1803. By a count of six to three, the members decided that the effect would be "detrimental:' Presumably, Silas agreed with the majority, for by this point he had given up teaching for trading. He had found his business partner, like his life partner, in his hometown of Marlborough; the $1,000 that he and Joel Cranston had pooled to open their shop reveals the social capital they could tap within those borders. Some of Cranston's startup funding probably came from his sale of farm properties gained through marriage; Silas pitched in his teaching money along with $300 loaned from his father. Their initial plan was to sell goods at very low prices, but only for "Cash in hand;' meaning coin or secured notes. That way, they could make money quickly yet safely, without the risk of bad debts or outside credit. In a letter from the fall of 1801, Silas reports that "our business has as yet been prosperous, and appears likely to remain so, but you know the common saying, 'We don't know about traders: "48 He soon discovered the truth of that saying. Because no one in Marlborough had much disposable income as "Cash in hand;' he and Cranston decided-after trying a safer alternative, it bears repeating-to increase their prices and inventory while reducing their standards of payment. Drawn into credit networks that flowed from the city to the country, they found themselves swept up in the dangerous currents of the market economy. Several times a year, they traveled to Boston to purchase goods: linens, paint, spices, glassware. They must have paid in "country money;' meaning book debts and promissory notes that were difficult to collect. When they sold their goods to customers back in Marlborough, they received payment in still more country monies. This is where the credit system failed them. For when they returned to Boston to pay their own debts, urban "capitalists" (as bankers were known) charged them high interest on the country currency or discounted its value. In 1803, three major banks in the seaport formed a kind of collecting agency to buy up out-of-town notes and replace them with more reliable currency. In his journal from 1804 or 1805, Silas Felton-petty entrepreneur and Jeffersonian radical-denounced these deflationary measures: "here I must say that the Banks under the present regulations are the greatest Curses or pests with which we are plagued with ... [if] each State had only one Bank, and that Bank had been Public property, we should felt

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the Blessed effects-Money would be plenty, no running from one Bank to the other ...."Without a "public" supply of capital, "cursd pests or Brokers" from Boston banks were "rifling the honest merchants Purses" by undermining the value of the money in which he and Cranston were paid. Some of these creditors began to send dunning letters about Silas, alerting other capitalists to avoid the ambitious rustic with bad debts. 49 Silas Felton and Joel Cranston ended their partnership in the summer of 1803, and the younger man watched his partner prosper as his own fortunes soured. "Cranston built his great house;' he scrawled in a short and cryptic entry, "and_ and_ and_ and I _lost _lost my happiness in part:' His journal skips over most of the next three years. Perhaps he did so because he and Lucretia had their hands full with two young children, or because of some other commitment he did not mention. But his financial woes certainly played a role, and these, along with his manic-depressive way of retelling them, highlight the personal hazards of ambition in a world where the velocity of commerce had outstripped the institutions of exchange. They also hint at the personal devastations that followed from a new sort of failure. As noted, the fear of losing freehold status was a constant concern in rural life. Yet Felton, Hitchcock, and others had not so much lost their independence as they had forsaken it. In the process, they had empowered the ambitious self to be inspired, to pursue excellence, to gain distinction. "I believe that almost every individual in society may find time to acquire that degree of information which will render him respectable;' Hitchcock told the Adelphi in 1813. No matter what the local roadblocks, "he will advance; he will rise; he will triumph over almost every obstacle:' 5° But what if the "individual in society" fell short? What was to stop his parents, siblings, and neighbors from issuing a collective "we told you so"? Those who remained in obscurity during the early national age coped with economic peril much as rural households always had, while wealthy merchants and gentlemen began to rationalize discrete failures as regrettable symptoms of what we now call "business cycles:' For the likes of Silas Felton, however, no reprieve or support or explanation was available. They had left behind the security of the household economy without gaining access to the money economy-and, just as important, without acquiring any vocabulary of setbacks and social forces. So failure defied words. It was too excruciating, too confounding, too damning for discussion. From a remove of about ten years, Edward Hitchcock recalled the year or two after his 1814 illness as a "dreadful blank;' a hazy period without meaning or sequence: "Sometimes I was a carpenter-sometimes a land surveyor-sometimes a farmer:' Behind

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the bright prospects of ambition, enterprise, and emulation in the early republic grew darker tales of depression, alcoholism, and suicide. 5 1 Among the few self-stories from the new republic that dwells on failureperhaps because it was so obviously not his fault-is the autobiography of Charles Harding, the Vermont youth whose parents had forsaken him when he was fourteen, in 1821. "Cheered on" by his academy preceptor and bearing a letter of recommendation from that school, he dared to hope in the summer of 1825. He would find his way, of course, within the village archipelago that had taken form during his youth. There, and only there, his unique talents and desire "to act in the world" might find purchase. First he took a teaching post "between the two villages in Brattleboro;' where he found the usual chaos of a country school, then landed a job as a store clerk. But just as Silas Felton's partnership broke down in hard times, this store also and mysteriously "changed hands:' Once again he was "set afloat:' After another teaching job in the winter of 1826-1827, he "looked around for a few weeks to find something that I could do:' He found nothing. 52 In the spring of 1827, Harding took one of the many new stagelines to Boston, the size and bustle of which must have been disorienting. Shuffling the streets and apparently staying at a hotel near the city's center, Harding searched in vain for steady work among 6o,ooo tradesmen, merchants, toughs, sailors, widows, and beggars. He could not find an apprenticeship, a labor arrangement that had begun to recede within the fluid labor market of the city. He therefore hunted for day work or a spot on a vessel. Again, nothing. After several weeks he returned to Vermont and sank into depression. "I came back;' he relates, "my money gone; my courage gone; my spirits broken-! could do nothing. I could be nothing. Oh, how I chafed under it-1 was mad with everybody, and everything, and I fear with God himself." Without a place or reason to work, he had no legitimate rank or role in the countryside, no ability to do anything or be anyone. '~nd perhaps I ought to draw a veil over the next few years;' he mused decades later, as if he understood how little patience his readers would have for such disheartening truths. 53 If a family member is someone who will take you in when you have nowhere else to go, then Charles still had family around Putney. "I know not what I should have done, but for the temporary home, my sisters and their husbands made me:' Naturally, they lived on farms in nearby towns, which enabled them to extend shelter. Naturally, their charity was temporary, leaving Charles to find work (on a farm?), search for another teaching job (in Brattleboro?), or resign himself to a marginal or merry life (in Putney?). His

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parents "saw it all, and suffered deeply;' he writes, "but they had put it beyond their power to help me." And since everyone "knew my folks were independent;' no one "supposed I needed charity:' He was caught between the identity his parents had earned and the one he would have to invent, between the customary disdain for the rootless and an emerging appreciation for the ambitious-which, again, left him without a reliable claim to manhood. "I was extremily youthful in appearance;' he explains, "no more beard than a girl, very small. To all human appearance I needed the sheltering care of a mother more than anything else." He spent a gloomy few weeks in the home of his brother-in-law. He was a twenty-year-old nobody in a nowhere town. "I wonder I did not commit suicide." 5 4 In this story, as in so many others, hope came from an outsider, from someone or something without local memories or obligations. In August 1827, Harding listened to a Methodist circuit rider passing through the area. He remembered the look and sound of the itinerant, whose name was Cushman: "His stile was new, no notes, and a readiness of utterance, and a liveliness of manner:' Cushman's sermon stirred Harding's desire to be saved, to "lay like a child upon its mothers bosom in Jesus' arms." Noting this, Cushman offered to meet the young man at the Harding homestead in eastern Putney. Due to some amalgam of hope and desperation, Charles made the trip to his father's home and waited with his mother for Cushman to call. "They had retired;' he vividly recalled of his father and another guest. "My mother and I were seting by the fire." There, in his childhood home, in the presence of the same parents who had abandoned him, Charles Harding told the stranger everything. Cushman listened, embracing the young man's vulnerabilities rather than flinching from them. "I felt strangely," Charles remembered, "nothing before like it in all my life:' 55 He had encountered the most successful religious movement of the early national period. In 1775, only one American in 8oo was a Methodist; by 1812, one American in 36 had joined. Unlike orthodox Calvinists, the Methodists insisted that Jesus had given his life for all humans, depraved as they were. Exhorting seekers to find saving grace now if not sooner, they held vast camp meetings and set up "classes" for the instruction of new converts. Together, the itinerant preachers and devoted followers of the Methodist church offered an intimate relationship with God and a close yet mobile fellowship of spiritual brothers and sisters. "They believe there is no standing idle in the things of religion;' noted an 1809 observer. They attracted strays from old Calvinism, common folk who had tired of hearing "the same

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Figure 13. Methodist circuit-rider, early nineteenth century. Reprinted from John G. McEllhenney, 200 Years of United Methodism (Madison, N.J., 1984). Courtesy of Drew University Library.

prayer, the same sermon, the same man, and who ardently desire some new thing:' As for evangelicals before and since, the path to Methodist membership required a personal conversion experience-a realization that the material world was transitory and profane, and that the only genuine or "sanctified" way led to Christ's eternal kingdom. 56 By its very nature, each conversion story was both unique and perfunctory, a personal thread in the emotional fabric that bound seekers together. Methodist converts often mentioned their prior life of sin, their dreams and visions of damnation or transcendence, and their longing to honor the memory of pious mothers. In a general sense, Harding fits the paradigm,

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although he did not overcome sin so much as he escaped uselessness. His narrative moves from childhood immersion in a small-minded and patriarchal world, to a brief respite at school and in villages, and then back to depressing obscurity. When he finally emerged from east Putney, Christ and Cushman by his side, he was not just another convert but also an aspiring minister. In the fall of 1827, he began to accompany Cushman "from one neighborhood to another, praying and exhorting, and also from house to house." Appropriately, Charles gained his purpose in life while moving from place to place, liberated from the little worlds in which he had found no good options. 5 7 "I began about this time to feel it my duty to devote myself to the Ministry:' he explained. Like many early republicans, Harding framed his ambitions in the language of duty, as if to insist or plead that he put others before himself. Indeed, the Methodist ministry enabled Harding to be "ambitious:' as he said he was, while combating the worldly versions of that very passion. Like all strivers from the early national hinterlands, moreover, he also found cultural and psychological barriers between himself and his new career goal. First, he had "always been taught" that a minister needed a college degree. How could he possibly go to college, when attending an academy had been so difficult? Another circuit rider, who in outsider's parlance denied the need to see "the inside of a college;' eventually convinced Harding that an academy education was adequate. In fact, Charles had more schooling than many itinerants, and the speaking skills he had developed during weekly declamation at Brattleboro might have helped him overcome another possible barrier: intelligence. His academy precept told him that he had a "suitable capacity," but Harding demurred. "It is not becoming in me to speak [ofthis]." 58 Finally, Harding had to face the local talk that followed those who did not follow local precedents. He was especially nervous to preach one of his first sermons in late 1827 "one mile from my fathers, among my old schoolmates and acquaintances:' Afterwards, "some said one thing, and some another:' His friends, such as they were, generally opposed his career plan or "thought it madness:' Some neighbors from east Putney "sneered:' while a few thought him "called of God." Still others made the scurrilous charge that he sought "to get my liveing, without work:' His own pastor "laughed outright," Harding claims, and his plan in general "was treated by many with ridicule." As always, it is difficult to distill lived events and specific happenings from the fog of memory and the stories it creates. But whether or not his minister had in fact laughed at his ambitions, Charles insists that a great

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change had happened to and in him. "Somehow I had become a Methodist;' he writes, and "could be nothing else" but a minister. 59 In 1809, one year into his studies at Andover, Ephraim Abbot returned home to Concord. He recorded the visit to Mary Holyoke Pearson, his spiritual "sister;' in the third person ("Your brother had a pleasant journey to Concord") as if to underline its out-of-body effect. Once he arrived, he went to work for his father. Abbot also wrote letters to Mary, visited old friends, and took frequent trips to the village, the neighboring towns where his siblings had settled, and the "distant parts of this town." He also attended services at his old church, where "the seat of Ephraim had long been empty:' All told he had a bittersweet homecoming. On the one hand, he found Concord "rich in love of parents, brothers, sisters, and friends." All seemed familiar, peaceful, reassuring. But he disliked farm labor more than ever and tired of the endless visits by neighbors and family members. He could not avoid the "calls of the family, or company:' When he began transcribing the family records with the help of his brother, a farmer who lived near the old homestead, the aspiring minister felt a rush of "many pleasant and many painful scenes:' It was nice to be home, but only for a visit. 60 By the time Abbot prepared Mary to meet his family three years later, he again discovered what later generations would come to assume: that you can never, truly, go home. "In Concord your Father will learn something of my family;' he wrote her. "Should he see my Father, he will see an honest man:' His parents now seemed much like the country folk of a Connecticut town he had met that same year. "The people here are farmers;' he remarked, "and have very little intercourse with the world, and the world little with them:' A pleasant place, but also an obscure one, and so not for him. "I should like a larger field for usefulness;' he reminded her. For rural youth born in working households, personal aspirations still had to fit inside social commitments. Rather than dismiss the central axiom of the family economy, they had expanded its implications; their lives had to be "useful" to others, not just rewarding to themselves. Having secured livelihoods, people like Abbot sought to carry their ambitions back to the local circles they had left. 61

Chapter6

Pursuing Distinction

The year 1815 wears the label watershed as well as any in American history. From our perch in the present, it is clear that fundamental changes in the economic and geopolitical contexts of the nation gained speed around that time. The introduction of new infrastructures and, to a lesser degree, new technologies spawned an economic regime of industrial production and commercial trade in which the household increasingly played a secondary or supplementary role. Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson's gratuitous victory at the Battle of New Orleans put to rest the plausible fear that the republic would not last long. The United States emerged from the second Anglo-American war as the hegemon of the northwest Atlantic; the triumphant Republicans of the Fourteenth Congress, seated in December 1815, pushed through an appropriately daring plan for "internal improvement" and the conquest of space. 1 In 1817, the twenty-four-year-old Edward Hitchcock addressed the graduating students of Deerfield Academy, where he had served as preceptor since 1816, and told them to seize the opportunities at hand. Having recovered from both his harrowing illness and his youthful hubris, he no longer trumpeted the glories of fame, as he had among the Literary Adelphi. Instead, he told the departing students what he had learned the hard way-that the world was full of disappointment. You may find your hopes dashed, your convictions upset, and your ambitions thwarted, he told them. There was no telling how God might test them. Yet they had been formed for an "active" and public future; they had no right to "stand idle spectators on the theater of life:' He did not want to "break down a spirit of ambition and hope in your bosoms;' he told them, but rather to "direct your efforts your ambition and hopes into a proper channel:' He wanted them to wonder, not how much fame or fortune they might acquire, but "How much ignorance is there to enlighten?" and "How many plans of wretchedness are to be unmasked?" The only way to find "respectability and eminence" in the world, which Hitchcock assumed they wanted as much as he did, was to confront these global challenges and so become a "benefactor of mankind:' 2

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Hitchcock issued this bold (if once-bitten) call to change the world as the economy and society around him began to catch up with his ambitions and render ambition itself more feasible and less threatening. The public careers of figures like him thus offer a close and personal perspective on the sweeping changes taking hold around 1815, a granular view of some of the major themes of nineteenth-century America. More than as transatlantic and macroeconomic upheavals, after all, Americans experienced and interpreted those changes as discrete initiatives by those who invested their ambitions with the positive virtues of nationalism, benevolence, and public spirit. In these varied efforts to plant villages, promote schools, build factories, convert sinners, and otherwise establish "progress" as the final arbiter of public good, we can discern a tipping point in the wider culture, a general movement from the goals of household and local independence to those of individual and national distinction. We also recover a glimpse of the new obscurity to which other strivers fell, where neither the conditions of competence nor the values of contentment held sway.

Innovations in Industry Silas Felton had once bristled at the name "Lazy;' which certain family members and neighbors from Marlborough had pinned on him during the 1780s and 1790s. He preferred to think that he embodied the golden virtue of "Industry" much better than his detractors (and much like Ben Franklin). When people of his age and "equal advantages" began to ask him for financial advice around 18oo, the young merchant gloated. They had nothing to say about him now, did they? But they still vexed Silas and his partner, Joel Cranston, by paying their debts in uncertified notes, if at all. Substantial sums moved through the Felton and Cranston account books, but they could never lay hold of the resources that the numbers represented. The country merchant was very much like a man with one hundred debtors, each of whom owed him $1. Could he truly claim to possess $100? In his notes from the early 18oos, Silas frets about dunning letters and "dull" business. His most reliable resource was his somewhat critical family; his father had loaned him at least $300 and probably underwrote other debts with parts of the Felton estate. 3 After struggling for several years, Silas and his partner bought another store located twelve miles from Marlborough; apparently, their plan was to overcome the slow pace of business by expanding its ken. In January 1806, Felton records that he set out to inspect this new store (they had hired

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another man to run it) and then "to [visit] Worcester Bank, and thence 3 miles to Burbanks paper mill:' The mostly Federalist leaders who had chartered this bank in 1803 sought to increase the volume of credit while centralizing its source, promoting investment and deflating the tensions that had long festered between lenders and borrowers. Bills or loans from the Worcester Bank may have helped Felton pay his debts while a capable young assistant kept the store in good condition. Underpinning all his fortunes was a general upsurge in the American economy from the mid-1790s to 1807, due in large part to a booming re-export business with Europe's warring powers. At the end of 1806, when he again parted ways with Cranston, Silas found that "the Company" had $17,500 in credits and just under $1s,ooo in expenses. That fall, after he and his family took a long trip through northern New England, he began another gap in his journal. This time, it was the "hurry of Business;' not the paralyzing fear of failure, that kept him from his own reflections. 4 During his 1806 trip, Felton took note of a new kind of town and enterprise that would inspire his life work and signature ambition. Traveling by turnpike, he praised the "agreeable;' "Elegant;' and "handsome" villages of Vermont and New Hampshire. Bath, New Hampshire, stood out: "a new Village on the Ammunodrock River at the falls, where they now have a Grist mill, saw mill, fulling mill, forge where they make Iron, and a number of stores ... [it] bids fair to be a flourishing place:' Silas had seen such mills before, not only during his trip to Worcester bank but also as a student at Leicester Academy, ten years earlier. During the 1780s, a Quaker family from Leicester had devised a machine that punched holes in leather strips, speeding the production of the pin-laden cards used to soften wool. Women and children in Leicester and nearby towns-possibly Marlborough-then did "out-work;' carding the wool and sending it back to the Quakers for weaving and sale. The children of this family went to Leicester Academy, as did Eli Whitney himself (against his parents' wishes, of course). By virtue of the location he inherited and the education he demanded, Silas Felton was an early witness to the early Industrial Revolution. 5 What did Felton and other ambitious men see in industrial ventures? To what extent did they welcome or worry about these innovations? The largest industrialists of the new nation, along with their allies in the national government, took pains to assure Americans that there would be "no Manchesters" in the United States. No grinding inequalities, no beggared workers, no hopeless slums. The great ventures at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Paterson, New Jersey, would preserve the independence of those who mattered while enriching

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Figure 14. Slatersville, Rhode Island. Oil painting, artist unknown. Courtesy of Slatersville Congregational Church, Slatersville, Rhode Island.

the nation and impressing Europeans. These enterprises foundered on uneven demand and scarce labor during the 1790s and early 18oos, but several dozen smaller factories formed along the streams of northern Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts. Here is Ephraim Abbot-aspiring pastor, not protocapitalist-describing the largest of these operations, Slatersville, Rhode Island, to Mary Holyoke Pearson in 1812: "There is probably more business done here, than at any other factory in America. On a spot where a few years ago there was but two or three houses, there is a vilage of 64 families and 500 people in some way employed about the factorY:' For Abbot, Slatersville offered a lively alternative to the decrepit isolation of the recent past. It seemed like another form of village, another indication of aesthetic and moral triumph over the old countryside.6 As early as 1801, when Silas Felton helped survey the roads of his native Marlborough, he labeled one spot of town "Feltonville:' It is unclear what he hoped to build or accomplish there; in any event, the name carried no social meaning for several years, because his shop barely scraped by. But as his business endured and expanded, Silas again tried to transform a piece of his hometown. Around and after 1805, he encouraged artisans to settle near his store and personally built a shed "for the convenience of the Public" in the

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vicinity. A frequent member of the town school committee, he pressed to form a new school district in northern Marlborough. From 1809 to 1811, moreover, he sold off several tracts of woodland around the Assabet River, in the north part of town, probably using the returns to help buy a carding machine and a distillery near his shop. With Cranston and another partner, he then purchased the plot encompassing all of these and promptly sold it to a Boston merchant, agreeing to pay him interest and reclaim ownership as of 1815. In this way Silas generated his own spending power, trading ownership of land for command of capital. By the 1810s, perhaps a dozen homes had settled in the small cluster around his shop, mill, and distillery. In lieu of the ego-heavy name, Feltonville, he began to refer to "our part of Town" and "this Village:' Apparently without sarcasm, residents began to call the area "New City:' 7 Among the settlers of New City was Folger Pope, a Quaker and saddler from the seaport town of Salem. He had married a woman from Nantucket Island in 1781 and raised nine children, including eight sons. Struggling to make payments on what Salem records call his "mansion house;' Folger Pope left Salem in 1802 and bought over one hundred acres along the Assabet River in northern Marlborough. The property had a tan yard, a brook, and a "[private1way;' as one deed entry called it, "opened by Joel Cranston from a view to accommodate both the publick and private [inhabitants1:'From 1802 to 1808, Pope mortgaged this farm three times to a relative back in Salem. He also sold small bits of it to another family member and neighbor, further attaching the estate to his extended family. All in all, the move to Marlborough allowed the Pope family to start over-right in the middle of Silas Felton's would-be City, as it happened. 8 Silas Felton claims that Folger Pope became "well esteemed in the Vicinity" due to his "smooth tongue" and "low Vulgar wit:' Perhaps so, but Pope also had more in common with the rural residents of northern Marlborough than Silas Felton or Joel Cranston. Like any farmer with the means, Pope did not hesitate to purchase goods at nearby stores. Within a year or so of his arrival, in fact, he had drawn a debt of about $8o at Felton's shop. Like any decent neighbor, he also knew that the ability to pay debts turned on the variable fortunes of each household. So long as he held on to his own property and changed worked with others, Pope no longer qualified as a bad risk or "abandoned" debtor, as Salem creditors had labeled him. Indeed, his acquired distaste for moneyed men and their rigid business schedules may have scored as a cultural credit in his adopted neighborhood. Although new to Marlborough, Folger Pope fit better into its social and moral relations than Silas Felton, the lifelong resident. 9

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Not that Silas wanted to pinch every penny from the locals or extract wealth from the village he meant to build. His enterprise had a civic dimension to it, an avowed deferral of immediate and personal returns in favor of future and collective prosperity. These were the key qualifications that had turned ambition into a potentially virtuous trait, a public-spirited remedy to the scattered strivings of the mere freeholders. In order to fashion a village worthy of the name, however, he and Cranston had no choice but to do business with Boston capitalists who did not care about the niceties of local exchange. Silas had to strike a balance between his prudent wish to "live quietly with neighbors" and his legal obligations to repay his own debts. He therefore waited for Folger Pope to repay the $8o during 1803 and 1804, and then used a third party to recover the outstanding debt. The delay in payment must have been all the more vexing during this gloomy time for his enterprise. He saw his troubles and those of Folger Pope as intertwined but distinct: Pope struggled because he "neglected his business;' while dunning letters followed the Felton name due to unscrupulous Bostonians or cruel fortune. Finally, in the summer of 1804, Felton initiated what he called a "long tedious, perplexing law suit" against his neighbor. 10 Folger Pope did not appear in the Court of Common Pleas as ordered, leading the judges to assign $150 of his property for seizure. Nonetheless, the farmer continued to delay payment and avoid imprisonment, while also spreading a very serious rumor about the transaction in question. As Silas recalls in his scrapbook of essays, letters, and personal affairs, Pope argued that the debt had been negotiated not as a promissory note (which specified repayment conditions) but as a book account (which did not). Neighbors and relative equals were likely to exchange book accounts, while strangers and business partners more often used promissory notes. By suggesting that his debt should be treated as an open and running account, Folger Pope draped a figurative arm around Silas's shoulder. Were they not neighbors? Did Felton not put the common good over his own selfish interests? For an indeterminate period between 1804 and 1810, many of Silas's debtors heard about this dispute and told the merchant that they, too, would prefer to handle their accounts as book debts. During that time, Silas "owned" about $w,ooo in outstanding notes-the great bulk of his total estate. If that sum devolved into a confusing mass of book debts, he would be ruined, because he owed $s,ooo to more powerful and less patient men. 11 The courts upheld Silas's interpretation of his debts, and he recovered most of what Pope owed him. (The skeptical reader of Paine thanked the "goodness of an allwise Being" for these legal victories.) Still, the threat from

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local tongues returned in what Felton called "the sponging money plot" of 1810. Two other neighbors, in league with one of their mothers and one Samuel Brigham, "conspired" to blackmail his partner, Joel Cranston. Convincing Brigham that Cranston was "ravishing" his wife, they told him to seek $soo in damages from the merchant. Felton describes Brigham as an "unfortunate" man who had fallen from propertied status and into alcohol dependence, "like many others." He and Cranston should have known: Brigham worked on their carding machine. The identities of the major parties and the details of the alleged crime evoke the gender anxieties surrounding waged work. The propertyless Samuel Brigham became a hapless cuckold due to the enterprising businessman for whom he labored-his manhood taken, his wife stolen. When Cranston got wind of the accusation, he marched with his "principal neighbors" to Brigham's home, where he and Mrs. Brigham furiously denied the charge. At length, the conspiracy petered out, much to the relief of both Cranston and Felton.U Yet the two accusers, joined by Folger Pope, would not relent. Perhaps embittered by the near defeat of his own ambition-to live as an independent man on his own land-Folger Pope became Silas Felton's nemesis, the sort of frightening rival who commands respect and knows how to use it. The struggle continued as New City took shape. "They reported all manner oflies about me as well as Cranston they could invent-that I owe more than I was worth:' Silas was at the mercy of their dishonest words because his business turned on the daily patronage of nearby households and their periodic willingness to pay their debts in commercially acceptable ways. He relied, in other words, upon credit broadly conceived and locally negotiated. His vulnerability underlay his hatred of these enemies, who seemed to change form at will, much like the credit instruments they so deviously abused. "A tattling backbiting disposition," Silas wrote of one accuser. "Good as honey to every persons face, and slanting them behind their backs:' They were "Devils in human shape;' "monsters in the shape of men;' and "Malicious Monsters" who "let the Devill rule:' 13 One might argue that Silas's efforts to escape the farming way had actually made him all the more dependent on local words and opinions. Unlike the factory owners of the near future, he could not ignore the hooded glances of the working people on whom his wealth was built. Nor could the other mill owners and small industrialists of the 1810s, most of whose ventures failed during the economic crisis of 1819. A fully industrialized society, after all, requires both an available labor force and a receptive base of consumers, who have no choice but to purchase necessary things and also have

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the spending power to do so. Towns like Marlborough did not fit this description in the 1810s. However much they patronized stores and participated in out-work, the households continued to set the terms of economic life, not the factory owners. Moreover, it seems that freeholders in various towns tried to keep industrialists out of local office-good evidence, if any were needed, that farm towns did not want to become factory towns. 14 Even though Folger Pope survived another lawsuit in 1811 to hold on to his farm, however, Felton and Cranston prevailed in the long run. Always expanding their business, they bought a new carding machine in 1812 to complement their wiremaking machine and shoemaking materials. They also owned a cider distillery that ran "night and day"; evidently, Silas saw the latent profitability of his employee's drinking problem. The final lines of his journal offer a glimpse of the industrial future: "[We] procured a new Carding Machine and put it into the same building with the other.... We do business well:' Eventually, Silas learned to get along with his many customers and debtors, so much so that the word "popular" has adhered to his memory. Even more gradually, he imposed new meanings of the traditional quality "industry" upon his neighbors. Once the quintessential virtue of households built on internal duties, industry increasingly carried a market value, a small and diminishing indication of the profits it made for businessmen. New City did more than erase a small patch of Marlborough countryside: it challenged the rural household as the primary site of labor and locus of duty. Felton had left a working monument to his own ambitions, one that undermined the social value of the work he had never wanted to do. 15

"Great Works" "They are now taking down the sails to drop anchor;' wrote Ephraim Abbot in a July 3, 1811, letter to his intended, Mary Holyoke Pearson. "The anchor is dropping at this moment 4 o'clock and 10 minutes." Abbot's present-tense narration highlights the thrill he felt after his first ocean voyage landed him near Passamaquoddy Bay in northern Maine: the far eastern fringe of the republic. Since the fall of 1808 he had studied at Andover seminary, a new training ground for a new generation of Congregational pastors. His classmates took a leading part in the transatlantic movement among evangelicals to spread the word before the Second Coming of Christ-and, in the process, to stem the flow of liberal "philosophy." The true Christian would hasten the day when the heathen masses of the world would "cast aside their

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idols to the moles and bats." Far beyond the good works incumbent on all, they would set their eyes to "the great work of enlightening and reforming mankind:' Ephraim Abbot recycled these slogans in self-deprecating missives to Mary. "But I feel a reluctance at beginning;' he told her after his professors licensed him to preach in early 1810. "It is a great work and I know not how to engage in it." Rather than take a settled position, Abbot joined the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Under its auspices, he spent the next three years as a missionary in remote corners of Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. 16 After his brush with death, blindness, and depression in 1814-1815, Edward Hitchcock of Deerfield also decided to channel his desire for notice and distinction-long enabled by Unitarian heresies-into service to God and strangers. Meanwhile, Deerfield Academy paid the bills. He served as preceptor from 1816 to 1818, teaching alongside Orra White and gaining a reputation for charisma in the classroom. In 1817, he published a report of errors he had found in a nautical almanac; in his reply to the readers of the American Monthly Magazine, the author dismissed the sniping of"one Edward Hitchcock" and wondered if the upstart only wanted a cash reward. If he remained in Deerfield, the young preceptor and scientist would be able to marry Orra White and begin a household. But he would also remain "one Edward Hitchcock," and he could not abide that. After a frustrating term of study with his Unitarian pastor, Edward gained admission to Yale Seminary in 1819. At last, at the age of twenty-six, he left his native village. In the spring of that year, his sister wrote him with a summary of"domestic news:' Mother was ill and Orra White was despondent, she reported, not that this would interest "a Divine a Mineralogist a Botanist a Chemist an Astronomer and a Master of Arts:' She knew that her gifted brother was not coming back, just as she knew that she was staying. 17 The early careers of Ephraim Abbot and Edward Hitchcock fit a larger pattern of change in the social role of the New England minister, which one historian describes as a shift "from office to profession:' Whereas the eighteenth-century pastor had primarily served as his town's biblical interpreter and moral steward, his successor from the next century was more likely to move between several posts and to belong to regional or national associations. Rivalry between denominations also gave rise to sectarian schools such as Andover, Williams, Bowdoin, and Amherst, whose diplomas separated the trained professionals from the mere itinerants. All of which reflected and encouraged a new culture of proselytizing among Calvinists, a personal search for what Ephraim Abbot called "a larger field for usefulness:' The ambition

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to serve God across imagined historical space-to labor in a "field" that encompassed many homes and even reached into them-became a positive distinction for young pastors. It involved a radical expansion of religious commitment, one that easily degenerated into the compulsion to "save" distant peoples who had done nothing wrong. Among Abbot's classmates, for example, was an early missionary to Southeast Asia, who a relative describes as a young man of"extravagantly ambitious" plans. Craving the "highest eminence;' this missionary was "full of worldly ambition, which in subsequent years had to be nailed to the cross." 18 In the remote settlements of Maine, Ephraim Abbot drew energy from all the new faces he came across, exhausting himself each day and starting fresh the next. He made over forty house visits in February 1812 alone. He asked the farmers, fishermen, and goodwives he met about their daily prayer habits, knowledge of the Gospel, and production of cider, maple sugar, and other saleable goods. In his diary and letters to Mary, he variously sounds like an urbane snob and a grieving idealist. A few towns in Maine raised more corn "than is sufficient for their own consumption" and hosted "people of taste and fashion as in any seaport in New England;' the Phillips Exeter and Harvard graduate noted. But most of the communities were isolated and rundown. The people were ignorant, shy, and sullen; even when they heard they did not listen. "I see a Goliath before me and I feel my self much less than David;' the humble seeker confessed. 19 After returning from Yale and settling as a pastor in Conway, Massachusetts, in 1821, Edward Hitchcock also ran into trying times. After seven years of courtship, he finally had the means to marry Orra White. She gave birth to their first son in 1822. The next year, Edward's father, the hatter Justin Hitchcock, passed away in Deerfield. Two years after that their first child, a boy named Edward, also died. Although they lived close enough to Deerfield and Amherst to visit friends and family, Edward and Orra were conspicuous strangers in a strange town. Edward also made the work of sermon preparation more difficult by refusing to exchange pulpits with Unitarians. In 1828, he explained this new symptom of sectarian conflict by insisting that his former coreligionists denied the fundamental truth of the Gospel: human depravity. Therefore, he would never surrender his pulpit to a heretical liberal in the name of polite custom. He would not subject his people to a seductive faith that too often led the "stubborn and refractory youth" (such as his younger self) to disdain the "faithful instructions" of humble parents (such as his late father). 20 Although they were both Calvinists, neither Hitchcock nor Abbot had patience for the fatalistic egalitarianism encased in the phrase "we are all

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sinners." Such obtuse pieties enabled what Hitchcock called "blundering stupidity and deathlike apathy:' Abbot, especially, stressed the human capacity to improve, to acquire better motives as well as better habits. "The envious:' he decreed in one of his favorite sermons, "must be renewed in the spirit of their minds, before they can ... rejoice to see others more excellent and more honored than themselves." Rather than harp on the inner war with sin, he lobbied for a robust public terrain of villages, schools, and churches, where virtues and talents might be noticed and cultivated. Like most reformers, he also had a pronounced interest in the education of the "rising generation;' in whom the older ways and local prejudices had not yet annealed. It was not enough that children learn to read and write, Abbot maintained. They had to believe that their progress in learning mattered, meaning that it bestowed or withheld esteem. Accordingly, he tried to organize the isolated schools he found in rural Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island into competitive classes and to convince people to attend their examinations. 21 By comparison, the converted Hitchcock was more insistent on human sinfulness and less comfortable with youthful emulation. "It has been much questioned whether emulation be not contrary to the spirit of the Gospel and productive of mischievous effects:' he noted in one sermon. The former academy star even wondered aloud whether any child had the right to more than a common school education. If his parents had no need or desire for a learned child, that child would have to rest contented with a practical education. Ultimately, though, Hitchcock argued that "all experience" had shown that students learned "ten times faster" when they grappled for praise. The inner passions that might be unleashed by these policies mattered less than the observable improvements they would bring. So the schools of Conway had to be reorganized. 22 Both Abbot and Hitchcock urged their listeners to locate themselves within the imagined communities of nation and society and to take unbounded pride in the global prowess of the nation. In his sermon "The United States Compared with Other Nations;' for example, Hitchcock gave his audience an absurdly parochial tour of the entire world. Most of the Earth's seven hundred million people lived in sin, Hitchcock reported. The Persians? Sunk in "extreme ignorance and superstition." The Javan Islanders? He had it "on good authority" that one of their queens annually ripped her own infant from her own breast "and served it up for her banquet!!" In addition to spicing his Sunday performances, these exotic tales reinforced his claim that the United States enjoyed a "progressive superiority" over other peoples and countries.23

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The progress that Hitchcock and Abbot celebrated was fundamentally ethical rather than economic or technological, a general broadening of moral horizons that called to mind their own passage beyond the farm. They defined progress, not against any Arcadian or "republican" past of simple virtue, but in opposition to a caricatured provincial world of envy and greed. They also assumed that progress would stop the moment people returned to their household interests. Far from leaving the great work to the operation of "free" markets and competing interests, they put their hopes in what Hitchcock called "benevolent institutions:' Schools, academies, churches, missionary societies-all of them did batde with our natural "meanness of spirit" and propelled society to a better future. If these efforts faltered, the archenemy would return: "selfishness-selfishness unmingled and universalselfishness without measure and without end:' The traditional belief in human depravity thus became a motive for cultural activism, while the new emphasis on selfishness, not pride, as the worst sin made ambition safe for Calvinism. So long as personal energies went to "great works" for the progress of nation or humanity, ambitious striving and pride could actually be virtuous, indeed selfless. 24 Hitchcock left Conway after only five years, surrendering his pulpit for a professorship at nearby Amherst College. In an 1828 speech to an incoming pastor, he described the frustrations that had surely contributed to his own departure. Some of your parishioners will want an excellent preacher and scholar, he reflected, while "a still more numerous class" will demand "a much greater share of parochial and social visits than is possibly consistent with other duties." One gets the sense that he and Orra never pined for their days in Conway. Ephraim Abbot might have sympathized. "I am gready distressed for the stupidity, the infidelity, the avariciousness, and the corruption of the people:' the missionary candidly reported of Gloucester, Rhode Island. This hilly farm town surely qualifies as his most trying assignment. In 1787, its freeholders had rejected the Federal Constitution by a 228-9 margin; during the 1790s, they had balked at a turnpike venture; by 1809, they had fallen prey to a banking scheme hatched in Boston. They were understandably wary of outsiders, and undeniably hard on Ephraim Abbot. 25 Before working his way through the neighborhoods of Gloucester in 1811, Abbot wisely tried to win the favor of influential locals like Abraham Windsor, a large farmer who lived on a hill bearing his name. During the 1790s, Abraham had raised money for new town roads (not the turnpike) and a subscription library. A successful patriarch, he had settled his sons on Windsor Hill and purchased lands for a few of them in the Ohio country. Ephraim

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noted that one of those sons, Obidiah, lived only a half-mile from his father's homestead and arrived at meeting with wife and children in tow, as an independent man did. Obidiah was polite enough when the two men spoke on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1811, just before Abbot preached at Abraham's home. During the service, though, Obidiah walked past Abbot and out of the makeshift church, his hat impiously perched on his head. As Abbot had dinner in Abraham's house that night, Obidiah returned in an evil temper. As the missionary recorded in a letter: "[Obidiah said] the bible was a pack of lies and I knew it. that ministers were a pack of lazy good for nothing fellows going about to get their living out of other people; that I was a liar, and thief, and villain going into all the poor houses after old negroes, squaws, and old dirty women; that because hay etc. is plenty now I have come about here to get my living; that nobody wants me here, and that I should not be here if I could get my living anywhere else .... He damned me over and over again. His parents indeavored in vain to still him:' That night, Abbot also found that someone had tied his horse's head to a post and cut off part of its mane. 26 Besides sheer malice and family discord, what did Obidiah Windsor's screed signify? Where did his venom originate, and why did he expel it as he did on Ephraim Abbot? According to Windsor, the missionary was a "lazy good for nothing" who could not "get his living" anywhere else or in any other way. That Abbot recorded this last phrase three times suggests that Windsor stressed the point, and that both men had heard it before. (As noted, Charles Harding faced the same charge after divulging his ambition to be a Methodist minister.) Allegedly, missionary labor had no tangible or immediate use, no value to the relevant community. Abbot was "going about" the town and consorting with "old negroes, squaws, and all old dirty women;' taking time from busy households as well as power from the freeholders who ran them. By holding court on Windsor's Hill and treating nonwhite "squaws" and white men as a single audience, Abbot diminished Obidiah's toehold on respectability and ignored the vital boundaries between independent men and "dirty;' despised dependents. Who was he to drop in on Windsor's Hill and tell its real residents how to live? 27 Perhaps the most distressing part of the incident was the identity of the attacker. Obidiah Windsor was not a stodgy old farmer who could be counted on to die soon enough. He was another kind of revolutionary inheritor. He knew that he would never amount to much more than he already did, indeed that he would probably live his whole life in Gloucester (he was to inherit the homestead, not the Ohio lands). Windsor was obscure but useful, undistinguished but independent. In the hill towns of New England and in frontier

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regions generally, these modest attainments were still accessible to white men, perhaps more so than they had been for previous generations. Empowered by the opportunities for independence, yet marginalized by the ideology of ambition, such freeholders did not welcome bright-eyed do-gooders. 28 For backcountry folk, Charles Harding made a better pastor than Ephraim Abbot or Edward Hitchcock. From his own past in Putney, Vermont, Harding knew that raw impiety and evangelical fervor worked together in hill towns, the one inspiring the other. He also knew how those on the edge yearned to transcend the secular world as much as they wanted to own a piece of it. Shortly after his conversion to Methodism in 1827, Harding was offered a teaching post near Putney. He turned down the sorely needed pay. To "shut myself up in a schoolhouse" would have been an unpardonable offense, he recalls, not only to himself and his students but also to the wider world he could now serve. He thus elected to set out on the Methodist circuit, a decision that required him to buy a horse and saddle. He asked his father and elder brother-now living on adjoining farmlands as Caleb Harding aged "past labor"-for $25 of his meager inheritance. The older Hardings balked at the request; mercifully, a neighbor intervened with a loan. 29 Once mounted, Charles rode away from Putney and never looked back. He soon discovered an inner strength he dared not explain. "It seemed almost like a vision:' he reports, "wherever I went, sinners were converted." Rather than promote institutional reforms and social progress, however, his "great work" was to spread a humble and yielding spirit to as many strangers as possible. "I gilded on the 'Temperance Armor,"' he reports of 1827, the first year of the "tee-totaling" campaign in Vermont, and stumped for the cause "from the pulpit, in the social circle, at the Post Office, in the stores, and on the highway:' His adopted church gave him the moral logic to forswear alcohol along with friends and allies-often women-to condemn its sale, while his alienation from the patriarchal world colored his descriptions of their efforts. "We routed the foe in many of his strongholds;' he reports of the male "demon:' Drink, and "almost entirely from the field of the farmer:' Charles also volunteered for extra work on the circuit, so that his colleagues could have more time at home. He had no home; his work was his life. 30

Public Roles and Private Spaces I suspect that Charles Harding, Silas Felton, and Edward Hitchcock were a bit sensitive about their public spirit. Each of them had departed from the

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labor ties and real estates that built reputations in the preindustrial hinterlands. Having moved beyond or around "independence:' they had only a novel and tenuous claim to public spirit or manly status. Their pursuits were fraught with moral no less than material peril. Beware of the "false notions of honor, which are sometimes termed spirit;' Ephraim Abbot told his listeners. He reminded them that the optimal temperament was "humble, teachable, [and] unambitious:' a "mild unassuming, inoffensive deportment united with a desire to do good to all:' Because their ambitions set off so many alarms in their own minds and in the culture around them, they hung much of their self-esteem on their claims of public spirit. These efforts bore powerfully on their domestic roles and living spaces. 31 In 1828, Edward and Orra White Hitchcock settled on a five-acre plot in Amherst village, just across the common from the college and in close range of a growing strip of stores, artisan shops, and fine homes. Edward's salary was modest, but as his professional distinctions grew, so did the comfort and elegance of the Hitchcock home. His four daughters and two sons grew up with a guest room, a parlor, a piano. They also grew up knowing-assuming-that they would receive a public education, either at an academy or a college, or both. However much he wrestled with the ethics of emulation and advanced schooling for common youth, Edward Hitchcock had no doubt that his own children should find distinction, first in school and then in life. 32 Silas and Lucretia Felton had struggled in the early years of their marriage, particularly as the dunning letters spread. Although Folger Pope and other malcontents remained a threat, however, the couple prospered by the 1810s. With his partners, Silas grew his shop, mill, and carding factory into the signature enterprise of New City. No longer the basis of his labor and "living;' Felton's dependents did not need to work as hard as he and his wife once had. Nor did his two daughters hear "discouraging" reports of their own sinfulness, at least not from their free-thinking father. While his enterprise drew his neighbors into deeper market involvements that strained family labor and resources, Silas Felton expanded his own home in the summer of 1811. The addition cost $1,000, or as much as his father's entire home. Silas's house also had its own library. 33 More than the wealthiest farm families, the Hitchcocks and Feltons had occasion to buy, read, and reflect more while making, spinning, and cooperating less. Their homes conform to the general trend towards the sheltered residence of the mid-nineteenth century and the ideology of "domesticity" tied to it. That trend, in turn, aligns with a process visible all over the Atlantic world, whereby the public domains of politics and commerce and "culture"

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became more officially and absolutely white, male, and propertied. If women were then consigned to the increasingly private home, native peoples were pushed onto reservations, the dangerous or disabled to prisons and asylums, and the eccentric or radical to the moral and religious margins. Along with the demise of the more diverse civil society of the eighteenth century, this phenomenon brought a fatal separation of private and public morality, so that a ruthless businessman could still qualify as a good man so long as he doted on his own. But we must not write Victorian developments back into the experiences of rural families like the Feltons or Hitchcocks, for whom the separation between home and work was neither distinct nor desirable. Indeed, the civic identities of Edward Hitchcock and Silas Felton involved their wives and children in a range of public duties. 34 Late in life, after decades of the annual ritual, Orra White Hitchcock commiserated with a daughter who was about to face her first commencement week at Amherst College. In her mind's eye, Orra could envision what the home would look like the day after everyone left. She could picture the "groaning of the wash tub under the numbers of linen sheets and pillow cases and towels-the desolation of the rooms that have so recently been filled with delightful visitors." Alone again, the professor's wife would have to endure "fatigue and loneliness and relief;' the emotional decompression that followed a major event. By the 1830s, the Hitchcocks hosted temperance reformers, visiting scientists, and assorted dignitaries. Although she was a gifted artist and thinker in her own right, Orra was obliged to entertain and then clean up after them all. Never confined to home in a rigid sense, yet never able to escape her gender-based obscurity, she became an "eminently domestic" woman in local memory, a pious lady who balanced "domestic care and public duty:' As for the Feltons, the only surviving portrait of their home reinforces what Silas's reflections suggest-that his store was attached to their living quarters. Silas and Lucretia kept a conspicuous household, a busy and multipurpose center where people came to do business, talk politics, or ask favors. 35 Both Lucretia Felton and Orra White Hitchcock lived in their native towns, and the proximity of friends and family surely eased their transition from rural "goodwife" to village hostess. By contrast, Mary Holyoke Pearson had grown up among the New England elite, while her eventual marriage to Ephraim Abbot brought her to rustic isolation. For five years, from 1808 to 1813, she waited as Abbot embarked on his "great works" from Maine to Rhode Island. Always uneasy about the match, Mary's father gradually shifted the tone of his prudent counsel, insisting that Ephraim give up his

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1'1

1111'. < 1: 48--49,50,57, 62, 69, S1-82, 101, 145, 1SO Mann, Horace, 1So Mann, Sally (mother of Daniel Mann), 48, S1, S2-83 Manning, William, 122 Marblehead Academy, u1, u2 Markets: See Capitalism; Farms and Farming; Households Marlborough (Mass.), 19, 20, 42, 63,121-22, 136, 15S Marriage, 31, 69,143-45 Massachusetts Historical Society, 52 Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 162 Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family. See Hitchcock, Enos Methodists and Methodism, 15o-53, 186 Miller, Samuel, 104 Ministers, S9, 162-63 Missionaries, 15o-53, 161-62, 165-67 Montesquieu, Baron de, 10 Morris, James, 101, uS, 120, 123, 124 Mother of a Family, The, 97, us, uS

Panic of 1819, 94, 175 Paterson (N.J.), 156 Pawtucket (R.I.), 156 Peabody, Stephen, u9-20 Pearson, Eliphalet, 129, 142-43 Pearson, Mary Holyoke (wife of Ephraim Abbot), 143-45, 153, 169-71, 1S3 Peddlers and peddling, 132 Philadelphia Academy, 100 Phillips Academy, Andover, 104, 111 Phillips Academy, Exeter, 104, 109, 12S Pioneers, The. See Cooper, James Fenimore Plymouth (N.H.), 173, 174 Pope, Folger, 158--61, 16S, 1S4 Portland (Maine), 92 Portsmouth (N.H.), 52 Poverty, 37, 50, 77-7S, 92,175-77,190 Pride, 30, 74, 164 Progress, 165, 1S6-S7 Promissory notes. See Debts Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism,

Nationalism: Constitution and, 1o-13; independence and, 42-43, 122-23; opposition to localism, 164-65, 1S6-9o Neighborhoods, 32-34, 65, 15S-59 New City (Marlborough, Mass.), 158-61, 1S4 New England and Her Institutions. See Abbot, Jacob New England Primer, S2 New England Tale, A. See Sedgwick, Catharine Maria New Hampshire Medical Society, 173 New Orleans, Battle of, 154 New York (city), 175-77 New York (state), 45, 53,64 Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike, 56-5S, 62, 145 Nortlmmberland (N.H.), 22, 37, 55, 90, 96, 104 Noyes, Caleb, u9

Railroads, 179, 192 Reid, Thomas, 3, 4 Republicanism, 7,122-23 Representation, 12 Richards, Caleb, 120 Rivalry. See Competition Roads and turnpikes, 22, 55-62, 191. See also Norfolk and Bristol Turnpike Rush, Benjamin, 97

Obscurity, S4, 127 Paine, Thomas, S3, 134 Paint, 23, 66

Th~SeeWebe~Max

Providence (R.I.), 56 Putney (Vt.) 46, 56, 59-60, 92, 149, 186

Quabbin. See Underwood, Francis Quakers, 156, 15S

Salem (Mass.), 57, 15S Sawyer, Jesse, U9 Sawyer, Jonathan, U9 "Scattered" settlement, 21-23 Schools and schooling: eighteenth-century practices, 27-2S, 9S; post-Revolutionary reforms, 98-103; Victorian-era reforms and practices, 180, 187. See also Academies; Teachers. Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 34, 123 Shays's Rebellion (New England Regulation), 39--41

Index "Shunpiking;' 63 Sketches of the Principles of Government. See Chipman, Nathaniel Slater, Samuel, 57, 157 Slatersville (R.I.), 157 Slavery, 186, 189 Smith, Adam, 4, 134 Social Enquirers, Society of, 136-37, 147 Society: as Enlightenment and nationalist ideology, 1-5, 13, 53-54, 76; in villages, 66-67 South Farms (Conn.), 118,120 Spirit of the Laws, The. See Montesquieu, Baron de Springfield (Mass.), 30, 32, 40 Stores and shopping, 22, 33 Stow family (of Marlborough, Mass.), 25,31 Talent. See Genius Tappan, David, 111 Teachers, 27, 99, 121-22,124 Temperance, 167 Thornton (N.H.), 174 Topographical descriptions, 52-53 Tucker, Josiah, 4-5 Underwood, Francis, 34, 43, 102 Unitarians, 29, 76, 78, 163, 183-84

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Universal benevolence, 12-13, 75 Upper Coos (region of N.H.), 37,90-91 Villages, 47, 63-68 Virtue,7-8 Voltaire, 5 Walpole (Mass.), 24, 37, 58, 101, 145 War of 1812, 154 Warning out, 47-48 Washington, George, 7, 77, 111, 113, 139 Weber, Max, 30 Webster, Noah, 12, 13, 75, 99 Westborough (Mass.), 174 Whigs, 187, 190 White, Orra (Edward Hitchcock's wife), 142, 144, 162, 169 Whitney, Eli, 156 Windsor, Abral!am, 165-66 Windsor, Obidiah, 166 Wiscasset Academy, 105, 117 Women: education of, 27-28, 113-15; envy and gossip associated with, 3~ farm duties of, 25-26; reformers' views of, 73-74; "separate spheres" ideology, 187; village duties of, 168-69 Woodbridge, John, 113 Worcester (Mass.), 181, 187 Yale College, 101, 162